Parables, A-Z

The notion of the messianic in critical discourse has been revived in recent work Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek, both of whom understand it as a perceived analogy between Jesus’ declaration of the kingdom of god and a Marxist vision of history; the Christian account of the deliverance of the faithful becomes a parable of historical materialism. This article explores the meaning or significance of parable as a contested and problematical genre that not only gives rise to the messianic, but also makes it impossible to specify, limit or control. This is partly because all forms of narrative resist conceptualisation, and partly because the very idea of the parable involves the telling of a story whose meaning is always necessarily displaced.