Paul De Man Research Articles

Allegorie/Symbol (Allegory/Symbol)

For Goethe, allegory and symbol function as poles of the dyad “sinnliche Darstellung” (representation). He introduced the contrasting pair in the second half of the 1790s, in the context of his project for a German classical aesthetics with Friedrich Schiller, his translation of Germaine de Staël’s Essai sur les fictions (Essay on Fiction), his ongoing work on morphology and optics, and his engagement with idealist philosophy. Despite the priority given to the symbol in Goethe’s scientific writings, he applied the term only occasionally to literature; he remained committed to the sophisticated allegorical poetics and imagery of the high baroque drama (e.g. Shakespeare, Calderón) in essentially all his mature work and was sympathetic to its use by the German Romantics. While Goethe’s own terminology often wavered between the poles of symbol and allegory, his distinction became the standard theme in discussions of poetic representation for more than a century, with symbol heavily prioritized over allegory, and it remains a theme in Goethe scholarship. The post-modernist return to allegory in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man is more a skeptical version of the Goethean symbol than earlier definitions of either allegory or symbol.

Squaring “The rhetoric of temporality”: Greimassian semiotics and de Manian deconstruction

A careful study of the writings of Algirdas Julien Greimas refutes many of Paul de Man’s influential criticisms of semiotics. Greimassian narratology neither reduces rhetoric to grammar nor simply conflates grammar with logic. Instead of forming “a closed totality”, the Greimas square is an open-ended analytical device; it is not the semiotic equivalent of the Schillerian chiasmus. Despite de Man’s claims for the disruptive agency of rhetoric, the elementary structure of signification organizes the possibilities of de Man’s own rhetoric. His essay “The rhetoric of temporality” is a narrative whose four major actants are symbol, allegory, irony, and mimesis. Though the discoursive level of de Man’s essay represses mimesis, it is active in what Greimas would call the argument’s surface grammar, which constrains, without completely determining, the narrative transformations the argument undergoes. While de Man’s analysis regards symbol as epistemologically inferior to allegory and irony, the persistence of symbol helps make “The rhetoric of temporality” a fascinating literary text in its own right.

Reading Literature: Catharsis, Duende, Pleasure and Bliss

In this study I purport to look into the relation between literature and its reception, from reading to literary criticism informed by theory. I start from Manguel and Hirsch’s accounts of reading literature and I continue with David Lodge’s contention that “reading a literary text is a process of continuous interpretation and evaluation” and that “the mere decision to go on reading a novel or a poem to its end is a kind of critical act” (Lodge 2003: 92). After a survey of Lodge’s four models of literary criticism and retaining his argument that criticism may even stifle creativity, I tackle the hypothesis posited by Paul de Man that literature resists theory. Drawing on Borges’s claim that any text is a rewriting of other texts, which underpins Gérard Genette’s theory of “architextuality” and “transtextuality” (Genette 1997: 1), I argue that any text absorbs other texts written before it and will be absorbed in its turn by texts written in its wake. My argument of the reception of literature based on the sense of duende (Hirsch 1999: 277) is rooted in Roland Barthes’s distinction between “pleasure” and “bliss”. I conclude that criticism in its most inspired form retains and restores a hedonistic and immersive bliss.

"Recalling this": Language and Irony in Nadine Gordimer's My Son's Story

Abstract: This essay interprets Nadine Gordimer's My Son's Story in relation to the history of irony, focusing particularly on the ideas of Paul de Man. By considering Gordimer's engagement with theory in essays she wrote during the novel's composition, I argue that she acquired an appreciation for the notion that language mediates one's relationship to reality; such a principle lets her develop the novel's ironic conceit. The effect of the novel is to shift attention away from ethical conundrums posed by oppression to problems of representation: an effect that helps us to understand certain features of theory.

Deconstruction and the Yale School: An Interview with J. Hillis Miller

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

That Monster Over There: Silvia Kolbowski, Trump, and Allegory

Abstract This essay considers the ways in which Silvia Kolbowski's 2018 video That Monster: An Allegory addresses the psychical and political basis of Donald J. Trump's appeal in the 2016 US election. The video is crafted out of a collection of fragments from James Whale's 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein, which Kolbowski plays first with a score by Philip Glass and then in silence. This article asks how such a format might illuminate resonances between certain psychoanalytic concepts and the postmodernist discourse of allegory as exemplified in the work of Paul de Man and Craig Owens. I argue that these theoretical frameworks help us to retain an open reading of Kolbowski's allegory which shifts an interpretive focus from questions of identity to problems of repetition, refusal, and erasure.

