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57 chapter 2 Allegory and Hauntology Ghosts, like . . . allegories, are manifestations from the realm of mourning; they have an affinity for mourners, for those who ponder over signs and over the future. —Walter Benjamin Allegories are always allegories of metaphor and, as such, they are always allegories of the impossibility of reading. —Paul de Man In the spring of 2002—mere months after watching the Twin Towers fall and dust-covered, distressed financial district workers hastily migrate uptown past the Greenwich Village campus buildings of New York University , where I was a graduate student at the time—I attended a Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Starring Liam Neeson and Laura Linney as John and Elizabeth Proctor, the play was at once a welcome escape from the distressed atmosphere of the city streets outside of the theater, and an uncomfortable reminder that Americans were still, more than 300 years after the Salem Witch Trials dramatized by Miller, imagining and hunting down enemies both domestic and foreign. The war in Afghanistan was well under way, and then-President George W. Bush was making regular televised speeches to his constituents on the axis of evil and other such paranoid, bellicose constructs. Yet as I sat in the theater, I couldn’t help but feel that Miller’s use of the Salem story in order to express a thinly veiled criticism of the anti-communist fervor of the 1950s amounted to a violent appropriation of history. While the depiction of witch-hunting in early colonial New England certainly provided an apt setting within which to ponder questions of scapegoating and blacklisting, desire and guilt, power and politics in the mid-twentieth century, I couldn’t rid myself of the thought that Miller’s aesthetic leap into the past in order to address the present—however potent—did so at the expense of the historical specificity of the seventeenth-century witch hunts, the singularity of Salem. I detected in the use of historical allegory a sort of discursive violence, in which the thematization of the past turned event into object. It therefore took me rather by surprise when, midway through act 3— in which the protagonist, John Proctor, appears in court to defend his wife and neighbors against the false charges of witchcraft—Judge Danforth uttered the following lines: “a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between” (Miller, The Crucible, 87). At that point, an audible gasp could be heard from the audience, who could not help but hear in Danforth’s accusation President Bush’s November 2001 proclamation that “you’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.” I realized at that moment—in which the words of a mid-twentieth-century theatrical work that took as its subject matter the religious politics of seventeenth-century colonial New England unexpectedly, hauntingly mattered to a twenty-firstcentury public—that the foundational period of the United States could erupt (and re-erupt) into the present moment: like a specter. The present chapter focuses upon the spectral quality of allegory by investigating the way in which the turn to the Inquisition in late-twentiethcentury theater and film relies upon the use of historical allegory, which I read as proper to the logic of hauntology. Placing Walter Benjamin’s idea of the skull or “death’s head” (in The Origin of German Tragic Drama) alongside Jacques Derrida’s notion of the “specter” (in Specters of Marx), I want to locate these Inquisition (hi)stories at the juncture between allegory, ruins, and haunting, arguing that the remains of historical violence disturb the present through the literary. Following an analysis of Miller’s play, I turn my attention to three Inquisition allegories : Arturo Ripstein’s El Santo Oficio (1974) and Sabina Berman’s En el nombre de Dios (1991), which project contemporary ethnic and class struggles onto a sixteenth-century context, and Bernardo Santareno’s O Judeu (1966), which links Inquisitorial violence to twentieth-century authoritarianism and genocide.1 Challenging the assumption, predominant in some critical circles, that allegorical representation, particularly in the context of political repression, serves as a disguise that masks or covers the “real” story (that is, the idea that the “truth” cannot be told for fear of censorship or punishment), I attempt to locate another side of allegory, in which the ruins of history serve as the condition of both possibility and impossibility for contemporary readings of violence...

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