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"Legacies of Paul de Man" is a most appropriate
topic for a publication specializing in romanticism. As
is well-known, romantic literature was, for de Man, a
privileged locus for asking the question of history (in
particular, the question of our history).
Indeed, one could say that de Man's thinking of
history—in fact, what he in his last essays calls
"material history" or "the materiality of actual
history" (and what no doubt constitutes one of the most
valuable and enduring legacies he has bequeathed to
us)—gets produced by his reflection on, and
reading of, the romantics. But to say this may seem a
bit odd, for de Man's own verdict on this work sounds
much rather like the confession of a failure, in
particular the failure to arrive at a "historical
definition" of Romanticism. Looking back with some
misgivings upon the essays collected in The
Rhetoric of Romanticism—for him a "somewhat
melancholy spectacle" in that it offers "such massive
evidence of the failure to make the various individual
readings coalesce" (RR viii)1—de
Man writes that these readings seem always to "start
again from scratch and that their conclusions fail to
add up to anything" (RR viii). He continues:
"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. I have myself taken refuge in more theoretical
inquiries into the problems of figural language"
(RR viii). De Man makes the same gesture in
the opening sentences of the Preface to Allegories
of Reading, and this time formulates the "failure"
explicitly as a "shift" from history
to reading (and thus to a "rhetoric of
reading"): "Allegories of Reading started out
as a historical study and ended up as a theory of
reading. I began to read Rousseau seriously in
preparation for a historical reflection on Romanticism
and found myself unable to progress beyond local
difficulties of interpretation. In trying to cope with
this, I had to shift from historical definition to the
problematics of reading" (AR ix)2.
That this shift is once again a move from historical
definition to the problems of figural language, i.e.,
to rhetoric, is clear enough in the following
sentences of the Preface and their account of a
"rhetoric of reading" where "rhetoric is a disruptive
intertwining of trope and persuasion." So: de Man's own
account of his work on the romantics and Romanticism
would seem to indicate, if anything, a turn away
from history and to the theoretical
problematics of reading, rhetoric, and figural
language. Nevertheless, it might be prudent not to take
de Man's own remarks about his alleged "failure" too
literally. It might be better to take a page from de
Man's own book, as it were, and actually read
what it is that happens, what takes place, in this
alleged "shift"—and its necessity ("I
had to shift")—from history to reading
and rhetoric. If we do so, it turns out that this shift
is in fact already (always already) a shift
past the rhetoric of reading and
to...history, indeed, to the material history
of de Man's last essays. Ironically (and
undialectically) enough, the "failed" attempt
at a historical definition of Romanticism turns into a
certain "success" for de Man's thinking of history.
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The mechanism and the necessity of de Man's apparent
shift from historical definition to the problematics of
reading and rhetoric are best legible in his 1967 Gauss
lectures on Romanticism and Contemporary
Criticism (and not so much in the essays
on Rousseau collected in Allegories of
Reading, in which the shift has, in a sense,
already been completed), in particular the lecture on
Heidegger's interpretation of Hölderlin ("Patterns
of Temporality in Hölderlin's 'Wie wenn am
Feiertage'") and the lecture on Wordsworth (and on
Geoffrey Hartman's interpretation of Wordsworth in his
1964 Wordsworth's Poetry) called "Time and
History in Wordsworth." The latter is particularly
helpful for understanding the shift because it consists
of two "layers"—an original "pre-shift" lecture
written in 1967 and some "post-shift" passages
interpolated into the lecture around 1972 that
reformulate the lecture's thematic concerns (death,
time, and history) in explicitly rhetorical terms.
Nevertheless, the actual push to rhetorical terms and
rhetorical reading occurs already in the lecture on
Heidegger's interpretation of Hölderlin's "Wie
wenn am Feiertage," and it occurs on account of the
lack of other terms and the failure of any other
reading to do justice to Hölderlin's text. In
short, the turn to rhetoric occurs on account of the
lack in Heidegger's terms and
Heidegger's failure to think the "temporality
of poetic form," as de Man puts it, when he comes to
interpret Hölderlin's poetry. How so?
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De Man begins his critical reading of Heidegger in a
hopeful vein: Heidegger's "ontological understanding of
Hölderlin's key concepts as they are seen to
operate within the limits of particular poems"
(RCC 56)3
is a promising development that could lead to a
"reorientation of literary interpretation toward an
ontological understanding." Such an understanding is
promising because it "does allow, in principle, for the
combination of a sense of form (or of totality) with an
awareness that poetic language appears as the
correlative of a constitutive consciousness, that it
results from the activity of an autonomous subject.
