DECONSTRUCTIONIST TRANSLATION THEORY: VISIBILITY OF DIFFÉRANCE

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 From a paragraph of the Geneva Manuscript omitted in Cohen's translation of the Confessions, cited in Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’ in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) p.143. 2 Paul de Man, ‘Kant and Schiller’, in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p.132. 3 The Messenger Lectures given by De Man at Cornell in Spring 1983 were, in order, ‘Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric’, ‘Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's ’Uber das Marionnettentheater’ (both published in The Rhetoric of Romanticism), ‘Hegel on the Sublime’, ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’, ‘Kant and Schiller’ (all published in Aesthetic Ideology), and ‘Conclusions: Walter Benjamin's ’The Task of the Translator' (published in The Resistance to Theory). 4 Paul de Man, ‘Kant and Schiller’, p.132. 5 Paul de Man, ‘Kant and Schiller’, pp.132-3. 6 Paul de Man, ‘Kant and Schiller’, p.134. 7 For an elaboration of the implications of the ‘Kant and Schiller’ essay for the normative idea of history as temporality see Martin McQuillan, ‘Paul de Man and Art History I: Modernity, Aesthetics and Community in Jacques Rancière’' in Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (eds), Reading Rancière, (London: Continuum, 2011). 8 See the forthcoming proceedings of ‘Performatives after Deconstruction’, a conference of the London Graduate School (29-30 June 2010). 9 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’ and ‘“Le Parjure”, Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying’, in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 10 See ‘Holderlin in America’ in Extreme Reading: essays in literature, theory, and culture (forthcoming). 11 Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, eds. Barbra Cohen, Tom Cohen and John Hillis Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 12 See my review of Material Events in The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 11, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 13 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.125. 14 Jacques Derrida, ‘”Like the Sound of the Sea within a Shell”: Paul de Man's War’ in Memoires for Paul de Man, Revised Edition, trans. Eduardo Cadava et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) 15 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.79. 16 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.71. 17 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.71 and p. 82. 18 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.148. 19 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, pp. 99-100. 20 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.100. 21 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.100. 22 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.104. 23 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.103. 24 I am currently undertaking, along with Kevin Newmark and Marc Redfield, the transcription, translation and editing of the de Man-Derrida correspondence. The most likely letter that de Man may have been referring to is dated June 1980. More to follow. 25 See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. Georges Collins, (London: Verso, 1997). 26 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.103. 27 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.148 and p.160. 28 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.145. See also Geoffrey Bennington, ‘de Man and the Machine’ in Reading de Man Reading, eds. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 29 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.154. 30 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.73. 31 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.79. 32 Martin McQuillan, Paul de Man, (London: Routledge, 199?). 33 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.106. 34 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p. 80. 35 See Texual Allegories at UCI, intro:http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/handle/10575/1091 record: http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/handle/10575/1092 36 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p. 80. 37 Jacques Derrida, ‘Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments’, Critical Inquiry, 15(4), 1989. 38 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.104, pp.124-125, p.149 and pp.154-155. 39 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.104. 40 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.125. 41 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.154. 42 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.154-158. 43 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p. 81. 44 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.106, p.115, p.152 and p.157. 45 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p. 81. 46 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.157. 47 See Elizabeth Roudinescou, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 48 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.105. 49 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p. 106. 50 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p. 115. 51 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p. 140. 52 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p. 151 and p.153. 53 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.153. 54 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.109. 55 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.134. 56 For example, see J Hillis Miller's Wellek Lectures series published as The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). 57 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.138. 58 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.116 and p.139. 59 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p. 159. 60 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.107. 61 We find this use of Heidegger in de Man quite frequently and repeatedly before de Man's use of the term deconstruction or his inaugural reading of Derrida's Of Grammatology. See my ‘Holderlin in America’. 62 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.107 (quotation from de Man's Allegories of Reading). 63 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.107. 64 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.108. 65 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, pp.108-109. 66 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.109. 67 Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Izarry, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). See also my ‘Toucher I: The Problem with Self-Touching’ in Derrida Today 1(2), 2008. 68 Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’, p. 293 69 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.107. 70 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.107. 71 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.74. 72 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.146. 73 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.100. 74 The full sentence helps make sense of this statement: ‘The literality of the letter situates this materiality not so much because it would be a physical or sensible (aesthetic) substance, or even matter, but because it is the place of prosaic resistance… To any organic and aesthetic totalization, to any aesthetic form’ (see Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.150). 75 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p. 85. 76 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p.142. 77 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p. 87. 78 Jacques Derrida, ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, p. 201.

