Abstract

In systems of meaning that run on a regular setting, allegory is about filling in or identifying the blanks that disclose the “other story.” In the modern setting that Walter Benjamin tracked , allegory must turn significance out of the blank itself, working the blank as a turning point for drawing the reading onward. The work most influential on, indeed syndicated in, Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play, as I’ve argued elsewhere, was Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.1 It is the text that hovers behind my own preoccupation with the science fiction genre as the “psy-fi” hub where bona fide science fictions, documentations of psychosis ..