This Great Allegory: On World-Decay and World-Opening in the
Work of Art by Gerhard Richter (review)
David Nowell Smith
MLN, Volume 140, Number 5, December 2025, pp. 1281-1285 (Review)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2025.a981050
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981050
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[139.222.193.29] Project MUSE (2026-03-04 10:18 GMT) University of East Anglia

Richter, Gerhard. This Great Allegory: On World-Decay and World-Opening in the Work of Art. MIT P, 2022. 326 pp. ISBN: 9780262544146
In a letter from 1851, the year of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville asked his great friend Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Ever since Adam, who has got the meaning of this great allegory—the world?” Gerhard Richter takes Melville’s question as a starting point for this erudite, ambitious, and wide-ranging study, not so much to answer the specific question that Melville poses (namely, who?), but rather to inhabit the problematics that the question raises: about the meaning of “world” as such, and most of all, the way that world is grasped, theorised, interrogated, and especially “opened up” in, by, and through works of art. Informed throughout by a revisionary reading of Martin Heidegger’s account of “world,” as it is elaborated first in Being and Time and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and later in The Origin of the Work of Art, Richter also draws together readings of many other philosophers, from Derrida’s late and posthumously published lectures to Adorno’s writing on both music and visual arts, via Bataille and Blanchot’s reflections on the palaeolithic cave paintings of Lascaux, through to Kafka’s short stories, the poetry of Hölderlin and Celan, the contemporary US photographer Andrew Moore’s depictions of urban decay, and recent memoirs by Botho Strauß and Didier Eribon. Throughout, we are encouraged to take Heidegger’s insistence on the “work-character” of the artwork seriously: as Richter puts it, the work is “not a mere repository of achieved meaning, a catalog of stable knowledge, or an archive of self-identical insights about the world, but rather the very site of poiesis upon which some of the most vexing and abiding questions with regard to our understanding and experience of world as world are brought to the fore” (4).
At the heart of Richter’s book is an attentiveness to the tension between the two “worlds” of the artwork: the world into and from out of which the work is produced, and the world[s] it opens up. Just as the latter world outlives the moment of the work’s production, so the former is inevitably subject to decay: the classical Athens of Sophocles, the early Gothic of Bamberg Cathedral, the Elizabethan and early Jacobean performance culture of Shakespeare. But Richter sees this not simply as character of the artwork’s afterlives, but immanent to the work’s world-opening capacity: “it is this same world-decay and world-withdrawal that make it possible for another world to become visible: the very world that the work itself creates” (45). World decay is the very condition for the artwork’s world-opening capacity.
This insight emerges from an astute reading of Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art. While critics have often noted that the artwork’s world-opening capacity emerges from its interplay with the withdrawal of the “earth” of the work (the opacity of its medium), Richter alerts us to a different kind of withdrawal, namely, the perishing of the world out of and into which the artwork was produced. Richter quotes Heidegger:
The Aegina sculptures in the Munich collection, Sophocles’ Antigone in the best critical edition are, as the works they are, torn out of their native sphere	But even when we make an effort to cancel or avoid such displacement of works—when, for instance, we visit the temple in Paestum at its own site or the Bamberg cathedral on its own square—the world of the work that stands there has perished. (cited 41-42)
But does it follow from this that the perishing of the world of Paestum or Bamberg is the condition of their world-opening capacity? On the face of it, Heidegger seems merely to be saying that the meaning the work had for its contemporaries is necessarily inaccessible to us today: not just because temple or cathedral are now surrounded by gift shops, but because the entire religious and social order through which these works of architecture set themselves to “work” has itself perished. In which case, it would appear that Heidegger is proposing almost the opposite to Richter’s claim: that once the world of the work has perished, so the work itself ceases to be the site of truth. A few paragraphs after the passage cited by Richter, Heidegger argues that the world-opening of a linguistic work like Antigone lies in its transforming the language of its community. Even if we read the tragedy in the best critical edition (or even watch a performance of it in the most scrupulously researched staging), the transformation of language it enacts or exacts for its contemporaries cannot, for Heidegger, be reactivated.
However, if Antigone can indeed transform its people’s saying, as Heidegger claims, then this also entails that any historical instance of this “saying” is inherently finite: the artwork’s transformation of speech discloses the fact, or facticity, of this finitude. And at this point we see the force of Richter’s own reading. For if the artwork opens a world by contesting the world of its production, then in this regard world-decay will indeed be necessarily imbricated in the artwork’s world-opening. That is, in setting up a world, the artwork becomes an agent not just of transformation, but of decay. And it is by virtue of this decay that world the work opens up will outlive the world of the work’s production.