Neither American formalist criticism nor European
phenomenological criticism has been able to give a
satisfactory account of this synthesis: the former had
to give up the concept of a constitutive subject, the
latter that of a constituted form" (RCC 57).
De Man's statement of the advantage of such an
ontological orientation is pithy, as it calls to mind
his critiques of the American New Criticism, its
misunderstanding of the concept of intention, and its
consequent reification of poetic form, and his
critiques of a phenomenological criticism like that of
the Geneva School which ignores questions of form and,
in a sense, simply does not read.4
Now Heidegger, de Man's argument continues, seems
particularly qualified to undertake "this renewal of
critical method" even though literary interpretation
was not his own academic field. Although Sein und
Zeit nowhere deals with literature, except for
some passing references, "it does contain insights that
can give a more concrete direction to an ontological
interpretation of texts" (RCC 57). De Man's
statement of these insights amounts to an extremely
compact summary of Sein und Zeit. Because it
contains in germ everything to come in de
Man—including the impetus for the shift from
history to reading—it is worth quoting in
full:
Sein und Zeit, indeed, stresses not only the
privileged, determining importance of language as the
main entity by means of which we determine our way of
being in the world, but specifies that it is not the
instrumental but the interpretative use of language
that characterizes human existence, as distinct from
the existence of natural entities. And this
interpretative language possesses a structure that
can be made explicit. This structure is in essence
temporal—a particular way of structuring the
three dimensions of time that is constitutive for all
acts of consciousness. The main task of any ontology
thus becomes the description of this temporal
structurization, which will necessarily be a
phenomenology of temporality (since it is the
description of consciousness) as well as a
phenomenology of language (since the manner in which
temporality exists for our consciousness is through
the mediation of language). One understands that, as
the 'purest' form of interpretative language, the one
least contaminated by empirical instrumentality and
reification, poetic language is a privileged place
from which to start such a description. And
conversely, one sees that an approach to poetic
language that would, by a description of its temporal
structure, bring out its interpretative intent, would
come closest to the essence of this language, closest
to accounting for what Heidegger calls 'das Wesen der
Dichtung.' We could thus legitimately expect from the
Heideggerian premises a clarifying analysis of poetic
temporality, as it is seen to act within the poetic
form. (RCC 57-8)
Although the terms de Man uses to summarize
Heidegger may be a bit too phenomenological—too
Hegelian phenomenological (for instance, in his
use of the word "consciousness")—his account is
precise and rigorous. And in its very precision and
rigor it presents Heidegger's fundamental ontology with
a redoubtable task: namely, to be not only a
"phenomenology of temporality"—something
Heidegger manages quite well, thank you—but also
a "phenomenology of language." This latter half of the
task is more difficult and has far-reaching
consequences because it necessarily entails, sooner or
later, some account of "the manner [my
emphasis] in which temporality exists for our
consciousness," and that "manner," i.e., the way that
language "mediates" consciousness and temporality, may
include factors and functions of language irreducible
to a hermeneutics of self-understanding, no matter how
fundamental the ontology it bases itself on: in short,
that "manner" may include the rhetorical dimension of
language. Although de Man does not yet put it that way,
one could already say that the reason Heidegger's
interpretations of Hölderlin's poetry are so
disappointing—indeed, so downright
wrong, according to de Man—is on account
of his inability to read the manner (i.e.,
ultimately the rhetoric) in which temporality
exists for the "consciousness" of Hölderlin's
poetic language. In any event, ironically (but, as
always, rigorously and consistently) enough, the result
is that the great thinker of temporality cannot think,
cannot read, the temporality of the poetic form of
Hölderlin's poem. In his interpretation of "Wie
wenn am Feiertage," Heidegger's misreading consists of
his flattening out, levelling, the temporal
articulations and tensions of the poem in the service
of an apocalyptic pattern. De Man summarizes: "By its
gradual widening out from particular physical nature to
history, to the gods, and finally to being itself, the
poem dramatizes a process of all-encompassing
totalization that stretches from the beginning to the
end of the text. The progression takes place without
discontinuity and moves in one single direction, toward
the full disclosure of being. The pattern is
apocalyptic, a temporal movement that culminates in a
transcendence of time" (RCC 64). The poet, in
Heidegger's interpretation, is "someone who stands in
the presence of being in the past (when he is waiting
for the disclosure), in the present (when it takes
place in the heroic acts of history), and the future
(when, like the countryman caring for his land, the
concern of his work will maintain, for others, a
mediate form of contact with being)" (RCC 65).
