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Marc
Redfield, "Introduction: Legacies of Paul de Man."
This essay introduces the special issue
"Legacies of Paul de Man." It argues that, more than twenty
years after his death, de Man remains a haunting presence
in the American academy. A ghost who has never quite
been laid to rest, and whose name still possesses conjuring
power, de Man continues symbolically to embody an aspect of
"theory" that resists easy routinization. Routinely
taken to personify routinized academic "deconstruction," de
Man routinely becomes an irritant in excess of the
obsessions he inspires. His legacy, therefore, remains
ongoing and uncertain, yet also massive and
unavoidable.
[go to
introduction]
Marc Redfield, "Professing
Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man."
This essay examines John Guillory's
influential reading of de Man in Cultural Capital.
Guillory characterizes de Manian rhetorical reading as a
symptom of, and a defense against, the increasing
marginality of literary culture, and the increasing
bureaucratization of the professoriat. Redfield
argues that Guillory is right to claim that de Man's
performance as a teacher and critic is inseparable from the
professionalization of reading in the modern university,
but that he is wrong to claim that de Man's text fails to
reflect on this aspect of its own production. On the
one hand, Guillory's text reads as a summa of anti-de
Manian cliches that have circulated ever since de Man's
work began to gain wide attention in the 1970s; on the
other hand, Guillory's forceful misreading opens up a truth
beyond the reach of more timid interpretations. In the wake
of Guillory's flawed but productive interpretation, it
becomes possible to think of de Man's oeuvre as a
reflection on institutionality and pedagogy precisely
because this oeuvre focuses so stubbornly on the problem of
reading reading.
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essay]
Cynthia
Chase, "Double-Take. Reading De Man and Derrida Writing
on Tropes."
In "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the
Lyric," de Man argues that Nietzsche's sentence identifying
truth as tropes takes on critical power through an anomaly
in Nietzsche's list of rhetorical terms:
"anthropomorphisms." Derrida's exploration in "White
Mythology" of Aristotle's conceptualization of truth and
metaphor reaches a similar conclusion: he finds among the
premises identifying truth with language—Aristotle's
inaugural figurations of metaphor and truth—a
catachresis, one becomes not a trope but a proper name. In
both essays, a surprising inflection of their rhetorical
mode signals the discovery of such a disruption. Both
Derrida and de Man associate these disruptions of an
organized system of figures with Nietzsche—his texts'
singular framing of the philosophical thought's tying
together of trope and truth. The disruption reflects a
possibility inhering in the configuration of trope and
truth, tropes' passage into ideology.
[go to
essay]
Jan Mieszkowski, "Reading, Begging,
Paul de Man."
Focusing on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man of
the Crowd" and Heinrich von Kleist's "The Beggarwoman of
Locarno," this essay explores Paul de Man's claim that
reading is "a praxis that thematizes its own thesis about
the impossibility of thematization." In Poe's story,
the cryptic assertion that a particular book does not allow
itself to be read becomes part of a larger structure of
self-reference in which legibility is no longer a factor of
clarity or obscurity. In Kleist, the notion that
language can tell a coherent story about its own signifying
capacities is unsettled as even the most rudimentary
distinction between form and content proves to be at once
too specific and too abstract. In the final
analysis, Kleist's work confronts us with an event of
language that is governed by neither a representational nor
a lexical logic. From this perspective, de Man's
understanding of allegory helps us to see why textual
reflexivity cannot be modeled on a figure of historical
self-consciousness.
[go
to essay]
Ian
Balfour, "History Against Historicism, Formal Matters
and the Event of the Text: De Man with Benjamin."
The essay argues that Paul de Man, far from
being simply opposed to history or the historical
understanding of literature, comes closer to the contrary
position, and indeed argues that close reading must be
literary history. This is elaborated primarily in the
essay "Literary History and Literary Modernity." De Man,
not unlike Walter Benjamin, posits the text as a kind of
historical event that has to be read accordingly.
Though de Man's appeals tend to be programmatic and
abstract (without the texture, say, of Marxist literary
historiography), the claims about history need to be taken
seriously. It's not a matter of indifference that de
Man's appeal to a certain kind of history against
historicism coincides in striking ways with Walter
Benjamin's outlining of a similar position in his "Theses
on the Philosophy of History" and elsewhere.
[go to
essay]
Andrzej Warminski, "Discontinuous
Shifts: History Reading History."
The essay argues that de Man's fabled
"shift" from "history" to "reading" and "rhetoric"—to
the "rhetoric of reading," as the Preface to Allegories
of Reading puts it—was in fact always already a
shift past rhetoric and to an other
"history." This shift occurs and becomes legible in
two particularly overdetermined moments in de Man's 1967
Gauss lectures on "Romanticism and Contemporary
Criticism": the critical reading of Heidegger's
interpretation of Hölderlin; and the reading of
Wordsworth's "Boy of Winander" together with one of the
Duddon sonnets. In the lecture on
Wordsworth—and its two "layers" (1967 and
1971)—the shift actually occurs as a
"material inscription." Thus it turns out that the
notion of history de Man comes up with here is already what
he calls "material history" or the "materiality of actual
history" in his last essays.
[go to
essay]
Sara
Guyer, "'At the Far End of this Ongoing
Enterprise....'"
This essay focuses on a 1979 special issue
of the journal Studies in Romanticism edited by
Paul de Man. The volume collects essays by de Man's
graduate students and members of an NEH seminar that he
organized. In the introduction, de Man endeavors to
articulate the relation between his students' work and his
own. In so doing he accuses his students of
undertaking an unwitting "parricide." This essay
argues that in accusing his students of betraying him
through a "blind" repetition, de Man also figures his own
legacy, not as the possible continuation of his
intellectual project, but rather as the question of the
possibility of legacy itself.
[go to
essay]
Arkady Plotnitsky, "Thinking
Singularity with Immanuel Kant and Paul de Man: Aesthetics,
Epistemology, History and Politics."
Proceeding from Kant's Critique of
Judgement, and de Man's reading of Kant, the article
discusses certain specific concepts, first, of singularity
and, second, of the relationships between the invidual and
the collective, based on this concept of singularity.
Although deriving from Kant's analysis of aethetics, this
last concept entails radical forms of epistemology and,
correlatively, of historicity. This conceptual architecture
also translates into a political concept of community or,
the article argues, parliamentarity. As a result,
aesthetics, epistemology, philosophy, history, and politics
become interconnected in a new way, and each field becomes
refigured in the process. The aim of the article is to
explore the nature of this interconnective
reconfiguration.
[go to
essay]
Rei
Terada, "Seeing Is Reading."
De Man's notion of phenomenality is
compared with the idea of "material vision" attributed to
him in the recent reception of his work and with ideas of
mental "seeing" or the impossibility thereof in the work of
Elaine Scarry and Timothy Bahti. These various critical
constructions of literary phenomenality reinstate
transcendental models of mind for divergent ends. The
editorial framework of Material Events, a recent
collection of essays on de Manian materiality, claims to
find in de Man's work inspiration for a utopian project of
intervention in structures of cognition. Material
Events' desire to be in on the ground floor of
cognition has more in common with Scarry's humanist fantasy
of seeing mental images under authorial instruction,
however, than with de Manian reading. De Man's material
vision may be understood, in contrast, on the model of
Kant's use of hypotyposis, as a figure for the analogy to
which we rightly resort when dealing with speculative
propositions about cognition.
[go to
essay]
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