Following his idea of the task of the critique, Walter Benjamin makes appear Calderon’s images of happiness into Gryphius’ ruined “original” landscape: the fleeting star of Spanish baroque shines intermittently into the demoniac darkness of Silesian baroque. The baroque is thus only able to meet its own truth through the inversion of its allegorical melancholy into the symbolic moment of redemption. I am aiming at demonstrate how, in Origin of German baroque, a figurative dialectic manifests itself, frozen between symbol and allegory, melancholy and redemption, forerunning the “dialectic images” that will polarize capitalist phantasmagorias between allegory and utopia.
Keywords:
Walter Benjamin, allegory, symbol, melancholy, redemption, baroque, expressionism, Calderón, Shakespeare, Gryphius, Goethe, romanticism, tragedy, dialectics, original phenomena
Berdet, M. (2018). Symbol and allegory or redemption and melancholy: Aesthetics of the baroque according to Walter Benjamin. Revista De Filosofía, 74, pp. 21–40. Retrieved from https://revistaei.uchile.cl/index.php/RDF/article/view/51871
