Reading Borges after Benjamin by Jenckes Kate

Author:Jenckes, Kate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York

The Umschwung leads to an Übersprung, a leaping not only forward but over, an “overspringing to.”6 Here allegory has turned into a Jacob’s ladder, in which the objects of this world serve as steps out if it into resurrection. This Übersprung is an entrance or reentrance into the ideology of a teleological history, but with a difference. It is more truly ideological because the abyss of temporality has been contemplated and denied, sutured in spite of “the impossibility of any ultimate suture” (Laclau, New Reflec tions 92). To paraphrase Žižek, it is not that they know not what they do, but that they know it and do it anyway (32-33).

“‘Weeping we scattered the seed on fallow ground and sadly went away.’ Allegory goes away empty handed” (OGD 233). Benjamin’s book began with the Ursprung, the dialectical beginning of a nonteleological history, and ends with an Übersprung, a leaping over this possibility, right back into the ontoteleological structure of a Christian history of resurrection. This Übersprung marks the beginning of the modern state: having glimpsed the precarious nature of the world, power learns to assert itself in new ways, taking that precarious nature into account. The metaphor of monarchy is no longer sufficient; the prince himself becomes an allegorist of the sadistic kind, writing his stories into the bodies of his subjects (184). This is due in part to what Benjamin calls the Baroque’s “theological essence of the subjective.” In spite of its conception of a nonhuman history that leaves skulls in its wake, Baroque allegory reveals itself in the end “to be a subjective phenomenon,” in which the “subjective perspective is entirely absorbed in the economy of the whole” (233).7 Benjamin’s examples illustrate the bizarre extent to which such a subjective perspective was taken. He tells of the pillars of a Baroque balcony that were “in reality arrayed exactly the way in which, in a regular construction, they would appear from below,” and of Santa Teresa’s response to a confessor who did not see the roses she claimed to see: “Our Lady brought them to me” (234). In the end, modern constructions of power would rely on more than hallucinations and trompes d’oeil to govern their constituents, but the fiction of the subject’s centrality would maintain a critical importance.

“Allegory goes away empty-handed”: Benjamin ends his book here. But I want to argue that allegory does not end here, with the Übersprung of the modern state, but rather ends in the beginning, in his discussion of the Ursprung. If there is any hope in the face of the modern state, it is in the beginning of a different conception of history, a different relationship to time and being. Baroque allegory fails in the end to remain open to such a difference: it closes off what it began in a faithless leap into the figure of Christian redemption. But the Epistemo-Critical prologue presents another conception of redemption, in which history is “redeemed or gathered” into the idea. Benjamin has come under frequent

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