| Summary: | This paper aims at showing that allegory, as reinterpreted by Bejamin, by presenting an irreducible gap between significant and meaning, anticipates a Derridian consideration of reading as difference, interruption and diversion. Benjamin contrasts the figure of the symbol —as an a expression of a totality— to the figure of allegory, reinterpreting it as a failure of the pretended atemporality of the symbol. Between the original literal text and its new meaning there opens an irreducible gap, which prevents the closure of the meaning of the allegory. From this perspective, everything which is premature, suffering and ill-fated in history, is reluctant to be represented in the symbol and the harmony of the classic form, and can only be expressed allegorically. Likewise, messianism, as an allegoric form of historical redemption, can only be exposed as fragments or ruins of the language, in relation to the fragmentary conception of Benjamin’s textual quote. Messianism also takes place in literary discourse in modernity (Kafka, for example) as an allegoric form of transmission. In this context, the truth it contains is not important, but its transmissibility, i.e., its significant iterability, its infinite writing and rewriting, in consonance with the deconstructionist proposal of reading.
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