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In the dynamics of the past four or five decades of
literary theory and criticism, one could witness an
often palpable struggle between the competing
claims—and the partisans—of "theory" and
"history." The structuralism born in Saussure and
reaching its methodological acme, say, in the writings
and teachings of Lévi-Strauss was
thought—in its freezing, if only momentarily, of
cultural history—to be relatively indifferent to
what counted as history, if by history, one understood
change, contingency, temporal heterogeneity or
difference that had to be registered if any given
moment or sequence of moments were to be understood at
all. This charge may well be unfair and certainly does
not apply equally well to all those commonly called
structuralists, certainly not the early Barthes, for
one. No doubt, the sort of theory that came, as we are
told, immediately in the wake of structuralism, the
so-called "post-structuralism," understood
difference—or in Derrida's case,
différance—to include, if not
quite to foreground, historical difference. But the
critics of post-structuralism, and especially those who
yoke it with post-modernism, still find that mode of
thought to be "soft" on history, not least on the
grounds of post-structuralism's putative relativism.
But it is hard to generalize about the precise status
of history in the varieties of thought in the loose,
baggy monster called post-structuralism. The sweeping
charges made against post-structuralism in the name of
history tend themselves to be weakly historical.
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At least since Hegel—and one might have said
since Vico, had that almost solitary figure been more
widely read and influential—it has been
pervasively on the agenda of philosophy and of the
human sciences to try to reconcile and do justice to
the double demands of history and theory, to treat the
subjects and objects under scrutiny historically ("in
their contexts") and theoretically—for their
conceptual import—at one and the same time. It
was in the Enlightenment broadly understood, the
canonical and largely persuasive story goes, that
historical consciousness dawned on European philosophy
in a profound way, well beyond even the polar
oppositions of "us" and "them" codified in the various
"quarrels" of the Ancients and the
Moderns.1
The item remains on the agenda of the humanities today
and shows few signs of fading away.
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How are we to understand Paul de Man's works in the
light of this conjunction of—or tension
between—history and theory? One reason de Man's
work fell out of favour in the last two decades surely
has to do with the rise of the New Historicism and
related historicisms and materialisms: the swing of
Foucault's pendulum, as it were. A widespread sense
prevailed that de Man's thinking posed, in unduly
formalist fashion, the literary text against or outside
of history rather than embedded in it. Or perhaps that
de Man reduced history to a matter of textuality,
narrowly construed. Routinely cited as proof of this
reduction is one of de Man's most notorious dicta,
namely the provocative conclusion of the essay
"Literary History and Literary Modernity," where he
claimed that "the bases for historical knowledge are
not empirical facts but written texts, even if these
texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions"
(Blindness and Insight 165). Even though very
different theorists, Jameson for one, make essentially
the same claim for the necessarily textual character of
history—that is, "the bases for historical
knowledge"—de Man's formulation rankled people a
lot more, presumably because we know from elsewhere
that Jameson treats at length a good deal of what
normally passes for history ("what hurts"), not least
the brutal determinations of class. And about de Man we
tend to be not at all certain and perhaps downright
suspicious, all the more so ever since the posthumously
revealed collaborationist writings. It's safe to say
that de Man's position was widely held to be promoting
textuality—such was Edward Said's fairly
representative view—at the expense of history
(Said, 161ff.).
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Yet the axiom that the bases for historical
knowledge are written texts comes only as the climax,
if that is the word for it, of a long and dense passage
that conveys a somewhat different and fuller picture of
de Man's stance towards history, especially literary
history. Immediately preceding the famous pronouncement
on the textuality of history, de Man claims: "To become
good literary historians, we must remember that what we
usually call literary history has little or nothing to
do with literature and that what we call literary
interpretation—provided only that it is good
interpretation—is in fact literary history"
(BI 165.). None of this is so self-evident and
it seems to run counter to the standard genealogies of
deconstruction, especially in its de Manian mode, often
traced partly to the once New Criticism. And so we
might step back for a moment and consider New Criticism
as a mode with and against which de Man worked out his
early positions and postures about the critical
project.
