One of the earliest examples of Descartes’ writings is the following fragment from a lost notebook, preserved in a copy made by Leibniz. In 1619 – 35 years after the publication of Giordano Bruno’s Ash Wednesday Supper and 13 before Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems – Descartes famously writes, “Actors, taught not to let any embarrassment show on their faces, put on a mask. I will do the same. So far I have been a spectator in the theater of the world, but now I am about to mount the stage, and I come forward masked.” He would, of course, go on to inscribe a set of philosophical and scientific texts containing constant renunciations of rhetorical and allegorical masking, insisting that clear and distinct perception alone serve as the criteria for rational knowledge. Focusing on the production of allegorical and dialogical masking and inscription in Bruno and Galileo, this paper inquires into the function and structure of allegory in early modern philosophical cosmology.

                       In particular, I focus on two parallel moments in these texts. The first is the general framework of the substitution of speaking characters as metonyms for both the text of Copernicus (in both cases, a copy of On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres makes an appearance) and the voice of their authors (as when Galileo has his character Salivati proclaim, “I act as a Copernican and play his part with a mask”), together with their accompanying disavowals of the philosophical value of such substitution (as when Salivati continues, “I do not want to be judged by what I say while we are involved in the enactment of the play, but by what I say after I have put away the costume”). The second is the enactment of diagrammatic inscription, when the characters in both texts pause their philosophical arguments to engage in the production of cosmological diagrams as deduction and representations of a Copernican universe, quite literally refiguring Copernicus’ text within their own. On the face of it, both sets of moments appear rather flat in allegorical content: the richness of Renaissance allegory proper has given way to the literality of a regime of representation. Yet perhaps in the years separating these works (in the midst of which Descartes begins to write) we can find a shift not only in the status and structure of allegory itself within philosophical discourse, but also a change in its purpose. Bruno’s emblematic Copernicanism – in a text somewhat ironically based on a real Oxford disputation in which he took part – functions as a cipher with which he conjures a metaphysically Cusan universe, whereas Galileo’s wholly invented dialogue is a direct intervention into the apparently more literal realm of early modern physics and astronomy.

                       I use these considerations regarding the structure and role of allegory in early modern philosophical cosmology to raise the following questions: Is it illegitimate to bracket seemingly non-philosophical techniques like allegory and dialogical metonymy in the conceptual and historical interpretations of these texts? If so, then how can we understand the supposedly straightforward philosophical content of these texts to be complicated to their rhetorical forms? And finally, what becomes of allegory itself when it makes contact with early modern modes of philosophical argument?

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In this paper I argue that Hegel's portrayal of conscience in the Phenomenology of Spirit allegorizes our human vulnerability to the excessive, unpredictable effects of performatives. Conscience's declaration of its dutifulness, a declaration which should performatively guarantee conscience the recognition it requires from others, inadvertently results in conscience's failure to obtain that recognition and thus to become fully actual. I go on to suggest that the failures associated with conscience's performative declaration within the Phenomenology reflect upon the purported effectivity of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a whole. That is, the Phenomenology may claim for itself to be the unfolding of Spirit that it also narrates, but it cannot conclusively accomplish that act. Hence within the Phenomenology as a whole, the chapter on conscience allegorizes the Phenomenology's own impossibility of guaranteeing that it is and does that which it claims to be and to do.

Drawing on several stunningly visual fifteenth-century burnings at the stake, I argue that medieval law made conscious use of mnemonic techniques not only to stage, pictorialize, and allegorize the death penalty but to "re-allegorize" the execution of criminals in such a way as to make images of justice unforgettable. Centuries before Michel Foucault ever spoke of the "spectacle of the scaffold," the Northern French city of Metz, for example, brought to the scaffold of an infanticidal mother a wooden doll which they placed in her charred arms along with "a painting of a child around her neck in order to signify the crime that she had committed." This unusual combination of a painting from the visual arts and a prop from the world of theater sheds new light on both the nature of any legal "exhibit" and on the symbolic systems of law itself. Just as one of the canonical functions of poetry is to “make new again” a tired old cliché or a metaphor, so too here do pictorialization, memory, theatricality, and staging reanimate and "re-allegorize" one of the great dead metaphors of the law: to "make an example of someone”—and to do so in ways that lend new meaning to the term legal representation. Moreover, in a country like the U.S. where our own vernacular makes room for a term like "burned in effigy" and where the Bush administration emphasizes what kind of spectacular dissemination of carnage the Iraqi people need to see in order to believe allegedly justifiable deaths (such as the deaths of the sons of Saddam Hussein), this process is not quite as medieval as one might suspect.

