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Legacies of Paul de Man
"At the Far End of this Ongoing Enterprise..."
Sara Guyer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Legacies of Paul de Man"At the Far End of this Ongoing Enterprise..."Sara Guyer, University of Wisconsin, Madison |
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NotesThanks to the Special Collections librarians at the University of California, Irvine and to Mrs. Patricia de Man for allowing me to reprint archival materials. Thanks also to Steven Miller for conversations about parricide and to Tres Pyle for thinking with me about distant inheritances. 1 More than
the other essays collected in the issue, these two seem to
have direct bearing upon the introduction—both to the
extent that they are explicit applications of de Man's
readings (Ray's is undertaken in advance of and referred to
in a footnote to de Man's own Kleist essay) and to the
extent that they give a frame for the topics addressed in
the introduction, even as they break that frame, because
they are not the work of de Man's students in quite the
same manner as the others. The other essays by
members of the NEH seminar were not included. 2 For another
version of this figure, one more explicitly linked to the
question of legacy and initiating from Freud, rather than
Kleist, see Jacques Derrida, "Freud's Legacy." Derrida
reads Freud's legend of "fils" (strings/sons): "The
legacy and jealousy of a repetition (already jealous of
itself) are not accidents which overtake the fort:
da, rather they more or less strictly pull its
strings. And assign it to an
auto-bio-thanato-hetero-graphic scene of writing.
This scene of writing does not recount something, the
content of an event which would be called the fort:
da. This remains unrepresentable, but produces,
there producing itself, the scene of writing"
(Postcard 336). De Man's introduction
concerns the question of the relation between legacy and
the production of the scene of instruction. 3 See
for example de Man's description of the dancing marionettes
who have in them a potential for grace in excess of any
human dancer as one model for this inheritance. This
model acknowledges the puppeteer's charge over the graceful
text: "The puppets have no motion by themselves but
only in relation to the motions of the puppeteer, to whom
they are connected by a system of lines and threads.
All their aesthetic charm stems from the transformations
undergone by the linear motion of the puppeteer as it
becomes a dazzling display of curves and arabesques.
By itself, the motion is devoid of any aesthetic interest
or effect. The aesthetic power is located neither in
the puppet nor in the puppeteer but in the text that spins
itself between them" (RR 285). 4 Paul
de Man Papers. MS-C 4. Special Collections and Archives,
The UCI Libraries, Irvine, California. Box 8, Folder
31. 5 The
mourned Wordsworth is presumably closer to the poet that
Richard Mant mocked in The Simpliciad
(1808), than the one read in the essays of this letter's
addressee. 6 See
Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
(250). That Bahti's essay might be understood to be
"romantic" for precisely the reasons that Wagenknecht
understands it to sacrifice Wordsworth and the
Wordsworthians is a topic that will have to be taken up on
another occasion. 7 The
quote from Bloom appears on page 607 of Bahti's
essay. Also key—but undiscussed in
Wagenknecht's letter—is Bahti's "engagement" with J.
Hillis Miller's essay on Wordsworth's "Dream of the Arab,"
which, at the time Bahti was writing, had appeared only in
French. Bahti's discussion of Miller—largely in
the mode of accolade and quotation—is relegated
almost entirely to footnotes. 8 Bahti
explains: "This [the structure whereby the figural
always turns into the literal and vice versa] is a
rhetorical understanding of a Wordsworthian (and more than
Wordsworthian) rhetorical structure, but thus far we have
approached it less through a reading of Wordsworth than
through a reading of the reading offered by the man Harold
Bloom has called 'the most defiantly Wordsworthian of
modern critics'" (607). Wagenknecht of course refers to the
draft version of the essay. 9
Perhaps it is no wonder then that what is at stake in de
Man's introduction could be understood as the uncomfortable
relation between obsequiousness and obsequy, that is,
between the awkward coincidence of following one's teachers
and issuing their burial rites. 10 At
the end of this paragraph Wagenknecht tells de Man that
Bahti's concluding claim that his rhetorical reading of the
"Dream of the Arab" episode could be extended to other key
passages, above all, those in Books VI and XIV in which
"imagination would find itself in and of nature" (Bahti
626) "rang very hollow in my ears." 11
Wagenknecht finally tracks down de Man in Kruzlingen,
Switzerland, and admits in a letter of 28 June 1978: "I
think you've treated me cavalierly, and I'm mad as
hell." 12
For a description of the model
Arbeitsgruppe—to which de Man suggests his
seminars do not match up—see the introduction to
Timothy Bahti's 1982 translation of H.R. Jauss's Toward
an Aesthetic of Reception also included under the
title "Reading and History" in The Resistance to
Theory. De Man explains: "By his own
volition the work of the German literary historian and
theorist Hans Robert Jauss has been associated with a study
group for which he is a spokesman and which practices a
specific way of investigating and teaching
literature. In the field of literary theory, the
existence of such groups is not an unusual occurrence. They
are, at time, centered on a single, dominating personality
and take on all the exacted exclusiveness of a secret
society, with its rituals of initiation, exclusion, and
hero-worship. Nothing could be more remote from the
spirit of the group of which Jauss is a prominent member.
