[Andrzej Warminski] Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

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Ideology,Rhetoric,

Aesthetics

The Frontiers of Theory

For De Man

Andrzej Warminski


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Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics


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The Frontiers of Theory

Series Editor: Martin McQuillan

Available TitlesReading and Responsibility:Deconstruction’s TracesDerek Attridge

Of Jews and AnimalsAndrew Benjamin

Not Half No End: MilitantlyMelancholic Essays in Memory of

Jacques DerridaGeoffrey Bennington

Dream I Tell YouHélène Cixous

Insister of Jacques DerridaHélène Cixous

Volleys of Humanity: Essays1972–2009Hélène Cixous

Poetry in Painting: Writings onContemporary Arts and Aesthetics

Hélène Cixous, ed. Marta Segarra and Joana Masó

The Poetics of Singularity: TheCounter-Culturalist Turn inHeidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and thelater GadamerTimothy Clark

About Time: Narrative, Fiction andthe Philosophy of TimeMark Currie

The Unexpected: NarrativeTemporality and the Philosophy ofSurpriseMark Currie

The Post-Romantic Predicament Paul de Man, ed. Martin McQuillan

Geneses, Genealogies, Genres andGenius

Jacques Derrida

Scandalous Knowledge: Science,Truth, and the HumanBarbara Herrnstein Smith

To Follow: The Wake of JacquesDerridaPeggy Kamuf

Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings inLiterature and Art Robert Rowland Smith

Veering: A Theory of LiteratureNicholas Royle

Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For DeManAndrzej Warminski

Material Inscriptions: RhetoricalReading in Practice and Theory

Andrzej WarminskiForthcoming TitlesWorking with Walter Benjamin:Recovering a Political PhilosophyAndrew Benjamin

Readings of DerridaSarah Kofman, trans. Patience Moll

Hélène Cixous’s Semi-Fictions: At theBorders of TheoryMairéad Hanrahan

Against Mastery: Creative Readingsand Weak ForceSarah Wood

The Paul de Man NotebooksPaul de Man, ed. Martin McQuillan

Visit the Frontiers of Theory website at www.euppublishing.com/series/tfot


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Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

For De Man

Andrzej Warminski


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For Katia and Adrian

© Andrzej Warminski, 2013

Edinburgh University Press Ltd22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF

www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon byServis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire,and printed and bound in Great Britain byCPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 8126 6 (hardback)ISBN 978 0 7486 8127 3 (webready PDF)ISBN 978 0 7486 8128 0 (epub)

The right of Andrzej Warminskito be identified as author of this workhas been asserted in accordance withthe Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.


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Contents

Series Editor’s Preface viAuthor’s Preface viiiAcknowledgements xiiList of Abbreviations xiv

PART I Aesthetic Ideology

1. Allegories of Reference: An Introduction to AestheticIdeology 3

2. “As the Poets Do It”: On the Material Sublime 38

3. Returns of the Sublime: Positing and Performative in Kant,Fichte, and Schiller 65

4. Lightstruck: “Hegel on the Sublime” 79

PART II Hegel/Marx

5. Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life 99 6. Man and Self-Consciousness: Kojève, Romantic Ironist 127 7. Next Steps: Lukács, Jameson, Post-Dialectics 137

PART III Heidegger/Derrida

8. Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin 159 9. Discontinuous Shifts: History Reading History 17310. Machinal Effects: Derrida With and Without de Man 185

Appendix 1: A Question of an Other Order: Deflections of theStraight Man 203

Appendix 2: Response to Frances Ferguson 215

Index 220


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Series Editor’s Preface

Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, endsand after-life. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is nolonger resistant to Theory but a significant consensus has been estab-lished and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstreamof the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view andnew generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leavesso-called Theory in an interesting position which its own proceduresof auto-critique need to consider: what is the nature of this mainstreamTheory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other

disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction andwhat processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have takenplace to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of amore-than-critical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, whichthinks thought’s own limits?

‘Theory’ is a name that traps by an aberrant nominal effect the trans-formative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought inan inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent: as a

‘name’, a word and a concept, Theory arrests or misprisions such think-ing. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or to abandonTheory (on the contrary one must always insist on the it-is-necessary ofTheory even if one has given up belief in theories of all kinds). Rather,this series is concerned with the presentation of work which challengescomplacency and continues the transformative work of critical thinking.It seeks to offer the very best of contemporary theoretical practice inthe humanities, work which continues to push ever further the frontiersof what is accepted, including the name of Theory. In particular, it is

interested in that work which involves the necessary endeavour of cross-ing disciplinary frontiers without dissolving the specificity of disciplines.Published by Edinburgh University Press, in the city of Enlightenment,this series promotes a certain closeness to that spirit: the continued


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Series Editor’s Preface vii

exercise of critical thought as an attitude of inquiry which countersmodes of closed or conservative opinion. In this respect the series aimsto make thinking think at the frontiers of theory.