In short, Hölderlin would be an apocalyptic poet,
"an eschatological figure, the precursor who, during a
period of temporary alienation from being
(Seinsvergessenheit), announces the end of
this barren time and prepares a renewal" (RCC
65).
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Now, according to de Man, this interpretation of
Hölderlin as an apocalyptic poet is wrong in
general and, in the particular case of Heidegger's
interpretation of "Wie wenn am Feiertage," it is wrong
in specific ways for specific reasons. It is wrong in
general because Hölderlin, rather than being an
apocalyptic poet, is precisely he who warns
against the danger of believing that the poet
can accomplish the kind of proximity to being Heidegger
sees in the poem. Indeed, the poem instead "cautions
against the belief that the kind of enthusiasm that
animates a heroic act is identical with the predominant
mood of a poetic consciousness" (RCC 67). But
more important than the erroneous results of
Heidegger's interpretation is the specific way in which
Heidegger manages to get things so wrong in his
resolute misreading of "Wie wenn am Feiertage" in terms
of an apocalyptic pattern. Heidegger is able to flatten
out the temporal tensions of Hölderlin's poem in
two ways. First, Heidegger ignores and treats as
unproblematic a certain "ambiguity of metaphorical
reference" (RCC 62) in the poem's opening
simile that makes it impossible to decide whether
"they," the poets, are like the countryman who goes out
to look at his field after the lightning storm
or whether they are like the trees that stand exposed
during the storm and get blasted by the
lightning. The ambiguity is important because its
temporal tension is what gets unfolded in the rest of
the poem—indeed, it is what constitutes the
temporality of this poem's poetic form. And it gets
unfolded in terms of the triadic tonal pattern of
Hölderlin's theory of the alternation of tones
(Wechsel der Töne), as the poem modulates
from the "naive" tone of its opening scene, to the
"heroic" tone of the heroic acts of history it
describes later, to end in the reflective, meditative
tonality that Hölderlin calls "ideal." Heidegger
cannot read the alternating tones of Hölderlin's
hymn because he ignores the poem's Pindaric triadic
structure and simply cuts off the fragmentary lines
that would have constituted the strophes of the poem's
end—that is, makes the poem "whole" by truncating
it. So: by glossing over the ambiguity of metaphorical
reference in the poem's opening simile and by ignoring
the poem's tonal structure and truncating its ending,
Heidegger completely disregards its poetic form. And
since its poetic form is the temporal structure of the
poem's self-understanding, disregarding it means also
disregarding the poem's temporal structure. Again, it
is a case of Heidegger—the thinker of
temporality—not being "Heideggerian" enough! The
consequences for Heidegger are clear: in short, there
is a flaw in Heidegger's method, as de Man puts it,
"that leads to a misinterpretation of Hölderlin as
an apocalyptic poet, when Hölderlin's main theme
is precisely the non-apocalyptic structure of poetic
temporality" (RCC 71). This flaw, de Man
concludes vigorously, is "the substitution of
ontological for what could well be called formal
dimensions of language. The ontologization of literary
interpretation, which seemed so promising in the
Heidegger of Sein und Zeit, does not mean that
literature can be read, so to speak, from the
standpoint of being, or from that of a poet who is said
to act as a direct spokesman for being. The standpoint
can only be that of a consciousness that is
ontologically (and not empirically) oriented but that
nevertheless remains a consciousness, rooted in the
language of a subject and not in being" (RCC
71).