Coleridge and the Materiality of Translucence

ABSTRACT Paul de Man’s thoroughgoing critique of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s symbol, which has had a lasting impact on Romantic scholarship, is based upon the supposed incompatibility of materiality and “translucence.” This article sets out to deconstruct de Man’s argument on the basis of a specific appeal to materiality. But it also takes his critique as a virtuous provocation to clarify the relationship between materiality and the metaphysics and phenomenology of translucence. Towards this end, the article develops a material history of translucence, focusing on Coleridge’s early notebook descriptions of weather phenomena, light, and water, and his representations of light in his poem, “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.”

Philosophy as It Is: The Second Mironov Readings

In early April the Department of Philosophy at Moscow State University for two days held the Second Mironov Readings, held in the memory of our colleague, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Science Vladimir Vasilyevich Mironov, a long-time head of the Department. The speeches at the Conference touched upon a wide range of philosophical topics from exiting the Plato’s cage (by Professor Dagmar Mironova) to developing courseware for certain branches of philosophy. Professors of MGIMO University were represented at the Conference by Professor V. S. Glagolev and M. V. Silantyeva. The plenary report by B. I. Pruzhinin and T. G. Shchedrina from the editorial board of the Journal Voprosy Filosofii was followed by an energetic discussion of cultural problems and intellectual continuity. In the track devoted to the problems of culture, the reports by N. V. Kuznetsov (SPbU), A. M. Sokolov (SPbU), A. A. Krotov (MSU), and A. P. Zabiyako (Amur State University) stood out. M. O. Kedrova (MSU) deconstructed the text theory of Paul de Man, head of the Yale School of Criticism. M. A. Kobrinets (MSU) revealed the features of the interpretation of time in the philosophy of the theater of the second half of the 20th century. A brilliant analysis of the theories of historical memory was presented in the report by D. A. Anikina. These and other speeches presented the main directions of the development of domestic cultural knowledge. The influence of V. V. Mironov on this process, as well as on the whole process of the development of philosophy in our Fatherland, can hardly be overestimated.

Free Falling: Wilderson with de Man

ABSTRACT Focusing on the work of Frank B. Wilderson III, this essay offers a new perspective on the central claims of Afropessimism by elucidating its implicit theory of language. Putting Wilderson’s “Raw Life and the Ruse of Empathy” into dialogue with the doctrine of linguistic positing elaborated by Paul de Man in his study of the Romantics, we see that Wilderson’s account of anti-Blackness identifies volatile signifying dynamics that many critical theorists have chosen to ignore. In his analyses of Black speech, Wilderson follows de Man in arguing that language is forever pushing—and frequently expanding—the limits of what can be said or done with words. This insight into the self-transgressive nature of linguistic formations proves crucial to the fight against racist logics of subjugation, which rely on a high level of discursive stability.

Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

Allegory and Accusation: The Rhetoric of Islamo-gauchisme

While historical and anthropological critiques of secularism have illuminated its contradictory claims, they have been less attentive to secularism’s rhetorical force, i.e., its performative effect. Before theorizing the rhetoric of “Islamo-Gauchisme” and contemporary secularism more broadly, then, this article first traces this inattention to an influential line of argument grounded in anthropologist Talal Asad’s critiques of religion and secularism (1993, 2003, 2018), which opposes secularism’s (putatively) transparent and referential language and autonomous subject, derived from Protestantism, to the performative, pedagogical discourse and subject of authoritative traditions of pious discipline, medieval Christianity and contemporary Islam, in particular. Next, the article lays the ground for theorization by foregrounding the performative and citational, or “theatro-graphic” (Weber 2001), qualities of secular rhetoric in Walter Benjamin’s (2019) and Paul de Man’s (1983) treatments of Baroque and pre-romantic allegory. It closes by reading the performative force of accusation and allegory in the avowedly secular (laïc) rhetoric of contemporary French politics.