Paul de Man Now, or, Nihilism in the Right Company1 Robert Savino Oventile (bio) [Walter Benjamin’s] “Theologico-Political Fragment” ends up on the word “nihilism,” and mentions nihilism as such. One could say, with all kinds of precautions, and in the right company, and with all kinds of reservations, that—and I think that’s a very small company—that Benjamin’s concept of history is nihilistic. Which would have to be understood as a very positive statement about it. —Paul de Man2 Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin gathers essays by J. Hillis Miller, Tom Cohen, and Claire Colebrook.3 The book also contains a set of notes by Paul de Man from which he delivered “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” the last of the Messenger Lectures de Man gave at Cornell in 1983. Two sets of these notes exist, a shorter and a longer. Theory and the Disappearing Future reproduces the longer set. Colebrook contributes an introduction to the book and transcribed de Man’s notes, which appear both as a facsimile of de Man’s handwritten notebook pages and as the transcription. These notes give the reader entrance into de Man’s workshop of thought, especially if the reader compares the notes with the lecture on Benjamin as it appears in de Man’s posthumous The Resistance to Theory. Three decades have passed since de Man delivered his Benjamin lecture. Catastrophes de Man did not survive to witness now press institutions [End Page 325] toward their limits: religion-inflected wars of choice, teetering capitalism, and climate change. Theory and the Disappearing Future addresses these disasters. Cohen focuses on climate and economic collapse, Miller on religion via de Man’s discussion of the “theotropic,” and Colebrook on attempts to reboot “left” politics to address capitalism’s endgame. The three literary scholars make no claim to be academic specialists in climate change, religion, or political economy, but each has expertise in reading literature for aesthetic appreciation and in distinguishing between the aesthetic as manifest in novels, poems, and plays and aesthetic ideology as manifest in (supposedly) critical discourses. In “Toxic assets: de Man’s remains and the ecocatastrophic imaginary (an American fable),” Cohen argues the implications of climate change expose the humanistic disciplines in U.S. academia as milling about in a precritical cul-de-sac signposted with exhortations toward “inclusion.” In their claims to speak for “social justice,” these disciplines show themselves unaware of or in confusion about the game-ending logics climate change brings. Cohen questions narratives of progress advocating an “empathic” reaching out to some “other” in a gesture of “inclusion.” On the one hand, to gather more persons into the levels and types of consumption upper-middleclass Americans enjoy can only exacerbate the environmental impacts speeding up climate change. On the other hand, this notion of inclusion operates as the benign face of a planetary war to domesticate and dominate, an ongoing, transnational war insuring, for example, that 5 percent of the globe’s populace (the U.S.) may consume 25 percent of global energy production (129). The economic dynamics, political institutions, social structures, and ways of life that evolved under modernity’s banner of humanity are inseparable from the consumption of fossil fuels. The resulting pollutions drive climate changes that are making untenable those ways of life, social structures, political institutions, and economic dynamics. Our modes of thought, habits of narration, and imaginings of horizons need to catch up to this situation. Jeopardizing the concomitants of the “human,” climate change prompts a questioning of that category as an aspect of a now unsustainable modernity. Foucault thought an unforeseen “event” might lead the regimes of knowledge positing the human to “crumble,” and, as a result, “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”4 The “event” precipitating a shift in knowledge regimes and so the erasure of the human, Cohen suggests, is climate change, with rising sea levels bringing, literally and figuratively, the waves Foucault predicted would dissolve the “face drawn in the sand.” However, climate change may also result in the extinction of the species...

J. Hillis Miller (1928–2021) was one of the most prominent figures in literary criticism and theory. After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University, he taught at Johns Hopkins University, Yale University and the University of California at Irvine. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 2002. Miller was president of the Modern Language Association of America in 1986 and contributed significantly to professional academic institutions and organizations throughout his career. As an important representative of the Yale School, he had close relationships with Derrida, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom. Dr. Ning Yizhong did postdoctoral research under his supervision at UCI from 1997 to 1998. This is part of his interviews with Professor Miller during that time. In this interview, Miller talks about the Yale School in general, and Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Harold Bloom in particular. 1