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But if the results for Heidegger's "method" of his
having substituted "ontological for what could well be
called formal dimensions of language" are clear, the
results for de Man's own developing "method" are more
complicated because they are double. On the one hand,
what de Man ends up with is a still more thoroughgoing
"ontologization" of language and of poetic form than
Heidegger's. The main difference would be that whereas
for Heidegger the poem's temporal movement takes place
"without discontinuity" and moves "in one single
direction"—again, according to an apocalyptic
pattern whose temporal movement culminates in a
transcendence of time—for de Man the poem's
temporal structure is one in which "beginning and end
come together within the tension of the radical
discontinuity that seemed to keep them apart"
(RCC 70). In connecting the beginning of the
poem with its end, the radically discontinuous
temporality of the poem's poetic form nevertheless
remains a principle of totalization. Indeed, de Man
goes so far as to call it a "hermeneutic circularity"
(RCC 71) and to deposit its discontinuous
temporality in the structure of being itself. "The
principle of totalization is indeed ontological," he
writes, "in that it has to be sought in the
discontinuous structure of being itself" (RCC
72). So, on the one hand, in his ability to read the
discontinuous temporality of Hölderlin's
poem—and in his depositing of this discontinuity
in the discontinuous structure of being itself—de
Man would seem to be more "Heideggerian" than
Heidegger. On the other hand, the conclusions of de
Man's reading of Heidegger nevertheless go in an
entirely different direction and prohibit such a
"super-Heideggerian" ontologization of poetic form.
Indeed, what can de Man mean by charging Heidegger with
having substituted ontological for what could well be
called formal dimensions of language—and by
saying that the poetic consciousness is rooted in the
language of a subject and not in being—and then
going on to deposit the discontinuous temporality of
poetic form in the discontinuous structure of being
itself? The tension—in fact, a certain
discontinuity—between ontological and "what could
well be called formal" dimensions of language, between
a poetic consciousness rooted in being and a poetic
consciousness rooted in "the language of a subject," is
legible throughout de Man's attempt at an ending for
his essay. For what de Man has come up with in his
more-Heideggerian-than-Heidegger thoroughgoing
ontologization of language and poetic form is "formal
structures"—the reversals and discontinuities of
which they are capable—that work according to
laws different from those of "the structure of being
itself." That these "formal" structures are
specifically linguistic, indeed already
rhetorical, structures is evident, as de Man
tries out various names for the "discontinuous element"
that constitutes the temporal structure of
Hölderlin's poetic form. Adorno's "parataxis" is
one possibility, which (parataxis) is linked by
Auerbach to what he calls a "figural style."
Hölderlin's own term for this discontinuous
element is "the caesura referred to in the commentaries
on the Oedipus tragedies, which marks a reversal of
tone as well as a reversal of time and in which the end
reestablishes with the beginning a contact which it
seemed to have lost" (RCC 72). De Man's ending
needs to introduce these explicitly rhetorical
terms—parataxis, caesura, figural style, and
others—because the discontinuous temporality his
reading of Hölderlin has disclosed is one whose
reversals can no longer be accounted for in ontological
terms. That de Man's reading of Hölderlin has
pushed Heidegger's fundamental ontological terms to
their breaking point is especially legible in an almost
stuttering formulation de Man uses in trying to
distinguish the totalizing yet discontinuous
temporality proper to Hölderlin's poetry from an
organic unity (like that of Schelling's philosophy of
identity) and from a purely dialectical one (like that
of Hegel): "Nor is it purely dialectical, in the
Hegelian sense," writes de Man, "for time itself, which
remains unproblematically forward-directed in Hegel,
here becomes itself a discontinuous element of a
structure that consists of a series of temporal
reversals" (RCC 72). The tortuousness of the
formulation becomes apparent if we try to paraphrase
it: if time itself becomes itself a
discontinuous element of a structure that consists of a
series of temporal reversals, then time becomes a
discontinuous element of a structure that consists of a
series of discontinuous reversals that will never allow
us to say how time itself could ever become, or be,
itself! In short, de Man's reading of the temporality
of poetic form proper to Hölderlin's poetic
language has disclosed a discontinuous temporality and
structures of reversal and substitution that cannot be
accounted for in the terms of Heidegger's fundamental
ontology—or even in the rhetorical terms of
Adorno and Auerbach insofar as these are still
compatible with their fundamentally hermeneutic
orientation.
