what is the nature of a subject...of a predicated that relies on itself? what sort of body does justice have? philosophers do not worry about this problem, except to dismiss it as a trick of the imagination. but a body of some kind is there for the poets, for whom the event of self-predication, whereby justice is said to be just, leaves a residue that is not justice but the thing in which justice must inhere in order to be true of itself. the logical absurdity is transformed by the poets into a kind of metaphysical wit, creating a surface noise that we are to suppose the allegory will recuperate at a point farther in: "disdayne he called was, and did disdaine / to be so cald." it appears as if the essence of spenser's disdain, disdaining to be disdain, initiates a movement within the sign to a remoter level of abstraction, where the contradiction at this level is overcome. spenserian wit typically has this anagogical spin. but the movement to a remoter level of abstraction must pass through an unacknowledged substance that is a subject in both senses of the word. it is an underlying, physical substance and a conscious agent who disdains and therefore is.

(from gordon teskey, allegory and violence, p22.)