Benjamin’s thought operates on parallel discontinuous levels of allegorical meditation

Evidence

Indeed, it seems to me that Walter Benjamin’s thought is best grasped as an allegorical one, as a set of parallel, discontinuous levels of meditation which are not without resemblance to that ultimate model of allegorical composition described by Dante when he speaks in his letter to Can Grande della Scala of the four dimensions of his poem: the literal (his hero’s adventures in the afterworld), the moral (the ultimate fate of his soul), the allegorical (in which his encounters resume one aspect or another of the life of Christ), and the anagogical (where his own drama foreshadows the progress of the human race itself toward the Last Judgment). It will not be hard to adapt this scheme to twentieth-century realities, if for literal we simply read psychological, retaining the second, moral level as such; if for the dominant archetypal pattern of the life of Christ we substitute religion in the broadest sense of the religion of art, seeing the Incarnation now as the incarnation of meaning in language; if finally, replacing theology with politics, we make of Dante’s eschatology an earthly one, where the human race finds its salvation not in eternity, but in history itself. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 140

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the Dantean four-level allegorical scheme (literal/moral/allegorical/anagogical) as the framework for grasping Benjamin’s method.
• XREF: Benjamin’s translation of theology into politics and religion into the religion of art echoes the Frankfurt School’s secularization of redemption — connects to Adorno’s aesthetic theory and to Jameson’s own dialectical method outside this book. — connects to: Benjamin’s dialectical images are momentary patterns linking present and past, not gradual transitions — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 841; Benjamin believed every sentence carries multiple layers of meaning — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 542; Benjamin’s oeuvre is fundamentally a collection of allegorical objects (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Benjamin’s dialectical images are momentary patterns linking present and past, not gradual transitions #expands (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 841
• Benjamin believed every sentence carries multiple layers of meaning #expands (0.80) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 542
• Benjamin’s oeuvre is fundamentally a collection of allegorical objects #expands (0.80)