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The New Criticism was associated in America,
especially in its academic contexts (i.e., apart from,
say, the institution that was T.S. Eliot), with Cleanth
Brooks, William Wimsatt and the transplanted (from
England) I.A. Richards but also, in de Man's case,
particularly with Reuben Brower. Its paradigmatic
object was the lyric poem, mined for its verbal
ironies, paradoxes, and ambiguities: most typically,
the poem's complexities were all chalked up to
aesthetic richness. Donne might well stand at the
pinnacle of the New Critical canon, with his densely
intellectual poems constituting a congenial aesthetic
counterpart to the prose of the New Critics themselves,
who prided themselves on or aspired to many of the same
virtues embodied in Donne.
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And it's no small matter that the focus on the lyric
poem was so well suited to the scene of pedagogy. Not
only were the great professors of New Criticism authors
of scholarly books and essays, many of them wrote
textbooks widely used in high schools. Their influence,
direct and indirect, was massive. Almost all of a
sudden, in the heyday of New Criticism—in the
40s, 50s, and 60s—the exemplary scene of teaching
in an American high school would not be one more
installment in a sequence of classes on Huckleberry
Finn but a close reading of a poem by Robert
Frost.
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De Man describes the parameters of teaching and
learning with Reuben Brower in the famous Hum 6 course
at Harvard as follows:
Students, as they began to write on the writings of
others, were not to say anything that was not derived
from the text they were considering. They were not to
make any statements that they could not support by a
specific use of language that actually occurred in
the text. They were asked, in other words, to begin
by reading texts closely as texts and not to move at
once into the general context of human experience or
history. Much more humbly or modestly, they were to
start out from the bafflement that such singular
turns of tone, phrase, and figure were bound to
produce in readers attentive enough to notice them
and honest enough not to hide their non-understanding
behind the screen of received ideas that often
passes, in literary instruction, for humanistic
knowledge. (The Resistance to Theory 23)
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In this same mode, Brower also advocated what he
called "reading in slow motion," rather in the spirit
of Nietzsche, who claimed that whatever shortcoming
classical philologists had, at least they read
slowly.2
This discipline, more often called "close reading," was
thought—misleadingly, I think—to be
antithetical to historical understanding, as if close
reading meant pressing one's eyes too near to the page
and so losing sight of the world beyond the text. Even
a cursory glance at the works of New Critics suggests
how much they knew about history and how they were
concerned to articulate it—one need only consult
Cleanth Brooks on Faulkner or Wimsatt on
Pope—even if their sense of history was certainly
pre-Foucauldean and non-Marxist, to say the least.
Rarely do any of the trinity of race, class, and gender
surface in a significant way in their analyses, though
some questions of power and hierarchy do. In The
Well-Wrought Urn Brooks had tried to assuage some
critical readers of his earlier Modern Poetry and
the Tradition (1939), not least by including a
long appendix on "Criticism, History, and Critical
Relativism," in which he pointed out how the various
readings of The Well-Wrought Urn looked
forward to a "new history of English poetry," agreed
that to understand Shakespeare we need "to know what
Shakespeare's words mean," (thus entailing at least
some historical or philological work), and so on
(Brooks, 215, 236ff.). One can, in Brooks's view as
well as de Man's, be doing literary history without
providing a thick description of the historical moment
of the text's production. But programmatic statements
about history—even appeals to
history—are one thing and the texture of
historical understanding evidenced throughout a
sustained analysis of a literary text is another. Some
of this same divergence may be pertinent within the
writings of Paul de Man.
