Philosophy Before Literature Deconstuction, Hisoricity, and The Work of Pal de Man

Philosophy Before Literature: Deconstruction, Historicity, and the Work of Paul de Man Author(s): Suzanne Gearhart and Paul
de Man Source: Diacritics, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Winter, 1983), pp. 63-81 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/464712 . Accessed: 16/10/2013 11:46
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Diacritics.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 190.170.156.98 on Wed, 16 Oct 2013 11:46:16 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
RESPONSE
PHILOSOPHY BEFORE LITERATURE:
DECONSTRUCTIO AND HISTORICITY,

THE
WORK
DE
OF
MAN
PAUL
SUZANNEGEARHART
The word deconstruction has always bothered me.... I had the impression that it was one word among many others, a secondary term of the text that was destined to disappear or in any case take its place in an ensemble where it commanded nothing. For me it was a word in a chain with many other words like trace and diff6rance .... It happens, and this merits analysis, that this word that I wrote once or twice, I don't even remember very well where, all of a sudden leaped outside of the text and others took it up and used it in such a way that afterwards,faced with this result, I had to justify myself, explain it, try to play with it. -Jacques Derrida, L'Oreillede I'autre
The question of the relationship between literature and philosophy has taken on new meaning at a time when assumptions central to the languages of both disciplines - assumptions about language, form, representation, etc. - are being challenged. If these assumptions are indeed fundamental to philosophy itself, and if literary criticism and interpretation have in their own way depended on these same assumptions, then to challenge them is in some sense to move "beyond" both literature and philosophy, to a region that is "strictly (hereafterDC) speaking no longer philosophical" ["Deconstructionas Criticism" - critical. Any attempt to move "beyond"a given state of a prob188], or literary lem or a discipline, however, must pay scrupulous attention to that state if the Insofaras the attempt to move "beyond"is not to result instead in a "regression." relationship between literatureand philosophy is concerned, a certain specificity of each must be respected if the challenge to the assumptions underlying the languages of both disciplines is not to result in a simple blurring of differences and a confusion of tongues. Clarificationof the meaning and context of the terms that figure prominently in the vocabulary of each discipline is thus indispensable. But the necessary labor of clarification is limited by the simple fact that there is no such thing as a language of philosophy or a language of criticism, no matterwhat the level at which one analyzes discourse within these and toning down" [DC 180] of the effects two disciplines. The riskof a "blurring of a critique written, say, in philosophy does not merely begin when that cri-
diacritics / winter 1983
into another language and its specificity distorted- say when deconstructique is "translated" tion is appropriatedby literarycriticism. The riskis just as great when one seeks to clarifythe stakes of such a critique from a position totally within philosophy. In two recent articles, "Deconstruction as Criticism"and "'Setzung'and 'Ubersetzung': Notes on Paul de Man"[cited hereafter as SU], Rodolphe Gasche undertakes a clarification of-the relationship between philosophy and literaturein a recent phase in the historyof that relationship. Moreover, it is as a philosopher that Gasche writes: his aim is to subject to rigorous philosophical analysis terms that, he argues, have been used loosely and unrigorously by "philosophically untrained readers" [DC 1831- notably by literary critics. Gasche's position is in many ways an ironic one, for the literarycritics he is criticizingare not those who reject what could be called a philosophical approach to literaturebut precisely those who ostensibly accept such an approach. Gasche calls them the deconstructive critics and argues that their use of philosophy (or theory) and particularlytheir attempt to "apply" the theoretical insights of Jacques Derrida to the study of literature result in a literary aestheticism or formalism that is in almost all ways the antithesis of the philosophy of Derrida. Thus Gasche must use philosophy against precisely the deconstructive literarycritics who claim it for themselves, or, as he puts it, he must restore the "rigorousmeaning" of deconstruction "againstits defenders" [DC 182]. Two terms in particularare the focus of Gasche's clarificationand analysis: self-reflexivityand deconstruction. According to Gasche, it is when they are placed in their philosophical context that the virtuallyantithetical meanings of these two terms become clear. The lack of rigor in the use of philosophical categories by deconstructive criticism is most evident for Gasche when it equates deconstruction with self-reflexivity: Deconstruction is not what is asserted by positive definitions in Newer [deconstructive] criticism. Here deconstruction is said to represent the moment in a text where the argument begins to undermine itself; or, in accordance with Jakobson'snotion of the poetic and aesthetic function, the relation of a message of communication to itselfthat, thus, becomes its own object; or, finally,the self-revelationand indication Deconstructive by the text of its own principles of organization and operation .... criticism ... assertsand simultaneously depends on the autonomy of the text. It is this rationale of almost all of modern criticism that totally distorts the notion of deconstruction. [DC 180-81] For Gasche, deconstruction is virtuallythe opposite of self-reflexivity,hence the opposite of "deconstruction" as it is used by deconstructive criticism:"Putanother way, deconstruction is an operation which accounts for and simultaneously undoes self-reflection"[DC 194]. Just how deconstruction does this becomes evident, Gasche argues, when one considers that it comprises two stages: a reversal and a reinscription. The deconstructive critic is guilty of equating deconstruction with what is only its firststage: reversal.Thus he takes the colloquial meaning of writing as it appears in the philosophical tradition and, simply reversing the hierarchy between speech and writing, privilegeswriting in a traditionaland colloquial sense over speech. By stopping with this simple reversal, deconstructive criticism manages easily to assimilate ecriture to literatureand to equate the negative, criticalthrustof deconstruction with a revelation of the autonomy and auto-referentiality of the text. In its complete and philosophically rigorousform, deconstruction necessitates not only reversal but reinscription. Thus Derrida not only upsets the hierarchy between writing and speech when he gives writing a thematic privilege in Of Grammatology, he also displaces or reinscribes"writing" so that it no longer coincides with its colloquial meaning. According to Gasch6, in reinscription,the hierarchy and hence the newly privileged term are situated in relation to an absolute other, that is, "anirreducible non-phenomenal structurethat accounts for the difference under examination"[DC 203]. Ecriture(or the arche-trace)then, is as much the "other" of writing in a colloquial sense as it is of speech in a colloquial sense. And yet, it is necessary to have recourse to an arche-trace in order to understand the phenomenal difference between speech and writing, presence and absence, for these differences cannot be accounted for by either speech or presence (or writing and absence) "in themselves." The philosopher can never explain the irruptionof writing if he starts by defining the essence of
64
speech, nor could the irruptionof speech be accounted for if the hierarchywere to be simply reversed, and writing granted the essential attributes (even in negative form) formerly bestowed upon speech. The phenomenal, conceptual, and historical difference between speech and writing thus "occults"the arche-trace or "originary" writing, but it is nonetheless to it. In his effort between reversal and reinscriptionand thus produced by distinguish clearly decisively show the limitations of the deconstructivist critics' use of deconstruction, Gasche is led to insist on the absolute break between the arche-trace and the phenomenal or conceptual opposition that occults it: "Althoughit uses the same name as its negative image, the deconstructed term will never have been given in the conceptual opposition it deconstructs" [DC 193]. Deconstruction, then, "does not operate from an empirically present outside of philosophy"; it "does not proceed from a phenomenologically existing exteriority"[DC 196] like literature, for instance. What separates Gasche from deconstructive criticism, the philosopher from the literarycritic, is this insistence on the irreducible function of reinscription within the complex procedure of deconstruction, the insistence on the nonphenomenal, absolutely other character of the arche-trace, on the impossibility of its ever appearing as such without simultaneously being occulted. Clearlyall or much of the force of deconstruction in its most rigorous, philosophical sense and also all the risksassociated with it lie here: in the determination of the (an) absolute other or, in Derrida's words, in the "enigma of absolute alterity."The danger is ever present that there will be a confusion of regions, strata, and types of discourse, with the result that it is no longer an "absoluteother" that is "reached for,"but a phenomenological, empirical, ideal, or essential other-that is to say, a version of the same, of the present, etc. With the substitution of an ideal or real other in a given system, is for the absolute other, the opening to the absolute other, its "irruption" that a becomes deconstruction "deconstruction," is, philosophy of self-reflexivity, negated, and the philosopher becomes a mere literary critic. The problem that confronts the philosopher is thus in a sense both thematic and formal. His aim is to determine the point that separates the irreducible absolute other from the "absoluteother"that is in realitysimply an essence or a presence and hence self-positingand self-reflexive.Or, to put it another way, he must determine the point at which reversal ends and reinscription begins, for it is preof cisely when the literarycritic confuses reversal and reinscriptionthat his "deconstruction" a given opposition wittingly or unwittingly yields an essence, a presence, or the mere negative face of one of these. Both of these determinations require the utmost philosophical vigilance and rigor. One could say that for Gasch&,the work of Paul de Man represents the most difficult case with respect to these determinations, because it can neither be dismissed as Newer (deconstructive) criticism, nor can it be assimilated entirely to the critique of self-reflexivity that for Gasche constitutes the core of proper deconstruction; it provides an example of both a self-reflexive theory of literatureand one in which literature ("inthe absence of a better term" [DC 183]) functions as an absolute other, never present as such except through its occultation. Gasche points to de Man's essay entitled "Actionand Identity in Nietzsche" as the point where a shift in de Man's perspective occurs. The main thrust of Gasche's discusis to argue that the essays in Blindness sion of de Man'swork in "Deconstructionas Criticism" Rhetoric of Blindness" constitute a defense of a theory of litand Insightand particularly "The Notes on Paul de Man," erary self-reflexivity, whereas, in "'Setzung' and 'O0bersetzung': offers a critique of selfthat Man's later of de work, Reading, Allegories argues Gasch6 reflexivity. The distinction between Blindness and Insight and Allegories of Reading is thus crucial in GaschP's reading of de Man. Ifthere is to be a philosophically rigorous rapprochement of the work of de Man and Derrida (or Lyotard),it can only be because de Man's later work is radically different from his earlier work. Though Gasche argues that Allegories of Reading is infinitelycloser than Blindnessand Insight to the work of Derrida, he nonetheless acknowledges that differences between the two do exist. For example, de Man uses the term "deconstruction"in an altogether different way than Derrida"[SU 43]. De Man's work "bordersupon" the work of Derrida, but it is at the same time "original" [SU 43]. The topography that allows the work of Derrida and de Man to share a common border-presumably the critique of self-reflexivity-and at the same time to remain unique and distinct is never explicitly mapped out by GaschP, but an
65
implicit mapping of it is a key to his analysis. As the title to his essay on Allegoriesof Reading suggests, a certain Heidegger provides the fundamental link between de Man and Derrida, and this link is used to substantiate the claim that despite specific differences, the work of Derrida and of de Man's Allegories of Reading are fundamentally compatible when considered from the standpoint of the critique of self-reflexivity. In order to bring rigorand clarityto the work either of de Man, Derrida,or Heidegger, Gasch6 implies, crucially relevant parts of the work of the others must be simultaneously clarified and comprehended as well. But Gasch6's clarificationof the relationship between the work of these three thinkers and, ultimately, his clarificationof the relationshipbetween literatureand philosophy are, of course, interpretations.That is, there is an irreducible performative aspect to his analysis: his "clarification" is in this sense already formed by an "ethico-theoreticaldecision" [DC 190]. More specifically, Gasch6's reading of de Man is not merely an exercise in the proper classificationof the work of a (highly influential)critic; nor is it the mere application of pre-existingcriteriato the judgment of a particularcase. Gasch6's interpretationof de Man is an interpretationof deconstruction as well. The problem, then, will be to analyze both de Man'swork and Gasch6's interpretationof it in order to elucidate the most forceful but also the most problematic aspects of Gasch6's and de Man's"decisions" concerning deconstruction. The firstextremely forceful- and problematic- point to consider in Gasch6's analysis is the relationship he establishes between Heidegger on the one hand and de Man (and Derrida)on the other. In his review of Allegoriesof Reading, Gasch6 introduces his brief analysis of Heidegger's concept of positing as "useful"in understanding de Man's utilization of the notion of the performative in his literaryanalyses. The comparison of the two concepts, Gasch6 argues, can enable the reader to understand better the relationship of de Man to Romantic theories of auto-reflexivity,for de Man is to a Romantic aestheticism like that of Schleiermacher what Heidegger is to a philosophy of self-reflexivitylike that of Fichte. In Gasch6's earlier "Deconstruction as Criticism,"however, Heidegger's role is even more crucial, and in considering it closely, one can come to understandwhy it is that the possibility of establishing a simple comparison between de Man and Heidegger should be so conclusive a proof in Gasch6's eyes of the impossibilityof interpretingde Man'swork as a theory of self-reflexivity. In "Deconstruction as Criticism,"Gasch6 draws his reader's attention to Derrida's definition of deconstruction and underlines precisely the passages in Of Grammatology where Derrida discusses the meaning of the term arche-trace and where his indebtedness to Heidegger is clearest. Those passages and the terms they employ are essentially the same as the ones Gasch6 himself later uses in his clarifyingcomparison between de Man and Heidegger. Thus Gasch6 quotes from Derrida:"'When the other announces itself as such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself'"[DC 199; Of Grammatology 47]. In "'Setzung' and 'Obersetzung,"' explaining Heidegger's notion of positing, Gasch6 writes: "positing [Setzen] is a translation [Uber-setzung]of the concealed into what is present, the distorting gesture of the revelation of which is at once reversed again by a foreclosing retranslation [Uber-setzung] into what is concealed" [SU 55]. Finally, Gasch6 writes of de Man's notion of text: "Inother words, the text, in the last resort,is constituted (but is this still a constitution?), by a notion of performative, of positing which makes it unconceal itself only as the displaced totality of paired, but incompatible textual functions"[SU 56]. For Gasch6, the possibility of reconciling the "materialdifferences" between Heidegger and Derrida on the one hand and on the other the "originality" of de Man with respect to Derrida hinges on the central importance of the concepts of Setzung (unconcealing, positing) and Obersetzung (translation,concealing) to an understanding of the work of all three. The question of the relationshipbetween Derridaand Heidegger is, of course, extremely complex. Even to begin to analyze it fully would require an interpretationof the entirety of the work of each, an interpretationthat would have to respect and not confuse different "levels, paths and styles" [DC 202]. It would have to take account of a growing body of literatureconcerning this relationship, a literatureof which Gasch6's work is an important part.' It would also have to take account of the points in Derrida'swork where he explicitly
IIn addition to the articles discussed here, see Rodolphe Gaschc, "Dutrait non adequat: La notion du rapportchez Heidegger,"Les Finsde I'Homme, Colloque de Cerisy [Paris:EditionsGalile, 1981]. Since
66
.-I i ii; ri ?1/ 11 i' : ?' --\I-_ Irr
~?r?,
I -t
C-C ..:.
r--
?' j ~i I
ii
jtl/
----; )Fi- ,:?::r' -i- . : -- ---~ I ii "I --?-,r-. --? i i