Stagnating the Life: Modern Wisdom in Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet

This article aims to draw attention to the existence of a common ground on which modern artist and modern thinker come close to each other in articulating a uniquely modern urgency, which gives shape to a new understanding of wisdom. Departing from the role often assigned to the poets/prose writers as the “stagnators of life” in the ages of turmoil, the article examines The Book of Disquiet, owned by Bernardo Soares, the semi-heteronym of Portuguese writer and poet Fernando Pessoa, as a collection of fragments that stage crucial moments of stagnation. After underlining how modernist literature has often been viewed as a separate realm from the devastating socio-political developments of the twentieth century, it exemplifies some experimenting gestures of the so-called “wise” artist through an analysis of The Book of Disquiet. The analysis focuses on the co-existence of poetry and prose, the exteriorization of interior experience via the notion of landscape, and the idea that life can best be observed from a distance after it is fully stopped. Drawing on literary readings of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul de Man, the article aims to show that The Book of Disquiet, like the works of such poet/prose writers as Rilke and Kafka, illustrates how the destiny of modern artist, unlike that of modern world, was to break with the teleological concerns of daily life in favor of capturing life in its reality.

MÈRE MÉTAPHORE

Bridging feminist new materialism and feminist phenomenology, Astrida Neimanis’s volume, Bodies of Water, discusses water in terms of nurturing maternality based on a figural reservoir of what she terms “amniotics” and “planetary breastmilk” in order to posit this maternality as the material condition of the embodiment of life. In this article I show that this imagery is a construction consistently haunted by figures of anxiety and loss. I do this by first revisiting earlier interventions in deconstruction concerning materiality and feminist theory as follows. First, pointing out a resonance between this figuration of wateriness and Kant’s notion of the dynamic sublime, I turn to Paul de Man’s reading of materiality in the Kantian sublime in order to suggest that Neimanis’s figuration of maternal water is an effect of an aesthetic ideology. Subsequently, I will revisit Diana Fuss’s reading of Irigaray – Neimanis’s main feminist resource – to show that the ontological status of water as maternal is constructed via an Irigarayan distinction between metaphor and metonymy. Finally, in order to show ways in which the maternal materiality of water is haunted by figures of anxiety and loss, I will consult Elissa Marder’s more recent work on the maternal function.

Samuel Beckett and E. M. Cioran: The Passion for Ruins

In this article I will focus on three major intersections between Samuel Beckett’s and E. M. Cioran’s works, irrespective of the fact that Beckett chose mainly the medium of prose and theatre, while Cioran chose the philosophical essay. Starting from several biographical encounters mentioned in Beckett’s Letters and Cioran’s Cahiers and the section on Beckett from Anathemas and Admirations, I will first explore autobiography as a “figure of reading” (Paul de Man), and use my role as a reader to become a sort of judge who looks into the different ways in which Beckett and Cioran wrote a type of autobiography always veiled through what I will call Facing / Defacing / Figuring / Disfiguring, also searching for possible reasons why they insisted on believing that in life one must keep on trying against all odds. The second comparison will delve into Beckett’s and Cioran’s “absentheism” (a concept I borrow from Jean-Luc Nancy) and negative theology. The third analogy will deal with the way in which Beckett and Cioran performed failure in their works.

Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800 by Edgar Landgraf and Elliott Schreiber

Reviewed by: Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800 by Edgar Landgraf and Elliott Schreiber Waltraud Maierhofer Edgar Landgraf and Elliott Schreiber. Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020. ix + 340 pp. Given the overwhelming presence of play in today's analog and digital entertainment market, this book is timely. It follows on a number of key studies on play such The Handbook of the Study of Play (2015) and It's All a Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan (2017), not to mention several new scholarly journals. For a collection of contributions by a range of well-known scholars, Play in the Age of Goethe is exceptional in its focus on the period from 1770 to 1830, its philosophical, literary, and pedagogical approaches to play, and their interconnections, or should I say, interplay. The subtitle aptly reflects the four parts of the volume: theories, narratives, children's play in practice, theory, and narratives and—connecting these parts—the play of language. In their engaged and engaging introduction, Landgraf and Schreiber outline the omnipresence of play and games in today's societies and the proliferation of play studies before they outline why the decades around 1800 were the "formative years" for how we understand play today, for the development of related values, and when it gained significance in aesthetics, pedagogy, even in politics and other fields. As they point out, German writers during the Age of Goethe made "a decisive contribution" to the discourse of play. The list of contributors makes an impressive who-is-who of established and up-and-coming scholars in the area of Goethe studies, most of them in literary and cultural studies. All the articles deserve to be introduced here. The first chapters discuss the "free play" of human faculties as idealist concepts that have formed the basis for discussions about play since Kant's Critique of Judgment. In the first chapter, Christian Weber presents careful readings of anacreontic poems by Gleim, Uz, Klopstock, and Goethe for their (sexual) politics of play, emphasizing the playful aspect in this subgenre of erotic poetry. He argues that Goethe invented a "free play of the human faculties" that made possible a free play between the sexes. He further finds indications "that Anacreontic poetry may have impacted Kant's reconceptualization of the aesthetic beauty." "Why bring German Idealism and poststructuralism into the study of play?" is the question that Samuel Heidepriem sets out to answer in his chapter. He argues that Paul de Man's critique of Schiller's notion of play as humanizing overlooks what Kant in his notion of free play has in common with Schiller: both "remain fundamentally humanist in the sense that humanity 'centers' their aesthetic systems." Heidepriem insists that his solution can help address gaps in contemporary theories of play. Lessing's Nathan the Wise and Goethe's Faust I, are the subjects of scholars Edgar Landgraf and Nicholas Rennie, respectively. In both dramas, games of chance are employed to reflect the human condition "in a world where a profound [End Page 197] sense of contingency has come to replace divine providence and necessity." Edgar Landgraf examines Lessing's use of wordplay as well as two key scenes. Saladin's and Sittah's game of chess is where they are "playing with the game," performing a metaplay about the expectations of the other. The second scene is the ring parable. Landgraf teases out the "hermeneutic play that Lessing invokes with his ring parable (and with the drama at large as the parable represents a play within the play that distills and simultaneously reflects on the hermeneutic approach crucial for Lessing's play for tolerance)." Thus, "false play" is at the heart of the ring parable. It is risky but necessary for the pursuit of religious tolerance and sympathy, and social reciprocity: "Lessing's ring parable suggests that we are not to learn from playing, but need to learn how to play this game and put into practice its underlying hermeneutic stance" because only the playful back-and-forth...