The Konstanz school of literary studies, so named because
several of its members taught or are teaching at the newly
founded University of Konstanz in Southern German, is a
liberal association of scholars, informally united by
methodological concerns that allow for considerable
diversity. It has the character of a continuing research
seminar that includes some constant members (of which H.R.
Jauss is one) next to more casual participants; a somewhat
comparable instance of such a group, in structure, if not
in content, would have been, in this country, the Chicago
critics of the forties and fifties, who shared an interest
in Aristotelian poetics" (RT 54). That de Man, three
years after the introduction to Studies in
Romanticism points to Chicago of the 50s rather than
New Haven of the 70s in order to show "a comparable
instance" of an Arbeitsgruppe indicates all the
more the ambivalence of the introduction's opening, but in
comparison with Jauss, this gesture also is
self-implicating, reminding us, perhaps that it is "by his
own volition" that de Man was associated with a study group
centered around the authority of a dominating
personality. 13 It
has always struck me that the genitive structure of "The
Rhetoric of Romanticism" requires some interrogation:
romanticism is the trope under analysis and the tropes and
figures of romanticism provide the terms of that
analysis. It is in this sense that all of the works
that appear under this ambivalent heading are not only
studies of romanticism or of romantic-period writers, but
are also studies of the critics of romanticism, a point
made most evident in the posthumously published Gauss
Lectures, which deal with not only Wordsworth,
Hölderlin, and Rousseau, but also Heidegger,
Starobinski, Girard, and Hartman. 14
This leads de Man to remark: "of all the coercions
exercised by graduate instruction none is more tyrannical
than the predetermination of the textual canon"
(495). 15 An
earlier, manuscript version of the introduction reveals
that in the final sentence, de Man initially incorporated a
pun on Derrida's essay on Blanchot, "The Law of Genre," and
play on the relevance of romanticism to this discussion of
generation: "It is a matter of chance 16
The unstable language of the event belongs to
Jean-François Lyotard; see in particular his "The
Sublime and the Avant-Garde." In that essay, Lyotard
recalls that, for Barnett Newman, the now "is what
dismantles consciousness, and what deposes consciousness,
it is what consciousness cannot formulate, even what
consciousness forgets in order to constitute itself"
(90). Lyotard translates this
non-consciousness—which we also could understand as
the condition of generation or happening in de Man's
essay—as a question mark, and states: "The event
happens as a question mark 'before' happening as a
question. It happens is rather 'in the first
place' is it happening, is this it, is it
possible? Only 'then' is any mark determined by
the questioning: is this or that happening, is it this or
something else, is it possible that this or that?"
(90). 17
The figure of birth without birth, a birth into death, or a
birth without life — which de Man will take from
Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Carol Jacobs's
reading of it—also appears in the final sentences of
his foreword to Jacobs's book: "But whereas the apparent
fluidity of Nietzsche's text turns out to be a stammer, the
high quality of Carol Jacobs's readings threaten her with a
worse danger. She cannot prevent her stammering text
from being impeccably fluid. Parable turns into
paraphrase after all, even and especially when one is as
fully aware as she is of this inconsistency. The
result is no longer the birth of something purely tragic,
though it is certainly not benign. It may well be the
birth of criticism as truly critical reading, a birth that
is forever aborted and forever repeated but that, in the
meantime, makes for indispensable reading" (CW 223).
One way of figuring this entire predicament would be in
terms of "liquidation." 18
William Flesch considers the "disdainful" aspect of de
Man's praise here, and understands it to contribute to a
transferential structure in de Man's pedagogical
relations. He explains: "One way that I think
de Man encouraged the transference was by taking a
disdainful view of his disciples (see, for example, his
introduction to the issue of Studies in
Romanticism that he edited) but always making you feel
that you were exempt from this otherwise general, though
subtle, contempt, precisely because you could see the
contempt he had for others (never your friends,
though)—because you got the irony of his never quite
believable praise of others. But of course you always
believed it when he praised you" (240). Yet it
is Flesch's account of transference that is most
interesting to me in the context of an analysis of legacy.
