This last work by Paul de Man before his death in 1983 brings together what is essentially his complete work on the study of European Romanticism and post-Romanticism.
Finally, our argument suggests that the relationship and the distinction between literature and philosophy cannot be made in terms of a distinction between aesthetic and epistemological categories. All philosophy is condemned, to the extent that it is dependent upon figuration, to be literary and, as the depository of this very problem, all literature is to some extent philosophical. The apparent symmetry of these statements is not as reassuring as it sounds since what seems to bring literature and philosophy together is, (...) as in Condillac's argument about mind and object, a shared lack of identity or specificity. Contrary to common belief, literature is not the place where the unstable epistemology of metaphor is suspended by aesthetic pleasure, although this attempt is a constitutive moment of its system. It is rather the place where the possible convergence of rigor and pleasure is shown to be a delusion. The consequences of this lead to the difficult question whether the entire semantic, semiological, and performative field of language can be said to be covered by tropological models, a question which can only be raised after the proliferating and disruptive power of figural language has been fully recognized. Paul de Man, Tripp Professor in the humanities and chairman of the comparative literature department of Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Political Allegory in Rousseau," appeared in the Summer 1976 issue and appears in his book Allegories in Reading. (shrink)
This last work by Paul de Man before his death in 1983 brings together what is essentially his complete work on the study of European Romanticism and post-Romanticism.
We are far removed, in this section of the Encyclopedia on memory, from the mnemotechnic icons described by Francis Yates in The Art of Memory and much closer to Augustine's advice about how to remember and to psalmodize Scripture. Memory, for Hegel, is the learning by rote of names, or of words considered as names, and it can therefore not be separated from the notation, the inscription, or the writing down of these names. In order to remember, one is forced (...) to write down what one is likely to forget. The idea in other words, makes its sensory appearance, in Hegel, as the material inscription of names. Thought is entirely dependent on a mental faculty that is mechanical through and through, as remote as can be from the sounds and the images of the imagination or from the dark mine of recollection, which lies beyond the reach of words and of thought[…]No wonder, then, that Hegel's Aesthetics turns out to be a double and possibly duplicitous text. Dedicated to the preservation and the monumentalization of classical art, it also contains all the elements which make such a preservation impossible from the start. Theoretical reasons prevent the convergence of the apparently historical and the properly theoretical components of the work. This results in the enigmatic statements that have troubled Hegel's readers, such as the assertion that art is for us a thing of the past. This has usually been interpreted and criticized or, in some rare instances, praised as a historical diagnosis disproven or borne out by actual history. We can now assert that the two statements "art is for us a thing of the past" and "the beautiful is the sensory manifestation of the idea" are in fact one and the same. To the extent that the paradigm for art is thought rather than perception, the sign rather than the symbol, writing rather than painting or music, it will also be memorization rather than recollection. As such, it belongs indeed to a past which, in Proust's words, could never be recaptured, retrouve. Art is "of the past" in a radical sense, in that, like memorization, it leaves the interiorization of experience forever behind. It is of the past to the extent that it materially inscribes, and thus forever forgets, its ideal content. The reconciliation of the two main theses of the Aesthetics occurs at the expense of the aesthetic as a stable philosophical category. What the Aesthetics calls the beautiful terms turns out to be, also, something very remote from what we associate with the suggestiveness of symbolic form.Paul de Man, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insight and Allegories of Reading and is currently completing a book tentatively titled The Resistance to Theory. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Political Allegory in Rousseau", "The Epistemology of Metaphor", and "A Letter". (shrink)
Rosso: Can you say something more about the differences between your work and Derrida’s?De Man: I’m not really the right person to ask where the difference is, because, as I feel in many respects close to Derrida, I don’t determine whether my work resembles or is different from of Derrida. My initial engagement with Derrida—which I think is typical and important for all that relationship which followed closely upon my first encounter with him in Baltimore at the colloquium on “The (...) Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”—had not to do with Derrida nor with me, but with Rousseau. It happened that we were both working on Rousseau and basically on the same text, by sheer coincidence. It was in relation to Rousseau that I was anxious to define, to try to work out some … not discrepancies … but some change of emphasis between what Derrida does and what I’m doing. And there may be something in that difference between us that remained there, to the extent that in a very genuine sense—not as denegation or as false modesty —my starting point, as I think I already told you, is not philosophical but basically philological and for that reason didactical, text-oriented. Therefore I have a tendency to put upon texts an inherent authority, which is stronger, I think, than Derrida is willing to put on them. I assume, as a working hypothesis , that the text knows in an absolute way what it’s doing. I know this is not the case, but it is a necessary working hypothesis that Rousseau knows at any time what he is doing and as such there is no need to deconstruct Rousseau. In a complicated way, I would hold to that statement that “the text deconstructs itself, is self-deconstructive” rather than being deconstructed by a philosophical intervention from the outside of the text. The difference is that Derrida’s text is so brilliant, so incisive, so strong that whatever happens in Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. He doesn’t need Rousseau, he doesn’t need anybody else; I do need them very badly because I never had an idea of my own, it was always through a text, through the critical examination of a text … I am a philologist and not a philosopher: I guess there is a difference there … I think that, on the other hand, it is of some interest to see how the two different approaches can occasionally coincide, at the point that Gasché in the two articles he as written on this topic says that Derrida and myself are the closest when I do not use his terminology, and the most remote when I use terms such as deconstruction: I agree with that entirely. But, again, I am not the one to decide on this particular matter and I don’t claim to be on that level … Stephano Rosso teaches English literature at the University of Verona and is writing a dissertation in comparative literature at SUNY—Binghamton. Among other works, he has coedited, with Naurizio Ferraris, Decostruzione tra filosofia e letteratura and Estetica e decostruzione. He is presently translating Paul de Man’s Resistance to Theory into Italian. (shrink)
In the Social Contract, the model for the structural description of textuality derives from the incompatibility between the formulation and the application of the law, reiterating the estrangement that exists between the sovereign as an active, and the State as a static, principle. The distinction, which is not a polarity, can therefore also be phrased in terms of the difference between political action and political prescription. The tension between figural and grammatical language is duplicated in the differentiation between the State (...) as a defined entity and the State as a principle of action or, in linguistic terms, between the constative and the performative function of language. A text is defined by the necessity of considering a statement, at the same time, as performative and constative, and the logical tension between figure and grammar is repeated in the impossibility of distinguishing between two linguistic functions which are not necessarily compatible. It seems that as soon as a text knows what it states, it can only act deceptively, like the thieving lawmaker in the Social Contract, and if a text does not act, it cannot state what it knows. The distinction between a text as narrative and a text as theory also belongs to this field of tension. Paul de Man, Tripp Professor in the humanities and chairman of the French department of Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. His forthcoming study of the theory of figural language, of which this essay will be a part, centers on Rousseau and involves as well Rilke, Proust, and Nietzsche. He has also contributed "The Epistemology of Metaphor" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)
