Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Ideology,
Rhetoric,
Aesthetics
For De Man
Andrzej Warminski
Forthcoming Titles
Working with Walter Benjamin:
Recovering a Political Philosophy
Andrew Benjamin
Readings of Derrida
Sarah Kofman, trans. Patience Moll
Hlne Cixouss Semi-Fictions: At the
Borders of Theory
Mairad Hanrahan
Against Mastery: Creative Readings
and Weak Force
Sarah Wood
The Paul de Man Notebooks
Paul de Man, ed. Martin McQuillan
Ideology, Rhetoric,
Aesthetics
For De Man
Andrzej Warminski
Contents
99
127
137
159
173
185
Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends
and after-life. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no
longer resistant to Theory but a significant consensus has been established and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream
of the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and
new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leaves
so-called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures
of auto-critique need to consider: what is the nature of this mainstream
Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other
disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and
what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken
place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of a
more-
than-
critical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, which
thinks thoughts own limits?
Theory is a name that traps by an aberrant nominal effect the transformative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought in
an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent: as a
name, a word and a concept, Theory arrests or misprisions such thinking. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or to abandon
Theory (on the contrary one must always insist on the it-is-necessary of
Theory even if one has given up belief in theories of all kinds). Rather,
this series is concerned with the presentation of work which challenges
complacency and continues the transformative work of critical thinking.
It seeks to offer the very best of contemporary theoretical practice in
the humanities, work which continues to push ever further the frontiers
of what is accepted, including the name of Theory. In particular, it is
interested in that work which involves the necessary endeavour of crossing disciplinary frontiers without dissolving the specificity of disciplines.
Published by Edinburgh University Press, in the city of Enlightenment,
this series promotes a certain closeness to that spirit: the continued
Authors Preface
This is a book about the work of Paul de Man on the critique of aesthetic ideology and the strange materiality a materiality without
materialism, as Derrida has put it that emerges from it. It consists
of three groups of essays I. Aesthetic Ideology, II. Hegel/Marx,
III. Heidegger/Derrida and it is about de Man in two senses.
Approximately half of the book in particular, Chapters 1, 2, 4, 9, and
10 consists of an explication and a reading of crucial articulations
in de Mans project; and the other half would extend this project and
its implications by a reading of material moments in Hegel, Marx,
and the Marxian tradition (Lukcs, Jameson) on the one hand and in
Heideggers hermeneutics (and its radicalization by Derrida) on the
other. The books subtitle For De Man could be read somewhat
like Althussers Pour Marx.
Paul de Mans turn to questions of ideology and the political in his
late work was anything but an arbitrary choice or an accident of biography. Rather it was a move that comes directly out of de Mans particular
kind of rhetorical reading i.e., one which goes through and past tropes
to demonstrate how tropological systems undo themselves and produce
a material remainder or residue, what de Man comes to call material
inscription.1 And since what gets undone in this self-undoing of tropological systems is the phenomenality including what de Man calls the
phenomenality of the linguistic sign that tropes on the one hand
make possible, one main casualty is the value of the aesthetic (and of
the aesthetic function of literature). This deconstruction of the aesthetic
is to be read in those texts that take the aesthetic not as a value but as a
philosophical category subject to critique: for example and above all, in
the philosophical aesthetics of Kant and of Hegel. That is, paradoxically
1 See my companion volume to this one: Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading
in Practice and Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
Authors Prefaceix
Authors Prefacexi
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgementsxiii
List of Abbreviations
Part I:
Aesthetic Ideology
Chapter 1
Allegories of Reference:
An Introduction to Aesthetic Ideology
Aesthetic Ideology
The texts collected in Aesthetic Ideology were written, or delivered as
lectures on the basis of notes, during the last years of de Mans life,
between 1977 and 1983. With the possible2 exception of the earliest text
The Concept of Irony (1977) all of these essays and lectures were
produced in the context of a project that we might call for short-hand
purposes a critique or, better, a critical-linguistic analysis of aesthetic ideology.3 This project is clearly the animating force of all the
essays de Man produced in the early 1980s and not just those explicitly concentrating on philosophical aesthetics to be included in the book
project he called Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology,4 but also the essays on
literary critics and theorists like Riffaterre, Jauss, and Benjamin that
made up a second of de Mans book projects part of which appeared
posthumously as The Resistance to Theory (1986) as well as the two
late essays (on Baudelaire and Kleist) expressly written for the collection The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984). Although the general project
is recognizable throughout these texts, it takes different forms in the
context of the three particular book projects.
The essays on Riffaterre and Jauss, for example, demonstrate how
both the critic whose point of departure is based on formalist presuppositions and the critic whose point of departure is based on hermeneutic presuppositions depend on the category of the aesthetic,
indeed on a certain aesthetization, to negotiate the passage between
the formal linguistic structures and the meaning of the literary texts
they interpret. This aesthetization turns Riffaterre into something of
a classical metaphysician, a Platonic swan disguised in the appearance
Allegories of Reference5
Allegories of Reference7
Allegories of Reference9
Allegories of Reference11
Allegories of Reference13
the text of Kants sublime, for instance, or, we might add, like the text
of de Mans readings of Kant and Hegel.
Allegories of Reference15
Allegories of Reference17
Allegories of Reference19
Allegories of Reference21
text, or even allegory (we can call such narratives ... allegories
[AR 205]), and attempt to account for it in a narrative: A narrative
endlessly tells the story of its own denominational aberration and it can
only repeat this aberration on various levels of rhetorical complexity
(Self [Pygmalion], AR 162).
Excess of Rigor
If it indeed reaches dead ends and breaking points, it does so by excess of
rigor rather than for lack of it.
de Man, Pascals Allegory of Persuasion
The characterization of de Mans accounting as a stuttering repertorization, repetition, enumeration, or numbering of referential (i.e., ideological) aberrations takes us back to the project of Aesthetics, Rhetoric,
Ideology and its specificity in relation to de Mans previous work. Our
attempt to explain, or at least to account for, the relation of reference and rhetoric in de Mans definition of ideology (as the confusion
of reference with phenomenalism) and its ending up in allegories of
reference would certainly link this project to Allegories of Reading.
Nevertheless, there is a definite and determinable specificity to the
allegories of reference that make up Aesthetic Ideology, which distinguishes it from the critical-linguistic analyses in Allegories of Reading.
One way to formulate this distinctive feature is by returning once again
to The Resistance to Theory and its characterization of the most
familiar and general of all linguistic models, the classical trivium, which
considers the sciences of language as consisting of grammar, rhetoric,
and logic (or dialectics) in its relation to the quadrivium, which covers
the non-verbal sciences of number (arithmetic), of space (geometry), of
motion (astronomy), and of time (music) (RT 13). To put it directly
though a bit proleptically: whereas the project of Allegories of Reading
comes from the side of the trivium the sciences of language that of
Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology comes from the side of the quadrivium
the non-verbal, mathematical sciences. This requires some explanation.
Insofar as the analyses in Allegories of Reading are concerned with the
way that rhetoric, the rhetorical dimension of language, always comes
to interfere between grammar and logic, thereby making impossible
any easy, unbroken passage between the formal structures and the
Allegories of Reference23
interconnection between a science of the phenomenal world and a science
of language conceived as definitional logic, the pre-condition for a correct
axiomatic-deductive, synthetic reasoning. The possibility of thus circulating
freely between logic and mathematics has its own complex and problematic
history as well as its contemporary equivalences with a different logic and
a different mathematics. What matters for our present argument is that this
articulation of the sciences of language with the mathematical sciences represents a particularly compelling version of a continuity between a theory
of language, as logic, and the knowledge of the phenomenal world to which
mathematics gives access. In such a system, the place of aesthetics is preordained and by no means alien, provided the priority of logic, in the model of
the trivium, is not being questioned. (RT 13)
Allegories of Reference25
Allegories of Reference27
Allegories of Reference29
Allegories of Reference31
Allegories of Reference33
saying here: To say then, as we are actually saying, that allegory (as
sequential narration) is the trope of irony (as the one is the trope of zero)
is to say something that is true enough but not intelligible, which also
means that it cannot be put to work as a device of textual analysis (AI
61). That de Mans saying what he wants to say here should interrupt
itself with something of a parabasis that calls attention to the act of
saying in the phrase as we are actually saying is most appropriate in the context of his own sequential narration. For he has just
been discussing the rhetorical terms that come close to designating
a disruption like that of the zero i.e., anacoluthon and parabasis as
long as one remembers that the zeros disruption is not topical, that it
cannot be located in a single point, and that therefore the anacoluthon
is omnipresent, or, in temporal terms and in Friedrich Schlegels deliberately unintelligible formulation, the parabasis is permanent. If what
we are actually saying in de Mans sentence is not intelligible just
as unintelligible as Schlegels definition of irony (which, like the zero,
is not susceptible to either nominal or real definition) as a permanent
parabasis, the constant possibility of a disruption of narrative intelligibility at every point of the narrative line it is not least of all on
account of a certain indeterminacy, a certain aberrancy, of reference
here. For the parabasis of as we are actually saying refers, takes back,
not only to the unintelligible something that follows (that allegory
... is the trope of irony (as the one is the trope of zero)) but also inevitably to the mere act of saying itself To say ..., as we are actually
saying. And this reference back to the act of saying ends up saying
more (or less?) than something as idiomatic and as innocuous as To
say, then, that ..., and introduces a certain unaccountable aberrancy
because the mere marker or place-holder that calls attention to the act of
speaking is already written in the sentences then: To say then, as we
are actually saying ... If we ignore the apparent mispunctuation for the
moment the poor Belgian should, after all, have written To say, then,
... this amounts to saying something already quite peculiar: a stutter
like To say, then, then ..., which only gets extended (permanently?)
if we notice that the actually may also carry such a merely marking or
place-holding function. There seems to be no end to the self-replicating
power of saying mere saying, whatever it is one wants to say, whenever
one says something or whenever one says anything at all. The missing
comma after To say only enforces the madness of this mechanical
repetition, for it insists quite clearly and grammatically that what we are
actually saying when we say To say then, as we are actually saying is
in fact only then in which case what we are actually saying now
(as in actuellement), in the present, is in fact only a certain weird pastness
Notes
1. Last entry in de Mans notebook for the last class he gave in a seminar on
Thorie rhtorique au 18me et 20me sicle (Fall 1983).
2. I say possible here because The Concept of Irony, which is on Fichte
and Schlegel, nevertheless covers part of the subject matter de Man planned
for the seventh chapter of Aesthetic Ideology: Aestheticism: Schiller and
Friedrich Schlegels Misreading of Kant and Fichte. See my note #4.
3. The phrase critical-linguistic analysis is de Mans in his 1983 interview
with Stefano Rosso, reprinted in The Resistance to Theory. See below.
4. Although de Man certainly used the phrase aesthetic ideology on occasion, the title he provided for the projected book in a typed Table of
Contents (sent with a letter dated 11 August 1983 to Lindsay Waters,
then an editor at the University of Minnesota Press) was indeed Aesthetics,
Rhetoric, Ideology. The Table of Contents reads as follows:
Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology
1. Epistemology of Metaphor *
2. Pascals Allegory of Persuasion *
3. Diderots Battle of the Faculties o
Allegories of Reference35
Allegories of Reference37
explicit formulation and the usage of tropes, or a tension between the
explicit theses and the implicit assumptions about language.