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The tension or discontinuity in the double ending of
"Patterns of Temporality" comes to full fruition in
"Time and History in Wordsworth," de Man's veritably
"Hölderlinian" reading of Wordsworth. In fact, one
could say that the double ending of "Patterns" produces
the two layers of "Time and History." De Man's readings
of "The Boy of Winander" and the Duddon sonnet can be
called Hölderlinian because they consist of a
certain "application" of Hölderlin's "caesura" for
an understanding of the reversals and substitutions
that lie at the basis of both poems and that de Man, in
a sense, "re-reverses." In the case of the Boy of
Winander, the poem substitutes the death of a third
person (the Boy) in the past for the death of the first
person ("I") which lies in the future. "Wordsworth is
thus anticipating a future event as if it existed in
the past. Seeming to be remembering, to be moving to a
past, he is in fact anticipating a future. The
objectification of the past self, as that of a
consciousness that unwittingly experiences an
anticipation of its own death, allows him to reflect on
an event that is, in fact, unimaginable" (RCC
81). In the case of the Duddon sonnet, the poem
substitutes one temporality—a movement that goes
from nature to history—for another, more
authentic, temporality—a movement that goes from
nature to the dissolution of self and the loss of the
name. In doing so it reverses middle and end (of the
poem) and makes it seem as though the derived,
secondary temporality (in short-hand, empirical
"history") could contain the more original,
authentic temporality of dissolution, mutability, and
ceaseless deathward progressing, when, in fact, it is
the other way around: the authentic temporality (one
clearly based on Heidegger's analytic of
Dasein and the finitude proper to it on
account of its being fundamentally a being-unto-death)
contains "history." In other words, both poems
perform a reversal and a substitution that makes the
impossible—reflecting on one's own death,
history-as-progress overcoming
mutability—possible. But already in the first,
thematic layer of the lecture, de Man recognizes that
the impossibility is made possible only thanks to a
certain sleight-of-hand which, already, is clearly a
linguistic, indeed rhetorical, sleight-of-hand. In the
Boy of Winander, conquering the time, the surmise, that
would allow one to reflect on one's own death is
possible only as a "fiction" which, "since it is a
fiction [...] can only exist in the form of a language"
(RCC 82). That this language is necessarily a
figural language is legible in de Man's formulations of
how it is that this "fiction" can allow one to look
back upon, as it were, one's own death: "The poem is,
in a curious sense, autobiographical, but it is the
autobiography of someone who no longer lives written by
someone who is speaking, in a sense, from beyond the
grave" (RCC 81) and "it is the epitaph written
by the poet for himself, from a perspective that stems,
so to speak, from beyond the grave" (RCC 82).
It is clear that speaking or writing from beyond the
grave is "possible" only thanks to the rhetorical
shifts of "in a sense" and "so to speak." Although in
the first layer reading of the Duddon sonnet the
rhetorical shift is not as marked, the fact that the
substitution and reversal—of history and
temporality, of the poem's end and middle—are in
fact a rhetorical structure is, in a sense, still more
explicit, since its reversal and substitution of
container and contained, enveloppant and
enveloppé, amounts to the very
definition of a particular trope, namely metonymy.
Indeed, it is no doubt the rhetorical shifts and
rhetorical structures of his own language that push de
Man to perform a self-reading which forces the thematic
readings of the Boy of Winander and the Duddon sonnet
to turn into readings "properly speaking"—that
is, rhetorical readings in explicitly rhetorical
terms—in the second layer of the lecture. In the
Boy of Winander, the substitution of a first person
subject by a third person subject, the "Boy" for "I,"
is now said to be based on a "metaphorical
substitution," just as in the Duddon sonnet the
reversal of "history" (contained) and authentic
temporality (container) is said to be based on a
"metonymic figure." But this passage, this shift, from
a thematic reading and its terms—death, finitude,
history, temporality, and mutability—to a
rhetorical reading and its terms—metaphor,
metonymy, metalepsis—should not mislead us into
thinking that the thematic has simply been left behind,
surpassed, as though de Man had succeeded in reducing
temporality and history to a question of merely
tropological substitutions and transformations. If we
read his second-layer interpolations with any attention
at all, we cannot make this mistake. For it is clear
that in the Boy of Winander the "metaphorical
substitution" of the first by a third person, of a
living self by a dead self, "is, of all substitutions,
the one that is, thematically speaking, a radical
impossibility: between the living and the dead self, no
analogical resemblance or memory allows for any
substitution whatever" (RCC 201). In fact, as
de Man goes on to say, "the metaphor is not a metaphor
since it has no proper meaning, no sens
propre" (RCC 201) and could more properly
be called "the metonymic reversal of past and present
that rhetoricians call metalepsis" (RCC 201).
