Allegory and Montage. The Work of the Fragment in Walter Benjamin

Abstract

Walter Benjamin ?s concept of history journeys across different theoretical and political states. Although in all of them he decidedly criticizes any Hegelian idealization of history's passive material, he does so from very different theoretical angles. In this paper we demarcate two key conceptualizations in history ?s disruption: the concept of“allegory”, coined in his work about the German tragic drama (and displayed in his works about Baudelaire), and the idea of “montage” inspired by constructivist avant-garde (and new ways of technical art). Two decisive features join these two concepts: the critique of any symbolic or totalizing conception about significance and its special performance in thinking the image problem. Nevertheless, there is a slight difference between them: if allegory is understood as a protest that dismisses every significance regime above suffering and lack of sense, montage is a building option that lasts after totality is dismantled. However, Benjamin sustains in his late work the tension between both of them. This shows us, on the one hand a Benjamin that tries to avoid an unilateral interpretation, but on the other, this fluctuation between the allegory ?s melancholic dismissal, its fixation in the loss, and montage ?s constructivist passion, its commitment with a work (of grief), “tightens the arch” of contemporary debates about “memory” and “horror ?s representation”.