Sovereignty and Experience: Walter Benjamin and Witold Gombrowicz

By dismantling misconceptions about experience, allegory, and storytelling, my book on Walter Benjamin and Witold Gombrowicz reveals that in the decline of the storyteller the allegorist is the new storyteller. Consequently, the preconceived notions that separate storytelling from allegory should be diminished. The allegorist, whose acts of redemptive rescue forge constellations between elements of the past unknown and unexperienced by anyone in the "present," finds common ground with the storyteller through a necessary violence, Benjamin's model of allegory - the angel of history.Benjamin's Trauerspiel and Baudelaire studies create a redemptive model for experience - allegory. Moreover, allegory's role in salvaging experience finds its counterpart in another violent model of interruption: Witold Gombrowicz's interhuman church. What allegory salvages in history and inexperience, the interhuman church forms amidst the ruins of language: the inauthentic "sovereign" self.