Martin McQuillan


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Author’s Preface

This is a book about the work of Paul de Man on the critique of aes-thetic ideology and the strange “materiality” – a “materiality withoutmaterialism,” as Derrida has put it – that emerges from it. It consistsof three groups of essays – “I. Aesthetic Ideology,” “II. Hegel/Marx,”“III. Heidegger/Derrida” – and it is “about” de Man in two senses.Approximately half of the book – in particular, Chapters 1, 2, 4, 9, and10 – consists of an explication and a reading of crucial articulationsin de Man’s project; and the other half would extend this project andits implications by a reading of “material” moments in Hegel, Marx,

and the Marxian tradition (Lukács, Jameson) on the one hand and inHeidegger’s hermeneutics (and its radicalization by Derrida) on theother. The book’s subtitle – “For De Man” – could be read somewhatlike Althusser’s Pour Marx.

Paul de Man’s turn to questions of ideology and the political in hislate work was anything but an arbitrary choice or an accident of biogra-phy. Rather it was a move that comes directly out of de Man’s particularkind of rhetorical reading – i.e., one which goes through and past tropes

to demonstrate how tropological systems undo themselves and producea material remainder or residue, what de Man comes to call “materialinscription.”1 And since what gets undone in this self-undoing of tropo-logical systems is the phenomenality – including what de Man calls “thephenomenality of the linguistic sign” – that tropes on the one handmake possible, one main casualty is the value of the aesthetic (and ofthe aesthetic function of literature). This deconstruction of the aestheticis to be read in those texts that take the aesthetic not as a value but as aphilosophical category subject to critique: for example and above all, in

the philosophical aesthetics of Kant and of Hegel. That is, paradoxically

1 See my companion volume to this one: Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Readingin Practice and Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).


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Author’s Preface ix

but consistently enough, the critique of aesthetic ideology is to be readalready in the founding texts of aesthetic theory, and it is only thanksto a relapse and a regression – what de Man calls the “Schillerization ofKant,” for example – in the reception of these texts that we can blunt

their critical thrust and continue to teach literature as an aesthetic func-tion. “We are all Schillerians,” says de Man at a lecture occasion, “noone is Kantian any more.”

In thus restoring the critical power of Kant’s and Hegel’s aesthetics, deMan accomplishes several things. For one, he begins what is perhaps themost serious and important rethinking of the question of ideology sinceAlthusser’s essays of the 1960s and 1970s. He also provides us with away to pose anew the (German Romantic) question about philosophy’s

“presentation” (Darstellung ) in a discourse that would lay claim totransparency on the basis of a taken for granted “phenomenalizationof the sign” – i.e., an aesthetic moment that, once read, turns out to beanything but stable. Unfortunately, de Man was not able to complete hisproject and left us something like an outline and some (at times cryptic)hints and indications of paths to follow. The present volume attemptsto clarify this project while doing justice to its rigor and to extend it inways productive for critical thought. It comes with a certain modestconfidence – or at least a willingness to take a certain risk – that the kind

of reading represented in these essays and their attentiveness to the ques-tion of language is needed on the contemporary critical scene, and thatrather than harkening back to a past over and done with, it may openup or point to a different future.

Taking the place of an Introduction, Chapter 1 is a detailed exposi-tion of de Man’s project in Aesthetic Ideology and how it relates to therhetorical readings in his Allegories of Reading . The chapter ends witha reading of de Man’s Pascal essay (in particular his difficult account

of the zero) as an example of what it means to read “from the point ofview of the quadrivium” and as an anticipation of de Man’s essays onKant and Hegel. Chapter 2 is a very close reading of de Man’s mainessay on Kant’s sublime and the linguistic models (“tropological”and “performative”) and peculiar “materiality” and “material vision”(ascribed to “the poets”) that emerge from it. In order to explicate deMan’s argument, the chapter also needs to perform its own commentaryon Kant’s difficult “Analytic of the Sublime.” Chapter 3 is a shorterpiece that follows up on the reading of Kant in Chapter 2 to demon-

strate that the aporetic structure of the Kantian sublime leaves tracesboth in the thought of Fichte and in the aesthetic theory of Schiller. Thechapter shows how Fichte and, in particular, Schiller bring to resolu-tion Kant’s unresolvable problematic of the sublime by resorting to


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x Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

what is in fact the beautiful – thus turning themselves into “aestheticideologists.” Chapter 4 is a commentary on what is perhaps de Man’smost difficult essay (“Hegel on the Sublime”) and it seeks to explainprecisely how it is that de Man draws political implications out of

Hegel’s sublime. Although the chapter is mostly an active paraphraseof de Man’s argument – due, again, to its sheer difficulty – it maycontain one bit of actual “reading” at the end in its response to MarcRedfield’s claim that de Man makes a mistake and tries to have Hegel’stext say what it in fact does not say. As the “programmatic” essay of the“Hegel/Marx” section of the book, Chapter 5 tries to demonstrate howa certain “Marxian” material moment already inhabits Hegel’s verydifficult argument in the Phenomenology of Spirit at the crucial point

in the dialectic of “Self-consciousness” where the text resorts to a phe-nomenalization of the sign in order to suture the break between “life”and “consciousness.” This material moment – something of a stutterin Hegel’s text – is what produces a remainder and a residue: amongother things, Marx and the Marxian tradition. The shorter Chapter6 shows how this “material moment” in Hegel’s argument “lives on”in Kojève’s famous interpretation of the dialectic of life and desire inthe Phenomenology. In remediating what Hegel’s text in fact does notmediate, Kojève winds up to be “more Hegelian than Hegel.” Chapter