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Within the uneasy alliance of all those called New
Critics, William Empson cuts a singular figure in
numerous respects and, as it happens, Empson was the
New Critic who fascinated de Man the most. Empson was
perhaps the most complex and seemingly contradictory of
the New Critics, for he was author of, on the one hand,
a veritable blueprint of "formalist" close reading in
Seven Types of Ambiguity (as well as the
related, more "linguistic" project, The Structure
of Complex Words) and, on the other, far more
historically, sociologically and politically oriented
studies such as Some Version of Pastoral,
which offered a sustained meditation on "proletarian
literature," among other things. And this is to say
nothing of his vividly cranky style of polemics, which
demonstrated time and again that the act of criticism
was thoroughly enmeshed in the "real world." It is
instructive to re-read de Man's old essays on the New
Criticism, such as the one on "The Dead-End of
Formalist Criticism" (originally in French as
"l'impasse de la critique formaliste" ) to find him
critiquing the very thing—namely the limits of a
certain formalism—of which he would later be so
roundly accused. Thus, at least fairly early on in his
career, and perhaps spurred on by his understanding of
historicity and temporality in Heidegger and his
understanding of allegory in relation to temporality
and history in Benjamin, de Man argued for a kind of
criticism that attempted, among other things, to
account for the claims of history. But not at the
expense of—and indeed any accounting for history,
literary or otherwise, was to be informed by—what
was commonly called close reading.
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For de Man, close—or as he preferred to call
it—rhetorical reading radicalized and
transvaluated the categories of New Criticism, with the
epistemological and ontological stakes raised and
rendered problematic as, for example, in the shift from
ambiguity to undecidability. One can glimpse something
of the texture and the stakes involved in such a shift
by juxtaposing de Man's reading of the famous ending of
Yeats's "Among School Children" with the readings of
critics in the orbit of New Criticism such as Frank
Kermode's or Cleanth Brooks, the latter contained in
The Well-Wrought Urn. In the long section on
Yeats in de Man's dissertation, reprinted as a chapter
in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, de Man
rehearses Kermode's reading of Yeats where the poet is
"presented as the successful seeker for 'the
reconciling image'" (RR 188). For Kermode, in
de Man's gloss, "the image of the dancer is said to be
the supreme instance of the reconciliation (a
reconciliation which presupposes, of course, an initial
severance) because it contains the ideal attributes of
both body and imagination" (188). In this nexus of
concerns, the poem "Among School Children" is "singled
out" as "heralding the triumph of the reconciliatory
image" (197), crystallized in the famous final lines of
the poem:
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Immediately following this citation, de Man
comments: "It might seem far-fetched or even perverse
to find here anything but a splendid statement
glorifying organic, natural form, its sensuous
experience and fundamental unity. Tracing back the
images of the dancer and the tree in romantic and
symbolist poetry, Mr. Kermode adds the testimony of
history to the instinctive delight with which one
welcomes a climax for which everything in the
poem…seems to be a perfect preparation" (198).
But de Man provides an alternative "tracing," an
alternative history within Yeats's oeuvre,
reading the passage in question as, in Yeatsian terms,
an emblem rather than an image (corresponding roughly
to the distinction between allegory and symbol in the
vocabulary of Romantic theory and in general). In this
light, de Man claims the famous closing lines can
acquire "very different connotations." He goes on to
say: " Assuming…that a difference exists between
what is represented by the dancer and what is
represented by the dance, by the leaf, and by the
blossom, the question could just as well express the
bewilderment of someone who, faced with two different
possibilities, does not know what choice to make. In
that case, the question [How can we know the dancer
from the dance?] would not be rhetorical at all, but
urgently addressed to the 'presences' in the hope of
receiving an answer" (200). Whereas here, as later in
"Semiology and Rhetoric," de Man opposes two different
possibilities—rhetorical question or real
question—considered to be mutually exclusive (the
line can't be mean both at the same time), at a late
moment in the dissertation chapter, de Man comments:
"The ways of the image and the emblem are opposed; the
final line is not a rhetorical statement of
reconciliation but an anguished question; it is our
perilous fate not to know if the glimpses of unity
which we perceive at times can be made more permanent
by natural ways or by the ascesis of renunciation, by
images or emblem" (202). It seems unambiguous here that
the true reading of the line is the "negative" one, the
one that stresses the difficulty of knowing rather than
celebrates the inseparability of dancer and dance. By
(partial) contrast, the later, official reading
proposed in "Semiology and Rhetoric" leaves the matter
suspended in properly undecidable fashion, with the two
mutually exclusive readings existing side-by-side, thus
constituting a decisive difference from the New
Critical norm, a difference that underscores
difference.3
Even Brooks, in the ringing conclusion of his essay,
which so often stressed the priority of form, returns
to the thesis of organic inseparability:
But we cannot question her as a dancer without
stopping the dance or waiting until the dance has
been completed. And in so far as our interest is in
poetry, the dance must be primary for us. We cannot
afford to neglect it: no amount of notes on the
personal history of the dancer will prove to be a
substitute for it, and even our knowledge of the
dancer qua dancer will depend in some measure upon
it. How else can we know her? "How can we know the
dancer from the dance?" (191)
Brooks's end was in his beginning, for despite the
significant attention to literary or textual ambiguity
(which can have no very precise counterpart in nature)
the very title of Brooks's chapter on the poem is
"Yeats' Great Rooted Blossomer," thus enlisting the
organic, natural image from the poem to describe the
poem itself.
