Double-Take. Reading De Man and Derrida Writing on Tropes

Notes

¹The Messenger Lectures. De Man's lectures were, in order, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric" (published in The Rhetoric of Romanticism), "Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's 'Uber das Marionnettentheater,'" "Hegel on the Sublime," "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," "Kant and Schiller" (all published in Aesthetic Ideology), and "Conclusions: Walter Benjamin's 'The Task of the Translator’"(published in The Resistance to Theory).
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² De Man also carries out a reading of the passage in Allegories of Reading, in "Rhetoric of Tropes (Nietzsche)." See pages 110-113. These pages address a subject being addressed in the opening of "White Mythology." "Granted that the misinterpretation of reality that Nietzsche finds systematically repeated throughout the tradition is indeed rooted in the rhetorical structure of language, can we then not hope to escape from it by an equally systematic cleansing of this language from its dangerously seductive figural properties? Is it not possible to progress from the rhetorical language of literature to a language that, like the language of science or mathematics, would be epistemologically more reliable?" (Allegories 110). (De Man's answer will be no.)
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³ An early version of this essay appeared in "Metaphor and Knot (Philosophy's Problem)" in Goggin and Burke,  Meaning, Frame and Metaphor. I thank Joyce Goggin and Michael Burke for permission to reprint portions of the essay.
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⁴ In "The Rhetoric of Persuasion," opening his analysis of a different passage of Nietzsche, De Man writes, "This is, however, only one among a variety of deconstructive gestures and it is chosen for strategic and historical rather than for intrinsic reasons." (Allegories 123).
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⁵ In De Man's terms in another essay: "Semantic determinants [are textually inscribed] within a non-determinable system of figuration." (Resistance 411).
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⁶ In a "figure of figure," "of" is indispensable punctuation. Maybe "of" is no less important than the third person of the verb "to be" in keeping names apart.
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⁷ The wide range of reference involved in the notion of "speech act" and "performative" as taken over by De Man from Austin justifies an allusion here to Judith Butler. Butler's Gender Trouble and Excitable Speech convey what it is to be pushed on to a performative model of language. Her concept "performativity" can be considered a way of thinking about "iterability," Derrida's word and concept introduced in "Signature, Event, Context." Performativity is a function of iteration, of repetition "with a difference." The ingrained values of gender definitions have "performativity": they push and press us, though it's not quite possible to know where; nor is it quite possible to determine whether one's "own" reiterations will have shifted the ground. Performativity is not a good thing but rather the condition of the occurrence--and implies the impossibility of true knowledge about, language acts. Butler's assertions, like De Man's, draw a line under ideology critique and mark another force.
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