In MemoriamJ. Hillis Miller (1928–2021) Andrzej Warminski (bio) I knew Hillis for a long time—it would be going on forty-six years now—first as a graduate student of comparative literature in the 1970s at Yale; then as a colleague, also at Yale, in the early 1980s; and then finally as a colleague in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine since 1989. J. Hillis Miller's path traversed not one but at least four careers. The first of these was his nearly twenty years at Johns Hopkins (1953–1972), where he distinguished himself as a talented scholar of Victorian literature and as the American "ambassador" for the Geneva School of literary theory. Hillis was also a prominent member of the school. (If you pick up Sarah Lawall's old book on the Geneva School of literary critics, Critics of Consciousness [1968], you will find there chapters devoted to Marcel Raymond, Albert Béguin, Georges Poulet, Jean-Pierre Richard, Jean Starobinski, Jean Rousset, and … J. Hillis Miller. Or should one say "EeLEES MeelER"?) Hillis's second career spanned the memorable years at Yale (1972–1986), when (along with Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman) he gained fame (and notoriety) as a member of the "Yale School" of deconstructive literary criticism. The third career would be his years (1986–2001) as indefatigable Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, where he, along with Jacques Derrida (whom Hillis brought to UCI), was the main shaper of UCI's reputation as a center for the rigorous study of "theory." But his fourth career would have to be Hillis's years since retirement. Hillis's achievements in "retirement" constituted what would be a full and very distinguished career for lesser mortals. This is the case not only in regard to the volume of publications—I count at least fifteen books (with more in [End Page v] production) and numerous articles—and an international lecturing schedule that many a younger scholar would not be able to keep up with. (Particularly in China—imagine what kind of trip you have to take to get from Deer Isle, Maine, to Beijing!) It was also true of Hillis's work as teacher and mentor. Since "retirement" Hillis served as chair or member on the dissertation committees of many students in English and in comparative literature. I know that he also supervised dissertations at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the University of Queensland. This is a remarkable record, and not just in terms of quantity. As anybody who has known Hillis within the academic context would affirm, Hillis was the most generous teacher that any of us will ever come across. His was above all an intellectual generosity: Hillis's willingness to see students' thoughts and projects through to the end without either preemptive acceptance or dismissal. But it was also a simply personal generosity with his time and effort that must have been a response to a genuinely ethical imperative—indeed, the equivalent of a religious "calling" or vocation—to treat others with the respect due to "the other." If Hillis was what one calls a "beloved" teacher, it is no doubt because students recognized this trait and appreciated being treated with respect—intellectual and personal. On the personal side: I have many memories of time with Hillis, a lot of them also involving Derrida, for instance, our annual ritual picking up Derrida at the airport—first at JFK, then at LAX—to take him to New Haven and Laguna Beach, respectively. From LAX we would drive to Irvine, Derrida would pick up his rental car, and then Derrida would drive the rental car, together with Hillis, to Laguna, with me following them, Derrida's very heavy suitcase (full of paper) in the trunk. After his long flight from Paris, Derrida would be weaving all over MacArthur Boulevard (and later Newport Coast Drive). I remember despairing, "Oh God, he's going to get himself killed, and he'll get Hillis killed too!"—while trying to make sure I didn't run into them, what with Derrida braking erratically on the hills. … Hillis and I sometimes...

Since first appearing in 1982 this book has been acclaimed as by far the most readable, concise and authoritative text of its kind. While in no way oversimplifying the complexities of the subject, or understating the challenge it presents, Norris's book sets out to make deconstruction more accessible to the open-minded reader. For this revised edition the author has provided a substantial postscript which looks back over the past ten years of critical debate and seeks to correct some prevalent misunderstandings. The volume also contains an updated bibliography - among the most extensive of its kind - giving details of more than two hundred books published during that period. Some critics have dismissed deconstruction as a harmless academic game; others have denounced it as a terrorist weapon or a discourse of last-ditch nihilist unreason. As Norris demonstrates, both responses are equally wide of the mark. Focusing on Derrida's major texts, and offers a detailed commentary on his readings of Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Husserl, Saussure, Levi-Strauss, J.L. Austin and others, this book brings out the extraordinary subtlety and force that have characterized his project from the outset. Norris also examines the work of those North American critics - Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller and Harold Bloom - who in their own prolonged efforts to move beyond the old' New Criticism have variously registered the impact of Derrida's thought.

