Romancing Fascism: Modernity and Allegory in Benjamin, de Man, Shelley

Kathleen Kerr-Koch has here devised an original and highly revealing constellation of three writers – Shelley, Benjamin, and de Man – whose work she shows, through careful and perceptive close-reading, to speak very directly to crucial issues in present-day literary and cultural theory. Above all she brings out their critical power, when conjoined in this way, to focus and refine our thinking about the reception-history of poetic and philosophical texts and, beyond that, their potential impact on the course of historical events. This involves a subtly inflected understanding of the structure and workings of allegory as theorised and exemplified in the work of her chosen authors. Kerr-Koch also demonstrates how wide of the mark, naïve and ideologically suspect are those other, less scrupulous readings that take for granted a simplified model of intellectual history and a grossly reductive or distorting view of the ‘influences’ active in current (usually deprecated) movements of thought. This book is a fine achievement and should remind us what is politically at stake when well-placed conservative antagonists of ‘theory’ – and of deconstruction in particular – take it as their stalking-horse for an overt or covert attack on the project and values of enlightened critique. –Christopher Norris, Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy, Cardiff University, UK