22. Rhetoric and Aesthetics was the title of de Mans Messenger lecture
series delivered at Cornell in February and March of 1983. The titles of the
lectures were announced as:
I. Anthropomorphism and Trope in Baudelaire
II. Kleists ber das Marionettentheater
III. Hegel on the Sublime
IV. Kant on the Sublime
V. Kant and Schiller
VI. Conclusions
Chapter 2
The entrance of the poets onto the scene of Kants attempt to ground
aesthetic reflexive judgments of the sublime as a transcendental principle
in his phrase as the poets do it (wie die Dichter es tun) could
hardly be more peculiar and more enigmatic.1 Paul de Mans reading
of this moment in the Third Critique is no less enigmatic and, if anything, even more peculiar, not least of all because the vision of the ocean
as the poets do it merely by what appears to the eye (blo ...
nach dem, was der Augenschein zeigt merely according to what the
appearance-to-the-eye shows, to put it more literally, or according
to what meets the eye) is termed by him a material vision whose
materiality is linked to what de Man calls Kants materialism (or
formal materialism): The critique of the aesthetic, he writes, ends
up, in Kant, in a formal materialism that runs counter to all values
and characteristics associated with aesthetic experience, including the
aesthetic experience of the beautiful and of the sublime as described by
Kant and Hegel themselves (AI 136). That it might be better not to
assume anything about our understanding of de Mans difficult materiality and materialism is certainly confirmed by the way the term
gets introduced in Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant. After characterizing the architectonic vision of the heavens and the ocean The
heavens are a vault that covers the totality of earthly space as a roof
covers a house, writes de Man as being neither a trope or a symbol
nor literal, which would imply its possible figuralization or symbolization by an act of judgment, de Man writes that The only word that
comes to mind is that of a material vision, but how this materiality is
then to be understood in linguistic terms is not, as yet, clearly intelligible (AI 135). Since the material is a word, the only word, that comes
to mind here, one can already suspect that its intelligibility will indeed
have a lot to do with its being understood in linguistic terms. We will
get to those terms soon enough, but it is already worth remarking that
seems to take place, it does so as such a tropological system of substitutions that are impossible except in the terms of such a purely formal
system. De Man summarizes: The desired articulation of the sublime
takes place, with suitable reservations and restrictions, within such a
purely formal system. It follows, however, that it is conceivable only
within the limits of such a system, that is, as pure discourse rather than
as a faculty of the mind. When the sublime is translated back, so to
speak, from language into cognition, from formal description into philosophical argument, it loses all inherent coherence and dissolves in the
aporias of intellectual and sensory appearance. It is also established that,
even within the confines of language, the sublime can occur only as a
single and particular point of view, a privileged place that avoids both
excessive comprehension and excessive apprehension, and that this
place is only formally, and not transcendentally, determined. The
sublime cannot be grounded as a philosophical (transcendental or metaphysical) principle, but only as a linguistic principle. Consequently, the
section on the mathematical sublime cannot be closed off in a satisfactory manner and another chapter on the dynamics of the sublime is
needed (AI 78). So: if the mathematical sublime is possible only
within the confines of such a purely formal tropological system, it is no
wonder that the epistemological and the eudaemonic proofs of the
mathematical sublime that de Man treats before his discussion of
Auffassung and Zusammenfassung and Kant treats after end up in the
assertions of the possibility of the sublime by dint of its impossibility and
failure: The sublime cannot be defined as the failure of the sublime, for
this failure deprives it of its identifying principle (AI 75). The section
on the mathematical sublime cannot be closed off in a satisfactory
manner because its (linguistic) principle of discourse as a tropological
system cannot itself be closed off. For what happens is this: in its purely
positional trans-position of number into extension, of inscribed markers
into phenomenal tropes, of catachreses into impossible metaphors, the
tropological system of the mathematical sublime introduces into itself an
excess or a lack that cannot be mastered or controlled or accounted for
by the resources by the principles of substitution and combination of
that system and therefore prevents itself from ever being able to close
itself off as a system. (This is an excess of marking, of substitutions
other than trope, purely differential relations and entities; and a lack of
the one metaphor that could complete the tropological system and allow
it to close itself off.9) De Mans way of putting it is that the transition
from the mathematical to the dynamic sublime, a transition for which
the justification is conspicuously lacking in the text ... marks [again,
marks] the saturation of the tropological field as language frees itself of
that are more markers than metaphors). And, of course, that power
of number to progress to infinity is its entirely mechanical, automatic
ability to designate the infinite by writing it, inscribing it, in an arbitrary differential mark. In short, the mathematical sublime too has at
its origin a power that is itself put into place by an inaugural act of
material inscription minimally, the (aesthetic reflective) judgment that
determines the magnitude of the measure by, say, dividing up the extension of a ruler into inches by marking and inscribing them. But, again of
course, that the three linguistic models of the sublime tropological,
performative, and, call it, inscriptional are intricated together and in
a sense already there at the outset becomes legible only if de Mans
and, indeed, Kants own reading-motion and its narration in what
can only be called an allegory (of reading and unreadability, yes) are
allowed to unfold in order. It is telling that the order of de Mans presentation is not exactly, not quite, the same as Kants. Indeed, there is
something like a logic of the sublime or, better, a sublime program,
pro-gramma at work in de Mans own presentation as he first recounts
the epistemological and the eudaemonic (failed) proofs of the sublime,
identifies them as subreptions in which a metaphysical principle mistakes itself for a transcendental principle, and summarizes the difficulty
by reference to the passage on thinking (denken) the impossibility
of an exhibition of ideas in section 29 of the Critique i.e., the section
that contains the passage on material vision and all this before going
back to the opening paragraphs of section 26 and the discussion of
Auffassung and Zusammenfassung. No wonder that de Mans transition
reads a little oddly; the first sentence of the paragraph begins: Still in
the mathematical sublime, in Section 26, next to the epistemology and
the eudaemony of the sublime, appears another description ... (AI 77,
my emphasis), which sounds like Meanwhile, back in the mathematical sublime ... This is odd because Kants description of Auffassung
and Zusammenfassung and the tropological system they constitute is
not next to but rather before the epistemology and the eudaemony of
the sublime. De Mans getting to it only after he has discussed them as
well as denken and thus reordering Kants presentation follows a certain
logic of the sublime in that it provides a certain privileged place that
itself allows an easier comprehension of his own reading-motions
difficult apprehensions and renders his reading of the mathematical
sublime intelligible in linguistic terms. That is, de Mans passage on
the tropological system itself serves as something like a metaphor of
comprehension that makes what precedes and follows in his reading of
Kant easier to understand. That the one figure of the double operation
of Auffassung and Zusammenfassung de Man provides should be what
the all-framing starry sky and the all-engulfing abyss of ocean, there is
the flat, placid, sheer surface of a mirror without depth. The sea is
called a mirror, writes de Man, not because it is supposed to reflect
anything, but to stress a flatness devoid of any suggestion of depth (AI
83). This placid flatness does not fit so easily into the tropologies that
can account for sky and sea as mathematical and dynamic sublimes or
as the bridge of the Third Critique over the abyss between the First and
Second Critiques. But it does indeed provide a nice figure for the mere
juxtaposition of incompatibles like the mathematical and the dynamic
sublime or the understanding and reason, or First and Second Critiques,
and so on the purely formal, purely material, vision of what the
Augenschein shows, or, even better, the phlegmatic, a-pathetic vision of
a calculating, counting Dutchman. In other words, legible here are de
Mans three linguistic models of Kants sublime, with the vaulted sky
a figure of the mathematical sublime as tropological system (that would
border off infinity), the abyssal ocean a figure of the dynamic sublime as
performative force, and the clear water-mirror a figure of the material
sublime whose model would be that of language as material inscription. But, needless to say, this is all too figural, too tropological; there is
all too much purposiveness and too much mind in such a reading. Such
a reading would not be how the poets do it. If we ask, in the spirit of de
Mans reading, what is the equivalence on the level of language, in linguistic terms, of this placid, flat water-mirror as seen by the apathetic
Dutchman described as a phlegmatized kind of German interested
only in the dreariest of commercial and moneymaking activities (AI 85)
in Kants pre-
critical (1764) Observations on the Feeling of the
Beautiful and the Sublime13 we get some direction from de Mans
own account of how meaning-producing tropes are replaced by the
fragmentation of sentences and propositions into discrete words, or the
fragmentation of words into syllables or finally letters. Where to find,
how to read, such a dismemberment of language in Kants text?
Another hint from de Man helps: But just try to translate one single
somewhat complex sentence of Kant, or just consider what the efforts of
entirely competent translators have produced, and you will soon notice
how decisively determining the play of the letter and the syllable ... is in
this most unconspicuous of stylists (AI 89, my emphasis). And, indeed,
if we go back one more time to the sentence on the poets and try to
translate it, we find very quickly that it does not in fact say what we and
all the translators I have checked Bernard, Pluhar, Philonenko want
to see there. For the sentence does not say, we must be able to view the
ocean as poets do ... and yet find it sublime (Pluhar), nor does it say,
To call the ocean sublime we must regard it as poets do (Bernard), nor
find sublime despite, whatever, the Augenschein shows, and the bridge
between our must and our being able to find sublime is indeed a purely
formal, only prosthetic bridge. This would mean or, better, only mark or
inscribe that what the poets do is not even so much to see according to
the Augenschein as to read an inscription, dismembered sentences,
words, syllables, letters like the illegible letter (or all too interpretable
hieroglyph?) of the arching line of the sky on top of the straight or squiggly line of the ocean. Indeed, it would perhaps not be too perverse to
suspend Kants sentence in the middle and identify the antecedent of it
in as the poets do it as neither seeing nor being able to find sublime
but rather must: one must (only) as the poets must (nevertheless be
able to find sublime) as one must as the poets must. (Ive tried out the
German: Man mu blo, wie die Dichter es tun, mssen; Man mu
mssen; One, we, must must.) Which amounts to saying that what
one must do to be able to find sublime is, above all, introduce, inter-ject,
the poets between the moral imperative and the sublime judgment.
The supplying of the poets, as in Dichter or dictare the only word that
comes to mind, as it were would be the always necessary and always
impossible grammatical, gramma-tical, bridge, the bottom line of the
prosaic materiality of the letter.
As is legible in several places, Paul de Mans title for what turned out to
be his last book was Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology. How and why the
book ultimately came to be called Aesthetic Ideology is a long and, at
times, comical story. In the end, and as always, the matter was decided
by a combination of contingency and necessity: the random event of
de Mans death and the (quite legitimate) preferences of Marketing at
the University of Minnesota Press. The difference between the two titles,
however, does invite a question: what difference would it make? Would
the (re)insertion of the word rhetoric between aesthetics and ideology make any difference at all? Would it not be, at worst, trivial, and
would it not, at best, merely reconfirm the suspicion or assumption that
too much, for de Mans next step, what actually occurs in (and as) de
Man, is not the performative, it is not the performative speech act or the
performative rhetoric which seems to be the issue of so many of de
Mans readings (from Allegories of Reading on) and their reception and
use in the work of others. It is true that a correct enough but ultimately
untrue or at least not true enough account of the typical de Manian
reading and what it does with the relation between knowledge and act,
the cognitive and the performative dimensions of a text i.e., trope and
performative would run as follows: de Mans readings start out by first
setting up, reconstructing, the text as trope, as a tropological system (of
substitutions and transformations of meaning) or, most directly put,
by interpreting the text as to be understood on the basis of (and as) a
tropological system that would be closed, in the sense that its intelligibility is grounded in some ultimately stable meaning, an ultimately stable
hermeneutic horizon of meaning. (In such a set-up, the rhetoric of tropes
would be continuous with, homogeneous with, logic the possibility of
universal and hence extra-textual [and hence extra-linguistic] meaning.)
All this means is: de Man begins by interpreting the meaning of the text,
figuring out what the text means and how its figural language works to
produce that meaning (once one takes even a small step beyond sheer
literal-mindedness). De Mans readings, in this account, proceed by,
second, demonstrating how it is that the text as tropological system,
as system of tropes, in fact cannot close itself off and remains open.
The reason this happens, most directly and succinctly put, is that the
tropological system of the text (i.e., that is the text) cant close itself off
(in a final stable meaning) because that system cannot account for its
own production, that is, cannot account for the inaugural act that put it
into place in the first place in its own terms, i.e., according to principles
internal to itself as system. Hence, third, the text makes a sort of jump
it stutters, as it were into another textual and linguistic model, that of
the performative, of text as act a model that diverges from the text as
trope, as cognitive rhetoric, indeed, disrupts the cognitive dimension of
the text. The upshot is that the text issues in the performative and that
the text as performative disrupts the text as cognitive, as trope.
This account is correct enough, and many of de Mans readings
from the early 1970s to the early 1980s would seem to authorize it.
