(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

THE PRESENCE OF THE BAROQUE
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dimension aside from its verbal propositional content. Similarly, in his
analysis of the mourning play he looks for a shaping principle that manifests
itself, like an “idea,” from combined and determining historical
forces. The notion of the “idea” refers — as we have already seen in relation
to the prologue — not to a Platonic heaven composed of abstract
entities but to historical potentials as gravitational fields that are not
maneuvered or influenced by the human subject. The “idea” does not
designate an item in an individual allegory but belongs to a “grundsätzlich
anderen Bereich . . . als das von ihr Erfaßte” (GS I.1:214; “fundamentally
different world from that which it apprehends,” Origin, 34). As
Heymann Steinthal says, Benjamin inspects what takes place in language
without defining this movement of language as a segregated “content”
of language. 34 The “idea” appears as a shaping force only in phenomena,
not beyond them. The “Allegorisierung der Physis” (GS I.1:391–92;
“allegorization of the physis [i.e. of ‘natural things’],” Origin, 217), the
way it is expressed in the dead body but also in “scenes of cruelty and
anguish” (GS I.1:389; Origin, 216) is therefore of structural nature and
not a leitmotif. “Die Personen des Trauerspiels sterben, weil sie nur so, als
Leichen, in die allegorische Heimat eingehen” (GS I.1:391; “The characters
of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, that they can
enter into the homeland of allegory,” Origin, 217).
The definitions of the allegory, as the German classical period conceptualized
them, saw in it only an arbitrary sign. For Benjamin it will become
the essence to be recovered or redeemed, as he writes in a letter to Scholem
in 1924 (GS I.3:881). While in the symbol the relation between sign
(sound, the written word) and signification (content, referent) is based
on an original link between these two elements; this link, which warrants
a fixable content of signification, breaks down in allegory. 35 One effect
is that the “content” melts into nothing. If we take in combination with
this statement Karl Marx’s diagnosis of modernity: “Alles Ständische und
Stehende verdampft” 36 (all that is solid melts into air) one can understand
why in the writings of Baudelaire and Proust Benjamin rediscovers the
allegory as a primordial stylistic device of modernity.
Even ancient rhetoric referred to a tension between sign and signification,
and it is this that Benjamin takes up as the particular nature of the
allegory in the Baroque mourning play. Benjamin interprets the allegorically
visualized transitoriness of worldly things as an allegorical sign 37 that
can even signify the contrary of itself. “Any person, any object, any relationship
can mean absolutely anything else” (GS I.1:350; Origin, 175). 38
Allegory refers as an emblem, auto-poetically, to its own referentiality, a
referentiality that cannot be decoded on the side of signification. The significations
do not keep their concrete meaning in dialogue but replace
one another mutually. Instead of being “effaced” and “stopped” by concrete
signification, the allegorical image remains vivid in this play and