Love's Shadow

Abstract

Love's Shadow Donald E. Pease (bio) Paul A. Bové's Love's Shadow is an eloquent, immensely learned, artful and multi-layered literary manifesto with two separate yet interrelated aims. Bové intends to connect the freedom of critical thinking to poiesis, the secular anagogic imaginative intelligence whereby "humans as a species can imagine alternatives to its own circumstances" (2021, xi 395 [footnote 18]). He also resolves to disrupt the hegemony of allegorical reasoning that makes ruin the response to crisis and that makes artists, nature, and humans "abject and in need of the redemptive intercession of priestly masters" (395). Allegorical and anagogical mental states are utterly noncomparable and separated by a non-traversable gap. The dispositions Bové assumes to achieve these different aims have almost nothing in common. Intriguingly, his devastating critique of allegorical thinking invites and at times encourages misreading. This problem begins with the opening chapter, aptly titled "The Path of Sorrows: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory: Misprisions of Utopia." In it Bové offers a polemical assessment of the impoverishment of thinking taking place in disciplines across the humanities and designates the agency chiefly responsible for bringing about this state of affairs to be allegoresis "the reading of all materials as allegories" (ix). Misprision is Harold Bloom's name for a creative misreading that conceals a precursor figure's disabling authority from a successor emboldened yet threatened by that power (2). Revolutionary utopianism might be understood a misprision of the powers of making and re-making inherent in poiesis. Alternatively, a messianic allegorist thinks secular humanism a catastrophic misprision of the creation that necessitates an apocalyptic correction. Was the decision to single out for special denunciation Walter Benjamin, the progenitor of messianic allegory, and Frederic Jameson, the theorist of revolutionary utopianism, intended to provoke multitudinous defenses? In a sense, Love's Shadow begins twice. In the opening chapters of Love's Shadow, Bové takes up the persona of a critic lacking relation to the resources of poiesis to conduct an immanent critique of catastrophic allegoresis. Yet, in the subsequent six chapters when Bové looks at art's own solutions and alternatives to the purveyors of catastrophic messianism, he assumes a decidedly different mental state. Unlike the critic who condemns allegoresis categorically, this persona feels sufficiently connected to the quintessential [End Page 609] agency of the imagination to regard this melancholic disposition a stunted actualization of poeisis. I find Bové's decision to personify two distinctly different critical personae to carry out the inter-related aims of Love's Shadow a topic of sufficient import to focus the remarks that follow. Bove's first chapter designates the longue durée of the "crisis of Europe" as a relatively localized temporality for the melancholic lineage that emerged in the wake of Walter Benjamin's messianic allegories. The second chapter extends this genealogy to the esoteric hermeneutic practices of the Elohist tradition. Upon staging Plato's replacement of the poet with the philosopher as the figure chiefly responsible for the enactment of reliable imaginative human efforts in the world, chapter three adds The Symposium to allegory's genealogical lineage. Since the world over which allegoresis exercises its melancholic rule severs relations between poiesis and criticism, Bové take up the persona of a critic lacking relation to the resources of poiesis to critique allegorical thinking. Bové's opening gambit as a critic of allegoresis entails radically disrupting its operations by exposing the double bind of ruination as its master trope: "Allegorical truth is the truth of continual ruination of historical culture and fallen nature and depends on ruination for its own repetitive victories over time" (21). Unable to animate a tie to the imaginative intelligence the rule of allegory perforce excludes, he constructs what might be described as a critical meta-allegory by reductively describing seemingly incompatible instantiations of allegorical thinking such as Walter Benjamin's Origin of the German Trauerspiel, Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future, The Symposium by Plato, and the Elohist esoteric hermeneutic tradition as reiterations of an overarching schema he negates in its entirety.1 Insofar as they reference radically different futures even when there is no alternative world imagined in that projection, Bové designates critics who...