For instance, the end of the famous (or infamous) concluding essay
of Allegories of Reading Excuses (Confessions) would certainly
seem to fit: the linguistic model cannot be reduced to a mere system
of tropes, writes de Man, since its (negative) cognitions fail to make
the performative function of the discourse predictable (AR 300) and
thus we find that we are restating the disjunction of the performative
origin of the text, the material trace or the material inscription that
would be the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility
of the text itself. In Kants Analytic of the Sublime the attempt to
ground the critical discourse, to found the very subject of the critical
philosophy and transcendental method, instead ungrounds, unfounds,
itself in the disarticulation of tropological and performative linguistic
models by, ultimately, the last linguistic model: the prosaic materiality of the letter, material inscription. In Rousseaus autobiographical
project, the attempt to ground the confessional/apologetic discourse, to
found the confessional subject, instead disarticulates itself and founders
on the random utterance Marion which, of course, is the material
trace at the very origin of Rousseaus autobiography, the reason, as
he says explicitly, for his writing the Confessions in the first place (i.e.,
to confess the shameful act).19 Among other things, such an account
helps to put the performative into better perspective. For what happens
when the text passes from trope to performative which is not a temporal progression but an event, an occurrence (as in comes to pass)
is a certain repetition of the violent, groundless and ungrounded,
inaugural act that, again, put it into place in the first place. The event
of this repetition is what gets disseminated all along the narrative line
and thus renders the text an allegory of its inability to account for its
own production (an allegory of unreadability, to coin a phrase) with
Rousseaus autobiographer doomed to mindlessly, mechanically, repeating Marion over and over again, and Kants critical philosopher
I must be able to bridge pure reason and practical reason, I must
exhibit the ideas of reason, I must be able to find sublime, I must
must, Ich mu mssen, mu mssen, mu mssen ...20
So: thats the difference the reinsertion of rhetoric between aesthetics and ideology makes. Without rhetoric, without the epistemological critique of trope, as de Man puts it, nothing happens. There
is no direct, immediate, royal road to the performative, to action and
the act, political or otherwise. Pretending that one can go to it directly
is sheer delusion and a guarantee that nothing can happen, nothing will
ever happen.21
Notes
1. It may be helpful to provide the passage from section 29 of Kants Third
Critique that de Man reads in the second half of his Phenomenality and
Materiality in Kant. In Werner Pluhars uncorrected (see the end of this
chapter) translation, it reads: Therefore, when we call the sight of the
starry sky sublime, we must not base our judgment upon any concepts of
Chapter 3
Let there be beauty (Sobald sie demnach den Ausspruch tut: es soll eine
Menschheit existieren, so hat sie eben dadurch das Gesetz aufgestellt: es
soll eine Schnheit sein) (Letters 102310). Reason does this on transcendental grounds: Reason, on transcendental grounds, makes the
following demand: Let there be a bond of union between the form-drive
and the material drive: that is to say, let there be a play-drive, since only
the union of reality with form, contingency with necessity, passivity
with freedom, makes the concept of human nature complete (Letters
1023). In other words, to put it brusquely, my divided and alienated
experience of human nature must have as its condition of possibility
the concept of an undivided and unalienated human nature otherwise
I would not have the experience that I do (of human nature as divided
and alienated). There must be a bond of union between the form-drive
(Formtrieb) and the material drive (Stofftrieb), which in turn means that
there must be a play-drive (Spieltrieb) since it is only by means of such
a third, mediating drive that the form-drive and the material drive can
be united. And this must be so otherwise, again, I would not have the
experience of human nature that I in fact have. Now if we look back to
the Fourteenth Letter, we discover that the actual purported deduction of
the play-drive takes place a bit differently, not so much as the promulgation of transcendental laws of the conditions of possibility of experience
but rather as the much stranger positing of experience, indeed a positing
not of transcendental laws but of (an impossible) transcendental experience. Let us proceed step-by-step. The Fourteenth Letter begins with
the concept of a reciprocal action between the two drives, Formtrieb
and Stofftrieb, of such a kind that the activity of the one both gives
rise to, and sets limits to, the activity of the other (Letters 945). That
the concept of reciprocal action (Wechselwirkung) and the mutual
self-limitation it entails comes from Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre of 1794
would be clear enough, even without Schillers long (and curious11)
footnote to the Thirteenth Letter, where he writes: This concept of
reciprocal action, and its fundamental importance, is admirably set forth
in Fichtes Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, Leipzig, 1794
(Letters 845). The Fichtean provenance of this concept of reciprocal
action (and the incipient dialectics in it) should be a signal to us that
the allegedly transcendental method Schiller uses already anthropologized, psychologized, and, indeed, empiricized12 is undergoing some
torsion here. In any case, the reciprocal action between the two drives
is, admittedly, but a task enjoined upon us by reason (ist zwar blo
eine Aufgabe der Vernunft), continues Schiller, and, it turns out, the
burden of this task, this Aufgabe, is the sublime: Such reciprocal action
between the two drives is, admittedly, but a task enjoined upon us by
Notes
1. All page references marked as WL are to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage
der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, [1794] 1997);
and J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, ed. Peter Heath and John
Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). The first page
number refers to the German text, the second to the English translation.
Occasionally I have had to modify the translation.
2. All page references marked as KdU are to the German and English of
Kants Third Critique: Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974); Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S.
Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987).
Occasionally I have modified the translation, in particular preferring presentation to exhibition in the rendering of Darstellung.
3. See the end of paragraph 23 of the Critique of Judgment. On the one
hand, the concept of the sublime is a mere appendix to the beautiful and
not nearly as important and rich in implications as that of the beautiful
in nature (KdU 167, 100). On the other hand, since the sublime testifies
not to a purposiveness in nature but only to a purposiveness within ourselves entirely independent (ganz unabhngig) of nature, it is in fact more
important than the beautiful because, ultimately, it would ground the critical subject as such i.e., the capacity to link appearance and intuition with
the supersensible according to a rule that is not given but that the judging
subject gives to itself. In fact, it is only the sublime and not the beautiful
that can accomplish the ultimate task that the Third Critique sets for itself:
not just showing how subjective reflexive judgments can make a claim to
universality but rather bridging the supersensible underlying nature and the
supersensible underlying freedom and demonstrating that the latter does
have an effect on the former as, according to Kant, it must.
4. On de Mans essay and on Kants Analytic of the Sublime, see Chapter
2, As the Poets Do It: On the Material Sublime, above.
5. Cf. the final paragraph of the Preface to the Third Critique: With this,
then, I conclude my entire critical enterprise. I shall proceed without delay
to the doctrinal one, in order to snatch from my advancing years what time
may yet be somewhat favorable to the task (KdU 77, 78).
6. Cf. paragraph viii of the Introduction to the Third Critique: Aesthetic
judgment, on the other hand, contributes nothing to the cognition of its
objects; hence it belongs only to the critique that is the propaedeutic to
Chapter 4
spiritual content in terms of sign and symbol and then works out their
mutual undoing. That he calls the labor of this undoing a mutual obliteration should be sufficient caution for anybody who would take the
liberationist rhetoric of the end literally.
Postscript
If de Mans reading of the juxtaposition of the two quotations from
Genesis and from Psalms And God said Let there be light and
Light is your garment is to work, he clearly needs the first quotation
to mean that God is the light: But since this same spirit also, without
mediation, is the light (p. 481), the combination of the two quotations
states that the spirit posits itself as that which is unable to posit, and
this declaration is either meaningless or duplicitous (AI 11314). In
Mistake in Paul de Man, Marc Redfield points out that Hegels text
never actually says that God is the light it is nowhere to be found on
the page (p. 481) of the Aesthetics de Man refers us to and that de
Mans assertion is therefore a mistake which constitutes a misreading
of Hegel on the sublime: That is the whole point of the sublime: God
is not one with the world, but has withdrawn, radically. The statement God is light misunderstands the sublime as a version of what it
is not pantheism.3 If correct, Redfields critique of de Man would
have serious consequences: namely, de Mans reading of Hegel would
be based upon a violence done to Hegels text and hence would not be
a reading at all. Although Redfield wants to avoid this conclusion, it
is necessary to insist on it: if de Man is mistaken about this, then he is
wrong about everything, and his reading is a sham.
But de Mans reading is not the empty performance of a reading. It
is based not on a gratuitous violence done to Hegels text but rather on
the rational power of the cognitive interpretive pressure he is able to put
on that text. (And it could be demonstrated that this is so not only here
in the case of God is light but also in the other instances Redfield mentions: the drowning of the shape all light in Shelley and the ne in
Rousseau.) To reply fully to Redfields critique would take many pages,
but let me at least try to outline a response. As Redfield points out,
although Hegel never actually says that God is light, the closest he comes
to it (and on p. 481) is in the sentence directly after the quotation from
Genesis: The Lord, the one substance, does indeed proceed to externalization (usserung), but the manner of manifestation is the purest,
even bodiless, ethereal externalization: it is the word, the externalization
of thought as the ideal power, and with its command of being (that the
same spirit also, without mediation, is the light (p. 481) ... (AI 113)
is indeed the reference he wants becomes clearer if we remember how de
Man himself translated (a bit earlier) the last words of the long sentence
about Gods manifesting or externalizing himself as the word that at
the same time posits what is in mute obedience: the word ... whose
command to be also and actually posits what is without mediation and
in mute obedience (AI 112). For de Man, the positing that takes place
without mediation (and hence without negation) here confirms that
in this monotheistic moment the power of positing and that which is
posited are one, all of a piece. But because this positing word posits itself
first of all as light the necessary phenomenality of any positing, i.e.,
the condition of possibility of phenomenal cognition and the mimetico-
diegetic system of representation this moment gets re-dialecticized into
a Longinian, dialectical sublime. 3) It is worth adding that the doubleness or duplicity de Man reads in Hegels sublime a Longinian and
a Hegelian sublime within the Hegelian sublime is also to be read
already within Longinus (and in Neil Hertzs recuperative interpretation
of Longinus) in the transition from the natural sources of the sublime
(Chapters 8 through 15) e.g., Mosess quotation of Gods fiat lux
to the first artificial source of the sublime (Chapters 16 and 17), i.e.,
figures, where the first example is ... apostrophe (i.e., Demostheness
apostrophizing the dead Greek heroes who were victorious in previous
battles at the moment when he is trying to get out from under his own
responsibility for the defeat at Chaeroneia). And as Kevin Newmark has
pointed out to me in a fruitful exchange about de Mans alleged mistake,
the doubleness or duplicity de Man reads in Hegel is also to be read in
the passage from Milton a veritable ode to light that Redfield quotes
as underwriting (along with a vast Christian tradition) de Mans mistaken assertion that God is the light. But this is to get things backwards.
As Newmark puts it, de Man does not misread Hegel because he is
steeped in a religious and literary tradition. Rather de Mans reading of
Hegel discloses the way that Hegel gives a philosophical grounding to
complications and a duplicity that necessarily resurface in any religious
or literary discourse. And why not add that Redfields own text seems
also to recognize that de Man is right about this doubleness or duplicity
at the very moment it reiterates that Hegel does not say God is the light:
But Hegels text does not say this, and for good reason: Hegel, at this
point in this text, is committed to the (Hebraic) sublimity of God as
word. The word is of course the divine imperative Let there be light
(pp. 10910). So: God is the word, and the word is the divine imperative
Let there be light i.e., the linguistic positing power. The word posits
itself as the word light which is not the result of the (positing) word
Notes
1. Roman Jakobson, Linguistics and Poetics, in Language in Literature
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 878. The original
version of Jakobsons well-known essay was presented at a conference on
style held at Indiana University in 1958. It was then revised and published
in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1960).
2. See the second paragraph of the Fourteenth Letter in Friedrich Schiller, On
the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and
L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), and my reading
of it in Returns of the Sublime: Positing and Performative in Kant, Fichte,
and Schiller, Chapter 3 above.
3. Marc Redfield, Mistake in Paul de Man, in Martin McQuillan (ed.), The
Political Archive of Paul de Man: Property, Sovereignty, and the Theotropic
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 109.
Part II:
Hegel/Marx
Chapter 5
For the philosophers relationship = idea. They only know the relation of
Man to himself and hence for them, all real relations become ideas.
Verhltnis fr die Philosophen = Idee. Sie kennen blo das Verhltnis des
Menschen zu sich selbst, und darum werden alle wirklichen Verhltnisse
ihnen zu Ideen.1
the one thing he cannot mean is a mere inversion, a mere reversal, for
that is precisely the (non-)critique of Hegel performed by the German
Ideologists who thereby fall back into a pre-Hegelian position. And,
indeed, in the case of the life/consciousness relation, it is easy enough
to see that for a dialectical thought it makes no difference which determines which as long as their relation remains one of determination. For
Hegel like for Spinoza omnis determinatio est negatio, and therefore
it does not matter whether consciousness is said to determine (bestimmen) life or life consciousness as long as one determines the other, it is
mediatable with it thanks to the work of the determinate negative. For
life to determine consciousness means for it still to be the negation of
consciousness, consciousnesss own negation that needs to be negated in
turn so that consciousness can verify and become itself, consciousness
(and so that life can be relegated to an essential, necessary moment [of
truth, of verification] of consciousness: consciousness = life sublated,
das aufgehobene Leben, one could say). So: if Marxs statement that
life determines consciousness (rather than vice versa) is going to make
a difference, is going to mean anything different from the eminently
sublatable differences of determinate negation, then both the nature
of the terms (life and consciousness) and the nature of the relation (of determination [bestimmen]) between them before and after
the inversion need to be rewritten, reinscribed: or, schematically put,
Marxs operation cannot be one of mere inversion, mere overturning
that is what the Young Hegelians do and he criticizes them for but
rather has to be an operation of inversion and reinscription in short, a
full-scale deconstruction of both consciousness and life and the relation between them. In other words, however symmetrical the chiasmic
reversal may seem and however parallel the determining (bestimmen)
before the inversion and after the inversion what Marx is actually
saying (and has to be saying if he is to be Marx and not just another
Young Hegelian or German Ideologist) is that life, real life, determines
consciousness in a way that consciousness cannot master, cannot come
up against as a merely determinately negative object of consciousness,
of itself as consciousness. In short, life overdetermines consciousness
it is made up of contradictions and a negativity, call it, that cannot be
reduced to (i.e., mediated, sublated, into) one, simple, determined negation.4 And we do not have to look far in The German Ideology to begin
to determine what the nature of this overdetermination is. Life, the real
life of human beings, is not biological, appetitive existence but rather
the product of a history of production: men distinguish themselves
from animals not by consciousness, not by knowing, but by producing
their means of subsistence. In other words, life is not a given, positive
that is, it negates me too immediately to be, to allow me to be, the negation of self-consciousness. In the second moment after eating the
other-being of the other is not essential enough, and my negation of its
otherness istoo immediate. So: in the first case, the potato negates self-
consciousness too immediately; in the second case, I negate the potato
(my negation) too immediately. In the first case, I revert to the position of
mere consciousness i.e., that for which the truth of knowing is the otherness of the sensory outside; in the second case, I remain a merely one-
sided, abstract, tautologous self-consciousness. Whats the point? The
point is that the potato is not yet essential enough for self-consciousness.
