(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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DOMINIK FINKELDE
it is to this literature that Benjamin devotes his attention. In the plays
of Andreas Gryphius, for example in his Leo Armenius (1650), human
history is not seen as a development; rather it is poetically depicted as
finitude and futility. The failure of the play’s characters is not caused by
a tragic conflict, as in Greek tragedy; rather it happens with a somewhat
transcendental necessity, because the striving for magnitude already entails
the protagonist’s downfall into perdition.
As one can see from this panoramic sketch, Benjamin’s interest in the
Baroque is embedded in the experience of a cultural predicament that
he experienced as an intellectual and cultural philosopher of the Weimar
Republic, but also of European modernity in general. This is evident
throughout the book, for example when Benjamin studies weak “sovereigns”
and powerful “intriguers,” or when he unfolds a world experience
detached from the eschatological hope for a final and divine affirmation
of the world. Germany’s defeat in the First World War and the failure
of the first German republic transform the Baroque into a mirror-like
era, where politics is doomed to fail and history emerges as Naturgeschichte
(natural history): that is, as an anonymous process standing for
the destruction of the Hegelian vision of World Spirit. With it allegory,
as a key stylistic device of the Baroque, becomes a kind of “geschichtsphilosophische
Signatur” (historical-philosophical signature) of this era.
On the one hand Benjamin sees in this figure of speech a breaking-apart
between the “object” and its natural embeddedness in its world context,
a split between signifier (form) and the signified (content, meaning). On
the other hand, the poetics of allegory seems to give the Baroque poet, as
Benjamin sees it, the possibility to put things permanently into new and
heterogeneous arrangements. This heterogeneity and this mise en scène
of the break of signification affect the Baroque but also a modern diction
like the one typical of Benjamin’s thinking. Benjamin presents the
Baroque in a constellation of “erstarrte Unruhe” (petrified unrest) that
takes form through his own restless diction, which breaks with a linear
structure of thought in favor of assessments in sidesteps, fragments, and
detours. This also makes explicit the modernity of the Trauerspiel book
and its relation to postmodern thought. As is well known nowadays, postmodernity
values the fragment over its totalizing idea, the discontinuity
of history over a universal process, the particular discourse over an “ideal
speech community.” Especially the philosophy of the second half of the
twentieth century takes up models that were developed by Benjamin no
less than half a century before. Therefore it is not surprising that Paul de
Man borrowed from Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book the idea that allegory
was bound to the law of non-correspondence and differentiality. 6 The
allegorical sign always refers to another sign, never to the core of its own
meaning. That means that the language of allegory leads — according to
Benjamin and de Man — to the self-revocation of its enunciation.