CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

evelation of this symbolic dimension restores language’s ability to give a voice to
nature; it allows nature to speak its history. The symbol itself becomes manifest in the
‘Idea’ that is exhibited in the constellation, and which exhibits the object in its relation to
our discursive language as a ruin. 387
387 A word needs to be said at this point about Benjamin’s attitude toward symbolism and allegory.
On the one hand, Benjamin is highly critical of the Romantic notion of the symbol—that is, the notion that
takes the symbol to be an embodiment of transcendence, and thus to give the object in its wholeness. For
Benjamin, this view of symbolism covers over the broken state of the real by giving the appearance of a
false totality. Compared to this notion of symbolism, the allegorical view of language (which Benjamin
analyzes in his study of the German Trauerspiel) considers the relation between words and things to be
merely conventional, accidental, and arbitrary. The allegorical attitude thus acknowledges the gulf that
exists between things and post-lapsarian language, and shatters the appearance of totality that characterizes
the Romantic view of language as symbolic. Benjamin clearly favors the allegorical attitude toward
language as opposed to the Romantic conception of symbolism, for, whereas the Romantic conception of
symbolism naively assumes that we can still ‘name’ things (i.e., that language and the thing named come
together into a whole in the symbol), the allegorical view replicates the brokenness and alienation
characteristic of the modern condition. The allegorical view of language is correct—i.e., adequate to the
world—insofar as it corresponds to the state of reality as governed and determined by the commodity form.
Benjamin holds that the expression of modern experience is necessarily allegorical, as this form of
expression destroys the semblance of meaningfulness in impoverished experience, whereas the Romantic
symbol claims to embody a transcendent meaningfulness that is no longer available in experience. As
Friedlander puts it, “Allegory…most adequately expresses, or actualizes in experience, the catastrophe that
the modern world has become” (Walter Benjamin: a Philosophical Portrait (Cambridge and London:
Harvard University Press, 2012), 155). By revealing the poverty of modern experience, allegory begins the
process of disenchanting a false appearance of wholeness in the object. Thus, the allegorical approach to
objects (works of art, texts, etc) is a necessary first step toward discovering whatever truth there is in the
object by destroying the false appearance that ordinarily surrounds the object.
But the goal of allegory is destructive: it is to extinguish a false appearance of beauty and
wholeness, but it cannot say anything true about the object: allegory destroys the object and is left with
nothing; its achievement is just to show the gulf that separates subject and object, language and nature.
Allegory is thus not the end of interpretation for Benjamin, but rather must be followed by the attempt to
redeem the object through the construction of the constellation, in which the dialectical image (which
discloses the “idea”) is revealed. The construction of the dialectical image, however, requires a reversal of
the allegorical stand through the redemption of phenomena. And the conception of language that makes the
constellation possible is rooted in a second, non-Romantic view of language as essentially symbolic, as
capable of revealing intention-less truth. Truth, however, is not revealed by giving the transcendent object
as a whole, but rather by expressing the object’s condition of fragmentation as an urgent call for
redemption. Whereas the allegorical gaze has a stance of melancholy and detachment toward the object,
the dead object, the dialectical image reveals the object as containing life. The life of the object is its past,
which lives within the object as a living force in the present, a living force that we are called to garner and
deploy for a radical transformation of the object’s present condition. In the dialectical image, the object is
revealed as expressing an imperative: the imperative of a revolutionary transformation of the present,
which alone can answer to the catastrophes of the past and the broken state of the object. The object is
disclosed as containing within it an urgent call for action, for radical change in the instant of the present
moment.
The role of language in the constellation that reveals the dialectical image is symbolic because it
achieves the goal of expressing the object in the object’s own voice, but it achieves this task not in the
manner that Romantic symbolism claims is possible (by giving the transcendent object in language), but
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