That is, it is essential enough for self-consciousness as desire, but not for
self-consciousness as self-consciousness. And the point becomes clearer
perhaps once we recall that the objects of desire, of self-consciousness as
desire, are living, are life. The potato I desire to eat is the object of self-
consciousness as living and desiring in fact, as desiring to live and
not of self-consciousness as self-consciousness, as self-knowing. This
means that in the potato, for example, life is not yet essential enough
for self-consciousness. And this sentence has to be read in two registers,
as it were, according to two emphases, two stresses: either on the word
self-consciousness or on the word life. On the one hand, we need
to emphasize the word self-consciousness life is not yet essential
enough for self-consciousness that is, life may be essential enough for
self-consciousness as living and desiring, but since the essence (truth,
an sich) of self-consciousness is not the otherness of life but rather the
unity of itself with itself (the I am I), life cannot be essential enough
for self-consciousness. But, on the other hand, we need just as much
to emphasize the word life life is not yet essential enough for self-
consciousness that is, until self-consciousness can make life essential
for itself as self-consciousness, it cannot become truly self-consciousness
but rather remains at the stage of the tautologous I am I, the merely
immediate unity of itself with itself. Now the first hand the stress on
the word self-consciousness (life is not yet essential enough for self-
consciousness) would certainly be obvious enough in the case of an
idealism that would want to dissolve all non-conscious otherness, all
merely living existence, into knowing, consciousness, mind, spirit, and
so on. It is no wonder that life would not be essential enough for self-
consciousness! But the second, other hand the stress on the word life
(life is not yet essential enough for self-consciousness) should make us
pause a bit and elaborate its considerable implications. Namely, first of
all, the inescapable fact that whatever is going on here in the dialectics
of desire and life is not your average, clichd received idea of idealism.
The burden of the passage is not at all a matter of self-consciousnesss
itself does not take place, is not said to take place, by means of a determinate negation. Consciousness here is not the other of life as its determinate negation but rather an other pointed to, indicated, beckoned to,
referred to, by life. The argument that would demonstrate the possibility
of the existence of self-consciousness (as self-consciousness) certainly
needs this pointing operation to be that of a determined negation and
it needs to have this other of life be lifes own other but the text just as
surely does not work this way, does not perform this operation. Rather
what the text does is to introduce something of a linguistic moment
into the relation of life and consciousness and, in doing so, threatens to
render impossible not only the emergence of self-consciousness (as self-
consciousness) out of life but also the project of the Phenomenology of
Spirit as such. Lifes pointing introduces this threat because it opens the
possibility of an unmediatable break or gap between life and consciousness: that is, if the relation between life and consciousness is mediated not by a determinate negation but rather by an act of pointing that
can, perhaps, point to many living things (just as it can point to their
other, many dead things) but that can, by itself, never make the other
of life consciousness as consciousness, knowing as knowing appear,
then this relation would in fact be a disjunction, the falling apart of
life and consciousness. (Another way to put it: life may indeed point,
may indeed speak, but that this pointing or speaking linguistic
function will make anything appear is doubtful least of all that it can
make the other of life itself i.e., death itself appear. Again: life can
make living things appear and it can make dead things appear, but death
itself? No.) And when life and consciousness are unmediated or de-
mediated in this way, then the possibility of spirits appearing the
possibility of a phenomeno-logic of spirits appearing in the phenomena
of its own self-negations would also be very much in question. It is in
question because a linguistic act or function of pointing or reference
cannot make anything appear unless it is itself phenomenalized, only if
it is given a figure, a face, as it were, only if the logos, speech, is made to,
said to, appear only if speaking is said to appear, only if the speaking
(logos) of the apparent (phenomena) is said to be the appearance of
speaking. But if the speaking of the apparent can turn into the appearance of speaking only thanks to the figural, rhetorical, function or
dimension of language, then the authority for this tropological substitution or transfer this trope or figure is most unreliable. It is unreliable
because the only authoritative ground for this figure a figure that
would turn life (in its result, Gattung) into a determinate figure for
consciousness would be the system of consciousness itself, i.e., the
system of (apparent) knowing, here taken as a closed tropological
the text, points to an other than he is, call him Marx. In saying this, the
reading is a repetition with a difference, or, better, with a remainder
of Hegel, the text, its reproduction, as it were.) But to say that Marx is
in a sense the reinscription of the remainder or remaindering of Hegels
text is not to say that Marx whoever that would be is the truth of
Hegel, the essence of Hegel, and so on. It does not even mean to say
that what Marx does is to think the unthought of Hegel. No, what
Marx does is to read Hegel, to read Hegels text in its difference from
itself. Thats what makes him Marx and not a Young Hegelian his
countersigning of Hegels text, as it were, is what allows him to sign
Marx. But to sign Marx is different from being Marx some sort of
monolithic, homogeneous document whose own single, simple, liberating truth could be discovered by a hermeneutic activity of unpacking
and u
nveiling for Marxs own signature needs itself to be read in turn,
meaning that his text is also heterogeneous, is also riven by overdetermined contradictions that will forever prohibit any easy totalization of
Marx into only Marx, just Marx, into Marx and nothing else. Marxs
text, like Hegels, is also living on in a species of after-life;30 it too is
still to come in the future, from the future. Thats what makes it Marx.
And its also what makes deconstruction or, better, deconstructions
something yet to come in and from the future. Its their future is also
coming, on the way, yet to come, any day now for instance, in the
reserve or remainder of texts that as texts will have always already been
the future of deconstruction(s), like Derridas Positions, which forty
years ago (in answer to questions about Derridas relation to and
silence about Marx) said not only that the lacunae ... are explicitly
calculated to mark the sites of a theoretical elaboration which remains,
for me at least, still to come, but also that:
when I say still to come, I am still, and above all, thinking of the relationship of Marx to Hegel ... Despite the immense work which already has
been done in this domain, a decisive elaboration has not yet been accomplished, and for historical reasons which can by analyzed, precisely, only
during the elaboration of this work ... Now, we cannot consider Marxs,
Engelss, or Lenins texts as completely finished elaborations that are simply
to be applied to the current situation. In saying this, I am not advocating
anything contrary to Marxism, I am convinced of it. These texts are not
to be read according to a hermeneutical or exegetical method which would
seek out a finished signified beneath a textual surface. Reading is transformational. I believe that this would be confirmed by certain of Althussers
propositions. But this transformation cannot be executed however one
wishes. It requires protocols of reading. Why not say it bluntly: I have not yet
found any that satisfy me ... I do not find the texts of Marx, Engels, or Lenin
homogeneous critiques. In their relationship to Hegel, for example. And the
So: despite all our misgivings, the title of the conference The
Future of Deconstruction: Reading Marxs German Ideology seems
to me correct enough, as long as we remember to emphasize the word
reading as well as the word future. Like Hegel, like Marx, indeed
like Hegel/Marx, the only future deconstruction can have is the
future produced by a reading that is transformational, i.e., that happens,
and as something that happens is history and as history has, is, will
have been, a future. As anything else as an institutional fashion, trend,
movement, or method, or, for that matter, as a new philosophy (of
the limit or whatever) deconstruction is already over (because it
didnt happen) and may as well have no future.32
Notes
1. Marginal note by Marx in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German
Ideology, vol. 5 of Collected Works (New York: International Publishers,
1976), p. 91. The German can be found in Karl Marx, Die Frhschriften,
ed. Siegfried Landshut (Stuttgart: Alfred Krner, 1971), p. 411.
2. The German Ideology, p. 37; Die Frhschriften, p. 349.
3. The German Ideology, p. 41; Die Frhschriften, pp. 3534.
4. For the distinction between simple and overdetermined contradiction, my reference is, of course, Louis Althusser, Contradiction and
Overdetermination, in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York:
Vintage, 1970), pp. 87128.
5. The German Ideology, p. 36; Die Frhschriften, p. 348.
6. The German Ideology, pp. 434; Die Frhschriften, pp. 3567.
7. The German Ideology, p. 45; Die Frhschriften, p. 358.
8. An extended reading of the Fourth Thesis on Feuerbach which is itself
something of a rhetorical reading of Feuerbach would be necessary
here. For some indications on how ideology is to be read as self-undoing
Chapter 6
Hegel makes the transition from the dialectics of desire and life to the
emergence of a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness and the consequent battle for recognition which issues in ones becoming master and
the other slave. Whatever it is that would afford the transition from the
mirror dialectics of desire on the one hand and life on the other, it is in
fact not desire or at least is no longer anything that Hegel would still
call desire (whether of the thing or of the self). Less well known is the
fact or at least the reading that would demonstrate it that whatever
Hegel (or the super-Hegel that Kojve would be) may want here,
Hegels text does not make the transition from the dialectics of desire and
life to a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness by means of a determinate negation. In fact, it is an open question as to whether the transition is made at all, whether Hegels argument is in fact able to get past
the moment of self-consciousness as desire. It can be shown or at least
read that when Hegels presentation finishes up demonstrating that the
object of self-consciousness as desire i.e., life goes through the same
dialectical process of self-negation as the desiring self-consciousness
and therefore proves to be independent enough for self-consciousness
it goes back to the subject (knowing, self-knowing) not by anything
that could be taken as a determinate negation but rather by something
of a linguistic moment of phenomenalized reference that would make
consciousness emerge, appear, out of life itself. Life, in its result (genus,
Gattung), writes Hegel, points to an other than it is, namely consciousness. In other words and in short, the dialectic of life and desire can get
back to consciousness and self-consciousness only thanks to a phenomenalization of reference in an impossible and aberrant trope. Impossible
and aberrant because: although life in its result the genus (Gattung),
the moments when the individual dissolves back into the genus (i.e.,
in procreation and in death) can certainly make many living things
appear, just as it can make many dead things appear, it cannot make
death itself appear death as the determined limit and negation of life,
and hence as a super-sublated life, das aufgehobene Leben, i.e., knowing
and self-
knowing, consciousness and self-
consciousness. But let me
not recount this reading which I have worked out at length and in
detail in the previous chapter for it is in any case not necessary for an
understanding of how and why the transition from the dialectics of life
and desire to a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness cannot take
place by any kind of determined negation and least of all by a desire
of desire. All thats necessary is simply to recall what Hegel means by
desire, the very definition of self-consciousness as desire.
For Hegel, desire, self-consciousness as desire the first figure of self-
consciousness to step on the stage of the presentation is by definition
(i.e., the unity of the I am I). In short, again, the one thing that self-
consciousness cannot verify itself in, make itself true in, is desire.7
One telling symptom of Kojves predicament is his paradigm for
desire of desire even though he gives it as just an example namely,
love as both analogous to and yet different from sexual (i.e., animal)
desire. He writes: In the relationship between man and woman, for
example, Desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but
the Desire of the other ... that is to say, if he wants to be desired or
loved, or, rather, recognized in his human value, in his reality as a
human individual (13/6). The sequence of quoted terms is indicative:
Kojve can make the passage from Hegelian desire proper which
would indeed be like animal desire to recognition i.e., a self-
consciousness for a self-consciousness only by way of something called
love. He needs love to get beyond mere appetitive desire because there
is indeed no necessity, no necessity of a determined negation, that will
make knowing and self-knowing (i.e., recognition) emerge out of the
experience of desiring to be desired at least not a self-knowing that
would be a knowing of the self as knowing rather than a knowing of
the self as desiring. Whats love got to do with it indeed? As Rousseau
and the romantics who follow in his train well knew, love is not a determined self-negation of desire but rather an impossible, overdetermined,
and hence aberrant, trope. We do not see what we love, writes the
late romantic Paul de Man, but we love in the hope of confirming
theillusion that we are indeed seeing anything at all.8 And, in fact, the
spectacular predicament in which Kojve finds himself with his desire
of desire is what renders him too such a late romantic. The predicament and its double binds would go like this: in successfully making the
transition from self-
consciousness as desire to self-
consciousness as
self-consciousness by what at least seems to be a determined negation,
Kojve is more Hegelian than Hegel and succeeds where Hegel fails.
But insofar as he is able to perform this operation only by means of
a too immediate anthropologization of self-
consciousness, Kojve is
not Hegelian at all, for he would attempt to ground self-consciousness
by doing away with self-
consciousness in its specificity, that is, as
self-knowing rather than as self-desiring. So: on the one hand, Kojve
is too much of an anthropologizer; he successfully grounds self-
consciousness by turning it back into man and phenomenology back
into anthropology. But this is only the one hand. For in apparently being
able to demonstrate that the essence of life and desire really is knowing
and self-
knowing, consciousness and self-
consciousness, Kojve also
phenomenologizes, as it were, life and desire. He also makes life and
desire disappear in their specificity by turning them into mere moments
Notes
1. For a list of those inscrit (under different modalities) in the seminar,
see Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1988), pp. 2256. See also the detailed discussion of the seminar in
Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojve (Paris: Grasset, 1990).
