The Prologue also seeks to rescue the allegorical experience recognised in the mourning-plays for a modern theory of criticism. Allegorical contemplation aims at the ruination of things so that it can, in its redemptive moment, construct [baun] a new whole out of the elements of the old. The character of this construction distinguishes it from the creative invention of fantasy, since it manipulates and rearranges pre-existing material. To leave an imprint or impression of this construction [Konstruktion] is one of its aims. This dual emphasis upon destruction and construction has led a number of scholars to see an anticipation of Derridean deconstruction in Benjamin’s work (Fischer 1996, Section 1: Modernity/Postmodernity; Weber 2008, 122–128), although it should be noted that his consideration of the specific historicity of this concept of criticism and his insistence of the immanent truth content of artworks remains resolutely modernist, and cannot be easily assimilated into any ‘postmodernist’ position (cf. Weigel 1996, xiv). The underlying affinity between romanticism and the baroque lies in their shared modernist concern with correcting classicism in art and the quasi-mythical perspective of classicism in general (OGT, 230; 185). The Prologue reflects upon this ‘modernity’ of the baroque when it notes how the “Striking analogies to the current state of German literature have repeatedly given rise to …immersion in the Baroque” (OGT, 36). Although Benjamin is citing the similarities between Expressionism in modern literature and the Mannerist exaggeration of the baroque, his own reconstruction of allegorical experience and its value for aesthetic theory is experienced according to a historical conjunction between the baroque past and the modernity of Benjamin’s present: modernity both reveals and is revealed in the baroque. 