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Excavating Epochal Allegory - Reply

cauldian model of allegory must rigorously inspect his or her own self-constitutive epistemic matrix. Virtu­ ally all theorists of allegory, for instance, begin their projects by attending to a philological ground zero— that is, the etymological business about the derivation of the Hellenic term allegoria from alios agorein ‘saying other.’ Brownlow rehearses precisely this step as she launches her general definition of allegory by citing Isidore of Seville’s authoritative and inaugural philological recovery (in Latin) of the cryptic term’s meaning—alieniloquium ‘other speech’ (294). A thor­ oughgoing Foucauldian paradigm would circumvent or “excavate” this theoretically (and institutionally) sanctioned move, for philology stands as one of the preeminently positivistic sciences produced by the nineteenth-century academy. Philology conceals the cultural drive for pure and absolute semantic and ethnic origins, the collective desire for originary myths. (It is no coincidence that the discipline was reared in the late-nineteenth-century German univer­ sity.) For the Foucauldian thinker, such a cultural apparatus must draw suspicion along with the Pla­ tonic residue of most allegory theory. At best, genea­ logical thinking might steer us to take Foucault’s pronouncements about the “allegorical” relation of “the analysis of thought” to “the discourse that it employs” as somewhat offhanded, oblique, meta­ phoric, or, if you will, allegorical (Archaeology of Knowledge 27; cited in Brownlow 294). The increased theoretical self-scrutiny I advocate also applies to the problem of Brownlow’s semiotic model of allegory, whereby allegory functions, as “all commentators on allegory agree” (296), as the inscrip­ tion of anteriority or temporality. In particular, Brownlow lays out an analogy that hinges either on a blunder or on a deconstructive misprision. She writes: “Foucault’s episteme could be said to bear the same signifying relation to experienced history that an authoritative allegorical paradigm bears to a sub­ sequent allegory or that a typological antitype bears to a type” (296; italics mine). Contrary to what the last clause says, in typology the type is the prefigurative or precursor element, while the antitype is the postfigurative or subsequent element. Brownlow’s analogy thus misaligns types and antitypes with other things that come before (“an authoritative allegorical paradigm”) and corresponding things that come after (“a subsequent allegory”). The confusion is significant and felicitous, however, because the focusing of a “deconstructive” theory of allegory on the problem of temporality (by means of de Man’s pronouncements) calls up the drastically needed further deconstructive processing of that very problem. De Man’s claims (found in “The Rhetoric of Temporality”) really represent the maximal structuralist semiotization of allegory, rather than a poststructuralist or deconstruc­ tive modeling of the trope. That is to say, the allegori­ cal sign functions as an embodiment of the most fundamental structural seme: anterior/posterior, or before/after. This sequential semiotic structure, a reso­ lute binary opposition, must be given up or dismantled in a rigorous deconstructive paradigm. (Such a re­ quirement perhaps explains de Man’s entirely shifted model of allegory later on in Allegories of Reading.) One way to effect this deconstruction would be to play up inversions of before/after pairings. (Medieval ty­ pology, in fact, has been seen to deconstruct the semiotic foundations of anteriority.) Brownlow’s con­ fused analogy does just that. Reading her passages on allegory and typology critically, one can conclude (as is inevitable in post­ structuralist thought) that theoretical discussions of allegory, temporality, and the like are prey to the same latent textual forces that they seek to explain and control. Of course, Brownlow tries to lay all this out in two pages or so—a move that makes, I suspect, for much argumentative telescoping and compression. I certainly look forward to the promised book-length treatment of this matter. In that format, Brownlow will, I’m sure, expand on what is a tricky and some­ times galling theoretical problem.