There is one further way of reading Heidegger at this juncture of “The Origin of the Work of Art”: as making an epochal claim about the nature of art. Not only have the worlds of Antigone, Paestum, or Bamberg Cathedral decayed, but the place of art in shaping the “open” for a people has itself decayed. Indeed, Richter’s later discussions of Hölderlin and Celan, of the Second Viennese School, of Kafka, and others, raises a further thought: that perhaps the dialectic Richter unpicks between world-decay and world-opening is a specific condition of modernity, and modern art. In his closing passages, Richter reflects on Hegel’s famous assertion that art is now a thing of the past—not because artworks cease to be produced, but because art has lost the “politico-religious essence” it held during its “Classical” period (cited 290). Perhaps this epochal shift is seen precisely in the different attitudes art can now hold towards world-decay—precisely as we enter an epoch where worlddecay becomes our most urgent political and metaphysical preoccupation.

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What role is played by “allegory” in such an account? Given the book’s title, one might expect the category to play a more overt role in its argument. In his opening discussion, Richter notes that Melville does not explain what makes the world an “allegory,” yet he teases out an implicit logic: the world “never speaks in self-identical terms,” it addresses us “differently, seeming to say one thing while saying something else”; and, conversely, speaking truth of the world, opening up a world through our poietic making, entails “speaking, reading, and interpreting otherwise” (1). Richter contrasts this to the hermeneutic allegorisation of historicist reading, where the artwork’s disclosure of its world[s] is re-translated or re-inscribed “according to so-called codes that are alien to the work” (36). But if Richter never provides a systematic treatment of allegory per se, one can nevertheless sense the allegorical informing each of the readings at a—to use a favoured term of Richter’s—”subcutaneous” level, and thereby reconstruct a more concerted vision of allegory. For instance, in his extended reading of Celan’s lines “Die welt, zu uns / in die leere Stunde getreten” (“The world, stepped towards us / into the empty hour”), Richter shows how Celan is both depicting a world “that has befallen us” (119), and offering a mode of the verbal artwork that, instead of “being identical to itself, an aestheticized form of ipseity”, is “always on its way elsewhere, leaving behind the sphere that it itself has called into aesthetic presence” (105). It is a short step to grasp the lines therefore as allegorizing the poem’s own allegorical condition, even if Richter’s focus shifts elsewhere: increasingly towards the question of mourning.
It is perhaps fitting for a work so concerned with the finitude of the world out of and into which artworks are produced, that mourning be so central to This Great Allegory. In his discussion of Hölderlin’s depiction of the relation between the shared measure that poetry opens up, and the individual world, Richter selects passages which were read aloud during Heidegger’s funeral at his open grave, by his son Hermann; similarly, Richter reads Derrida’s funerary addresses to Levinas and Blanchot, his final seminar series The Beast and the Sovereign, and the last interview he gave, in order to reframe the trope of artworks’ afterlives in terms of survivance. The chapter on Andrew Moore’s photography invites us to see the finitude, and pervasive decay, of our own world: something that is placed in sharper focus when, in the book’s acknowledgements, Richter explains how its composition was shaped by the Covid pandemic. All these concerns are brought together into an especially powerful formulation, at the opening of the penultimate chapter, which can be read as the key holding together the book’s various strands: “If the work of art bears witness to a world that is constantly disappearing while simultaneously commenting on that retreat through its own aesthetic acts of world-construction, one might say that the work of art is always also a work of mourning” (235).
Richter’s ability to hold in abeyance, and weave together, these different strands is the source of much of The Great Allegory’s pleasures. Many of the most compelling moments are when Richter teases out the contradictions and antagonisms between thinkers and modes of questioning, and thereby places them into productive dialogue. Yet elsewhere there is a tendency to foreground equivalences between such different thinkers, even at the risk of undoing the singularity of the individual text. One chapter thus explores the trope of the “subcutaneous” in Adorno’s account of musical inheritance, and the way that a “true” inheritor of musical tradition does not reiterate that tradition but rather, following a negative dialectic, learns from that tradition precisely through breaking from it, and thus allowing the tradition to become itself not through continuity but departure. Adorno takes the word “subcutaneous” from Schönberg, for whom it operated as a metrical term for “an irregularity that takes place under the skin of the regular” (cited 129)—thus upsetting our habitual assumption that irregularity is a surface effect subtended by the regular. From which Richter extrapolates: “To find a relation to the subcutaneous, then, means to listen to a world behind or beyond the world” (130, italics added). What is the word “then” doing here? Its inconspicuousness, its suggestion of a simple inference, are jarring. Rather, the word is being tasked with facilitating the translation from one set of problematics (musical rhythm, and then the relation between innovation and tradition in classical concert music) into another (a searching for relation, an attunement to transcendence), one conceptual vocabulary to another, but without recognising the inherent pitfalls of merging profoundly different modes of thinking into a kind of master discourse. And as the term “world” becomes tasked with holding together these different modes of thinking, so it risks losing its own conceptual specificity.
