citation a l'ordre du jour

In Walter Benjamin’s brilliantly eccentric definition of the Allegorical, he returns constantly by way of example, to the recoding of the old pagan gods by Christianity. The Pagan world leaves in its wake idols, ritualistic objects, symbols of worship, which Chistianity, far from discarding, seizes and re-uses, presiding over these dead gods - in all their recalcitrant otherness and antique dignity - with a sovereign interpretative and destructive power.

Thus, allegorical materials are signs and symbols that have fallen outside their place within a definite Symbolic support system (here, the old pagan world). No longer plugged into their living context, these ruined signs can now be overwritten by a different Symbolic Order (Christianity).
But if Christian allegory is an attempt to recode and ‘contain’ the old gods, their dangerous potency is never entirely extinguished. The exorcism of translation is never complete. Something has escaped, leaked away into silence. And what leaks away (i.e., in recoding the old gods) returns as occult mists, an obscure presentiment or spiritual exorbitance. This x which has escaped the re-coding operation nags at the mind of the allegorist, filling him with a creeping awareness of occult forces & the knocking of the dead.

Thus, a purely aesthetic veneration for the old & defeated culture coexists with an intimation of its still unquiet daemonic power.

This in part explains the affinity, the sympathy, between allegory and melancholy.

Let me remind you of the now familiar distinction between mourning and melancholia. Mourning would translate the lost object into symbols. If the absent thing can be dragged into representation its binding force will be exorcised. The melancholic, instead, recognises that there is that which resists translation into the symbolic. There is that which cannot pass into language, and the melancholic is locked in fidelity to this unspoken thing.

For the Benjamin allegorist too, there is often this intimation of a lost root, of that which has escaped the recoding operation, fallen outside the net of symbolisation. Wanting to rescue for Meaning the old gods, the allegorist finally, says Benjamin, comes away empty handed. When confronted by the ruined signs of an older form of life, the allegorist (to re-employ a distinction I have drawn on before) recognises that they signify without knowing what. Lacan has a relevant phrase here: Hieroglyphs in the desert. A jug from the seventeenth century, some medieval chasuble, even the embossing on a volume of Yeats’s early poems all have this quality to varying degrees. They seem pregnant with a blocked significance. We can see that they have significance – it’s like a nimbus surrounding them – but the absent and inaccessible content haunts us. And this nimbus without content is the sure index of a form of life which we are now unable to restore or enter into.

Thus, the allegorist recognises a ‘jagged line of demarcation between sign and meaning’, and inhabits a world pregnant with the glow of a Meaning which has itself slipped out of reach. This incidentally also characterises Kafka’s world, where the constant rumour of significance, the perception that things signified, was in bewildering excess of any actual interpretive returns.

But the allegorical condition, as Benjamin describes it, is in fact, ultimately the condition of historical interpretation as such: the awareness of lost forms of life, the limitations of our own temporal horizon, the nostalgia for a meaning which doesn't require endless and deferred unpicking. The time lag between sign and meaning is the definitive property of the allegorical. And allegory, in so far as it recognises this time lag, is thought to bear witness to humanity’s alienation.. But this, Benjamin implies, is the very Truth of our life in time, and will only become untrue when time stops:

To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l'ordre du jour — and that day is Judgment Day.