2. See Stanley Rosen, Kojves Paris: A Memoir, Parallax 4 (February
1997), pp. 112.
3. Jacques Derrida, The Ends of Man, in Margins, trans. Alan Bass
Chapter 7
Next Steps:
Lukcs, Jameson, Post-Dialectics
Lukcs
At the outset of Hegel on the Sublime, Paul de Man offers Lukcs
in a list that also includes Benjamin, Althusser, and Adorno as an
example of an authentically critical aesthetic thinker who can make
the most incisive contributions to political thought and political
action precisely because of, and not in spite of, his concentration on
aesthetic questions and literary texts. Such a characterization certainly
makes sense, at least once we get past the platitudes of aestheticism and
remember what intellectual history, let alone actual philosophy, will
tell us: namely, that the category of the aesthetic is a principle of articulation rather than a principle of exclusion that is wrongly assumed
to operate between aesthetic theory and epistemological speculation, or,
in a symmetrical pattern, between concern with aesthetics and concern
with political issues (AI 1057). And the company in which Lukcs
is included would be equally apt. Less obvious and more suggestive,
however, would be de Mans juxtaposition of Lukcs with one other
truly critical aesthetic thinker, namely Derrida.
Derridas and Lukcss serving as good examples of productive
political thought because both are truly critical aesthetic thinkers is
suggestive in what it would imply about their work, especially in the
context of de Mans project of a critique of the aesthetic ideology
that characterizes the reception of Kants and Hegels truly critical aesthetic thought. Compactly, if a bit tortuously, stated: according to de
Mans readings of Kant and Hegel, what renders their aesthetic theories
politically productive is their pushing the critique of the philosophical
category of the aesthetic to a point where rather than grounding this
category (transcendentally, dialectically, or otherwise) both of them
destabilize it and thereby disarticulate their respective systems rather
than closing them off and, as a residue of this disarticulation, produce
Next Steps139
Next Steps141
Next Steps143
Next Steps145
Next Steps147
Jameson
That Jamesons analysis of postmodernism as the logic of late capitalism (a term he takes over from the title of Ernest Mandels book
Late Capitalism) can be taken as an extension of Lukcss analyses in
History and Class Consciousness is clear enough and has been noticed
by others. Indeed, Jameson himself explicitly marks the debt in several
places both in the Postmodernism book and in many essays written
during the 1980s and early 1990s. The most obvious sign of the debt
to Lukcs comes in Jamesons resounding defense of the concept of
totality a defense that takes on almost heroic proportions, given the
overwhelming odds in the face of which it is mounted: namely, the total
atomization and fragmentation of all experience due to its relentless
commodification by late capitalism; and the concomitant repudiation
of the concept of totality as hopelessly out of fashion and out of date in
postmodern theoretical discourse that makes a value out of pluralism
and celebrates heterogeneity. Jamesons analyses are clear-sighted and
unsparing on this point. To capture the rhythm of their dialectical progression, it is worth quoting at length:
The passionate repudiation of the concept of totality is also illuminated by
the proposition that it is more interesting as an anxiety to be analyzed in its
own right rather than as a coherent philosophical position. The postmodern
moment is also, among other things, to be understood as the moment in
which late capitalism becomes conscious of itself, and thematizes itself, in
terms of extreme social differentiation, or in other words, of a pluralism
which is constitutive rather than, as in an older liberalism, simply ideal.
For this last, pluralism is a value, that expresses itself in terms of moral
imperatives such as tolerance and democracy (in the sociological sense of the
acknowledgement of multiple group interests). In late capitalism, however,
it is the very complexity of social relations and the inescapable fact of the
coexistence of unimaginably atomized and fragmented segments of the social,
that comes to be celebrated in its own right as the very bonus of pleasure
and libidinal investment of the new social order as a whole. (Consider, for
example, the attraction of fantasy images of the United States, of California
and Manhattan, for Europeans.)
Pluralism has therefore now become something like an existential category, a descriptive feature that characterizes our present everyday life, rather
than an ethical imperative to be realized within it. What is ideological about
current celebrations of pluralism is that the slogan envelops and illicitly
identifies two distinct dimensions of social complexity. There is the vertical
Next Steps149
Next Steps151
That Jamesons work in Postmodernism and after should have constituted a certain response to cultural studies is no surprise, given
that The Political Unconscious can be taken as a certain response to,
call it, textualist poststructuralism (or, more narrowly, deconstruction) and The Prison-House of Language and Marxism and Form as
responses to the moment of structuralism. And, as in the case of these
earlier responses, there is plenty of genuine merit in it. Aside from the
massively convincing (at least for me) global analysis or mapping of
Next Steps153
Next Steps155
Notes
1. The original version of this chapter was presented at an MLA Convention
session on Lukcs and Derrida in 1995 hence the unwieldy opening
where I chose to speak on Lukcs rather than on Derrida for strategic
and other reasons.
2. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3, trans. P. S. Falla
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 299.
3. Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London: Verso, 1991), p. 97. Cf. Kolakowskis
critique in Main Currents, pp. 299300.
4. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Basil Blackwell,
1990), pp. 3245.
5. G. W. F. Hegel, Phnomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister
(Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), p. 140. English in Hegels Phenomenology
of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977),
p.110. My paraphrase of Hegel above is mostly of the tenth, eleventh, and
twelfth paragraphs of the Introduction to the Phenomenology. The deduction or identification of the we as a formal self-consciousness is an
interpretation that requires another (longer) essay.
6. Georg Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1971), pp. 1313. Subsequent references to this book are given in
the body of the text. The first page number refers to this English edition
whose translation I have had to modify on occasion and the second
page number to Geschichte und Klassenbewutsein in Lukcss Werke
(Neuwied and Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand, 1968).
Part III:
Heidegger/Derrida
Chapter 8
Monstrous History:
Heidegger Reading Hlderlin
Heideggers lectures on Hlderlins late hymns his third and last lecture
course on Hlderlin, given in the summer of 1942 and published in 1984
as volume 53 of the Gesamtausgabe follow a path from and back to
a commentary on Hlderlins Der Ister by way of a long excursus
on the Greek determination of mans essence in Sophocless Antigone.
This excursus to Greece and hence Heideggers entire interpretation of
Hlderlin turns, as always, on a translation from the Greek. Here it is
the well-known second choral ode of Antigone, in particular one word
in its opening, which Heidegger renders as follows:
Vielfltig das Unheimliche, nichts doch
ber den Menschen hinaus Unheimlicheres ragend sich regt.
and which Ralph Manheim in turn translates as: There is much that is
strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness.1 This opening
is something of a riddle why is it, how is it, that man is stranger than
strange, more uncanny than the uncanny? and the lines that follow
could hardly be taken as an answer: man goes out on the sea and on
land, masters the earth and the animals, teaches himself language and
thought, cures illnesses, and yet comes to nothing, for he cannot escape
death. Whatever the answer to the riddle of man, it has to do with
what he can do and what he cannot do anything about, his living and
his dying. Heideggers translation of the Greek words deinon and deinataton by unheimlich (uncanny, say) is already an answer to the riddle:
an account of mans living and dying, his always going out to that which
is different and his always coming back to the same. But before going
over to Heideggers answer to his determination of mans essence as
the most uncanny of that which is uncanny we should note that it is a
little different from, not quite the same as, Hlderlins own answer.
That is, Hlderlin translates the opening of the choral ode by rendering
the Greek word not as unheimlich but as ungeheuer:
Heidegger is, of course, well aware of this difference and the apparent
strangeness of interpreting Hlderlins dialogue with Sophocles and yet
not using Hlderlins own translation of Sophocles: Since Hlderlin
himself translated the whole of Sophocles Antigone, it would seem
appropriate to listen to this choral ode in Hlderlins own translation.
Nevertheless, this translation (bersetzung) is comprehensible only on
the basis of the Hlderlinian translation (bertragung) in its entirety
and this in turn only in the immediate proximity of the original Greek
word (70)2. In other words, Heidegger does not quote Hlderlins own
translation because he does not want to quote it out of context. But the
context of Hlderlins translation in its entirety is not to be understood
in any ordinary sense. As many scandalized philologists have pointed out,
Heidegger has no trouble whatsoever quoting Hlderlin out of context
indeed, some would say that his whole project of interpreting Hlderlin
rests on arbitrarily ripping lines out of context and making them mean
something other than what they mean in context. No, Heidegger
means more than that by only on the basis of Hlderlinian translation
in its entirety (nur aus dem Ganzen der Hlderlinschen bertragung)
as the switch from bersetzung to bertragung suggests. He means that
Hlderlins translation of the choral ode would be understandable only
on the basis of our already having understood Hlderlins interpretation
of the Greeks historical specificity and our (Hesperian) historical
specificity in their sameness and their difference. In other words, the
real reason for Heideggers not quoting Hlderlins translation here is
the nature, the essence, of translation itself. Translation, according to
Heideggers Note on Translation which he interposes directly after his
quotation of the choral ode, is not the substitution of a word in one language by a word in another language as though one could coincide with
the other. All translation has to be interpretation (Auslegen), not the
preparatory step to interpretation but always the result of interpretation.
But the reverse also holds, continues Heidegger: every interpretation,
and everything that serves it, is a translation. For translation moves not
only between two different languages, but rather there is a translation
within the same language. The interpretation of Hlderlins hymns is
a translation internal to our German language (75). Heidegger summarizes: All translation is interpretation. And all interpretation is
translation. Insofar as it is necessary for us to interpret works of thought
Monstrous History161
and of poetry of our own language, this indicates that every historical
language in itself and for itself is in need of translation and not only in
relation to a foreign language. This in turn indicates that a historical
people is at home in its own language not of itself, that is, not without
its contribution [its act in addition, Zutun]. Hence it can happen that we
indeed speak German and yet talk in nothing but American (7980).
(And to talk American is according to these lectures of 1942 the
worst thing one can do. What the lectures call Amerikanismus is bereft
of history [geschichtslos] and unhistorical [ungeschichtlich], and even
Bolshevism is only a degenerate form [Abart] of Amerikanismus.) If
this is the case, if translation is not confined to what takes place between
different languages but rather is what (always already) takes place within
one and the same language, then it is no wonder that Heidegger, in his
attempt to interpret the Greeks and Hlderlin, to interpret the dialogue
of Hlderlin and the Greeks, does not (indeed, cannot) use Hlderlins
own translation but rather has to retranslate both Sophocless Greek
and Hlderlins German. For Hlderlins German is not his own, is
not truly German, is not in an authentically historical sense, except in
dialogue with Greek just as a historical people is only on the basis of
the dialogue of its language with foreign languages (Ein geschichtliches
Volk ist nur aus der Zwiesprache seiner Sprache mit fremden Sprachen)
(80). Hence when Heidegger retranslates the Greek word, the x of the
Greeks determination of mans essence, with his unheimlich (uncanny)
rather than Hlderlins ungeheuer, it is no arbitrary substitution but an
interpretation that would say the same thing as Hlderlin. For to say the
same (das Selbe) is not to say the merely identical (das Gleiche): the
same is truly the same only in the differentiated (155), says Heidegger.
In order to think the same of what Hlderlin says, it is necessary to say
what he leaves unsaid, in other words, to say it differently, to say it otherwise. This is why Heidegger says unheimlich and not ungeheuer (i.e.,
unheimlich says the same thing as ungeheuer but [precisely because]
it says it in its difference). As is clear, all the weight of Heideggers
thinking of the same and the identical, of Dichten and Denken, of
dialogue as Auseinandersetzung, and so on and what Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe calls its hyperbologic3 in short-hand, the more it differs,
the more it is the same could be brought to bear in order to justify this
retranslation. Nevertheless, questions remain. For one, it remains to be
asked whether Heideggers unheimlich preserves the internal difference
proper to ungeheuer, whether his retranslation translates the words self-
translation. What happens when the x of the Greek, the x of the Greeks
their determination of the essential nature of man is translated as
unheimlich and not as ungeheuer? And since the question of the Greek
Monstrous History163
If the Ister the Greek name for the Danube (Istros) seems to hesitate
at its source and origin in Germany before resuming its West to East
itinerary and thus seems almost to go backwards (i.e., East to West, as
though it had come from the East), it is not just on account of the difficulty (for a demi-god) of forgetting the source. Rather it is also because
the river Ister fulfills the law of historicity in short, coming to be at
home by going out to and back from that which is foreign, the altercation of Unheimischsein and Heimischwerden and it has always already
fulfilled the law of history at its source, at its origin, by having invited
the Greek Hercules as a guest (den Herkules zu Gaste geladen), as the
second strophe puts it, when he came from the hot isthmus (vom heien
Isthmos) to the shady source of the Ister looking for the shady olive tree
to plant it in the shadeless festival arena of the Olympic games. The
Ister, writes Heidegger, is the river, for which that which is foreign
is a guest and present already at the source, the river in whose flowing
the dialogue of that which is ones own and that which is foreign always
speaks (Der Ister ist jener Strom, bei dem schon an der Quelle das
Fremde zu Gast und gegenwrtig ist, in dessen Strmen die Zwiesprache
des Eigenen und Fremden stndig spricht) (182). If the Ister at its source
seems almost to go backward, as though it had come from the East, it is
because its foreignness is at the source, it has always already at its source
gone out to the foreign and come back to the fatherland. The Ister does
not want to go East because it has always already at its source gone to
the East and come back to the West thus fulfilling its authentically
historical destiny, its essence as Halbgott, and hence as essentially poetic
(dichterisch), and so on.