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The subfield of Science Studies called “Rhetoric of Science” has well treated the governing tropes and figures that constitute, ironically, modern science, that paramount “discourse of the literal” (as Gilles Deleuze has christened all post-Newtonian sciences, mathematics in particular). Following some of the most

trenchant innovators in this regard (notably the Belgian philosopher of science Fernand Hallyn and the unique “semiotician of mathematics,” Brian Rotman), I argue that the general program of the Rhetoric of Science has not gone far enough -- certainly not far enough to challenge the purportedly iconoclastic Deleuze in his findings in books such as The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. The historical legacy and structure of allegory, of allegory

theory itself, must come to recondition many of the achievements in late modern science. Taking up examples where the rhetoric of allegory is already underway, and with focus on biological cellular studies, neuroscientific theories of consciousness, and immunology as well as modern cosmological physics, I press for our better understanding of the “unseen allegory” that constitutes much major scientific progress into our new century. Noted scientists on target include: Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Hammeroff, and Frank Tipler. My plea is for the continued interdisciplinary animation of literary theory with its emphasis on rhetoric and poetics, physics, biology, systems theory, and cognitive studies. The result would make science itself prosper more fully, I opine, while it would finally help the humanities live up to the dream of historian of science Gerald Holton, who has long labored for the interanimation of what C. P. Snow once quarantined into “the two cultures.”

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The assumption is usually that allegorical compositions and interpretations are based on a correspondence between images and agents on the one side---the "story' or "fiction"---and a set or system of ideas---the "ideology"---on the other. This correspondence gives us so-called "levels of meaning." A strange question then might be: What if there are no ideas available for an interpretive structure? This allegory without ideas is examined in the light of recent conditions of thought, as a kind of desperate Nominalism.

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While seventeenth century English allegory witnesses a rapid decline in the kind of multi-leveled, continuous allegorical symbolism employed by Spenser and Donne, the genre itself remains strangely vigorous. In its first half the “triumphant” allegorical masque not only thrives but survives Puritan iconoclasm by preserving its emblematic iconography (Treip, “`Celestial Patronage’”). After the Restoration, Milton’s Paradise Lost continues to use mystical allegory machinery to represent both hellish machination and divine justice, while Royalists like Dryden actually return to something like continuous allegory in “The Hind and the Panther.” As Walter Benjamin would predict, both poets use allegory to mourn either mankind’s or England’s fall from sacramental unity and potency; yet in England as opposed to Germany, allegory’s “ruin” actually appears more like a regenerative metamorphosis than a decline.

Various solutions to this problematic difference have been proposed by myself and others, but this paper points to a single, overriding, but erroneously ignored source: Francis Bacon’s “conversion” to allegoresis as both a creative and a legitimate teaching device in his extremely popular Wisdom of the Ancients. Previously thought to influence only “decadent” Royalists like Dryden, Bacon is clearly present in the central symbolic system of Paradise Lost, where Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death is actually a thinly disguised version of Bacon’s Scylla and her deadly lovers. This borrowing makes perfect sense given 1) that Bacon’s “genuinely Machivellian theory of war, vigor, and instability. . .set an important precedent for. . .seventeenth-century republicanism” (Peltonen, Cambridge Companion); and 2) that after his “tragic” exile from the political arena, Bacon’s critiques of the human idols increasingly promoted a frankly libertarian agenda. Despite their biblical and Spenserian sources, Milton’s Sin and Death follow his precedent by first isolating their roots in narcissistic self-deception, superstition and tyranny. His Archangel Michael then shows how to exile their effects by simply eliminating their illusions. Unlike Paul Ricoeur’s “symbolism of evil,” Sin and Death thus become symbols of false ideology far more than simple biblical “stings” or heal wounds; and by book 10, these Xerxes-like tyrants reveal their broader Baconian symbolism by waging war not just on human life but on human liberty, self-determination, and “republican” virtue. As Michael’s symbolic counter-attacks further show, both the analysis and the cure of the disease remains Baconian through and through, so that the father of modern science ironically joins in fathering the fully modern epic.

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After 1550 in Italy, Aristotle's Poetics encouraged a mode of mimetic representation that was centered on the passions. But that mode did not entirely displace the neo-platonic urge to allegorize. In many spoken and sung tragedies of the seventeenth century, the tragic hero or heroine's failed but meaningful bid for transcendence is represented as a failed quest for the allegorical significance of song, dance, or verse. By about the 1640s, a more refined and stable rhetoric of the passions that would permit a co-ordination of the arts had been established. I take it that his development is what Winckelmann, quoted by Walter Benjamin, is thinking of when he refers to "the hope of those who believe that allegory might be taken so far that one could paint an ode." The publication of Descartes's Treatise on the Passions of the Soul provided real impetus to this development, which located the allegorical referent not in the heavens but in the passions of the soul. I conclude with some more general speculations about the relationship between allegory as a mode of representation and tragedy as a genre.

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