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This juxtaposition of readings shows something of
what is at stake in thinking though formal matters and
their relations to the thematic. In the context of de
Man's chapter from the dissertation, this attention to
form, rhetoric, grammar, image and emblem, and so on,
is enlisted in a properly literary historical
problematic. To determine with precision what exactly
Yeats's poems are saying will allow one to gauge more
accurately Yeats's relation to the tradition,
distinguishing the specificity of his work (and the
phases of his work) from various Romantic and Symbolist
precursors. Such work is literary-historical but not
exactly in a way that we would now generally recognize
as "historicist." There is little in de Man's long
chapter that would situate Yeats's poetry in the world
of Irish politics, say. For example, when de Man treats
Yeats's "Meditations in Time of Civil War," there is
little sense of the war itself. Nor is there any
discussion of a poem such an "Easter, 1916," surely now
of the most canonical of Yeats's poems.
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The undecidability that de Man discerns in "Among
School Children" remains primarily an epistemological
affair, not—or not yet—the undecidability
of the later Derrida, where it becomes the very site
of, and a provocation to, responsibility. (For Derrida,
an easily decided decision is no decision at all. Such
decisions can more or less be programmed and as such
are not properly decisions in the first place.) Still,
even this more modest or circumscribed sort of
undecidability seems linked to difference and even,
most particularly in Yeats, to the "controlled
violence" (189) so characteristic of his later work,
and thus by no means simply non-historical.
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At the outset of the early essay, "Form and Intent
in the American new Criticism," de Man had charted, in
retrospect, an opposition between the highest and most
characteristic achievements of the major European and
American critics and found the latter lacking in one
respect: "In evaluating what American criticism had to
gain from a closer contact with Europe, one would have
stressed the historical knowledge and a genuine feeling
for literary form" (BI 20). De Man went on to
contend that the New Criticism "was never able to
overcome the anti-historical bias that presided over
its beginnings. This inability was one of the reasons
that prevented it from making major contributions in
spite of considerable methodological originality and
refinement" (20). European literary criticism, in de
Man's characterizations, tends to stand for a
historically informed study of literature or, even
better, a synthesis of attention to both history and
form. That is the standard against which the New
Critics fall somewhat short. Empson, once again, is the
exception or near-exception. On the one hand, there is
the attention to what counts as history noted above, to
say nothing of his politically antinomian positions. On
the other hand, sometimes what Empson conceives of as
historical, such as the tension between nature and
society in the pastoral tradition, turns out to be, in
de Man's view, primarily a version of a more purely
structural, in the sense of non-historical, division
between nature and mind in general. Thus in the latter
respect, Empsonian criticism would be somewhat blind to
its status as pseudo-historical.