This brief and insufficient sketch of Heideggers interpretation of
going over and coming back by going over and coming back should
nevertheless indicate the law governing his interpretation of Hlderlin.
That law is the law of history itself according to which that which
is ones own is the most distant and the path to that which is most ones
own is the longest and most difficult (derzufolge das Eigene das Fernste
und der Weg zum Eigensten der lngste und schwerste ist) (179) and it
is grounded in an ontological interpretation of historical mans essence.
This is why it is futile to object to Heideggers interpretation on the basis
of any prematurely philological grounds: if Heidegger interprets
Monstrous History165
Monstrous History167
(Hesperians,Germans) and the Greeks, that which is ones own and that
which is foreign, das Eigene and das Fremde, that is to say, of simple
terms and thereby reduces Hlderlins version of the relation between
the Greeks and us to one of the terms of that relation. No, more important than what this shift does to Hlderlins scheme is what it does to
Hlderlins Greeks. That is, whereas Heidegger is able to preserve a
certain doubleness of, a certain internal difference to, us Hesperians,
Germans insofar as we are ourselves, das Eigene, only in dialogue with
the Greeks, das Fremde, and so on in identifying the Greeks with the
simply foreign, das Fremde, he nevertheless is not able to preserve the
Greeks difference from themselves, their own dialogue between that
which was their own, das Eigene, and that which was foreign for them,
das Fremde. In other words, by calling the Greeks simply fremd, foreign,
Heidegger collapses that which is their own and that which is foreign,
das Eigene and das Fremde, for them. This is evident throughout his
interpretation in his constant identification of the foreign, das Fremde,
with the Greeks and the Greeks with the East and the South, the fire
from heaven. In short, Heidegger in calling the Greeks foreign, das
Fremde, for us quite simply reverses Hlderlins terms and calls that
which for Hlderlin is our own, das Eigene the clarity of representation, Junonian sobriety, i.e., Greek culture, say foreign, das Fremde.
And in doing so, he also renders that which is radically foreign for us
i.e., the Greeks nature, that which is natural and their own, das Eigene,
for the Greeks: the fire from heaven, holy pathos our own, that is to
say, Greek. That this shift effaces the Greeks internal difference to
themselves becomes clearer if we identify the Greeks nature, that which
is their own, das Eigene i.e., the fire from heaven, holy pathos: namely,
as the East, the Orient, or, in some of Hlderlins texts (for instance, the
Hyperion or the third version of the Empedocles drama), Egypt and the
Egyptians. That is to say, the Greeks nature, that which is their own,
das Eigene, is somebody elses culture: the Oriental fire from heaven and
holy pathos (just as our Hesperian nature, that which is our own, das
Eigene, for us is also somebody elses culture: the Greek clarity of representation, Junonian sobriety). If it is legitimate to read Hlderlins
scheme in this way, then what happens in Heideggers identification of
the Greeks as foreign, das Fremde, for us as the fire from heaven and
holy pathos, as the South and the East is his turning of what is a three-
fold historical scheme of Orient, Greece, and Hesperia into a two-fold
scheme of Greece and Hesperia: in other words, Heidegger turns a
scheme of us (Hesperians) and them (Greeks) and their them (the Orient)
into a scheme of us and them, Hesperia (or Germany) and Greece. To
turn the Greeks into that which is simply foreign for us (when for
Monstrous History169
Vieles wre
Zu sagen davon.
But it seems almost
To go backwards and
I mean, it must come
From the East.
Much could
Be said about this.
That is, the Ister seems almost to go backwards not in its hesitating
at the source and seeming almost to go East to West but rather in its
natural itinerary, in its going from West to East as though its historical origin were in Germany and the West and not in the East whence
(from the Indus through the Alpheus) we have historically come and
whence, historically, it must come: und / Ich mein, er msse kommen /
Von Osten (and, I mean, it must come from the East). In short, rather
than going backwards West to East the Ister, as truly historical,
must come from the East (and the antithesis between going [gehen]
and coming [kommen] would support such a reading). This reading
of Hlderlins historical scheme cannot help but have implications for
Heideggers law of history in short-hand, again, that which is ones
own the most distant and the hyperbologic of not being at home and
coming to be at home, Unheimischsein and Heimischwerden. In other
words, that which is the furthest, the most distant, the most foreign, for
us is not Greece and the Greeks strictly speaking, i.e., Hlderlin speaking, this is our own, das Eigene but rather the East and the Orient.
And it is most foreign for us because we are separated from it by our
Greek nature our Greek metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, and so on. If we are not at home, exiled, we are not not at home in
relation to, or exiled from, Greece and the Greeks but rather in relation
to, and exiled from, the East, the Orient. And because the relation of
nature and culture, that which is ones own and that which is foreign,
das Eigene and das Fremde i.e., the clarity of representation and
Junonian sobriety on the one hand and the fire from heaven and holy
pathos on the other for the Orient was exactly the same as it is for us10
(how else could the Oriental fire from heaven have been natural, their
own, das Eigene, for the Greeks?), to be not at home in relation to, or
exiled from, the Orient means to be not at home in relation to, or exiled
from, ourselves: i.e., not the Graeco-Hesperians or Graeco-Germans
but the Hespero-Orientals, Germano-Orientals. In short, we are not at
home not because we are exiled from Greece but rather because we are
exiled by Greece from ourselves: the Orient, the East, Egypt, and so on.
Monstrous History171
Notes
1. In his translation of Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), p. 123.
2. All page references within the body of this chapter are to Martin Heidegger,
Hlderlins Hymne Der Ister (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,
1984). This is volume 53 of the Gesamtausgabe of Heideggers works.
3. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La csure du spculatif and Hlderlin et
les Grecs, in LImitation des modernes (Paris: Galile, 1986). English in
Lacoue-Labarthes Typography, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989).
4. I pluralize the translation of Seiendes (as beings) in order to distinguish
it (aurally) from Being.
5. As quoted (and translated by Robert Eisenhauer) in Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe, The Caesura of the Speculative, Glyph 4 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 80.
6. Cf. Carol Jacobs, The Monstrosity of Translation: Walter Benjamins
The Task of the Translator, now in Telling Time (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993).
7. Peter Szondi, berwindung des Klassizismus, in Hlderlin-Studien
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967). See my reading of Szondi in
Hlderlin in France, in Readings in Interpretation: Hlderlin, Hegel,
Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
8. Endpapers: Hlderlins Textual History, Hlderlin in France, and
Heidegger Reading Hlderlin, all in Readings in Interpretation.
Greece
nature
culture
Junonian
sobriety,
clarity of
representation,
Hesperia
Chapter 9
Discontinuous Shifts:
History Reading History
Discontinuous Shifts175
they are seen to operate within the limits of particular poems (RCC
56) 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 Mans 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.1 Now
Heidegger, de Mans 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 Mans 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
Discontinuous Shifts177
(RCC 65). In short, Hlderlin 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).
Now, according to de Man, this interpretation of Hlderlin as an
apocalyptic poet is wrong in general and, in the particular case of
Discontinuous Shifts179
Discontinuous Shifts181
Discontinuous Shifts183
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
Hlderlin and Wordsworth and their disclosure of reversals and substitutions whose discontinuity is not temporal but rhetorical. What this
also means is that de Mans 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 history3 a shift whose own discontinuous passage or
passing from and to is what happens, what actually occurs, materially historically, in and as de Man.
For a coda it would be good to offer an example or an emblem of
de Mans discontinuous shift from history to history. If we are right to
callthis shift material and historical, then what would be the equivalent
of this moment in the order of language (AI 89)? In de Mans 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 in
an understanding of his [Wordsworths] 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
Mans history and our legacy.
Notes
1. See de Mans Form and Intent in the American New Criticism and The
Literary Self as Origin: The Work of Georges Poulet in Blindness and
Insight.
2. See de Mans Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant (AI 79). On de
Mans reading of Kants sublimes, see As the Poets Do It: On the Material
Sublime, Chapter 2 above.
3. It is worth noting that the alleged shift from history to reading was, in
fact, always already a shift from reading to reading, since the itinerary
Chapter 10
Machinal Effects:
Derrida With and Without de Man
Toward the end of Acts the third and what would have been the
last lecture and the last chapter of Derridas Mmoires, for Paul de
Man if it had not been for the necessity of adding Like the Sound of
the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Mans War in a revised edition
of 1988 Derrida quotes passages from two letters de Man wrote to
him in 1970 and 1971 before and after the publication in Potique
(1970) of de Mans The Rhetoric of Blindness: Derrida as Reader of
Rousseau.1 De Mans first letter is itself a reply to a letter that Derrida
wrote to de Man in responding to the critique of his (Derridas) reading
of Rousseau in Grammatologie. In the excerpt Derrida quotes, de Man
refuses to be put off by what he calls Derridas kindness (gentillesse)
and emphasizes the areas of disagreement or at least divergence: The
other day was neither the time nor the place to speak again of Rousseau
(pour reparler de Rousseau) and I do not know if you have any reason
to return to the question. Your supposed agreement (accord) [This is
a word I must have written in my letter (Derrida interjects)] can only be
kindness, for if you object to what I say about metaphor, you must, as it
should be, object to everything. And a bit later in the excerpt, de Man
adds: I do not yet know why you keep refusing Rousseau the value of
radicality which you attribute to Mallarm and no doubt to Nietzsche; I
believe that it is for hermeneutic rather than historical reasons, but I am
probably wrong (M 129, 127).2 After the essay appeared in Potique,
Derrida must have thanked de Man once again, he says, and he gets in
reply another letter from Zrich (dated 4 January 1971). In the extract
Derrida quotes, de Man qualifies a bit his disagreement with Derrida,
but he also attempts to correct whatever Derrida had said in his letter
about de Mans critique. We dont have access to Derridas letter its
not in the de Man archive at UCI but it clearly did more than just offer
renewed thanks for de Mans critique! I quote Derridas quoting de
Man at a bit more length:
In the second excerpt from this letter, de Man makes some additional
remarks on the areas of their agreement and then finishes up by saying:
I incessantly return to this in what I am in the process of trying to do
with Rousseau and Nietzsche and perhaps we can speak of this again
later (et nous pourrons peut-tre en reparler plus tard) (M 131, 128).