Since first appearing in 1982 this book has been acclaimed as by far the most readable, concise and authoritative text of its kind. While in no way oversimplifying the complexities of the subject, or understating the challenge it presents, Norris's book sets out to make deconstruction more accessible to the open-minded reader. For this revised edition the author has provided a substantial postscript which looks back over the past ten years of critical debate and seeks to correct some prevalent misunderstandings. The volume also contains an updated bibliography - among the most extensive of its kind - giving details of more than two hundred books published during that period. Some critics have dismissed deconstruction as a harmless academic game; others have denounced it as a terrorist weapon or a discourse of last-ditch nihilist unreason. As Norris demonstrates, both responses are equally wide of the mark. Focusing on Derrida's major texts, and offers a detailed commentary on his readings of Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Husserl, Saussure, Levi-Strauss, J.L. Austin and others, this book brings out the extraordinary subtlety and force that have characterized his project from the outset. Norris also examines the work of those North American critics - Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller and Harold Bloom - who in their own prolonged efforts to move beyond the old' New Criticism have variously registered the impact of Derrida's thought.

This innovative work sets two texts by two different authors on facing pages, designed so that they read in tandem—Miller's text on the right, Asensi's on the left. It makes a long trajectory, moving back and forth as an ox plows a field, boustrophedonically, to borrow the figure in Manuel Asensi's title. Black Holes, by J. Hillis Miller, analyzes changes in the contemporary research university in the West. The mission of the research university has been profoundly influenced by the end of the Cold War and by globalization, advances in communication technologies, and shifts in funding from the federal government to transnational corporations. Miller aims to discover what the function of the humanities might be in this new kind of university. Echoing Bill Readings, he calls for a university of dissensus that would be made up of adjacent or overlapping communities, each fundamentally other to the others, each inhabited by its own otherness. Each of those opacities is a kind of black hole in the luminosity or enlightenment to which the university has traditionally been dedicated. Miller concludes with sections on Trollope and Proust that attempt to show how otherness is exemplified in the work of two fundamentally dissimilar authors. Manuel Asensi's J. Hillis Miller: or, Boustrophedonic Reading is the first comprehensive interpretation of Miller's work, one that foregrounds its difference not only from the work of his associates—such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Georges Poulet—but from European literary methodologies such as semiotics, Slavic formalism, Glosematics, narratology, structuralism, and reception theory. Bypassing or challenging conventional accounts of Miller's work, Asensi brings a fresh view to his readings of Miller's criticism. He finds there a complex and partially contradictory "matrix" that persists, throughout the apparent methodological changes, from Miller's earliest work to the most recent. According to Asensi, that matrix organizes itself around a fascination with the strangeness or otherness of literary works.

The “Yale School” is the term commonly used to describe the work of five outstanding scholars – Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller – located in the departments of French and Comparative Literature, and of English, at Yale University between 1972 and 1986. It is often referred to as the Yale School of deconstruction or even as “American deconstruction” in general. While de Man used the term “deconstruction” and both Derrida and Miller remained aligned with this term throughout their writing, the connection between Bloom and Hartman and deconstruction is less obvious. Three broad factors, however, link these critics and thinkers. First, this grouping of scholars represented a profoundly influential opening in literary theory and criticism in North America at this time, through which French‐influenced poststructuralist theoretical inquiry came to be accepted, albeit contentiously, in the US humanities, although their reading strategies circled much more within the ambit of Derrida than any other French thinker. Second, and more subtly, what the Yale scholars have most in common is a shared interest in European Romanticism, from Derrida's frequent sorties into eighteenth‐century philosophy, de Man's work on Rousseau, to Hartman's many commentaries on English Romantic poetry. As commentators on eighteenth‐century and early nineteenth‐century thought, the Yale School might be thought of as representing the reopening of Enlightenment thought through deconstructive reading. Finally, their influence is perhaps most keenly felt in the impressive array of graduate students who passed through the Yale comparative literature doctoral program at the time and who subsequently came to dominate literary and cultural theory in the United States for a generation. Accordingly, the Yale School might be more meaningfully thought of as identifying this pedagogical legacy with the expanded graduate diaspora being more worthy of the title “Yale School” than the five original scholars. The only significant volume produced by the Yale quintet together is the collection of essaysDeconstruction and Criticism(Bloom et al. 1979), in which each critic contributes an essay on Shelley's “The triumph of life.”