But even to call this reversal a metaleptic metonymy
would be claiming to know more than one can about the
radically discontinuous nature of this reversal. Just
as there can be no analogical resemblance between the
living self and the dead self, so there can be no
contiguity or juxtaposition, no "next-to-ness," between
a dead past and a living present that would allow for a
"properly" metonymic substitution. In time the dead
self may be "near to" the living self—just as the
child, according to a sentence de Man crossed out,
"being the father of man [...] stands closer
[my emphasis] to death than we do" (RCC
202)—but this proximity has no empirical,
phenomenal, thematic existence, and therefore the
"metonymy" is a blind, mutilated metonymy—in
fact, more of a catachresis than a metonymy. In short,
the "metaphorical substitution" is in fact a
self-undoing trope that self-deconstructs into the
catachrestic imposition of a name. "The poem does not
reflect on death," de Man concludes, "but on the
rhetorical power [my emphasis] of language
that can make it seem as if we could anticipate the
unimaginable" (RCC 201). In the same way, the
metonymic reversal of the Duddon sonnet, because it "is
a rhetorical device that does not correspond to a
thematic, literal reality" (RCC 202), also
gets undone in what de Man is already able to call
(after his reading of Grammatology) a
"de-constructive rhetoricity" (RCC 203). This
is thematically, literally, understandable: if the poem
performs a reversal and a substitution of contained
(empirical history) for container (the authentic
temporality of dissolution), then its rhetorical device
amounts to the equivalent of saying that the water or
the wine can contain the glass. And if the "glass" here
is the authentic temporality of ceaseless dissolution,
then even "properly speaking," as it were, it was not
much of a "container" to begin with! In any event, the
point is not to dwell on the mechanics and the details
of this "de-constructive rhetoricity"—we can read
all about it in Allegories of Reading and
elsewhere—but rather to insist that already here,
at the very pivot of de Man's "shift" to rhetoric and
rhetorical terms, the move to rhetoric is
already a move past rhetoric, to an awareness
that tropological textual models will also not be able
to account for what actually happens, what actually
occurs, in and as the texts of Hölderlin and of
Wordsworth. And, as we can read in Aesthetic
Ideology, what actually occurs—that which is
truly, materially, historical—is not the textual
linguistic model into which the tropological model
empties out and passes (for example, of language as
performative) but rather the passage, the passing,
itself—a break, gap, or discontinuity like the
one that cleaves Kant's Third Critique (between the
tropological "model" of the mathematical sublime and
the performative "model" of the dynamic
sublime).5
In "Kant and Schiller," de Man does not hesitate to say
directly what thinking history as event, as occurrence,
ultimately means, and he does it in terms particularly
resonant for our discussions of "Patterns of
Temporality" and "Time and History": "History is
therefore not a temporal notion, it has nothing to do
with temporality, but it is the emergence of a language
of power out of a language of cognition" (AI
133). In saying starkly that history is not a temporal
notion, that it has nothing to do with temporality, de
Man draws out the full implications of his 1967
readings of Hölderlin and Wordsworth and their
disclosure of reversals and substitutions whose
discontinuity is not temporal but rhetorical. What this
also means is that de Man's alleged "shift" from
history to reading and rhetoric—as one
that is also a shift past rhetoric—is in
fact a shift from history to
history6—a
shift whose own discontinuous "passage" or passing
"from" and "to" is what happens, what actually occurs,
materially historically, in and as "de
Man."
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For a coda it would be good to offer an example or
an emblem of de Man's discontinuous shift from history
to history. If we are right to call this shift material
and historical, then what would be the equivalent of
this moment "in the order of language" (AI
89)? In de Man's last essays, this equivalent always
turns out to be what he calls the materiality of
inscription, the prosaic materiality of the letter. And
the double-layered lecture on Wordsworth in fact
provides a material inscription that renders the
discontinuous shift—from history to reading, from
rhetoric past rhetoric, from history to
history—vividly legible. In passing from his
reading of the "complex temporal structurizations" in
the Boy of Winander to the Duddon sonnet, in order to
take one further step toward an understanding of "his
[Wordsworth's] temporality," de Man in the second layer
of the lecture simply inscribes the word "rhetorical"
above the word "temporal" (in "temporal
structurizations") and the phrase "rhetorical movement"
above the phrase "his temporality" (RCC 202),
in both cases without crossing out what he had
originally written in the first version of the lecture.
However legible this shift or passage "from" temporal
"to" rhetorical may be, it also remains singularly
unreadable and incomprehensible in terms of any
narrative that would tell stories of from and to,
before and after, or even "first layer" and "second
layer." What happens happens "between" the two
inscriptions and, as such (i.e., as something that
happens), is genuinely, materially, historical—de
Man's history and our legacy.
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