(E
r----t? Li ~I:~-E \..-.1.I--
_..i~
----~---!
.:i"'1,.- I? i ::i
i:-. ;; ;
__~~1=13
17,:
..-.-
zi ii
I:r ---..-~I-..-
-i
I,,
situates himself with respect to Heidegger. These statements cannot, of course, be given any exclusive privilege, but clearly an interpretationthat would not account for them in some way is inadmissible.They would include both points in his work where Derridaexpresses his relative lack of reserve towards (a) Heidegger, and others, more critical in thrust,which Derrida makes in what he has called a "deconstructivemode" ["Leretraitde la metaphore"109]. Let us assume, however, for the sake of argument, that the very fundamental rapprochement between Heidegger and Derrida that Gasche is making in his two articles has been established. The rapprochement between de Man and Heidegger would no doubt require an equally complex analysis, and, analogous to the analysis of the relationship between Heidegger and Derrida,it too would have to be concerned with de Man'sexplicit references to Heidegger. As is the case with Derrida, they are not of a piece. But though he does not referto them, their general sense seems, at least at firstglance, highly favorable to Gasch"'s Heideggerean analysis of de Man, and, moreover, they seem to foreground precisely those aspects of Heidegger'sthought privileged by Gasch&.One could go even furtherand say that insofaras de Man criticizes certain aspects of Heidegger'sphilosophy, it is from a perspective that could itself be qualified as Heideggerean. Thus, in an early article, he comments on Heidegger's interpretationof Hilderlin: H1lderlin is the only figure Heidegger cites as a believer cites Scripture.... Hilderlin tells of the presence of Being, his word is Being made present, and he knows that it is so; metaphysicians,on the other hand, tell of their will that Being be present, but, since it is of the essence of Being to reveal itselfthrougha on hiding of itself in what it is not, they can never name it (Being).... H61lderlin, the other hand, knows the movement of Being. ["LesExegeses de H61derlinpar Martin Heidegger"805] Heidegger, then, is the philosopher who, through the themes of concealment and unconcealing, points to the illusorinessof any immediate access to Being. But his interpretationof Hblderlin is strikingly at odds with his analysis of the metaphysicians: the poet will be granted a privilege of direct access to Being that Heidegger has categoricallydenied to them. An incredible privilege, according to de Man, as if Icaruswere allowed to returnfrom the sun. Indeed, de Man suggests, the privilege Heidegger gives H61derlin"invites parody, it seems so excessive" ["LesExegeses"808], not only in relation to H61derlin,but in relationto Heidegger himself, whose own pretention to have found a way beyond metaphysics hinges in some sense on the incredible privilege he accords the poet, H61lderlin.2 De Man, then, will argue that "H61lderlin says the exact opposite of what Heidegger makes him say" [809]. But though such an interpretationwould seem to place de Man directly at odds with Heidegger, in an important sense it does not. The poet, Hblderlin, does not claim a privileged access to Being, according to de Man. Rather,his poetry points to the illusorynatureof
the Text: from my essay was written, Gasche has published an additional article on this subject: "Joining Heidegger to Derrida,"in The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. Ed. JonathanArac, Wlad God-
Martin. of Minnesota zich, and Wallace Press,1983. Minneapolis: University in two laterarticles in Blindness of Heidegger included and 2Thiselementof de Man's critique figures and Intentin American Selfas Origin" "Form New Criticism" [30]and "The [100]. Literary Insight:
67
all claims to accede directly to Being, and, thereby, it points to its own mediate status. If Being is intended by all poetry, as it is by all metaphysics, Hilderlin's poetry tells us that it can only be intended: "Itis not because he has seen Being that the poet can name it; his word prays for parousia, but it (his word) cannot establish it. It cannot establish parousia because as soon as the word is pronounced, it destroys immediacy and reveals that, instead of telling of Being, it can only tell of mediation"[812]. In this instance at least, poetry is more rigorousthan philosophy. But its privilege with respect to metaphysics does not derive from its abilityto give us direct access to Being. Ratherit lies in the fact that poetry openly declares that there is no direct, immediate access to Being. As de Man puts it, apropos of Hilderlin's hymn, Wie wenn am Feiertage:"We can deduce ... from this hymn a conception of the poetic as an essentially pure, free act, a pure intention, a concerted and conscious prayer that becomes conscious of itself in its failure"to accede directly to Being [816]. 'This poetry constitutes a constant critique of its certitudes, recognized as illusory"[817]. The philosopher, then, is a "bad"literarycritic. His rigoras a philosopher does not hold up when he considers poetry. To use Gasch6's terms, one could say that his philosophy is a paradigm for all critiques of self-reflexivity,but his literarycriticism nonetheless constitutes a theory of the totality and self-reflexivityof the literaryor poetic work. Heidegger points to "a persistent negative moment that resides in Being"[Blindness73], a negative moment that is constitutive of the necessity that there only be mediation and mediacy, never parousia. But the philosopher forgets this insightwhen he turns to the work of H61derlin.He forgets that all unveiling or positing is also a concealing or an occultation, and he overlooks the elements of the poet's work that equate poetry with a "consciousness" of its own failure to accede directly to Being. A later essay on Blanchot establishes with equal clarity the link between de Man's notion of a literarytext and the Heideggerean concepts of Setzung and Ubersetzung. Here too de Man criticizes Heidegger (but from a standpoint that could itself be qualified as Heideggerean) by opposing him to Blanchot, who, in this instance, is more Heideggerean than Heidegger himself: "Unlike the recent Heidegger, Blanchot does not seem to believe that the movement of a poetic consciousness could ever lead us to assert our ontological insight in a positive way" [76]. The insight that can never be formulated in a positive way concerns precisely the concealment that is the correlativeof all unconcealing: "ForBlanchot, as for Heidegger, Being is disclosed in the act of its self-hidingand, as conscious subjects, we are necessarily caught up in this movement of dissolution and forgetting. A critical act of interpretationalways enables us to see how poetic language always reproduces this negative movement . . . ." [76]. These passages clearly establish the link Gasch6 forges by other means between de Man and Heidegger. But, significantly,their place in de Man'swork is not what one would expect from Gasch6's division of it into two phases, the first,self-reflexivephase coinciding with the essays published in Blindnessand Insight(and presumably with the essays published earlier, in Critique),the second represented by Allegoriesof Reading. The passages quoted above in which de Man borrows most explicitly from Heidegger to define literatureas concealing in the process of revealing appear not in Allegories of Reading, but rather in an essay dating from 1955 and in another essay included in Blindness and Insight. If one accepts Gasch6's contention that the essays in Blindnessand Insightconstitute a theory of the self-reflexivityof literature,then one would have to admit that, in de Man'swork, a concept of literatureas an absolute other that- like Being- always conceals in its unconcealing, is contemporaneous with a theory of literaryself-reflexivityand does not inaugurate a new phase in de Man's work. But de Man's analyses of Heidegger not only undercut Gasch6's division of de Man's work into two separate phases. They also clearly, in themselves, imply or constitute a theory of literaryor poetic self-reflexivity,inasmuch as de Man defines the poetic as "a pure intention ... that becomes conscious of itself in its failure"["LesEx6ghses" 816], that is, conscious of the concealment of Being that results from its effort to name Being. The self-reflexivityof "consciousness"of its own status or "failure" is, for de Man, the source poetry, its (structural) of the "privilege" or of the "priority" of poetry. The critic can never add to this movement of self-reflexivity,his critique or reading can only repeat the self-criticalelement that is already constitutive of poetry. The theme of the priorityand privilege of poetry is central to de Man's
68
reading of Blanchot as well as to his reading of Derrida. Its logical extension is that there "is no need to deconstruct" [Blindness 139] the authentically poetic text, that the act of reading or interpretation is never "something we have added" [Allegories 17]. Whatever the place one would ultimately want to assign to Heidegger with respect to the problem of selfreflexivity,the possibilityof assimilatinghis concepts of Setzung and Ubersetzung on the one hand and de Man's conception of literatureon the other is not in itself evidence that the latter entails a critique of self-reflexivity. Indeed, one could say that the "Heideggerean" moment in de Man's theory is also the moment of self-reflexivity. The schema that divides de Man's work into an early, self-reflexive period and a later period consisting of a Heideggerean-style critique of self-reflexivityis clearly disrupted when one considers the role played by Heidegger in de Man's early work, but it is open to challenge on other grounds as well. Certainlyde Man himself has always discreetly insisted on the coherence and continuity of his preoccupations, and if de Man is not the ultimate authority in the interpretationof his own work, he is, nonetheless, an important authority among others. His highly sympathetic reading of Blanchot stresses the importance and interest of the work of a critic who, while he did not remain "aloof"from contemporary philosophical, literaryand critical trends, who even "took part in them" and was "influenced by them," nonetheless remained faithful to a problematic that was distinctively his. For de Man, Blanchot is one of a group of writers of which one could say that "the true quality of their literaryvocation can be tested by the persistence with which they kept intact a more essential part of themselves" [Blindness60], despite their being influenced to some extent by contemporary trends. In a similarvein, de Man is critical of those who divide Lukacs'work into two distinct periods, whether they consider the later period to be his "weak"one as is typically the case in the West, or whether they consider the earlier period to be tainted by idealism as is typically the case in the Soviet Union and EasternEurope:"Theweaknesses on the one hand and the strength on the other of Lukacs'work cannot be limited to an early or late period" [52]. De Man's sympathy for a critic like