Allegory shifted from outer corpses to inner relics as secularized commemoration

Evidence

And what marks baroque allegory holds true for the allegory of modern times, for Baudelaire as well: only in the latter it is interiorized. “Baroque allegory saw the corpse from the outside only. Baudelaire sees it from within.” Or again: “Commemoration [Andenken] is the secularized version of the adoration of holy relics…. Commemoration is the complement to experience. In commemoration there finds expression the increasing alienation of human beings, who take inventories of their past as of lifeless merchandise. In the nineteenth century allegory abandons the outside world, only to colonize the inner. Relics come from the corpse, commemoration from the dead occurrences of the past which are euphemistically known as experience.” — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 160

Categorization

• XREF: Core of Jameson’s Benjamin chapter — connects to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book and Adorno’s critiques; fits reader’s Frankfurt-School lineage goal. — connects to: Allegory conveys a painful secular disenchantment that symbolic language soon obscured. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 312; Modern classification of cultures secularized earlier religious structures; Secularization transferred religious aura to art and literature. (+1 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The move from outward allegorical corpse to inner commemoration, with ‘experience’ ironically reified as dead merchandise, condenses the whole Benjamin-Adorno problematic of reified interiority in one dense passage.

Broader Connections

• Secularization transferred religious aura to art and literature. #expands (0.78)
• Modern classification of cultures secularized earlier religious structures #expands (0.75)
• Allegory conveys a painful secular disenchantment that symbolic language soon obscured. #qualifies (0.72) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 312