Seeing Is Reading

Notes

¹ Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant, in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996), p. 73. Henceforward AI.
close window

² The classic discussion is Minae Mizumura's "Renunciation," Yale French Studies 69 (1985), 81-97; see also Ortwin de Graef, Serenity in Crisis: A Preface to Paul de Man, 1930-1960, especially pp. 90, 93, 171-172. My attempt to think about this was "De Man and Mallarmé between The Two Deaths,'" in Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture, ed. Michael Temple (Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1998, pp. 107-125, 247-250). Maybe one could say that the "necessary degradation of melody into harmony . . . of metaphor into literal meaning" in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983, p. 136) decomposes further in the late texts, from literal meaning into letters.
close window

³ The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), p.8. Henceforward RT.
close window

⁴ Complementarily, there is no warrant to treat thematics of materiality as particularly material instances of language. For a similar caution about the thematics of "form," see Eyal Amiran, "After Dynamic Narratology," Style 34 (Summer 2000), 212-226.
close window

⁵ For other considerations of "seeing" as a figure of something other than transparency, see David L. Clark, "How to Do Things with Shakespeare: Illustrative Theory and Practice in Blake's Pity." In The Mind in Creation: Essays on English Romantic Literature in Honour of Ross G. Woodman. Ed. J. Douglas Kneale (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1962, pp. 106-133); and Cynthia Chase, Decomposing Figures:Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986).
close window

⁶ Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Ethics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992).
close window

⁷ Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, and J. Hillis Miller, "A Materiality without Matter?" Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001). Many arguments of "A Materiality without Matter?" also occur in Tom Cohen's Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) and Ideology and Inscription: "Cultural Studies" after Benjamin, de Man, and Bakhtin (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). What I argue here is true of Cohen's books as well. It is the collective enterprise of the Material Events conference and volume, however, that more explicitly shapes the scholarly conversation about de Man. For a different perspective on de Man's materiality, see Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch's collection Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1995).
close window

⁸ Derrida's Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996) would seem to be a more substantial inspiration.
close window

⁹ See especially "The Chain of Being and Some Internal Conflicts in Medieval Thought," in The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (New York: Harper & Row, 1936), pp. 67-98.
close window

¹⁰ Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, pp. 331-332, quoted in de Man, "Criticism and the Theme of Faust," Critical Writings 1953-1978, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989), 81-82.
close window

¹¹ E.S. Burt deals with a similar problem, de Man's emphasis on the one-way arrow of the time of inscription, by identifying that time with a revolutionary drive toward the future, i.e., revolution as something other than intervention (Poetry's Appeal: Nineteenth-Century French Lyric and the Political Space ([Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999], pp. 185-186). For other thoughts on the irreversibility of inscription see Jacques Derrida, "Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2) ('within such limits')", in Material Events, p. 320 (henceforward TR); and Andrzej Warminski, "As the Poets Do It': On the Material Sublime," in Material Events, especially pp. 10-11.
close window

¹² Natural symmetry forms the basis for Scarry's equally ideological idea of justice in On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999).
close window

¹³ In poet-critic Sarah Riggs's book Word Sightings (New York: Routledge, 2000), it is the sensory experience of our failing struggle to produce any mental image that is credited to the idea of the mental image and thus helps to substantialize its absence—a phantom limb model.
close window

¹⁴ Alternatively, my not knowing what a handmill is demonstrates Kant's point over again. The handmill is a Riffaterrean object, a generic object that does not contribute anything beyond its illustrative function, yet can function even though we don't know what is doing the illustrating, because we understand enough of the terms in the mutually implicated network of references of which it is part. The handmill, like any other single term, can be an example whose content is bracketed: there is nothing in this handmill.
close window

¹⁵ Claudia Brodsky brilliantly analyzes the discourse-method interdependence in Descartes in Lines of Thought: Discourse, Architectonics, and the Origin of Modern Philosophy (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996).
close window

¹⁶ The corresponding moment in Schiller is when (in de Man's translation of Schiller's essay "On the Sublime") "even the imaginary representation of danger, if it is at all vivid, suffices to awaken our sense of self-preservation, and it produces something analogous to what the real experience would produce'" (Werke [Weimar: Hermann Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1963], 20:181, quoted in de Man's translation in AI 143). "Analogous is an important word," de Man comments (AI 143).
close window

¹⁷ Thanks to Benjamin Bishop for thought-provoking ideas on indexicals.
close window

¹⁸ Judith Butler's discussion of the two possible senses of "transcendental" is helpful: "In the Kantian vein, 'transcendental' can mean: the condition without which nothing can appear. But it can also mean: the regulatory and constitutive conditions of the appearance of any given object. The latter sense is the one in which the condition is not external to the object it occasions, but is its constitutive condition and the principle of its development and appearance" ("Competing Universalities," in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left [London: Verso, 2000], p. 147). Inscription for CCM is transcendental in the second sense; as Butler notes, such a transcendental condition can be "considered to have a historicity—that is . . . considered to be a shifting episteme which might be altered and revised over time" (147). Like post-Lacanian political philosophy, CCM's use of inscription, and perhaps also Derrida's in "Typewriter Ribbon," uses the second model of transcendental condition to fold historical contingency into a priori form and power. But since such a folding is the goal of Kantian aesthetics in the first place, and nontranscendental ways of conceiving the relation between contingency and form are available, second-tier transcendentalism often looks as though it were motivated by the desire to preserve first-tier transcendentalism.
close window

¹⁹ Gasché gives an eloquent, comprehensive and rather shocked account of de Man's project as having the goal of breaking the text into a "radically irreducible empiricalness of . . . agencies and instances" ("In-Difference to Philosophy: de Man on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche," Reading de Man Reading, ed. Wlad Godzich and Lindsay Waters [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989], p. 282). Gasché himself is so deeply formalistic that he just cannot take an empirical philosophy seriously: "it is a longstanding philosophical truth that empiricism is capable of explaining everything except explication itself, that is, the difference that explication makes . . . . If they ['the nonphenomenal material and formal properties' of language] are empirical qualities, pragmatic properties, they will never be able to elevate themselves to the thought of difference. If they are universal and general properties, then they are properties that make the difference, and all that has been achieved is a, perhaps, more sophisticated philosophical questioning of philosophical difference" ("In-Difference" 292). But there are of course answers from radical empiricism that from its (perhaps incommeasurable) perspective deal with these complaints. For a recent version see Bas C. Van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002).
close window

top of page