Blanchot and his criticism of attempts to divide the work of a Lukics into distinct early and later periods are linked to a discreet insistence on the vocation." Butwhat are consistency of his own concerns, the persistence of his own "'literary' we to make of Allegoriesof Reading?Does it constitute a break with his earlier, fundamental project? Certainly de Man himself does not present it that way. Specifically, in the Preface, where he discusses the introduction of the term "deconstruction" into his own critical vocabulary, he stresses that his use of it does not represent a significant departure from his earlier concerns: became a bone of contention, Most of this book was written before "deconstruction" and the term is used here in a technical ratherthan a polemical sense - which does But I saw not therefore imply that it becomes neutral or ideologically innocent .... no reason to delete it. No other word states so economically the impossibility to evaluate positively or negatively the inescapable valuation it implies.... I confor the first time in the writings of Jacques sciously came across "deconstruction" Derrida, which means that it is associated with a power of inventive rigorto which i lay no claim but which i certainly do not wish to erase. [x] De Man here describes himself in the same way he describes Blanchot in "Impersonalityin Blanchot." He does not remain "aloof"from the contemporary philosophical and literary trends associated with the term "deconstruction,"he may even to some extent be "influenced" by them. But clearly in de Man's view the work collected in the Allegoriesof Reading does not represent a fundamental departure from previous work, in which, in a certain sense, the (his) concept and technique of "deconstruction"were already implicitly in play. Any reader of Allegories of Reading will note many themes that run from Blindnessand Insight and even from earlier essays through this recent book, many passages that seem to echo one another. Literature,however, is the one theme or term that seems to dominate the others. No matter what analytical path de Man takes, it leads to this term. Heidegger's ontology, Husserl's phenomenology, Empson's formalism, Speech Act Theory, New Criticism, as diverse as they are, are all treated by de Man in the same way he treats Marx-
69
ism, as "a poetic thought that does not have the patience to arrive at its ultimate conse495]. De Man's interpretation of Heidegger's exegeses of H61derlin quences" ["Impasse" makes clear that, for him, literaturehas a special privilege rooted in its "consciousness"of its own mediacy and of the necessary mediacy of all access to Being. In "Criticism and Crisis," de Man restates this position in language that clearly echoes that of his earlier essay: '"The statement about language, that sign and meaning can never coincide, is what is precisely taken for granted in the kind of language we call literary. Literature, unlike everyday language, begins on the far side of this knowledge; it is the only form of language free from the fallacy of unmediated expression" [Blindness17]. In all of the "phases" of de Man'swork, this view of (poetic) language leads him to a second axiom that is a direct correlate of the first. If (poetic) language expresses nothing (immediately), then it has no determinable meaning, but is ratherambiguous in an ultimate sense. Thus he writes, apropos of Empson'sSeven from referringto an object that would be its cause, the poetic sign Types of Ambiguity:"Far sets in motion an imaging activity that does not refer to any particular object. The meaning ... of metaphor is precisely that it does not signify in a definite manner. ... A simple metaphor is sufficientto suggest . . . an infinityof valid readings"["Impasse" 490-91]. As is consistently the case in de Man's work, the fundamental "ambiguity" of literature,its "consciousness" of its own mediacy, corresponds to a privilege he accords metaphor over or "everyday"language. "referential" This "early"position concerning the privilege of literaturecommunicates directly with his position in Allegories of Reading. Just as he argues in "Impassede la Critique Formaliste" that metaphor suspends meaning, so he argues here that a generalized metaphoricity he calls rhetoric inevitably engenders a plurality of meanings. In analyzing the grammatical/ rhetorical structure of the question "What'sthe difference?"de Man concludes: "Thegrammatical model of the question becomes rhetorical not when we have, on the one hand, a literal meaning and on the other hand a figural meaning, but when it is impossible to decide by grammatical or other linguistic devices which of the two meanings (that can be entirely incompatible) prevails. Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration.... I would not hesitate to equate the rhetorical, figural potential of language with literature itself"[10]. In Allegories of Reading one clearly hears the echo of "Criticism and Crisis"and "Impassede la Critique Formaliste." The privilege of literatureand the related issue of the critique of unmediated expression are themes that run throughout de Man's work and constitute an implicit theory of literary is missing from his vocabulary. The quesself-reflexivity,even when the term "self-reflexivity" in its most rigorous, philosophical sense can be tion, then, is whether or not "deconstruction" shown to be compatible with a theory that privileges literaturein the way de Man's does. Gasche writes that in Allegoriesof Reading it is literaturethat functions as the absolute other to which deconstruction refers the empirical differences under its scrutiny, once it has reversed the hierarchy structuring those differences, and elsewhere he argues that this designation of the absolute other as literatureis justified"inthe absence of a better term"[DC 183]. This assertion is questionable in the context of the passage from "LaDissemination"to which Gasche refers for support.3 But it is equally questionable- though for different reasons-when applied to de Man'stheory of literature.For it suggests that de Man has used the term "literature" as a kind of last resort, whereas de Man's privileging of literature is always positive and unhesitating; for him, there are only worse terms. Even if we keep in mind Gasche's caution that de Man's use of the term "literature" is not colloquial, one would still have to contrast his use of it sharplywith Derrida'suse of such terms as 6criture, arche-trace or differance. From the beginning, these terms have been qualified by Derridaas terms among others, whose privilege is historical- in a sense that Of Grammatology and all of Derrida'swork undertake to define:
I want to emphasize that the efficacity of this thematic of diff~rance can very well be, must one day be "relev~e" [that is, negated, retained and raised to a higher level, or "theabsolute other"must be designated as 3The passage cited by Gasche does not argue that "play" occults literature"inthe absence of a better term,"but rather that calling "theabsolute other""literature," "theabsolute other"or "play" and accomplishes only a partial (albeit necessary) reversalof the hierarchy between chance and rule, play and necessity, rather than a radical reversalof them [LaDissemination (Paris:Editionsdu Seuil, 1972):62; Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981):54].
70
WWI-"
40i.. Rf 1.
?LL
--7_
-,a4w!7i
_I
"m"T IIW,
L. )L U?.M
lend itself, of itself, if not to its own replacement, at least to its impli"aufgehoben"7, cation in a chain it never will have, in truth, governed. It is for this reason, once again, that it [la diff6rance] is not theological.... Diff6rance, which is neither a word nor a concept, appeared to me to be strategicallythe most appropriateterm to [" poque'7. I start think, if not to master ... what is most irreducible in our "age" out, thus, strategically,from the place and time where "we"are, although my point of departureis not in the last instance justifiableand though it is always only in terms of diff6rance and of its "history" that we can pretend to know who and where "we" diff6rance"7, my translation] are, and what the limits of an "age"might be. ["La In Derrida'swork, the fact that the "master-term" is implicated in a chain it does not govern is consistently associated, as it is in the passage quoted above, with the "epochal"or "historical" character of deconstruction. Derrida cautions that the epochal, the contextual, and the historicalare not terms that have any priorityover a term such as diffcrance:any comprehension of the "historical" hinges on a comprehension of diffirance (or the arche-trace). Nor, on nature of deconstruction the sign that Derrida is a historicist the other hand, is the "historical" or a relativist,or that any term will do. If considerations related to "context"always limit and relativize the privilege of certain terms, they also preclude others from being efficacious or strategicallyappropriate. But all of these terms remain irreduciblyhistoricalfor Derrida:their privilege is not absolute. Such affirmationsof the historical nature of deconstruction have importantimplications for the interpretation of the two operations it entails- reversal and reinscription. Though Derrida stresses the absolutely other character of diffcrance, what is stressed in the passage above is the strategic character of that absolute otherness. The absolutely other character of diff6rancedoes not preclude it from functioning "within"metaphysics, from being negated, retained and raised to a higher level. Put in terms of the relationship between reversal and reinscription, one could say that the reinscriptionof writing is not itself an irreversibleprocess; the absolute other is always also in the position of a mediate other, that is, implicated in a (metaphysical)opposition and, as such, subject to reversal. It is for this reason that our task, according to Derrida, is not only to think diffcranceor the arche-traceas "absoluteother,"but at the same time, as that which is given in metaphysics.4 One can cite no similarqualification in de Man's use of the term "literature." Though he may affirmthat it constitutes its own undoing, the fact that it is literaturealone that has this occupies a comcapacity to undo itself indicates that, for de Man, literature(or "literature") manding position from which it cannot be moved. De Man claims a certain solidaritywith the project of "deconstruction,"but his simultaneous privileging of literature represents a resistance to crucial aspects of deconstruction - the refusal to posit a master term, and the corresponding emphasis on the reversibilityof the process of reinscription. Gasche's interpretationof deconstruction reminds us that the absolute other is indeed in a sense already given in metaphysics. As he writes, "philosophy,already against its will and unknown to it, could never avoid linking presence and self-reflexivityto an irreducible nonpresence which has a constitutive value" [DC 195]. But one could say that in his effort to draw a necessary distinction between deconstructivist literary criticism and philosophical deconstruction, Gasche overemphasizes the break between reversal and reinscription to such a point that the implication of the "absolute other" in metaphysics is obscured. If Gasche is willing to accept "literature" as an "absolute other"and if, even more importantly, he is reluctantto question why de Man, in contrast to Derrida, makes literaturethe absolute other, it is because to an important extent that position is already implicit in the special emphasis he places on the radicallydistinctive role of reinscription in the philosophical procedure of deconstruction. The task, of course, is not to deny the distinctive character of