Paul de Man’s Flemish

Abstract This essay seeks to fill a gap in the scholarship on Paul de Man by taking stock of the scattered references to Flemish in his later writings. Taking its cue from a passing remark in the most recent de Man biography—namely, that late in life the theorist attested repeatedly in private to the experience of “losing” his native tongue—this article has two aims. One is to show that de Man’s later works bear witness to this ongoing experience of native-linguistic loss; the other is to relate this experience to the theory of deconstruction that de Man had espoused by then. To this latter end, the essay establishes a comparison between de Man’s later works, from Allegories of Reading (1979) onward, and Jacques Derrida’s 1996 autobiographical essay Monolingualism of the Other in order to show how the deconstructive theory conception of language-as-other is rooted in these two thinkers’ respective experiences of native-linguistic loss. The essay closes by reflecting on the contrast between a major language's relative resilience to native-linguistic loss, as in the case of Derrida’s French, and the far more precarious condition of a minor language in exile such as de Man's Flemish.

Open Form in American Poetry: Essays by Burton Hatlen. Ed. Bruce Holsapple. U of Maine P, 2021. 309 pp. plus seven color plates. ISBN 978-0-89101-131-6. $28.00.

<i>Open Form in American Poetry: Essays</i> by Burton Hatlen. Ed. Bruce Holsapple. U of Maine P, 2021. 309 pp. plus seven color plates. ISBN 978-0-89101-131-6. $28.00.

The Per(ver)formative Aspects of Pandemic Fashion Performances: Moschino’s Deconstructive Marionettes

Abstract It is said that due to the social and economic effects of the recent pandemic, fashion has been caught in a destructive position. One aspect is the material change of the fashion objects and the strong pre-eminence of the so-called “stay-at-home collections” against the earlier dominance of the ready-to-wear and haute couture garments intended for social events. An important feature of recent fashion changes is their reliance on current pandemic rules and the related political decisions. In my presentation, I will focus on an interesting example of these pandemic changes: Moschino’s 2021 Spring/Summer Collection. Moschino’s “Marionette Performance” is a perfect example for infelicitous performativity where the show is created in a per(ver)formative (in the Derridean sense) act in the catwalk space. I intend to show that performativity is broken at every step of the show. In this spring collection, not only are the mannequins substituted by dolls but the viewers – some are well known (e.g. Anna Wintour) – are also transformed into marionettes by Jeremy Scott. With a self-ironic gesture, anyone of us from the possible audience can be changed into a puppet. To analyse the performative character of the show, I use deconstructive approaches and ideas. I wish to emphasize the interweaving performative dimensions that, in a sense, preclude each other with the help of Paul de Man’s interpretation of Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater. I want to point out the mechanical, meaningless materiality appearing in the marionettes’ movements on Moschino’s special catwalk. My lecture argues that in the movements of the marionettes the possibility of the clear manifestation of performativity becomes uncertain.