What interests me here is not the disagreement or the divergence
between Derrida and de Man on the question of Rousseaus being
blinded or not. Sorting it out would in any case be a very difficult
undertaking indeed, perhaps an endless and definitely a nightmarish
task and it would no doubt have to take into consideration de Mans
and Derridas differing conceptions of a texts and a readings blindness or blind spot. For the de Man of Blindness and Insight, a critics
blindness is something that can be observed by a reader in the privileged position of being able to observe the blindness as a phenomenon in
its own right (BI 106), whereas for the Derrida of Grammatologie, the
blind spot (tache aveugle) is something to be produced by the reading;
it is the very task of reading (une tche de lecture): The reading must
always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between
what he commands and what he does not command of the schemas of
the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantifiable
distribution of shadow and light, of weakness and force, but a signifying
structure that the critical reading should produce.3 In any event, it is
not this divergence that interests me here perhaps I will have an opportunity to talk about it again another time but rather what Derrida says
Machinal Effects187
about it or, better, what he does with it. For after quoting these passages from de Mans letter, Derrida in fact does not say anything about
the disagreement or the divergence as though to confirm that he has
quoted from the letter only that which, as he put it in introducing these
excerpts, does not concern me (ce qui, en somme, ne me concerne
pas) (M 129, 126). Instead, Derrida takes up de Mans final remark
perhaps we can speak again (reparler) of this later, which, we may
recall, echoes the verb in the opening sentence of the first excerpt (The
other day was neither the time nor the place to speak again [reparler] of
Rousseau) and tells us that the two of them never did speak about
it again (je crois que nous nen avons jamais reparl), at least in the
mode of conversation, direct discussion, or even of correspondence:
Such silences, he writes, belong to the vertiginous abyss of the unsaid
in which is kept, I dont say is grounded, the memory of a friendship, as
the renewed fidelity of a promise (M 131, 129). Nevertheless, Derrida
continues, in a certain way that of which Paul de Man says perhaps
we can speak of this again later and of which I have just said we never
spoke again (nous nen avons jamais reparl), in truth, is what we have
never ceased writing about ever since, as if to prepare ourselves to speak
of it again one day ( en reparler un jour), in our very old age (M 131,
129). So: they never spoke about it again and yet they did nothing but
write about it again and again ever since. I emphasize this never again/
nothing but again and again structure for a reason one obvious enough
to readers of Derrida and de Man (Derridadaists and de Maniacs):
namely, it is an echo or a repetition of the predicament Rousseau gets
himself into in the very last words of Book Two of his Confessions. After
recounting the shameful story of the purloined ribbon and his calumnious lie, Rousseau writes: That is all I have to say on the subject. May
I never have to speak of it again (Quil me soit permis de nen reparler
jamais) (C 89, 87).4 Of course, as we have learned from de Mans
Excuses (the last chapter of Allegories of Reading), Rousseau has to
speak about it again, and not only in the Fourth Rverie. In a certain
sense, he does nothing but speak about it again and again throughout
the Confessions (and the other autobiographical writings) insofar asthe
need to confess this crime is, according to his own testimony, at the
very root of his autobiographical project. So: if since 1970 de Man and
Derrida write about nothing else but it i.e., Rousseau and their
disagreement or divergence about reading his text it is fitting that the
last chapter or the last act or the last word of this text a text, lets
remember, in which the unsaid gets written should be one about
Rousseau, and about none other than the Rousseau of the last words
of Book Two of the Confessions. I suspend the word about here (in
Machinal Effects189
Machinal Effects191
To make known does not come down to knowing and, above all, to make
known a fault does not come down to making known anything whatsoever; it
is already to accuse oneself and to enter into a performative process of excuse
and forgiveness. A declaration that would bring forward some knowledge, a
piece of information, a thing to be known would in no case be a confession,
even if the thing to be known, even if the cognitive referent were otherwise
defined as a fault: I can inform someone that I have killed, stolen, or lied
without that being at all an admission or a confession. Confession is not of
the order of knowledge or making known. (TR 108, 79)
Derrida adds that he is all the more troubled by these passages inasmuch as de Man seems to hold firmly to a distinction that he will later,
in fact right after, have to suspend (TR 110, 80) when he (de Man)
says that the interest of Rousseaus text is that it explicitly functions
performatively as well as cognitively, and thus gives indications about
the structure of performative rhetoric; this is already established in this
text when the confession fails to close off a discourse which feels compelled to modulate from the confessional into the apologetic mode (AR
282). Derrida will have none of this. He asks if the confessional mode
is not already, always, an apologetic mode (TR 110, 81) and reiterates his objection: In truth, I believe there are not here two dissociable
modes and two different times, in such a way that one could modulate
from one to the other. I dont believe even that what de Man names the
interest of Rousseaus text, therefore its originality, consists in having
to modulate from the confessional mode to the apologetic mode. Every
confessional text is already apologetic. Every avowal begins by offering
apologies or by excusing itself (TR 110, 81). Although he proposes to
leave this difficulty in place it is going to haunt everything that we
will say from here on (TR 110, 81) Derrida continues by making his
case still more forcefully:
This distinction organizes, it seems to me, his whole demonstration. I find
it an impossible, in truth undecidable, distinction. This undecidability,
moreover, is what would make for all the interest, the obscurity, the nondecomposable specificity of what is called a confession, an avowal, an excuse,
or an asked-for forgiveness. But if one went still further in this direction by
leaving behind the context and the element of the de Manian interpretation,
it would be because we are touching here on the equivocation of an originary or pre-originary synthesis without which there would be neither trace
nor inscription, neither experience of the body nor materiality. It would be
a question of the equivocation between, on the one hand, the truth to be
known, revealed, or asserted, the truth that, according to de Man, concerns
the order of the pure and simple confessional and, on the other, the truth of
the pure performative of the excuse, to which de Man gives the name of the
apologetic. Two orders that are analogous, in sum, to the constative and the
I quote Derrida at some length here not only because it is better than
paraphrasing him but also because doing so gives a better indication of
what Derrida sees as the stakes of the argument and its theoretical (and
practical) payoff. The tone, the rhetoric of the always already, and
the talk of an originary or preoriginary synthesis without which there
would be neither trace nor inscription, neither experience of the body
nor materiality makes it clear enough that, for Derrida, these stakes
are high.
Now the fact is that the stakes are equally high for de Man who
himself has been known to talk about undecidability and the undecidable distinction between performative and cognitive and the trouble
is that his reading of Rousseau at this moment is nothing so much as
a demonstration of the truth of Derridas assertions. De Man may not
say it on quite the same level of generality except perhaps in the very
modest phrase and thus gives indications about the structure of performative rhetoric but he does say the same thing. Derridas noting
that de Man in fact suspends the distinction right after setting it up
already admits this, and to a certain extent the disagreement stems
only from Derridas somewhat perverse refusal to allow de Man to set
up his argument. But how exactly de Mans reading works out the relations between confessional text and apologetic text, avowal and excuse,
and therefore cognitive and performative is a difficult movement that
takes place in a series of steps. Rather than having the confessional
text modulate into the apologetic text and from the Confessions to
the Rveries, as Derrida seems to think already the very first step of
de Mans reading of the story of the stolen ribbon in the Confessions
suspends the distinction: The first thing established by this edifying
narrative is that the Confessions is not primarily a confessional text
(AR 279). In the narration of his story, Rousseau cannot limit himself
to the mere statement of what really happened and already begins
to excuse himself. But if he who accuses himself excuses himself, then
this ruins the seriousness of any confessional discourse by making it
self-destructive (AR 280). And it is the self-destructive nature of the
confession in the mode of excuse an utterance that, as de Man puts
it, functions performatively as well as cognitively that does not allow
Rousseau to close off his confessional/apologetic discourse and compels
him to go back to the story of the stolen ribbon in the Fourth Rverie
Machinal Effects193
(despite his plea at the end of Book Two: May I be allowed never to
speak of it again). But the real interest and the real difficulty of de
Mans reading begins here: that is, in how the avowal and the excuse,
a cognitive and a performative use of language, are coupled together in
Rousseaus text. Shame (honte) is the key term here. It is not some gratuitous viciousness that makes Rousseau accuse Marion of doing what
he had done but rather the inner feeling of shame. Rousseau fears shame
more than death, more than the crime, more than anything in the
world ... unconquerable shame was stronger than anything else, shame
alone caused my impudence and the more guilty I became, the more the
terror of admitting my guilt made me fearless (de Mans translation in
AR 283). But then what is one ashamed of, asks de Man, and answers:
Since the entire scene stands under the aegis of theft, it has to do with
possession, and desire must therefore be understood as functioning, at
least at times, as a desire to possess, in all the connotations of the term.
Once it is removed from its legitimate owner, the ribbon, being in itself
devoid of meaning and function, can circulate symbolically as a pure
signifier and become the articulating hinge in a chain of exchanges and
possessions. As the ribbon changes hands it traces a circuit leading to
the exposure of a hidden, censored desire (AR 283). Although de Man
already insists on the status of the ribbon as a pure signifier in itself
devoid of meaning and function, it is first of all a desire to possess the
ribbon which was, after all, the only object that tempted him (and for
reasons we can surmise). But since it was Rousseaus intention to give
the ribbon to Marion, the desire is also a desire for Marion, to possess
her, as de Man says. But, again, if the ribbon can stand for Rousseaus
desire for Marion or, what amounts to the same thing, for Marion
herself (AR 283), then it also stands for the free circulation of desire
between Rousseau and Marion, for the reciprocity which, as we know
from Julie, is for Rousseau the very condition of love; it stands for the
substitutability of Rousseau for Marion and vice versa (AR 283). In
other words, the ribbon substitutes for a desire which is itself a desire
for substitution, that is, for a specular symmetry which gives to the
symbolic object a detectable, univocal proper meaning (AR 284). Such
specular figures are metaphors, says de Man, and it should be noted
that on this still elementary level of understanding, the introduction of
the figural dimension in the text occurs first by ways of metaphor (AR
284). In short, this is a tropological system, a system of metaphor, and it
is a system that works to produce meaning and sense, to bring the chain
of substitutions back to that univocal proper meaning. De Man summarizes this step of the reading: Substitution is indeed bizarre (it is odd
to take a ribbon for a person) but since it reveals motives, causes, and
Machinal Effects195
The final sentence of this passage identifies this system and the reason
for its apparent strength. As a system that is epistemologically as well as
ethically grounded, this system is quite recognizably the critical system
Machinal Effects197
Machinal Effects199
way, from the beginning of his text and throughout: for instance, in the
captatio benevolentiae at the outset when he excuses himself and asks
for the listeners (or the readers) forgiveness for the compromise that I
had to resolve to make in preparation of this lecture (TR 745, 37). The
compromise is that in order to save time and energy, he had to reorient in the direction of this colloquium [ propos of de Mans Aesthetic
Ideology, recall] certain sessions of an ongoing seminar on pardon,
perjury, and capital punishment (TR 75, 37). Hence some traces of
this seminar will remain in the lecture, and, in fact, In a certain way, I
will be speaking solely about pardon, forgiveness, excuse, betrayal, and
perjury of death and death penalty (TR 75, 38). That Derrida takes
de Mans Excuses an essay whose full title in Allegories of Reading
gets printed as Excuses (Confessions) as the text that de Man wrote
in the place of a confession of, and hence an apology for, at least certain
articles, paragraphs, sentences, phrases, and words in his wartime journalism is explicit in Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul
de Mans War: I even imagine him in the process of analyzing with an
implacable irony the simulacrum of confession to which certain people
would like to invite him after the fact, after his death, and the auto-
justification and auto-accusation quivering with pleasure which form
the abyssal program of such a self-exhibition. He has said the essential
on this subject and I invite those who wonder about his silence to read,
among other texts, Excuses (Confessions) in Allegories of Reading. The
first sentence announces what political and autobiographical texts have
in common and the conclusion explains again the relations between
irony and allegory so as to render an account (without ever being able
to account for it sufficiently) of this: Just as the text can never stop
apologizing for the suppression of guilt that it performs, there is never
enough knowledge available to account for the delusion of knowing. In
the interval, between the first and last sentences, at the heart of this text
which is also the last word of Allegories of Reading, everything is said
(M 228, 209).
But to do this, to take Excuses (Confessions) as the phantom proxy,
the allegory, of de Mans impossible confession/excuse, means that
Derrida needs to take de Mans text as itself politico-autobiographical,
and he says so explicitly several times. Toward the end of Typewriter
Ribbon, he insists that de Mans writings can and should be read as
also politico-autobiographical texts (TR 150, 133) and, a page later,
announces the necessity of showing the politico-performative autobiographicity of this text (TR 152, 135), i.e., Excuses. If de Mans
text is politico-
autobiographical (or autobiographico-
political,
as Derrida puts it on the last page of his text), if he is talking about
Machinal Effects201
name of reference, of the referential reading moment, or of the referential function itself. But, then again, what do we know about reference
and the referential function apart from texts like Rousseaus, generated
by a suspension of reference in utterances like Marion whose meaning
and reference is nevertheless immediately determined, leaving us with
something to read, a text? One would do better to say that what we
call reference and the referential function is an allegorical name
for Rousseau or de Man, or Derrida, or even Leiris in his essay De la
littrature considre comme une tauromachie. To end, I dont say conclude, let me quote the first sentence of Excuses (Confessions) again,
but this time in its entirety: Political and autobiographical texts have in
common that they share a referential reading-moment explicitly built in
within the spectrum of their significations, no matter how deluded this
moment may be in its mode as well as in its thematic content: the deadly
horn of the bull referred to by Michel Leiris in a text that is indeed as
political as it is autobiographical (AR 278). De Man has a footnote to
this sentence that identifies Leiriss text and its publication in 1946. He
adds one sentence: The essay dates from 1945, immediately after the
war (AR 278).10
Notes
1. In Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2), Derrida writes that justice is
both without reference and applicable, thus with a reference: without
and with reference (TR 125, 101). All references marked as TR followed by page numbers are to the English and French of Jacques Derrida,
Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2), in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy
Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), and Le ruban de
machine crire (Limited Ink II), in Papier Machine (Paris: Galile, 2001).
This is a revised version of the text originally published in Tom Cohen,
Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski (eds), Material
Events, Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2001).
2. All references marked as M followed by page numbers are to the English
and the French editions of Jacques Derrida, Mmoires, for Paul de
Man, revised edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), and
Mmoires, pour Paul de Man (Paris: Galile, 1988).
3. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 158; De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), p. 227.
4. All references marked as C followed by page numbers are to the English
and the French editions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans.
J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1953), and Les Confessions in Oeuvres
compltes, vol. 1 (Paris: Bibliothque de la Pliade, 1959).
5. Excuses (Confessions) was first published under the title The Purloined
Appendix 1205
a curve all along, the thrust a feint, the truth of fiction a fiction of truth,
the straight man a straw man, and so on nevertheless, all these figures
for the literal, insofar as no reading can do without them, necessarily
leave that reading open to the thrust of the straight man who will take
these figures literally. In other words, a deflecting reading always deflects
in two senses: it deflects transitive: to cause to swerve or turn aside; and
deflects intransitive: to swerve or turn aside. In order to cause a text
to swerve or turn aside the reading always needs to swerve or turn aside
itself. And it swerves or turns aside itself in order to avoid the thrust of
the straight man. To read this (intransitive) deflection i.e., what the
reading wants to avoid in swerving or turning aside itself would be to
ask with the insistence of the literalist: how straight is the straight man?