For example, in "Freud's Legacy," Derrida links
transference to legacy in the formula: "no legacy without
transference" (Postcard 339). This is not
simply a statement of transference as the condition of
legacy's possibility, but, as he elaborates: "Which
also gives us to understand that if every legacy is
propagated in transference, it can get underway only in the
form of an inheritance of transference" ["pas de legs sans
transfert. Cela donne aussi à entendre que, si
tout legs se propage en trasfert, il n'est en train que
dans la forme d'un héritage de trasfert"]
(Postcard 339; Carte Postale 360).
In some sense, this ambivalence may come down to the
ambivalence of radicality (and rootedness) itself. 19
"Freud's Legacy" opens with a discussion of the difference
in Freud between fear and anxiety, and Freud's account of
anxiety as "more a protection against trauma, linked to
repression" (Postcard 297). While I
leave a comprehensive reading of Derrida's essay for
another occasion, I do wish to point out that the recurring
figure of the dance in his reading of Freud (the various
"pas") raises the specter of Kleist's dancing marionettes
and amputees. Indeed it is tempting and possible here
to link the question of "legacy" (legs) to the marionette's
dancing legs, to the grace whereby the seemingly proper or
faithful inheritance (in this case of reading and of
romanticism, of the rhetoric of romanticism—in
advance) is also parricidal thanks to the unconsciousness
of elegance and non-anxiety. In other words, anxiety
is a prophylactic device not wholly dissimilar from grace,
and both emerge as responses to the non-consciousness of a
trauma. 20
See, for example, the preface to The Rhetoric of
Romanticism: "This collection of essays on the general
topic of European romantic and post-romantic literature was
established at the initiative of William P. Germano,
Editor-in-Chief at the Columbia University Press. . . .With
the possible addition of the essay entitled "The Rhetoric
of Temporality" (now reprinted in a new edition of
Blindness and Insight), the collection presents
the main bulk of what I have written on romanticism.
Except for some passing allusions, Allegories of
Reading is in no way a book about romanticism or its
heritage" (vii). 21 As
de Man says of The Rhetoric of Romanticism: "The
principle of selection for this volume is clearly
historical: all the essays deal with romantic poetry and
its aftermath. The historical topology makes sense to
the extent that the original papers were part of a project
that was itself historically oriented. The choice of
authors is banal enough to require no further
justification" (vii). For a description of this
project see E.S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej
Warminski's "Editors' Preface" to de Man's Romanticism
and Contemporary Criticism (a text that might be
read as the inversion of the introduction to Studies in
Romanticism): "[S]ince this romantic historical
consciousness is, according to de Man, a powerful 'source'
for our own consciousness, a historical study of
romanticism would also necessarily be a reflection on our
own historical predicament, our history. De Man had
in fact projected such a historical study of romanticism,
and, around 1968, had collected the Gauss lectures and his
other essays on romantic texts in a manuscript volume
entitled The Unimaginable Touch of Time"
(viii). 22
For de Man's account of his own response to this
predicament, see the preface to "his" The Rhetoric of
Romanticism: "Such massive evidence of the failure to
make the various individual readings coalesce is a somewhat
melancholy spectacle. The fragmentary aspect of the
whole is made more obvious still by the hypotactic manner
that prevails in each of the essays taken in isolation, by
the continued attempt, however ironized, to present a
closed and linear argument. This apparent coherence
within each essay is not matched by a
corresponding coherence between them. Laid
out diachronically in a roughly chronological sequence,
they do not evolve in a manner that easily allows for
dialectical progression or, ultimately, for historical
totalization. Rather, it seems that they always start
again from scratch and that their conclusions fail to add
up to anything. If some secret principle of summation
is at work here, I do not feel qualified to articulate it
and, as far as the general question of romanticism is
concerned, I must leave the task of its historical
definition to others" (RR viii). Here de Man
positions his "fragmentary" and suspended work in relation
to the failed summae he describes in the
Studies in Romanticism introduction. 23 He
writes: "What emerges is a process of reading in which
rhetoric is a disruptive intertwining of trope and
persuasion or—which is not quite the same
thing—of cognitive and performative language" (AR
ix). 24
See, for example, the foreword to the second edition of
Blindness and Insight: "I am not given to
retrospective self-examination and mercifully forget what I
have written with the same alacrity that I forget bad
movies—although, as with bad movies, certain scenes
or phrases return at times to embarrass and haunt me like a
guilty conscience. When one imagines to have felt the
exhilaration of renewal, one is certainly the last to know
whether such a change actually took place or whether one is
just restating, in a slightly different mode, earlier and
unresolved obsessions" (xii). 25
Editors' Preface to Romanticism and Contemporary
Criticism vii. The authors explain that
"romantic historical consciousness is, according to de Man,
a powerful 'source' for our own consciousness." For
other versions of this claim see Cynthia Chase's
introduction to the Longman Anthology of
Romanticism and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc
Nancy, The Literary Absolute. 26
Cf. "For the other is not the possible. So it
would be necessary to say that the only possible invention
would be the invention of the impossible. But an
invention of the impossible is impossible, the other would
say. Indeed. But it is the only possible
invention: an invention has to declare itself to be the
invention of that which did not appear to be possible;
otherwise it only makes explicit a program of possibilities
within the economy of the same" ("Psyche: Inventions of the
Other" 60). 27 On
the fable, see Thomas Keenan's brilliant Fables of
Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and
Politics. Keenan's work is helpful not only for
thinking about "the rhetorical mechanism of the fable" and
its relation to ethics and politics, but also for thinking
further about the meaning and possibility of de Man's
legacy. 28
Tension evokes the entire specular metaphorics and
the predicament of self-reflection as the impossibility of
invention at work here, specifically the metaphorics of
Psyche (as mirror and woman) rendered in terms of
an inextricable temporality ("tense"). Minimally,
Tension—the act or action of
stretching—recalls
Psyche—outstretched—as we find her in
Freud and in Nancy. Jean-Luc Nancy, "Psyche" trans.
