Allegory and Apocatastasis: Walter Benjamin and the Image of Neoliberalism
Date
2023-08
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Abstract
This dissertation argues that Walter Benjamin’s image of allegory as at once an encounter with a “ruin” and “a petrified, primal landscape” can only be analysed through the prism of a wider critical program that takes into consideration a larger aggregate of his key concepts. The term apocatastasis does not appear often in his writings, but it refers to a sudden intensity of recognition wherein “the entire past is brought into the present.” Rather than a mythic moment of total knowledge, this dissertation argues that Benjamin uses apocatastasis to conceptualize the recognition and preservation of dialectically (i.e., historically) cancelled values. This moment of recognition, or Jetztzeit, corresponds to an authentic political experience—an understanding that the present is not a repetition of previous historical events, but a unique string of values that requires unique, political actualization. Apocatastasis, as this dissertation conceives of it, is a mode of reading that places three key terms in tension: allegory, image, and secularization. These three terms contain a multitude of others that all contextualize the scene of an encounter with some ruined, historical phenomenon (allegory). This dissertation will then use this reading method to critique the ruin of neoliberalism—an allegorical scene par excellence. Through Benjamin’s unfinished writings about the allegorical nature of the commodity form, this dissertation argues that the unique value that emerges in neoliberalism is display value. Display value enables the reification of—and the continuing commodification of—language itself, in ways that were still developing in classical liberalism. With the origins of this value emerging in Baudelaire’s Paris, this dissertation will also attempt to contextualize the extent to which display alters the scene that is still unrecognizable as anything but liberalism to the majority of readers today.
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Keywords
Allegory, Apocatastasis, Secularization, Image, Walter Benjamin, Neoliberalism
Citation
Groh, B. (2023). Allegory and apocatastasis: Walter Benjamin and the image of neoliberalism (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.