Speech Acts in Literature: A Review of J. Hillis Miller's Work (Actos de Habla en la Literatura: Reseña de J. Hillis Miller)

A Cultural Ambassador East and West: J. Hillis Miller’s <i>Lectures in China</i>

Henry James and the Art of Impressions examines the concept of the ‘impression’ in the essays and late novels of Henry James. Although Henry James criticized the impressionism which was revolutionizing French painting and French fiction, and satirized the British aesthetic movement which championed impressionist criticism, he placed the impression at the heart of his own aesthetic project, as well as his narrative representation of consciousness. This book tries to understand the anomaly that James represents in the wider history of the impression. To do this it charts an intellectual and cultural history of the ‘impression’ from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, drawing in painting, philosophy (John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, J.L Austin), psychology (James Mill, J.S. Mill, William James, Ernst Mach, Franz Brentano), literature (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde), and modern critical theory (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller). It then offers close readings of James’s non-fictional and fictional treatments of the impression in his early criticism and travel writing (1872–88), his prefaces to the New York Edition (1907–9), and the three novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Golden Bowl (1904). It concludes that the term ‘impression’ crystallizes James’s main theme of the struggle between life and art. Coherent philosophical meanings of the Jamesian impression emerge when it is comprehended as a family of related ideas about perception, imagination, and aesthetics—bound together by James’s attempt to reconcile the novel’s value as a mimetic form and its value as a transformative creative activity.

IN A RECENT ESSAY, entitled Fear and Trembling at Yale, Gerald Graff lambastes some of today's leading literary critics, principally Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, often referred to as the Yale School. Graff points to the supposed self-absorption of these critics, whose agony as is said to be the main subject of their criticism; and he remarks on their disjunctive and self-reflexive style, the creative response they offer to texts, and their overriding rejection of norms of interpretation.'1 These characteristics, in his interpretation, reflect weary of itself and knowing it, but not ready to strike out in a different direction (p. 478). That modernism seems to be epitomized, according to Graff, in Derrida's hope for a Nietzschean affirmation-the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world and without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation.2 Graff writes: The 'freeplay of the world' is the randomness of a world without intrinsic order or meaning; the 'active' interpretation is that which asserts the critic's freedom in this absurd universe-in contrast to the bad faith of criticism that passively conforms to the text or to its 'origin,' the 'author's intention' (p. 473). In the pages that follow, I want to explore certain aspects of the work of the Yale School, particularly in light of the charges Graff brings. I shall refer to all the Yale critics but will focus on Hartman and Derrida. According to Bloom and Hartman, the battle of books implied in Graffs discussion between practical, plainstyle, and objective and their speculative, visionary, and hermeneutical opponents may be the battle of the Ancients and Mod-

Richard Macksey and the Humanities Center Stuart W. Leslie For four days in October 1966 Johns Hopkins became the beachhead of a French invasion that would fundamentally transform the humanities across the American academic landscape. "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy" put Hopkins on the map as the place where the leading lights of French literary theory and their American interlocutors began a generation-long debate about texts, language, reading, and methods that would reshape scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences. Some of the participants, such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan, had already made their mark internationally, and others soon would, most prominently Jacques Derrida. Some had previously taught at Hopkins, including Georges Poulet, and many would subsequently teach there with joint appointments or as visiting faculty, including Derrida. Even the no-shows, such as Michel Foucault, who did serve on the advisory board for the symposium, would become an important part of the Hopkins circle. What began at Hopkins as a wide-ranging discussion about structuralism and post-structuralism, semiotics and deconstruction, soon spread to other universities. The short-lived Hopkins School migrated to and enriched many other top departments of comparative literature. J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man moved together from Hopkins to Yale a few years after the landmark symposium, and recruited Derrida to join them as a regular visitor. Miller and Derrida subsequently decamped for UC Irvine as the founders of its Critical Theory Institute. Hopkins would nonetheless remain an essential contributor to the broader [End Page 925] conversation. The symposium participants, nearly a hundred in all, representing most of the top universities in the northeast, recognized even at the time that something special had happened at Hopkins. Jan Miel of Wesleyan University's Department of Romance Languages spoke for many of his colleagues in saying: "'The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man' reminded me that it seems to be a habit at Hopkins to be first, and that this is usually achieved not by force of numbers or dollars but by listening attentively to what is going on elsewhere and bringing ideas and scholars into a critical intersection" (Macksey, "Final Report" 61). Rene Girard, who had joined the Hopkins Department of Romance Languages in 1957 and already made a name for himself with the publication of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), provided the intellectual heft for the symposium (Haven, Evolution of Desire). Richard Macksey did most of the heavy lifting. He drafted the grant application to the Ford Foundation, handled the complicated logistics of the meeting, and later translated and edited the essays for publication, a volume which became a bestseller for the Johns Hopkins Press. Prodigy and polymath, Macksey had come from Princeton to study with Georges Poulet, and wrote his dissertation, in French, on aesthetics in Proust. While Macksey held an appointment in the Writing Seminars his passion was literary theory and criticism. He preferred reading, discussing, and collecting books to writing them. He amassed a legendary library at his stately Guilford estate, but he never published his dissertation or any other monograph, and only a relative handful of essays and articles, a thin dossier by later standards. Like Hopkins scholars of an earlier era, he aspired to erudition and could hold his own in any number of diverse fields, from mathematics and medicine to classic and contemporary literature (de Vries, "Vocation for the Humanities" 1003–1009). An incurable insomniac prone to composing long letters in the wee hours, and to leaving his Gilman office about the time his colleagues arrived in the morning, Macksey was a gifted and generous teacher who gave away his best ideas, whether in the classroom, around the seminar table in his personal library, or in detailed commentaries written as formal or informal reviews of other scholar's books and articles. Characteristically, he shared his reader's report of Barbara Johnson's Critical Difference with the author, a second-generation Yale School member trained by Paul de Man. "I feel like a surfer riding the most exhilarating wave he has ever encountered," she replied. "Your reading of my manuscript is a more intelligent, critical, and...