Throughout This Great Allegory Richter is alive to the capaciousness, and indeterminacy, of our concept(s) of world, and the kinds of world and worldness opened up in and by the artwork. But for this reader at least, there is a frustration at the refusal to choose between stances. The primary impetus for Richter’s reflections is a Heideggerian model of world as the “as a whole” we inhabit (the phrase is from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, cited 9), a space of Mitsein and ecstasis. Yet Richter also draws heavily on a passage from Derrida’s final seminar series, The Beast and the Sovereign, whose account by contrast reads as an extreme solipsism: each individual has their own “world”, bounded by an “infinite difference”, such that “There is no world, there are only islands” (cited 16). At first, Richter recognises that Derrida’s position constitutes a challenge for the Heideggerian problematic, as it discounts a priori the notion of world as collectively inhabited, as “gathering”. But as the book continues, so Richter navigates between the opposing approaches, and the worlds of the artwork proliferate. Richter lists “at least six”: the world into and out of which the work is produced; the decay of that world; the world opened up by the artwork; the withdrawal of that world; the reader-listener- beholder’s personal world; the closure of that world in their death (57). But at this point, “world-opening” seems like little more than personal epiphany, at the expense of the idea, so central to The Origin of the Work of Art, that artworks allow for a shared inhabitation of what the work opens up, even while allowing for the multiplicity of experiences, interpretations, among readers, listeners, beholders, who will never otherwise encounter one another. At a time of fracturing information sources, where customisation is shifting from a mode of consumerism into a metaphysical horizon, it might be that the very notion of a shared world is quaint, let alone the idea that the work of art might be able to open up such a world. Yet it is for precisely that reason that Richter’s meditations on world-opening in a time of world-decay speak to today’s most urgent concerns.
In his elegy “Brot und Wein”, discussed at length by Richter, Hölderlin writes: “immer besteht ein Mass, / Allen gemein, doch jeglichem auch ist eignes beschieden” (“always a measure exists, / Common to all, though his own to each one is also allotted”; cited 59). Can we think of “world” simultaneously as a shared context of meaning, made up of intersubjective interaction and competing traditions or histories, and as subjectively experienced through individual finitude and positionality? This is the question Hölderlin’s lines challenge us to ask, and the question that This Great Allegory has so capaciously brought into view.
University of East Anglia DAVID NOWELL SMITH
Lawtoo, Nidesh. Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation. Cornell UP,
2022. 350 pp. ISBN: 9789462703469
For full disclosure, I acknowledge that an essay of mine was published in Homo Mimeticus II (2024), edited by Nidesh Lawtoo and Marina Garcia-Granero. So, my views in this review are not entirely unbiased. But I would still argue that Lawtoo’s definition of a new transdisciplinary field called “mimetic studies” is of crucial significance to comparative literature scholars and many others. Along with outlining the book’s argument, I will note areas where I wished for further developments or had critical questions. Such remarks will hopefully stimulate not only interest in the book but also an ongoing dialogue about key issues it raises.
Drawing on the ideal of “diagonal science” from Roger Caillois, this book explores the origins, elements, and current politics of our species’ prodigious theatricality, from mimesis and methexis to myth and media making, for good and ill, through ancient to modern philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. As a revised collection of essays Lawtoo wrote between 2017 and 2022, the book also explores illustrative examples, such as Woody Allen’s 1983 film, Zelig, and Hannah Arendt’s framing of Adolph Eichmann’s 1961 genocide trial. Addressing the “(new) fascism” of our times, Lawtoo extends mimetic theory in various directions, beyond (while recognizing and critiquing) Rene Girard’s prior formula: mimetic desire evokes envy, rivalry, and sacrificial scapegoating.