In allegory, history looks like a petrified landscape. … No sense of freedom lives in its features. The fate of every human being is symbolized in this token of mortality. This is the core of the allegorical vision, of the Baroque idea of history; History is significant only in the stations of its corruption. Signification is a function of mortality - because it is death that marks the passage from corruptibility to meaningfulness.

Jujutsu With Zizek