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In his most searching work, Seven Types of
Ambiguity, most searching at least in
methodological terms, Empson explores the complexities
of language in one local analysis after another, such
that the analyses of the various types of ambiguity
reach a point where the author comes to confront what
would later be christened, in deconstructive writing,
"undecidability." In this, the seventh and last type,
we are no longer, according to de Man's account,
dealing with ambiguities whose richness can be easily
be admired but rather with mutually exclusive
significations whose uneasy co-existence defies
reconciliation. This for de Man is more than a matter
of a local difficulty in interpretation but has,
instead, full-blown ontological implications, insofar
as the division in signification points to and is a
version of nothing less than a division within being
itself. To the extent that the literary text is shown
to expose in a profound way the ontological status of
poetic language, as a heightened version of language as
such, it is not simply historical, though it is also
always emphatically that.
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But let us return now to the passage from de Man
with which we began and inquire further into why it
might be for de Man that we usually call literary
history has "little or nothing to do with literature"?
In de Man's view, what counts as "literary history"
seems normally to operate at one or more removes from
the literary text and what passes for history is often
a rather clumsy application of period concepts,
producing analyses that confirm what one thinks one
knows in advance, that a poem generally thought to be
Romantic will turn out to be—quelle
surprise!—Romantic. Or, in related fashion,
"literary history" will tend to read through what de
Man terms "the screen of received ideas," as noted in
the passage about Brower's course quoted above. The
common-garden variety of literary history constitutes a
sort of non-reading that is, in effect, not even open
to what a text might actually, in its specificity, be
saying. Such literary history is thus non- or, worse,
pseudo-historical.
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But why would literary interpretation,
provided only that it is "good interpretation" be, of
necessity, literary history? To begin with:
because the text is, of itself, already
historical—indeed a kind of event—and a
certain historical, philological knowledge is a
necessary basis for even beginning to read it. Figuring
out what a text is saying—and de Man will often
ask in the "most naïve," "most literal" fashion
what a text is saying—will produce historical
understanding or knowledge. And the very historical
being of a work of art cannot be separated from what
might appear merely posthumous to it. Consider this
passage from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, which
seems to me close to the spirit of de Man's thinking on
history:
…if finished works only become what they are
because their being is in a process of becoming, they
are in turn dependent on forms in which their process
crystallizes: interpretation, commentary, critique.
These are not simply brought to bear on works by
those who concern themselves with them: rather they
are the arena of the historical development of
artworks in themselves, and thus they are forms in
their own right. They serve the truth content of
works as something that goes beyond them, which
separates this truth content—the task of
critique—from elements of its untruth. If the
unfolding of the work in these forms is not to
miscarry, they must be honed to the point where they
become philosophical. It is from within, in the
movement of the immanent form, of artworks and the
dynamic of their relation to the concept of art, that
it ultimately becomes manifest how much art—in
spite of, and because of its monadological
essence—is an element in the movement of spirit
and of social reality. The relation to the art of the
past, as well as the barriers to its apperception,
have their locus in the contemporary condition of
consciousness as positively or negatively
transcended; the rest is nothing more than empty
erudition.…The opposite of a genuine relation
to the historical substance of artworks—their
essential content—is their rash subsumption to
history, their assignment to a historical moment.
(194)
Adorno's claims are derived in no small measure from
Walter Benjamin, whose mark on de Man's thinking is
profound. Both these thinkers are generally, and not
without reason, thought to do more justice to the
demands of history than is de Man. In the long passage
quoted here Adorno is drawing on Benjamin's notion of
"critique," formulated in the most elaborate fashion in
Benjamin's dissertation, Der Begriff der
Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (The
Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism). There
Benjamin himself drew on Friedrich Schlegel's exemplary
reading of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister to
formulate a far-reaching theory of the work of art as
both entailing its own critique (in advance, so to
speak) and necessitating a critique "external" to the
work, a strangely "necessary" supplement to what seems
like the autonomous work of art. Benjamin extended
Schlegel's notion of critique by conceiving of the work
of work as that which gazes at the reader or spectator
and in turn demands its gaze be met. This already means
that it makes little or no sense to consign a work of
art simply to the moment of its production. The
reflection that is critique is required of and by the
work, in principle, again and again and simply is not
able to be limited to one and only one historical
moment. Critique, then, is nothing if not historical,
insofar as repetition and difference are built into the
notion of the (critical) work of art, but it perhaps is
not historical in the conceptual framework that
prevails in "historicism."