Fiktion bei Paul de Man

"Fiction in Paul de Man. Literature as a modern institution is founded—as, considering the relationship between testamentality and fictionality, Jacques Derrida pointed out in his essay Demeure and pertinent texts—on the one hand on the neutralization of the undecidability that haunts the demarcation line between literature and its “other,” and on the further fiction of comme si on the other. Aiming to inquire into the far side of this institutionally fortified “other fiction,” the present contribution attempts to give an account of Paul de Man's concept of fiction that is based on the non-phenomenal effects of a machine-like textuality. This concept appears—even if in a rather dispersed way—again and again in central contexts of the Rousseau part of Allegories of Reading, but has received surprisingly little attention in the literature on de Man. The focus of this article lies on the close reading of a longer passage from the final chapter of the mentioned work. Keywords: deconstruction, fiction, Paul de Man, testimony, textuality"

Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings by Thangam Ravindranathan

Reviewed by: Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings by Thangam Ravindranathan Derek Schilling (bio) Thangam Ravindranathan. Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings. Northwestern UP, 2020. 253 pp. ISBN 9780810140714 and 9780810140721. So forceful in the 1990s was the new historicist turn away from deconstructive readings of literature and philosophy that once familiar critical gestures have, in the new millennium, come to acquire an obdurate strangeness. Readers who enter (unawares?) a textual thicket without hors-texte find themselves wandering, and wondering if language is so wrought as to endlessly undo the work of reference it was enlisted to support. The eccentricity of deconstruction today betrays an empiricist and quantitative bent within literary studies; it is likely also the by-product of retrospective assessments of the dual legacy of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, a legacy that has been dissected from the standpoint of discourse, institutions (including that of “French Theory”), and even biography. In mistaking deconstruction for its outward manifestations and treating it as historical artifact, might a generation of scholars have come to forget that an animal as restive as deconstructive reading was never fully domesticated in the first place? At its bristling best, always unequal to itself, it has remained —like poetry in Derrida’s celebrated reading “Che cos’è la poesia?”—a hedgehog of sorts, now gathered into an impossibly compact, inscrutable ball, now unfolding its spines the better to probe its surroundings. The exemplary Behold an Animal reminds us that, even as we take pains to measure the literary record against such hypostases as reality, history, or materiality, we must not give up on literariness and on paradox as a means to place thought under tension. Far from a critical approach circumscribed in a place and a time, suggests Ravindranathan, deconstruction continues to name the very possibility of reading. Its title borrowed from a quip by Nietzsche on the impossibility of definition (“Behold, a mammal”), Behold an Animal turns on a question that is simple only on its face: “What do (we think) we see when (we think) we see an animal in a text?” (5). G.W. Leibniz’s distinction [End Page 844] between (unconscious, immediate) perception and (conscious, reflexive) apperception is relevant here (199): texts ask of us, argues Ravindranathan, not only that we identify or recognize animals when they appear literally in a story, but that we follow their tracks into corners of the text where they are not, are no longer, or have yet to appear. Acutely attentive to the “distribution” (5) of realism and un-realism in the figural economy of late modern and contemporary texts, the author maintains that animals call for peculiar forms of readerly attention, as if to acknowledge their receding presence in everyday life and, indeed, in the biosphere itself. Where animals—say, a draught horse—once served in works of literature to index the real and to foster, following Barthes, a “reality effect,” works by such post-realists as Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Éric Chevillard, Marie NDiaye, and Marie Darrieussecq posit animals as “riddled entities, ‘vague’ places where literature most self-consciously admits the weirdness of its commerce with the world” (4). The animal calls for “exorbitant” readings that allow us to follow complex pathways of thought along which reference breaks down and a generative intertextuality takes hold. Thus Ravindranathan purports to read core texts of fiction “with” key moments in the history of philosophy (Blanchot on the siren’s song; Levinas on the concentrationary guard dog Bobby in “The Name of a Dog”; Deleuze on Lewis Carroll’s Alice; the sorities paradox of the heap and the grain of sand . . .), or “with” other literary texts, whether by the same author or by others, from Homer to Michaux. Barking dogs in NDiaye’s En famille put us on the trail of other canines in Mon cœur à l’étroit, Trois femmes puissantes, or Ladivine; Chevillard’s Sans l’ourang-outan prompts a re-reading of voice, language, and animality in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the rue Morgue” with La Fontaine’s fables as a stopover point. Any reader who harbors prejudice against the literary subfield of animal studies should be prepared to abandon their preconceptions from...