To what extent is the straight man a straw man?
But in order that we may ask these questions we must first identify
the straight man. In Jacobss text, at least one of those who plays this
role can be identified by name and text: Kant and the Critique of Pure
Reason, in particular the section on the Second Analogy (i.e., the principle of causality). As Jacobs has written, while Kants text insists on
the rule that links cause with effect, the common concern of Kleists
three stories is with a deflection and a lapse in the understanding that
mark[s] an unexpected discontinuity between cause and effect. Indeed,
if the law of causality fails to operate in the events of each anecdote,
that breakdown has its crucial point, as we have just seen, in the language of its telling. Although there is a necessity that orders the succession of stories, it is not that of causality. In short, Kleists text is a
rewriting of certain moments of Kants First Critique, and although it
may not hit its mark directly, let us just say that it throws it temporarily off-course. This last metaphor of Jacobs (and Kleist) is particularly
appropriate since Kants famous example for an event that we experience as a necessary succession of perceptions whose necessity is o
bjective
insofar as it is determined by the object we perceive is that of a boat
moving downstream. Whereas in the case of our perceiving, say, a house
the order of our perceptions is subjective in that we can look at the house
from roof to foundation or from foundation to roof, in the case of our
perceiving a boat moving downstream we cannot see the boat at point B
downriver before we see it at point A upriver. In any case, before we ask
whether Kleists text does indeed succeed in throwing Kants boat off-
course whether Kleists barge deflects Kants boat (Schiff) we should
recall that a great deal is at stake in this setting up of Kant as the straight
man, for when the principle of causality (i.e., Kants Second Analogy) is
at stake, then, to quote Jacobs again, objectivity, experience, the possibility of representation and the primary function of the understanding
Appendix 1207
the perception of an event there is always a rule that makes the order in
which the perceptions (in the apprehension of this appearance) follow
upon one another a necessary order (CPR 221). If we understand this
order of perceptions in an event as a necessary order, then something
is indeed presupposed in the preceding state A i.e., the state in which
the event was not (yet) upon which the determined state B invariably
follows, that is, in accordance with a rule. And it follows that this series
is 1) irreversible and 2) inevitable whenever the state which precedes A
is posited. But there are some things which do not follow, and we can
make those clearer by staying with the example of the boat moving
downstream: namely, it does not follow that the boats being at a point
upstream i.e., the preceding state (A) is the something that is presupposed and upon which the boats being at a point downstream i.e.,
the determined state (B) necessarily follows. All that follows is that
there is something in the preceding state that determines the succeeding state to follow necessarily, that is, according to a rule. We may never
be able to determine what this something is, but we presuppose it, and,
according to Kant, we have to presuppose it in order to experience an
event and, ultimately, anything.
We have already arrived (prematurely)6 at the concept of cause so
we may as well include it in this context of what does not follow upon
the rule that links cause with effect. Again, and in other words, it does
not follow upon this rule that the cause of, for example, the boats being
at a point downstream is its having been at a point upstream, for then
according to the two consequences of irreversibility and inevitability we
should 1) never see the boat at a point downstream before we see it at
a point upstream and 2) never see the boat at a point upstream without
its being at a point downstream necessarily following. To disprove such
a rule of cause and effect, all one would have to do is make the (somewhat facetious) critique of Schopenhauer: if you want to see the boat
moving upstream from point B to point A all you need is enough hands
strong enough to pull it.7 This critique, of course, misses Kants point
entirely, for the cause of our seeing the boat downriver is not its having
been upriver, but rather something we presuppose in the preceding state
A that determines the succeeding state B to follow necessarily, that is,
according to a rule. And one of the things that makes up the preceding state A in this case is precisely the boats moving downstream. The
possibility of its moving upstream by no means touches the principle of
causality, for then all we need do is say that our example is the case of a
boat moving upstream. In any case, lest we get carried away by this multiplication of examples, let us make our point and then consider whether
the events of Kleists stories can deflect it.
Appendix 1209
which it is based. Since the universality and necessity of the rule would
not be grounded a priori, but only on induction, they would be merely
fictitious (nur angedichtet) and without genuinely universal validity
(CPR 223). We could say that the mere force of (empirical) events
cannot throw Kants boat off-course, for that course is transcendentally
guaranteed.
But that the law of causality fails to operate in the events of each
anecdote (italics of the straight man) is, of course, not really the main
thrust of Jacobss text. It is rather in the language of [the] ... telling
that the breakdown has its crucial point, and at this point the straight
man has real reason to worry, for such a breakdown introduces the
possibility (indeed necessity) of a crisis whose deflections are not merely
incalculable but undecidable. Kants proof of the principle of causality
is, as it were, something of an event, and in order to make the proof he
has to tell the story of that event. That story is anything but straightforward, and hence the language of its telling the rhetoric of its operations
and the operations of its rhetoric is of interest to even the straightest
of straight men. We may already wonder about the transitions of Kants
story when we note that his procedure is to define an event, read that
definition of event into experience by giving an example, and then read
that event along with a necessary order of perceptions according to a
rule out of the experience. And we worry not just because the extent
to which Kants definition of an event already contains the concept of
causality within it is also the extent to which his transcendental proof
is open to the charge of its arriving at a conclusion that is not synthetic
but analytic.9 Rather it is the authority and the necessity of precisely the
transitions of his story the carrying-over from definition to example
and back to rule without anything having been lost or gained (except
to literalists like Schopenhauer) in the course of the trip that makes
us worry, for, after all, this story is to prove the possibility of such
objective transition, such carrying-over. A good example of the sense in
which Kants boat may be said to have (always already) deflected itself
from its proper course is the passage, quoted by Jacobs, that declares the
primary function of the understanding: Understanding is required for
all experience and for its possibility. Its primary contribution [consists]
... in making the representation of an object possible at all. This it does
by carrying the time-order over into appearances and their existence
(CPR 2256). The full import of this operation of carrying-over performed by the understanding is not conveyed until we understand that
it is an event: that is, rather than the innocuous This it does ..., what
the German text says is Dieses geschiehet nun dadurch, dass er die
Zeitordnung auf die Erscheinungen und deren Dasein bertrgt (This
Appendix 1211
metaphor is that of Ziel goal, aim, target. Kleist has been rendered
aimless (ohne Ziel) and he repeats the following formulation four times
(twice in the letter to Wilhelmine and twice in the letter to Ulrike von
Kleist): my only, my highest goal, aim, target, is sunk (mein einziges,
mein hchstes Ziel ist gesunken). Rather than Kleists throwing Kants
boat off-course, what we have here is Kants (the straight mans?) hitting
his mark directly, causing a crisis, and deflecting the course of Kleists
life. And it is indeed the course of Kleists life that is deflected, for Kant
or rather Kleists reading of Kant sinks the goal, aim, target Kleist had
set up for his life: the history, the story, of his soul (die Geschichte
meiner Seele) has been disrupted and deflected. What is Kleists goal and
how has his reading of Kant sunk it?
Kleists highest goal, aim, target is Bildung (education, formation) and
what that means for him is the amassing of truth: Education (Bildung)
seemed to me the only goal (Ziel) worth striving for, truth (Wahrheit)
the only riches worth possessing. And the reason his goal is sunk is not
only that he is now convinced that here below no truth is to be found,
but that the relation between objective and subjective knowledge, truth
and verisimilitude, Wahrheit and Wahrscheinlichkeit, is undecidable: If
all men had green glasses instead of eyes, then they would have to judge
(urteilen) that the objects (Gegenstnde) which they sighted through
them were green and they would never be able to decide (und nie
wrden sie entscheiden knnen) whether the eye shows them things as
they are or whether the eye does not add something to them that does
not belong to them but to the eye. Thus it is with the understanding
(Verstand). We cannot decide whether that which we call truth truly is
truth or whether it only so appears to us (Wir knnen nicht entscheiden,
ob das, was wir Wahrheit nennen, wahrhaft Wahrheit ist, oder ob es uns
nur so scheint) (II, 634). In short, the crisis of reading (Kant) is a crisis
of undecidability. If we rehearse the particulars of this crisis, it is not in
order to repeat the tedious banalities of Kleists Kant crisis indeed,
we would say that, thanks to Jacobss reading, that crisis is no longer
banal but rather to bring out the full implications of the crisis. And
we leave aside the question of how well Kleist understands Kant we
would say that he reads him very well or the extent to which Kleist
sets up Kant as a fictional point of instability in order, say, to go to
Paris with his sister Ulrike and break off his engagement to Wilhelmine
von Zenge.12 No, all I would do here is point out that the crisis of
undecidability the undecidable crisis is also what Unwahrscheinliche
Wahrhaftigkeiten is about: indeed, one could say that the anecdote is
a proof of the principle of undecidability which makes a decision
between truth (Wahrheit), verisimilitude (Wahrscheinlichkeit), and their
Unwahrheit
Unwahrscheinlichkeit
Unwahrheit
Unwahrscheinlichkeit
Appendix 1213
Notes
1. This essay was originally published as a Response to Carol Jacobss The
Style of Kleist in Diacritics 9:4 (December 1979), pp. 708.
2. This reading of the straight man is that of Paul de Man in his Yale seminar
on Theory of Irony (Spring 1976).
Appendix 2217
Appendix 2219
have left out a great deal and a great deal that I find excellent in the
essay. Still, I felt that I had to do so in order to get my main objections
across as economically as possible. Indeed, on the whole, I feel that your
essay makes quite a number of correct and very astute insights into de
Man for instance, the remarks on human and nonhuman and the
sublime on pp. 378 but that these insights are embedded in a general
argument that, in the face of Excuses (never mind Pascals Allegory
of Persuasion and Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant), simply
does not hold.
Notes
1. This response is to Frances Fergusons essay Historicism, Deconstruction,
and Wordsworth. It was first published along with Fergusons essay and
her own response to my response in a special issue of Diacritics 17:4 (Winter
1987) entitled Wordsworth and the Production of Poetry and co-edited
by Cynthia Chase and me. All page references to Fergusons essay are to this
issue of Diacritics. A revised version of Fergusons essay which incorporates and extends her response to my response is published in her Solitude
and the Sublime (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).
2. In Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981), pp. 21922.
3. See my account of de Man on the zero in the third part of Allegories of
Reference, Chapter 1 above.
Index
Abrams, M. H., 83
Adorno, T. W., 137, 179
aesthetics and politics, 1378
allegory, 1921, 245, 334, 11618,
1545
Althusser, Louis, 11, 35n, 36n, 121n,
125n, 137, 153, 154, 156n17,
156n19, 156n20
anacoluthon, 1967, 216, 217
anagrams, 62n2
apostrophe, 889
Arnauld and Nicole, 28
Auerbach, Erich, 179
Auffret, Dominique, 135n1
Barthes, Roland, 16, 1718
Bataille, Georges, 113, 124n20, 135
Baudelaire, Charles, 415
Benjamin, Walter, 137, 155
Blanchot, Maurice, 170
blind spot, 186
Brcker, Walter, 214n4
Buchdahl, Gerd, 214n4
catachresis, 11314
chiasmus, 21213
class consciousness of the proletariat,
1426
Cohen, Tom, 35n9
cultural studies, 1514
De Man, Paul (essays by)
Allegory (Julie), 1819, 21, 154
An Interview with Paul de Man,
13, 56
Index221
The Resistance to Theory, 910,
1418, 20, 214, 114, 123n19,
124n21
The Rhetoric of Blindness: Derrida
as Reader of Rousseau, 1857
The Riddle of Hlderlin, 1701
Time and History in Wordsworth,
1803
death, 1802
deconstruction, 7, 202n9
Derrida, Jacques, 32, 58, 63n7, 63n9,
77n8, 11920, 127, 135, 1378,
172, 182, 185201, 210, 217
desire
in Hegel, 1059, 12935
in Kojve, 12935
Dove, Kenley Royce, 123n18
Eagleton, Terry, 9, 10, 11, 137, 139,
142
Engels, Friedrich, 141, 156n8
Ewing, A. C., 214n4
Ferguson, Frances, 21519
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 100, 102
fiat lux, 69, 867, 936
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 6570,
77n7
forgiveness, 1989
Freud, Sigmund, 190
Gedchtnis, 82
geometric method, 258
German Ideology, The, 11, 12, 20, 56,
99103, 118, 120
Goebbels, Joseph, 8
grammar, 1920, 21
Hartman, Geoffrey, 174
Hegel, G.W.F., 58, 10, 12, 24, 8096,
13941
Heidegger, Martin, 39, 113, 15972,
17480, 195
Heinrichs, Johannes, 122n18
Hertz, Neil, 83, 86, 95
Hlderlin, Friedrich, 15972,
17480
Hunter, Ian, 152
Hyppolite, Jean, 109, 122