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This structure of critique bears an affinity with
translation, as theorized in Benjamin's landmark essay
"The Task of the Translator" and as commented on by de
Man. Here too, the translation emerges as an oddly
necessary supplement. (Il faut tout traduire,
Derrida once said.) And it is a structure than brings
us close to Benjamin's concept of history
(Geschichte), insofar as the paradigm for
historical knowing—and even of historical
action—is the relation of one moment to another,
the moment known and the moment of knowing
(Erkennen). Translation stresses the finitude
and even, provisionally, the finality of the relation
between original and translation, given the fact that
one tends not to translate a translation, such that the
historical dynamic set in motion by the original is
brought to an end (Ende) by the critical
reading that is translation. But the translation had
already set the original in motion, de-stabilized it,
de-canonized it, according to de Man, which is another
way in which critical reading or translation is
something like a historical act in relation to the
already historical act that is the literary
text.4
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To consign a work of art to its past, to the moment
of its production, for Adorno and de Man is also, in
effect, not to read it. And what, in any event, is the
moment of its production? Is it the moment or moments
of its conception, its first or final inscription, its
publication, its being read? Derrida raises some of
these questions in his long essay on Paul Celan by
asking what is the "date" of a poem and suggesting that
the singular "date" of a poem is traversed by the
iterative structure of dating and its complex
histories. The problem of the date would be one version
of the more general problematic of the difficulty of
consigning a work of art to a discrete past and would
be related to what de Man calls variously, in the
"Shelley Disfigured" essay, "burying" or
"monumentalization". "Einmal ist keinmal," Benjamin
ventriloquizes. "One time is no time." The dictum is
the traditional opening for the fairy-tale, translated,
usually and aptly, as "once upon a time." It is this
fairy-tale tag that Benjamin finds emblematic of
"historicism." In Benjaminian—and Derridean and
de Manian—history there is no pure "once upon a
time," even if a text also always demands to be read in
its singularity. It is just that the singularity of the
text is partly constituted by its citational character:
the text always cites, but it does not cite just
anything and it cites in a certain way, never being
just of the order of sheer citation, as even in
Borges's mind-experiment of the Don Quixote
written by Pierre Menard, repeating the original word
for word and yet still somehow with a (historical)
difference.
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Benjamin claims in the drafts to the Theses that
"the true historical method is a philological one." By
this he did not mean to reduce history to textuality
but to foreground, once again, how the historical
encounter is structured as a relation of one moment to
another, and thus structured like reading or, more
precisely, the precise form of reading and writing that
is citation. Like the violence of quotation, this
negatively dialectical model of text and reading
wrenches the text, momentarily, from the homogenizing,
totalizing, containing narratives within which literary
history likes to enfold it. This is not to say that the
quotation is not somehow historical. Indeed, citation,
in Benjamin's theses, is the very model for
revolutionary action, following the lead of the
spectacular opening pages of Marx's The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte.
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It is in the theses "On the Concept of History" that
Benjamin most resolutely takes what he calls
"historicism" to task for the naiveté and
insidiousness of its "once upon a time" view of
history. Benjamin links such historicism with the
politically and epistemologically suspect phenomena of
no less than fascism and vulgar Marxism. Benjamin
argues for a revised mode of historical materialism
that would do justice to the structure of history as an
anti-narrative relation of moments, for a history
against historicism. Close to the end of "Shelley
Disfigured," de Man contends that "Reading as
disfiguration, to the very extent that it resists
historicism, turns out to be historically
more reliable than the products of historical
archeology" (RR 123).