4"To think, at the same time, of diff6rance as an economical detour that, in the element of the same, always aims to rediscover pleasure or a presence differed (deferred)by calculation . . . and on the other hand diff6ranceas a rapport with an impossible presence, as expenditure without reserve, as irreparable loss of presence ... ." ["LaDifferance"20, my translation].
71
reinscription,but ratherto understandat the same time why reinscriptionremains reversible, why it produces not a single, master-termor "absolute other," but a series of strategically effective terms. 2 A certain conception of historicity is, I would argue, an irreducible element of deconstruction. In his two major essays on deconstruction, Gasche does not discuss nature of deconstruction, but despite Gasche's lack of Derrida'sconception of the "historical" I of this aspect of Derrida's work, and more that a consideration would concern, argue specifically of de Man's interpretation of it, is essential in understanding the relationship between them. Indeed, the question of historicity bears on all of the crucial points in Gasche's analysis of de Man- the critique of self-reflexivity,the break between early and late periods of his work, and even the relationshipto Heidegger. Furthermore,it is with regardto the concept of historicitythat de Man expresslystates his criticismsand reserves concerning Derrida'swork. I would argue that in de Man'swork, the claim that Derrida'suse of historical terms is inconsistent with the fundamental insightsof deconstruction amounts to a resistance to deconstruction itself. That resistance is both direct, inasmuch as he explicitly devalorizes those moments in Derrida'stexts where the question of historicity is raised, and indirect, insofar as de Man's privilegingof literatureis indissociable from a devalorization and reduction of historicity. De Man'sdevalorization and reduction of historicityis apparentfirstof all in the fact that he consistently defines literature and literary language in opposition to a natural or phenomenal world. Passages defining literaturein this way can be found in the earliest as de Man equates irony with well as the most recent texts. In "The Rhetoric of Temporality," fiction and literature,and argues that "farfrom being a returnto the world, the irony to the second power or 'ironyof irony'that all true irony at once has to engender asserts and maintains its fictional character by stating the continued impossibilityof reconciling the world of fiction with the actual world . .. it serves to prevent the all too readily mystified readerfrom confusing fact and fiction, and from forgettingthe essential negativityof the fiction"[200]. In a recent article, "Resistanceto Theory,"de Man defines literatureand literarylanguage in is fiction not because it somehow refuses to opposition to the phenomenal world: "Literature it is a but not because priori certain that language functions according acknowledge 'reality,' to principles which are those, or which are like those, of the phenomenal world" [11]. De to this view of literatureas the sign of Man frequently characterizes what he calls "resistance" a naive historicism or of a naive belief in a mimetic view of language. But one could easily such a description - or at any rate attempt to situate it as "metaphysical"- in the name "resist" of deconstruction. In Of Grammatology, Derrida argues that, within the family of concepts inherited from metaphysics, there is a "superveningopposition between physis and nomos, physis and techne, whose ultimate function is perhaps to derive historicity;and, paradoxically, not to recognize the rightsof history, production, institutionsetc., except in the form of the arbitraryand in the substance of naturalism"[Of Grammatology 33]. I would like to argue that de Man's persistent definition of the literaryin opposition to the phenomenal or empirical has just such an aim: to derive historicity,and, thereby, to protect the privilege of literature,a privilege entirely "metaphysical"in form. There are, of course, important moments in de Man's work where the question of de history is treated in a more positive light. Indeed, in "Impassede la Critique Formaliste," Man implicitlyqualifies his own approach to literatureas tending towards a historicalpoetics [496]. There he argues that "a profoundly historical poetics would be one which attempts to think separation according to its actual temporal dimensions, instead of superimposing on it cyclic or eternalist schemas of a spatial order. The poetic consciousness, which issues from this separation, constitutes a certain time as the noematic correlative of its action" [497]. The historian or literary historian is referred to implicitly in this passage as the thinker who superimposes cyclic or eternalist schemas on a temporality that is constituted by poetry itself and is radically resistant to such schemas, which themselves are not truly temporal, but rather spatial. Just as Hilderlin's poems are more faithful to Heidegger's insights than Heidegger himself, so here, poetic consciousness is more truly historicalthan the historical consciousness criticized in this passage. This aspect of de Man'stheory of literatureis crucial, 72
and to criticize it from the standpoint of a theory of history that would claim to be the ultimate ground or context in which all events and objects, including literature,would be situated is simply to ignore the force of de Man'scritique of history in this passage and others like it. A theory of historythat takes for granted its categories (time and space), its language, and its own metaliterary, metaformal (and ultimately, metahistorical)status is not "post-de Manian,"but "pre-de Manian." De Man discusses the relationship between history and literaturein a similar vein in a History and LiteraryModernity"[Blindness 165], where he sketches a passage in "Literary programfor the radicaltransformationof literaryhistoryand of history in general. This more elaborate discussion of the relationship between literatureand history raises a crucial question not as readily apparent in his more concise presentations of it. In this article, he suggests that it may be possible to write a (literary)history that is not purely empirical and thus not naive in its use and implicit conception of language, and hence of literature.Such a history would no longer be dependent on the false self-evidence of categories of truthand falsehood and would no longer (naively)claim to dominate literatureand language from the outside. If history were to be redefined along these lines, de Man implies, it would be legitimate to of literaturein general and of literarymodernity in particular.At the speak of the "historicity" same time, de Man clearly states that the practical basis of such a history would be the reading of literary texts, and its epistemological basis, the "knowledge literature conveys about itself" [164, my emphasis]. The historicity de Man speaks of here thus remains a historicity of language and of the literary text, that is, one defined by the relatively homogeneous sphere of literarylanguage and of its self-reflexivity.The revelation of an interdependence of history and literaturedoes not create a methodological aporia, or if it does, the contradictions stemming from such an interdependence can be resolved by "the much more humble task of reading and understanding a literarytext." History could deal with literatureand language only if it were radically transformed, while literatureand language are held to be essentially and constitutively adequate to the task of "knowing"their historicity. De Man's theory of literatureis an importantcontribution to the theory of history insofar as it shows literatureto be in the position of asking questions that history has heretofore been unable or unwilling to ask about itself. What is open to question in that theory of literature, however, is de Man's conclusion that history has nothing to say to literaturethat literature has not already said to and about itself, or, to put it another way, that in the dialogue between history and literature, literature must always, does always have the last word. The secondary, derivative status de Man persistently assigns to any and all concepts of historicityis the sign that his corresponding theory of literatureconstitutes an implicit theory is absent. Of course it is necessary to of self-reflexivityeven when the term "self-reflexivity" distinguish de Man's work from the formalist and structuralistcriticism whose tendency to turn language into a discrete object with definable boundaries he has criticized. But in arguing that an authentic temporality or historicitycan only be constituted by literature,de Man himself closes off language and defends what he has elsewhere criticized as an intrinsicinterpretation of literature. Indeed, one must ask if the critique he makes of such intrinsic interpretation does not in some way apply to his own rhetorical interpretation:". . . the intrinsic interpretationof literatureclaims to be anti- or a-historical,but often presupposes a notion of historyof which the critic is not himself aware"[Blindness163]. De Man'stheory of language does in fact presuppose a notion of history in which language- in the form of metaphor- engenders itself. Forde Man, metaphor is the origin of language in the sense that language is itself essentially metaphorical or rhetorical. He consistently argues that the that narrates the metaphorical origin of language is merely a figuration of a fun"history" damentally synchronic situation, but he first reduces the complexity of history in order subsequently to negate and transcend it in his model of language. It is only because history has an origin for de Man that it can always be assimilated to or derived from the movement by which literarylanguage constitutes and deconstitutes itself. De Man's theory of history is thus essential to his views on literature, no matter how negative or deluded the historical moment is for him. To understand how these two moments-the historicaland the literary- mutually condition and imply each other and how his theory of their relationship is opposed to Derrida's, it is necessary to consider two of de Man's essays, "The Rhetoric of Blindness" and
73
