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TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

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Benjamin‟s theories imply that the aesthetic language that traffics in these<br />

mundane place-holders, deployed by baroque poets as willful “archaisms” and “verbal<br />

inventions,” attempt to express what man‟s titles render taboo. That which titles render<br />

taboo is the realization that natural history, as the formative matter of fate, is organized to<br />

produce the separation of man‟s will from the destruction that he would avoid and which<br />

is promised to him in allegorical images like “The Angel of History.” This conclusion,<br />

and the ambivalent relationship that exists between words and things, is implicitly the<br />

subject of that section of The Arcades Project entitled “The Collector.” There, Benjamin<br />

asserts that an Allegorical imagination favors the spectacle of material destruction in its<br />

celebration of immaterial, mutable, concepts: “Allegory views existence, as it does art,<br />

under the sign of fragmentation and ruin” (330); it dispels “the illusion of totality or of<br />

organic wholeness” (331). Baudelaire is an Allegorist precisely because he has no interest<br />

in universals but is insatiably drawn towards fate; like the flaneur, he is interested in what<br />

turns up on the street, whether a whore, a piece of junk, an object in a window, whatever<br />

catches his eye. He differs from the Collector because: “Every intimacy with things is<br />

alien to the allegorical intention” (p. 336). The Allegorist collects things for evidence that<br />

would assist him in his attempt to augur God‟s pure word for what it can tell us about<br />

fate. The “ur” word, and the divine order in which it participates, is perpetually under the<br />

revision of the Allegorist‟s own personal illuminations about its noumenal character. The<br />

Allegorist treats each thing under his attention with equipoise because its significance is<br />

always guaranteed by an ideal order – but an ideal order that is formed from that<br />

virtuality that is natural history, fate‟s avatar. It is the failure of things to meet their<br />

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