ABSTRACT
Whenever one wishes to clarify what is meant by the term ‘allegory’, one inevitably meets with the formulation of the ‘other speech’ (die andere Rede). The meaning of the ‘other’ (das andere) within this paraphrase always remains curiously opaque, however. Indeed, a certain indifference as to the sense, origin, and function of this ‘other’ seems to suggest itself whenever the definition of allegory as ‘other speech’ is repeated. This is particularly noticeable at the transition to modernity where the o/Other in all its multilayered and iridescent meanings rises to the surface and makes its way into the foreground of literature and art. What I want to suggest is that the ‘other’ in the sense given to it in psychoanalysis becomes dominant in the allegorical writing of modernity, and that pre-modern allegorical techniques-such as indirect speech, pictorial representation, personification, allegorical schemata and narrative structures-go into this writing, but transformed in such a way that the ‘other speech’ becomes the ‘speech of the Other’ (Rede des Anderen). In this transformation, the pictorial representations metamorphose into a figurative language of the unconscious or into read images, embodiments (Verkörperungen) become semiotic bodies (semiotische Körper), body-and image-spaces for the imaginings (Imaginationen) of the subject, while metaphorical (literally transferred) representation1 becomes distorted representation, or translation without an original.