These readings- the firstof which appears in Blindnessand Insight,the second, "Metaphor." in Allegories of Reading- are of special interest because, at least at first glance, they tend most strikinglyto confirm the view that in Allegoriesof Reading a highly significantshift takes place in de Man's theory of literature. By closely analyzing these essays, it is possible to understand the nature of the differences separatingthe two works in which they appear, but also the more profound continuity between them. In "The Rhetoric of Blindness,"the opposition between physis and nomos, between nature and language, history and literature,structuresde Man's interpretationof both Derrida and Rousseau in a strikingway. De Man distinguishes between two levels in Derrida's work, the one being the rhetorical, the other, a more direct or literal level. He argues that Derrida ultimately shares his (de Man's)view concerning the privilege of literature,because Derrida shares the view that history is a negative moment, a mere dramatization of the essentially rhetorical nature of language. Just as de Man considers Rousseau's historical language to be a narrativedevice, so he considers that the same is true for Derrida. Like Rousseau's work, Of Grammatology also tells a story: the repression of written language by what is here called the "logocentric"fallacy of favoring voice over writing is narrated as a consecutive, historical process. Throughout, Derrida uses Heidegger'sand Nietzsche's fiction of metaphysics as a period in Western thought in order to dramatize, to give tension and suspense to the argument, exactly as Rousseaugave tension and suspense to the story of language and of society by making them pseudo-historical. Neither is Derrida taken in by the theatricalityof his gesture or the fiction of his narrative:exactly as Rousseau tells us obliquely, but consistently, that we are readinga fiction and not a history. Derrida'sNietzschean theory of language as "play" warns us not to take him literally, especially when his statements seem to refer to concrete historical situations such as the present. [137, my emphasis] Despite his claim to agree with Derrida'sposition, de Man finds it necessary to differentiate among the elements of Derrida'stext. We should not take Derrida literally, but especially when his statements "seem to refer to concrete historical situations such as the present." Other statements, which would presumably referto the rhetoricityof language, can be taken or "more literally."Indeed, de Man consistently equates the historical with "the arbitrary" even in the context of Derrida'swork. He thus interpretsit "inthe substance of naturalism," ignores Derrida'sown directions for interpretinghistorical language as it is used in his texts: "Forthe proper understandingof the gesture that we are taking here, one must understand the expressions 'epoch,' 'closure of an epoch,' 'historicalgenealogy' in a new way; and must first remove them from all relativism"[Of Grammatology 14]. One could perhaps argue in the logic of Gasche's interpretationthat de Man'sdiscounting of Derrida's use of such terms as "epoch" is limited to "The Rhetoric of Blindness"and thus to that "early"period in his work where he equates deconstruction with the selfreflexivityof literature.This, however, is not the case. The same devaluation of historyand of Derrida's(and Heidegger's)use of "historical" language is evident in the Allegoriesof Reading: The ultimate test or 'proof'of the fact that Romanticismputs the genetic pattern of history in question would then be the impossibilityof writing a history of Romanticism. The abundant bibliography that exists on the subject tends to confirm this, for a curious blindness seems to compel historiansand interpretersof Romanticism to circumvent the central insights that put their own practice, as historians, into question. One way of progressing in this difficult question involves the examination of texts which, by their own structureand their own statement, lay the foundation for the genetic conception of history .... Even such recent examples as Michel Foucault'sor Jacques Derrida'sattempts to see the conceptual crisisof language that figuresso prominently in contemporary philosophy, as a closing off of an historical 74
J ii
-...:
i
C" i F~' .ti
period, sometimes specifically designated as the "6poque de Rousseau,"fall within this pattern. ["Genesisand Genealogy," Allegories 82] 5 In the Allegories of Reading as in "The Rhetoric of Blindness,"Derrida and Foucault are poras "historians" the "centralinsights" trayed as "circumventing" they achieve as philosophers of language (presumably of literarylanguage in de Man's sense). Here again de Man defends the privilege of literatureby reducing the concept of historicity, by interpretingit as existing only at the price of a "blindness"to the conceptual crisis of language, a crisis of which literature is constitutively "aware." The way in which de Man's theory of literature and his devalorization of historicity mutually condition each other, both in Blindnessand Insightand in Allegoriesof Reading, is also apparent in his interpretation of Rousseau, which he explicitly opposes to Derrida's interpretation. It is here, in the "technicalities"of his reading, that de Man's theory of literature operates most forcefully and its underlying assumptions are exposed with particular clarity. As Gasch6 has noted, de Man's theory of literaryself-reflexivityis formulated with the greatest possible directness in "TheRhetoric of Blindness."In it, de Man argues that any text in the full sense of the "thatimplicitlyor explicitly signifies its own rhetoricalmode" is "literary term"[136]. Moreover, he argues that, according to this definition of the literary,Rousseau's text is exemplary, inasmuch as "itaccounts at all moments for its own rhetoricalmode" [139]. De Man's view that Rousseau's text contains a theory of or accounts for its own rhetorical mode is supported by two "givens":1) the "entireorganization of his discourse"and 2) "what it says about representation and metaphor . . . ." [136]. But one could argue that these two are at bottom one, since clearly, for de Man, the issue of the "entireorganization"of "givens" Rousseau's discourse is determined by "what it says about representation and metaphor." Though Rousseau at times states that denomination is the origin of language and at other times, metaphor, de Man argues that the second statement should be, indeed is, privileged over the first,that it conveys Rousseau'strue insightand authorizes us to regardthe firststatement as deluded. De Man does not argue this point, he asserts it. Here, at the outset of his analysis, the relationship between de Man's reading of Rousseau and his theory of literary language reinforce each other in a highly problematic way. Because of the contradictory nature of Rousseau's statements concerning the origin of language, we can only be sure Rousseau is telling us that metaphor is indeed the origin of language if we already hold that it is and if, as a result, we privilege those passages in which Rousseau declares that metaphor is
SDe Man includes Heidegger's "TheOrigin of the Workof Art"in his list of works that lay the foundation for the writing of genetic history. Heidegger, like Derrida, would be in the position of employing a historical language (and the term "epoch"is of course Heideggerean as well as Derridean) inconsistent with his philosophical insight concerning language. Thisaspect of de Man's interpretationof Heidegger in understanding de Man's theory of considerably complicates the question of Heidegger's "usefulness" literature.
75
the origin of language over those passages in which he qualifies or even contradicts this declaration. Rousseau's affirmationthat language is "originally" figuralor metaphorical is his central insight, according to de Man, but it is also a misleading statement, for it is phrased in a historical code that is not ultimately appropriate where language is concerned: "Rousseaugave tension and suspense to the story of language and society by making them pseudo- historical" [137]. The critic must thus restore to "the story of language"its fundamentally structural significance. He can do this if he recognizes two things. First,that according to Rousseau's theory of metaphor, metaphor and language in general refer not to a presence but to the absence of any object and hence of any meaning or intention. Thus in concluding his reading of the sixteenth chapter of the Essaisur I'originedes langues de Man writes: "the musical sign can refer to silence .... Painting refers to the absence of all light and color, and . .. language refers to the absence of meaning" [131]. Second, the reader must understand that an entity that exists "independently of any specific meaning or intent [as both language and passion do, according to de Man] can never be traced back to a cause or an origin" [132]. Thus, according to de Man, Rousseau's conception of metaphor of necessity implies a critique of the notion that language is in essence referentialand of the correlative notion that language has an origin. When read from the perspective of Rousseau'stheory of metaphor, de Man argues, passages in which a term such as "origin" appears can be given their true, synchronic significance. The structural, a-historical character Rousseau's text ascribes to language thus becomes clear. But while Rousseau'saffirmationin the Essaithat language is "originally" figuralis capital in de Man's interpretation,the status of that affirmationremains unclear, both because it is contradicted by other statements made by Rousseau and because the status of metaphor is itself a problem to be elucidated. These issues come to the fore in de Man's critque of Derrida's Of Grammatology. The focus of de Man's dispute with Derrida's interpretation of Rousseau is the third chapter of the Essai,where Rousseau deals with the problem of the origin of metaphor. At stake in the interpretation of this chapter is the significance of Rousseau's statement that "the first language must have been figured."As we have seen, de Man reads this as a declaration of the non-referentialnature of language. According to Derrida'sreading of the chapter in question, however, Rousseau does not see metaphor as referin ring to an absence; instead, Derrida argues, Rousseau's theory of metaphor is "classical" that he considers that though the metaphor does not correspond to the object it names, it does originallycorrespond to the emotional state of the speaker who uttersit. Derridaargues that for Rousseau, metaphor derives from representation, and that its figural sense is thus derived from (the notion of) a primarysense [Of Grammatology 389]. De Man's objection to Derrida's interpretation of this passage is curious and highly significant. He disputes it not because he considers that Derrida has misread Rousseau, at least in the usual sense, but because Rousseau himself was "wrong"at this point and because, de Man clearly implies, Derrida should have recognized as much and read the passage accordingly. According to de Man, metaphor, which refers to an absence, could only have been engendered by passion, which also refers to an absence: "all passion is to some degree passion inutile, made gratuitous by the non-existence of an object or a cause" [134]; metaphor is not, then, engendered by fear or need, which, de Man holds, refer immediately to concrete things (quoting Rousseau-"the firstspeech was not caused by hunger or thirst, but by love, hatred, pity and anger"- de Man adds: "Fearis on the side of hunger and thirstand could never, by itself, lead to the supplementary figurationof language, it is much too practicalto be called a passion"[135]). Thus he concludes: "thethird chapter of the Essai, the section on metaphor, should have been centered on pity, or its extension: love (or hate)" [135, my emphasis]. Moreover, de Man refersback to this rectificationof Rousseau lateron, in a footnote to his assertion that Rousseau's text "has no blind spots":"The choice of the wrong example to illustrate metaphor (fear instead of pity) is a mistake, not a blind spot" [139]. A passage using historical terms to describe the fundamentally figural and structural nature of language "misleads"or "dramatizes," according to de Man, but it can nonetheless be correctly interpreted by the critic who knows what Rousseau purportedly knows: that language is in essence metaphorical and that metaphor is in essence non-referential. A passage declaring that metaphor represents or refersto something else can only be correctly 76