Emily McVarish in The Birth to Presence (393);
Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher Jean-Luc Nancy;
Jacques Derrida, "Psyche: Inventions of the Other." 29
This recalls the trap (Fälle) that de Man
discusses in the final paragraph of "Aesthetic
Formalization in Kleist" and that Cynthia Chase will come
to consider the in "Trappings of an Education," her
contribution to Responses. De Man
writes: "But Fälle also means 'trap,'
the trap which is the ultimate textual model of this and of
all texts, the trap of an aesthetic education which
inevitably confuses dismemberment of language by the power
of the letter with the gracefulness of a dance. This
dance, regardless of whether it occurs as a mirror, as
imitation, as history, as the fencing match of
interpretation, or as the anamorphic transformations of
tropes, is the ultimate trap, as unavoidable as it is
deadly" (RR 290). I find it curious that the mention
of a "trap" in the introduction to a volume in which her
own essay on Wordsworth appears goes unmentioned in Chase's
later essay. 30
For a particularly compelling account of an unconscious
legacy articulated in terms of "haunting" and
ventriloquism, see Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's
various accounts of the "Transgenerational Phantom," in
particular Abraham's 1975 "Notes on the Phantom: A
Complement to Freud's Metapsychology." 31 De
Man's description of the scope ("certainly not wider, far
from it") and serenity ("far from causing anxiety. . .") of
these papers resonates with his description of the work of
his predecessors—"no general works on Romanticism
were produced comparable is scope and serenity to those of
the previous decades" (496). It seems as if de Man's
complaint is that these papers — as well as Jacobs's
Dissimulating Harmony, against which he offers
more or less the same criticism—are both limited in
scope and untroubled by the difficulties they would seem to
encounter. Granted, the criticism, if taken
seriously, seems devastating—suggesting that this
text not only describes a guiltless parricide, but also
enacts a violent infanticide in the recovery of absent
guilt, that is, in the accusation of parricide. 32
Cf. Kleist, "On the Marionette Theater": "'Have you,'
he asked, as I cast my eyes silently to the ground, 'have
you heard of those mechanical legs that English artists
fabricate for the unfortunates who have lost their
limbs?' I said no, I had never set eyes on such
things. 'That's too bad,' he replied, 'for if I tell
you that those unfortunates dance with them, I'm almost
afraid you won't believe me. What am I saying!
Dance? Certainly the range of their movements is
limited; but those at their disposal are accomplished with
an ease, lightness and grace that astonish every sensitive
mind'" (416-17). De Man turns to these "dancing
invalids" in the final paragraphs of his essay on Kleist's
parable: "The dancing invalid in Kleist's story is one more
victim in a long series of mutilated bodies that attend on
the progress of enlightened self-knowledge, a series that
includes Wordsworth's mute country-dwellers and blind
city-beggars. The point is not that the dance fails
and that Schiller's idyllic description of a graceful but
confined freedom is aberrant. Aesthetic education by
no means fails; it succeeds all too well, to the point of
hiding the violence that makes it possible" (RR 289).
In de Man's translation of Kleist, the phrase reads:
"The circle of his motions may be restricted, but as for
those available to him, he accomplishes them with an ease,
elegance, and gracefulness which fills any thinking mind
with amazement" (RR 288-89). |