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De Man's insistence on the event of the text no
doubt owes a good deal to Austin's foregrounding of the
speech act and especially the performative character of
crucial and unacknowledged dynamics of language. All
texts are events, even when largely constative. And
then within this general class, some texts for de
Man—his chief examples are from Rousseau, such as
the organizing excuse of The
Confessions—are more of the order of
"textual events" than others. De Man explicitly
admitted that his notion of "textual event" was rather
obscure (RT 103-04). Derrida agrees about the
obscurity but registers a proximity to de Man on just
this obscure matter in his essay "Typewriter Ribbon:
Limited Ink (2)," where he draws attention to the
conjunction of the categories of the event and the
machine in de Man, which have to be thought together.
(Derrida, 2000). The de Manian "textual event" seems to
occur in situations where the stakes are higher than
usual, as in the politics of the social contract, but
the problematic is that which besets the text in
general, of which de Man says, "A text is defined by
the necessity of considering a statement, at the same
time, as performative and constative, and the logical
tension between figure and grammar is repeated in the
impossibility of distinguishing between two linguistic
functions which are not necessarily compatible"(270).
This general problematic of the textual event requires
reading in each and every instance, and unlike the
discourse of the natural sciences, literary theory,
like political theory, always has to confront the
singularity of the example—which is not only or
not fully an "example"—in question. The grandeur
and the misery of the example is that it pretends to be
fully exemplary of the whole of which it is meant to be
an example and yet it is never quite. Not all
examples—as anyone who has ever tried to teach or
even just to persuade anyone else knows full
well—are equally good. It is out of conceptual
rigour—and against the grain of a potential
popularity and perhaps even efficaciousness—that
Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason steers
clear of example.
-
It may well be that in de Man's work the
programmatic appeals to history, somewhat in the manner
of Cleanth Brooks, are not or do not seem to be borne
out in the texture of history elaborated in the
readings proper. And indeed, even the programmatic
appeals to history tend to be made in rather negative
fashion, that is, outlining rather more what sort of
history de Man is not doing. Thus, the resonant,
provocative conclusion of "Anthropomorphism and Trope
in the Lyric":
Generic terms such as "lyric" (or its various
sub-species, "ode," "idyll," or "elegy") as well as
pseudo-historical period terms such as "romanticism"
or "classicism" are always terms of resistance and
nostalgia, at the furthest remove from the
materiality of actual history. If mourning is called
a "chamber d'éternel deuil où vibrant
de vieux râles," then this pathos of terror
states in fact the desired consciousness of eternity
and of temporal harmony as voice and as song. True
"mourning" is less deluded. The most it can
do is to allow for non-comprehension and enumerate
non-anthropomorphic, non-elegiac, non-celebratory,
non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is to say, prosaic, or,
better, historical modes of language power.
(RR 262)
The italicized word historical no doubt
would strike many as un-de Manian, but I hope now it
should be somewhat clear, given how de Man conceives of
the literary text, that the word should come as no
surprise.
-
I do not mean to suggest that de Man has somehow
surreptitiously answered everyone's possible concerns
about history and historicity, but I would contend that
the dismissal of de Man on the grounds of his thinking
being anti- or non-historical has been altogether too
precipitous and largely off the mark. At the risk of
appealing to ex post facto proof of the historical
power and claims of de Manian reading, I would simply
invoke some of the numerous examples of close reading
of texts, events, and textual events partially enabled
by de Man's thinking. I think of the work of Gayatri
Spivak in any number of domains, especially on the
postcolonial, of Samuel Weber on technology and the
media, of Tom Keenan on human rights (and the media),
Cathy Caruth on trauma, Shoshana Felman on testimony
and the holocaust, Lee Edelman on queer textuality,
Deborah Esch on the AIDS pandemic or Marc Redfield on
terrorism and war. Perhaps not all of this work would
have received de Man's blessing, though I suspect he
would have admired it all. None of this work can be
reduced to being "de Manian" (though that, as
reductions go, would say a lot) but it has been partly
enabled by his thinking, and the profession at large
would do well to work through this body of post-de
Manian thinking and acting and one of its sources, as
we still continue to come to terms with the untimely
thinking and writing of Paul de Man.
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