interpreted by being substantially modified, so that the "correct"example, pity, is used instead of the "incorrect" example, fear. Such recastingof the text is never easy for an interpreterto justify,and seems even more questionable in the light of the criticisms de Man himself levels at the entire tradition of Rousseau criticism:that it consistently negates "ambivalence"in Rousseau'stext, "blottingout the disturbing parts of the work" in order to do away "atall costs with these ambivalences" [111]. My concern here is not to defend the purityor integrityof Rousseau'stext, but rather to ask what de Man's extremely active and deliberate intervention in the text is designed to accomplish, what interpretativesystem it protects. In the broadest terms, I would say that it is designed to defend two essential points: the first is the exteriority of metaphor to what de Man, borrowing explicitly from Derrida, calls "logocentrism"or "Western philosophy";the second is the simplicity of the origin, which entails a reductive (and hence reducible) concept of history. In "The Rhetoric of Blindness,"de Man takes the exteriority of metaphor to "logocentrism"to be axiomatic. For him, a language that is fundamentally metaphorical is one that does not refer to any illusory presence or plenitude, but ratherto an absence-of meaning, of intention, or, what is the same thing, of an object [131]. De Man argues that any theory of language whose first premise is that language is metaphorical automatically "escapes from the logocentric fallacy"which "favorsoral language or voice over written language (ecriture) ." [114]. in terms of presence ... the unmediated presence of the self to its own voice .... De Man thus criticizes Derrida for not acknowledging that Rousseau "means what he says" of language. But de Man's criticism of Derridaon this when he makes metaphor the "origin" point obscures an even more crucial point of contention between them, albeit one de Man does not acknowledge: the status of metaphor. De Man consistently argues as if Derrida essentially agrees with him on the question of the exteriorityof metaphor to "metaphysics." In fact, both in Derrida'sreading of the third chapter of the Essaiand elsewhere in his work, it is clear that this is not the case. The assertion that any theory of language which holds that language originates in metaphor and that metaphor is in essence a pure signifier"does not belong to the logocentric 'period'" is flatly contradicted by "LaMythologie Blanche,"6which, with "Le Retraitde la M6taphore,"constitutes the most detailed treatment of the problem of metaphor in Derrida's work to date. This essay confirms the argument of the section of Of Grammatology on the origin of metaphor in Rousseau by showing the role of rhetoric as the more or less naive instrument of a philosophy which furnishes it with all of its fundamental concepts. "La Mythologie Blanche"also analyzes the conception of metaphor as a pure signifierthat puts into question the existence of any priorsignified. This conception of metaphor, according to Derrida, is also a philosophbme and to treat it as if it were not is to naively assume that rhetoric comes before philosophy, when, in fact, all of its organizing concepts- literature, language, the signifier- are furnished by philosophy.7Thus the critique of logocentrism does not constitute a fortioria defense of metaphor or of literature:under certain circumstances and in certain contexts a critique of both may be its most urgent task. De Man's rewriting of the chapter on the origin of metaphor and language is thus designed to protect the status of metaphor both within Rousseau's text and within the broader, philosophical/literary context. It is also designed to protect a reductive theory of history that is the corollary of any theory of literature-including de Man's-defining literatureas closed or as self-reflexive. That de Man's concept of metaphor and of literature depends on a reductive theory of historyand a concept of the origin is evident in the steps he takes to defend the unity of the origin of language as described in Rousseau'swork. Though de Man condemns the concept of the origin as "deluded," his critique of that concept is highly selective: in a Hegelian manner, a concept of the origin, though negated, is at the
6"LaMythologie Blanche,"Marges [Paris:Editionsde Minuit, 1972]; translatedas "WhiteMythology," Margins of Philosophy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982]. Structure,Lesigne, et le jeu dans le discours des 7Withrespect to the concept of a pure signifier,see "La et la diff6rence [(Paris:Editionsdu Seuil, 1967):412]; "Structure, Sign, and sciences humaines,"L'Ecriture Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,"Writing and Difference [(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978):281].
77
same time retained and raised to a "higher"level in de Man's defense of literature. This stance is evident in the critique de Man addresses to Derrida. De Man argues that Derrida's over his fundamental reading of the third chapter of the Essaiprivileges Rousseau's"mistake" insight:that it makes it seem that Rousseau takes need to be the origin of language when he is actually arguingthat passion is. Butthis argument oversimplifies Derrida'sinterpretation.In fact, Derrida argues that in the Essai,need and passion are both origins of language, and that the affirmationthat passion is the origin of language does not preclude need from also functioning as an origin of language, "anotherorigin"[319]. De Man insists throughout "TheRhetoric of Blindness"that Rousseau (except for a rare "mistake") consistently posits a single origin for metaphor and ultimately for language. That in de Man's view, is a void or an absence, but it is nonetheless a single, unified point. origin, Passion is the simple origin of language. Nothingness is the single "referent" or "meaning" of language and of metaphor. Derrida's analysis of the double origin of language does not, of language in absence or in a however, state that Rousseau is blind to the actual "origin" void. Ratherit argues that the theory of language as originatingin passion and the theory of language as originatingin need point to an origin which is irreduciblydouble, and which, as such, predetermines any opposition which could be made between presence and absence, between passion and need. This Derridacalls "the law of the supplement."It is not a law dictating that figural language has no referent other than nothingness but rather that figural language and language in general have their origin in a nature which is never identical to itself- not even in the form of an absence [Of Grammatology 332,335]. It is because Derrida does not share de Man's reductive concept of the origin and of history that he does not privilege Rousseau- or any other writer- in the way de Man does. For Derrida,all discourse, that of Rousseau included, belongs to a metaphysical traditionthat constitutes the "historical"heritage of all language: "Rousseau is not the only one to be caught in the graphic of supplementarity.All sense and as a resultall discourse is caught in it" [349]. To privilege Rousseau as de Man does is to negate what Derridacalls the historicityof Rousseau's discourse- its place "within"a metaphysical tradition in which all discourse is implicated. The relationship of Rousseau's work to this tradition, Derridaargues, is so comto it - de Man'squestion of whether or not plex that the question of Rousseau's"exteriority" his text has any "blindspots"- has no sense other than that which the metaphysical tradition itself gives it. The historicityof which Derrida writes here is of a peculiar type: it is the sign that all discourse, all language, is implicated in an "ensemble"that can no longer approIf it cannot, it is clearly because for Derridathis priately be designated by the term "history." historicity is itself negated when the "ensemble" in question is reduced to the status of a history, insofaras, within that same ensemble, history implies a simple linear structureand a single, undivided origin.8 Once reduced to a history,the metaphysical tradition becomes the object of a historical discourse that claims to exist outside and independently of that tradition, but, as Derrida argues, this is never the case. History, like all discourse, is metaphysical. Derrida judges, then, that the metaphysical tradition cannot be reduced to a history, but this is so precisely because the historicityof all discourse is irreducible. In this sense, then, there are no privileged discourses according to Derrida.The reinscriptionof a given term, while transforming it into an "absolute other," never precludes that term's functioning "within"metaphysics. All and "science")are equally "historical." That is, the terms, including "literature" (and "history" critical force of any term derives from a given context, with the understandingthat no single context, no matter how general, is ever all-determiningwith respect to a term's meaning and strategic value. If one compares "The Rhetoric of Blindness" to the chapter entitled "Metaphor"in Allegories of Reading (where de Man deals anew with Rousseau's Essaisur I'originedes langues and the Second Discourse), the differences are striking. De Man's entire strategy seems to have changed. He appears to be no longer at odds with Derrida concerning the to illustratethe metaphorical origin of significance of Rousseau's choice of the word "giant" did not entailin itselfthe motifof a finalrepression the word'history' of difference, one couldsay 8"lIf can be fromthe outset[d'entr&e de jeu]andthoroughly thatonlydifferences 'historical'" [de parten part]
["LaDiff6rance"12, my translation].
78
SmHL OF A OatSLIT AS &S VILL SrVID ~Z~~. ~ R~t~iC~ Irlt

