Works do not have meanings they soak up meanings: a work is a machine for libidinal
investments (including the political kind). It is a process that sorts incommensurabilities and
registers contradictions (which is not the same as solving them!) The inevitable and welcome
conflict of interpretations - a discursive ideological struggle - therefore needs to be
supplemented by an account of this simultaneous processing of multiple meanings rather than an
abandonment to liberal pluralisms and tolerant (or intolerant) relativisms. This is not a book
about method but it does propose a dialectic capable of holding together in one breath the
heterogeneities that reflect our biological individualities our submersion in collective
history and class struggle and our alienation to a disembodied new world of information and
abstraction. Eschewing the arid secularities of philosophy Walter Benjamin once recommended
the alternative of the rich figurality of an older theology in that spirit we here return to
the antiquated Ptolemaic systems of ancient allegory and its multiple levels (a proposal first
sketched out in The Political Unconscious) it is tested against the epic complexities of the
overtly allegorical works of Dante Spenser and the Goethe of Faust II as well as symphonic
form in music and the structure of the novel postmodern as well as Third-World: about which a
notorious essay on National Allegory is here reprinted with a theoretical commentary and an
allegorical history of emotion is meanwhile rehearsed from its contemporary geopolitical
context.