Stanley Cavell's work is distinctive not only in its importance to philosophy but also for its remarkable interdisciplinary range. Cavell is read avidly by students of film, photography, painting, and music, but especially by students of literature, for whom Cavell offers major readings of Thoreau, Emerson, Shakespeare, and others. In this first book-length study of Cavell's writings, Michael Fischer examines Cavell's relevance to the controversies surrounding poststructuralist literary theory, particularly works by Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Stanley Fish. Throughout his study, Fischer focuses on skepticism, a central concern of Cavell's multifaceted work. Cavell, following J. L. Austin and Wittgenstein, does not refute the radical epistemological questioning of Descartes, Hume, and others, but rather characterizes skepticism as a significant human possibility or temptation. As presented by Fischer, Cavell's accounts of both external-world and other-minds skepticism share significant affinities with deconstruction, a connection overlooked by contemporary literary theorists. Fischer follows Cavell's lead in examining how different genres address the problems raised by skepticism and goes on to show how Cavell draws on American and Englishromanticism in fashioning a response to it. He concludes by analyzing Cavell's remarks about current critical theory, focusing on Cavell's uneasiness with some of the conclusions reached by its practitioners. Fischer shows that Cavell's insights, grounded in powerful analyses of Descartes, Hume, and Wittgenstein, permit a fresh view of Derrida, Miller, de Man, and Fish. The result is not only a revealing characterization of deconstruction but a much-needed and insightful introduction to Cavell's rich but difficult oeuvre.

Now that the dust has begun to settle after the furor surrounding the discovery after Paul de Man's death in 1983 of his war-time journalism in Nazi-occupied Belgium, it is time to ask what there is to learn from the entire affair aside from the reminder that academics like a good fight as much as everyone else. Certainly, part of what fueled the intensity of the controversy was the sense that the reputation of deconstruction (and, in a sense, literary theory itself) was on the line. So it seems appropriate to ask now what are the consequences of the controversy for deconstruction and, more generally, for literary theory. I am not going to argue for (or against) the proposition that what the young Paul de Man did, said, thought, and wrote between 1940 and 1944 has consequences or implications for deconstruction, as I see no very direct linkbetween the ideas expressed by de Man then and the practice and theory of reading known as deconstruction developed by him, Jacques Derrida, and others twenty to forty years later.' But this does not mean that the controversy over de Man is without consequences for deconstruction or without lessons for literary theorists. On the contrary. What the de Man affair provides is the fullest display we are likely to have of how deconstructive critics actually read texts. In a sense, the de Man affair accomplished what was attempted in the 1979 collection, Deconstruction and Criticism, in which Derrida, de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom all were supposed to read the same poem, Shelley's Triumph of Life. Faced with the discovery of de Man's wartime journalism, these critics, with of course the exception of de Man (and that of Harold Bloom), but now joined by Jonathan Culler, Shoshana Felman, and a host of younger critics, read and interpreted the same texts, de Man's wartime writings, with a focus and intensity not found in the earlier, rather artificial test case. The theoretical interest of the de Man affair is thus that the body of commentary on de Man's wartime journalism gives us an unparalleled occasion to examine the relation between deconstructive interpretive theory and practice. In the 1970s, theorists commonly insisted that practice needed to accord with theory; in keeping with this, phrases of condemna-