THIS
LMTTLL
TYPVR~ITLR
DOE
JIH.
%DYRK
language: "YetRousseau stresses fright,and Derrida is certainly right in stating that the act of denomination that follows-calling the man a giant, a process that Rousseau describes as a figural use of language - displaces the referentialmeaning from an outward, visible property for to an 'inward'feeling" [150]. Correspondingly, de Man no longer considers it a "mistake" Rousseau to have chosen fear to illustratethe figuralorigin of language. Instead, this choice "complicates and enriches the pattern to a considerable degree" [150]. A seemingly even more significant change is evident in a passage like the following, where de Man indicates that the positing of metaphor as the origin of language does not automatically remove a given discourse from the metaphysical tradition or make it "deconstructive":"Metaphor overlooks the fictional, textual element in the nature of the entity it connotes. It assumes a world in which intra- and extra-textual events, literal and figural forms of language can be distinguished, a world in which the literaland the figuralare properties that can be isolated and, consequently, exchanged and substituted for each other. This is an error ... ." [152]. Despite these changes, however, the essential elements of de Man's argument in "The Derrida is still implicitly"blind" Rhetoric of Blindness"are retained in "Metaphor." according to the logic of de Man's argument, for though de Man revises his view that it was a "mistake" for Rousseau to designate fear ratherthan passion as the origin of (figural)language, de Man is as insistent as ever that, for Rousseau, language has a single origin, and that that origin is is metaphor. Derrida is still implicitly wrong when he argues that the original figure, "giant," in fact referential for Rousseau (that is, that it refers to an inward emotion), not because Rousseau made a mistake when he chose fear as his example, but because de Man now includes fear in the list of "non-referential" terms, along with passion and language: "The metaphor 'giant,'used to connote man, has indeed a proper meaning (fear),but this meaning is not really proper: it refers to a condition of permanent suspense between a literal world . . and a figuralworld" [151]. Similarly,de Man re-interpretsRousseau's concept of denomination to show that it is also, in essence, a metaphorical process. These parallel revi"The sions lead de Man to a confirmation of the conclusions of "The Rhetoric of Blindness": statement of the Discourse that 'the first nouns could only have been proper nouns' is therefore a statement derived from the logically priorstatement 'thatthe firstlanguage had to be figural.' There is no contradiction if one understands that Rousseau conceives of denomination as a hidden, blinded figure"[153]. De Man'saim in Allegoriesof Reading is still essentially the same as in "The Rhetoric of Blindness." He still seeks to resolve-and to reduce-the contradiction that results because Rousseau posits now metaphor and now denomination as the origin of language. He is explicitly more in agreement with Derrida than ever, but implicitly and polemically as opposed as ever-that is, he is still implicitly responding to the argument that Rousseau makes denomination the single origin of language and not to the argument Derrida actually makes: that the origin of language for Rousseau is double, and thus the historicityof language, complex and irreducible. Ifde Man still argues, in Allegoriesof Reading, that metaphor is the origin of language for Rousseau, it is because the general argument he makes in "TheRhetoric of Blindness"is still in force. Indeed, de Man distinguishes between two levels or uses of the term "metaphor." One is complicit with a metaphysics of presence, with a naive and "erroneous"certitude concerning the possibilityof distinguishingfiguraland literallanguage. The other level or use of the term is clearly more fundamental: "Metaphoris error because it believes or feigns to believe in its own referential meaning" [151]. This sentence clearly indicates the "dedoubleand also the privilege de Man continues to attach to an ment" of metaphor in "Metaphor"
79
blindness by feigning to believe in its own referential "unblinded"metaphor, one that "feigns" meaning. At this fundamental level, the privilege of metaphor as the (structural)origin of language and the corresponding privilege of literature are still very much intact: "All language is language about denomination, that is, a conceptual, figural, metaphorical metalanguage" [152-53]. And not only is the privilege of literary language left intact by "Metaphor";its essential self-reflexivity is still clearly discernible: "Ifall language is about language, then the paradigmatic linguistic model is that of an entity that confronts itself" [153]. In writing of "deconstruction"as that term is elaborated in Jean-Frangois Lyotard's Discours, Figure, Gasche isolates a third moment-which corresponds to the moment of reinscriptionas he defines it in connection with Derrida'sOf Grammatology- in the process of deconstruction. With this third moment (or "negativity"), "deconstruction then seeks to account for the irruptionof the extra-linguisticinto both the reflexive discourse and into its invariable system of differential traits. It is an operation that takes aim at elucidating the linguistic and non-linguisticconditions of the possibilityof reflection"[DC 189]. To open the notion of the text or of language to its outside, Gasche cautions, does "not, however, mean that the text is to be precipitously connected to the real and empirical outside" [182] without the mutual conditioning of such concepts as "text" and "outside" or "theempirical"firstbeing examined. The "outside"of a text (or of language) is also that which "it harbors at its core" [183]. From Gasche's argument here, one could conclude, against de Man, that the literary text and (literary)language never confront an "outside"that would be totally alien to them, but that this is so precisely because they never can be said to confront themselves. The text and (literary)language are at once themselves and other, so radicallyother that they cannot always be confidently identified as text or literarylanguage. What de Man offers is a choice between regarding the "extra-linguistic" as the text in masquerade [Blindness 165] or as a In either phenomenal world that can only be conceived of "inthe substance of naturalism." case, the perimeter of literature is respected and defended, for the extra-linguisticis either assimilated or rejected, the radicalestrangement of literatureand language from themselves is forestalled. De Man's work constitutes a radical theory of literature, one that rejects all traditionalforms of totalization, whether formal, aesthetic, hermeneutic, or historical. But in spite of de Man's resistance to all attempts to close off literature and treat it as a discrete object, his work persistently reassures us that literature, literarylanguage, and the text are there all along, deconstituting themselves in a process that only confirms their priorityand their privilege. According to the logic of such a theory of literature,all forms of history or even of historicityare derived from language. However much literaturemay undercut itself in de Man's theory, it remains closed off from a historicitythat can be reduced neither to an intra-worldlynor a transcendental conception and that, as such, figures the irruptionof the non-linguistic "within"language and literaturethemselves. De Man'stheory of literatureis then a theory of self-reflexivity,and as such, it belongs to a long philosophical tradition. But the traditionallyphilosophical nature of de Man's theory of literature should not be allowed to obscure the efficacity of his critique of philosophy, even of philosophy in its radically critical, Heideggerean form. For de Man's reading of Heidegger's exegeses of Hblderlin argues that it is Heidegger's literary aestheticism - his theory of the ultimate value of the work of art as the privileged locus for the unconcealment of Being-that is the basis of his entire critical strategy and of his radical questioning of metaphysics. And yet, de Man clearly indicates, it is in his pretension to exceed metaphysics and in his literary aestheticism that Heidegger is most theological and, hence, most philosophical in a traditional sense. From such a critical stance as the one implied in de Man's reading of Heidegger, one would have to say that it is always too late to try to restoreto their strict, philosophical meaning those philosophical terms that have been loosely appropriated by literarycritics. Indeed, the idea that a "philosophicallytrained"reader could remain perfectly faithfulto the proper meaning of a term such as deconstruction is clearly naive, because it ignores the conflict of forces within philosophy. For how would a philosophical reader be properly trained?What institutions-or extra-institutionalgroups-would certify his competence? In fact, every attempt to clarifythe proper meaning of philosophical terms is an interpretationthat is to
80
say, it confronts, not an entity that is given, even in its refusalof itself, but a field of conflicting forces in which it too is enmeshed. The nature of this conflict is such that there is no master term to resolve it- whether that supposed term is Being, or literature,or deconstruction. But equally important,there is no way to simply determine the terrain- philosophical or literary critical-on which this conflict is played out, and this fact precludes the possibility of a resolution of the conflict through a properly poetic or properly philosophical definition of the terms involved. Thus if deconstruction has a strategicallyimportant role to play in the conflicts surroundingits "proper" meaning, it is because it is neither a philosophical nor a literary term, and because it thereby indicates that the conflict between literary criticism and philosophy is not just a border conflict for either, but one also at the core of both. WORKSCITED de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.
. Blindness and Insight. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. . "Les Exegeses de H61derlin par Martin Heidegger." Critique 100-101(1955):800-
819.*
" "Impasse de la critique formaliste." Critique 109(1956):483-500. . "Resistance to Theory." Yale French Studies 63(1982):3-20. . "The Rhetoric of Temporality." Interpretation: Theory and Practice. Ed. Charles S.
Singleton. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969, 173-209. Derrida, Jacques. "LaDiff6rance."Marges. Paris:Seuil, 1972, 1-29;"Diff6rance."Marginsof Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
. La Dissemination. . Of Grammatology. Paris: Seuil, 1971; Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1974.

