Timothy Flanagan (Dundee)
Allegorical Aesthetics and the ‘Sensibility of Sufficient Reason’:
Reading Deleuze’s Fold through Benjaminian Themes
This paper argues that although Walter Benjamin is mentioned only once in The Fold,
his work bears substantial affinities to the key positions set out in Deleuze’s text. Situating
this affinity within a more extensive harmony between the two thinker’s oeuvres and
trajectories, this paper seeks to use Benjamin’s own work on the Baroque to consider some
important, and perhaps otherwise unappreciated, themes in The Fold.
At heart, the thesis of the paper will be that consideration of Benjamin’s study on
Seventeenth Century dramaturgy opens up a peculiarly ‘temporal’ interpretation of the
philosophy that Deleuze seeks to establish in his book on the same period. This temporality, it
will be argued, is an experience what might be called a ‘sensibility of sufficient reason’.
Benjamin’s study on German Trauerspiel had set out to show the inherent sense of
caducity which typified a particularly Baroque feeling of history. His scholarship documented
features such as the crumbling pediments used as stagecraft, the casting of rulers as villainous
and corrupt, and most of all the explicit absence of cathartic resolution in the plot. Benjamin’s
intention was to show that the baroque sensibility was one characterised by a despairing
suspension between redemption and damnation; it was a sensibility that was not amenable to
either a substantively transcendent or immanent ground of thinking.
Deleuze finds in Benjamin a development of allegory which points beyond analogy
and homology, an account which is more than just a dirge on the problem of reconciling the
supposed authenticity of ‘substance’ with the banality of ‘accident’. He finds Benjamin’s
account of a ‘nature literally saturated through with history’ as an indeterminate ground which
pertains to the problem of the logical relation between objects and concepts, and seeks to
consider what it entails for thinking about the world. This way of thinking can be set out in
terms of the familiar poles of the transcendent and the immanent, however in essence such
thinking cannot be substantively reduced to either metaphysical valency: it is a ‘sensibility of
sufficient reason’.
This is because essentially, this type of thinking has no beginning and neither does it
tend toward an end. Rather it is always at once in the middle (because it seeks contiguity with
the natural networks of objects), and at the edges (because it determines concepts, albeit
concepts that never represent the object sufficiently). It is a type of thinking which is
prompted by a fundamental engagement with the world.
According to this model, as thought formulates concepts for the objects of encounter
it becomes apparent that these concepts cannot hold for eternity and so thought is behoved to
create new ways of engaging the object of the world. Thought does not take its cue from
transcendent laws of logic but from the metaphysics of experience. Such a sensibility of
sufficient reason would not be contiguous with the extended or quantifiable conceptualisation
of the world, but rather would take place in the encounter of the of thought’s experienced
relation to the objects of the world.