. "LaMythologie blanche." Marges. Paris: Minuit, 1972, 247-324; "White Mythology."
Marginsof Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. . L'Oreillede I'autre.Ed. Claude Levesque and ChristieV. McDonald. Montreal:VLB Editeur, 1982. et . "LaStructure,le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines."L'Ecriture la diff6rence. Paris:Seuil, 1967, 409-28; "Structure,Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Writingand Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
. "Le Retrait de la metaphore." Poesie 7(1979):103-26; "The Retrait of Metaphor."
Enclitic 2.2(1978):5-34. Gasche, Rodolphe. "Deconstruction as Criticism." Glyph 6(1979):177-215. "'Setzung' and 'Ubersetzung': Notes on Paul de Man." Diacritics 11.4(Winter 1981):36-57. "Du trait non adequat: La notion du rapportchez Heidegger."Les Finsde I'homme. _. Paris:Galilee, 1981,133-59.
* This de la CritiqueFormaliste" have recently been translatedand republishedin an essay and "Impasse expanded edition of Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1983.
diacritics/ winter 1983
81

Philosophy Before Literature Deconstuction, Hisoricity, and The Work of Pal de Man

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Descrizione originale:

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Philosophy Before Literature Deconstuction, Hisoricity, and The Work of Pal de Man

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Philosophy Before Literature: Deconstruction, Historicity, and the Work of Paul de Man Author(s): Suzanne Gearhart and Paul

DECONSTRUCTIO AND HISTORICITY,

diacritics / winter 1983

diacritics / winter 1983

.-I i ii; ri ?1/ 11 i' : ?' --\I-_ Irr

----; )Fi- ,:?::r' -i- . : -- ---~ I ii "I --?-,r-. --? i i

r----t? Li ~I:~-E \..-.1.I--

diacritics / winter 1983

diacritics / winter 1983

diacritics / winter 1983

diacritics / winter 1983

diacritics / winter 1983

diacritics / winter 1983

SmHL OF A OatSLIT AS &S VILL SrVID ~Z~~. ~ R~t~iC~ Irlt

diacritics / winter 1983

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

University Press, 1974.

diacritics/ winter 1983

Potrebbero piacerti anche