7 demonstrates how the “material moment” in Hegel recurs in Lukács’svery attempt to say what “the class consciousness of the proletariat”amounts to and how both Lukács in History and Class Consciousness and Jameson in Postmodernism end up with something of a post- orother-than-dialectical materialism and an understanding of ideologyas allegorical sign. The third section (“Heidegger/Derrida”) opens withChapter 8’s critical reading of Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin’shymn “Der Ister” (i.e., the river Danube). It turns out that Heidegger’s

“ontologization” of Hölderlin cannot account for what is truly, materi-ally, historical in Hölderlin. Chapter 9 is a reading of two of de Man’s1967 Gauss lectures – one on Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin asan “apocalyptic” poet and one on Wordsworth and Geoffrey Hartman’salso rather “apocalyptic” interpretation of his poetry – which arguesthat de Man is pushed toward rhetoric and rhetorical terms by hisreading of Heidegger’s failure to think “the temporality of poetic form”in Hölderlin. In de Man’s Wordsworth lecture we can almost “see” theturn to rhetoric take place in the text’s two “layers” – the original lecture

of 1967 and some interpolated passages from 1971. Paradoxically butin fact consistently enough, de Man’s alleged turn (from history and) torhetoric is legible as, in fact, always already a turn to history. Chapter10 attempts to disentangle Derrida’s perversely argumentative account


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Author’s Preface xi

of de Man’s reading of Rousseau (in “Excuses”) from what de Man’stext actually says – which turns out to be not all that different fromwhat Derrida says! – and in the process shows how both Derrida andde Man (and their altercation about Rousseau) are already inscribed in

Rousseau’s text. While Derrida’s text in a certain sense “gets back at”de Man for his critical reading of Grammatologie in 1970 – and tries to“take back” the term “deconstruction” – it also performs something likean act of forgiveness for “the unforgivable”: i.e., de Man’s wartime writ-ings. The book includes two appendices from, as it were, the archive of“deconstructive reading”: one is a response to Carol Jacobs’s reading ofKleist and Kant; the other is a response to Frances Ferguson and what ittakes as her misunderstanding of the zero in de Man’s reading of Pascal.


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Acknowledgements

A number of the chapters that follow were published previously. Chapter1 first appeared as the Introduction to Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology,ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1996), pp. 1–32; Chapter 2 in Material Events, Paul de Man and theAfterlife of Theory, ed. Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller,and Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,2001), pp. 3–31; Chapter 3 in MLN 116:5 (December 2001), pp.964–78; Chapter 4 in The Political Archive of Paul de Man: Property,Sovereignty, and the Theotropic, ed. Martin McQuillan (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 118–30; Chapter 5 in YaleFrench Studies 88 (1995), pp. 118–41; Chapter 6 in Parallax 4:4(1998), pp. 57–64; Chapter 8 in Yale French Studies 77 (1990), pp.193–209; Chapter 9 in Romantic Circles/Romantic Praxis (May 2005);Chapter 10 in MLN 124:5 (December 2009), pp. 1,072–90. Appendix1 appeared in Diacritics 9:4 (December 1979), pp. 70–8; Appendix 2 inDiacritics 17:4 (Winter 1987), pp. 46–8. The Johns Hopkins UniversityPress is the copyright holder of the texts originally printed in MLN and

Diacritics. Permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged.Nearly all of the chapters and appendices in this book originated ininvited lectures or essays written for various occasions. For these invita-tions and occasions, I am grateful to Wlad Godzich, Lindsay Waters,the Comparative Literature graduate students in 1998 at SUNY Buffalo,Marc Redfield, Jonathan Culler, Ned Lukacher, Rainer Nägele, HaunSaussy, Carol Jacobs, and Cynthia Chase. Over the many years, I haveaccumulated particular debts for the intellectual and personal generos-ity of Dick Macksey, Cathy Caruth, Neil Hertz, Werner Hamacher,

and Sam Weber. Without J. Hillis Miller’s persistently cheerful andunaccountable encouragement – and Tom Cohen’s well- aimed nudges– neither this book nor Material Inscriptions would have seen the lightof day. The same is especially true for Martin McQuillan’s understated


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Acknowledgements xiii

kindness and what I can only call (a demonstrably undeserved) faith inmy work and me. At Edinburgh University Press, I am grateful for thehelp of Jackie Jones, Jenny Daly, Rebecca MacKenzie, and James Dale.Thanks to Cathy Falconer for her expert and intelligent copyediting. I

have been fortunate to have the long-term friendships of Ellen Burt andKevin Newmark. The decades of electronic dialogue with Kevin havebeen particularly sustaining. I do know how lucky I am to have Cathrine

Ji’s love and unrelenting admonishment. Katia and Adrian – to whomthis book is dedicated – make it all worthwhile.


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List of Abbreviations

Works by Paul de ManAI Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1996)AR Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,

Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979)BI Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary

Criticism, Second Edition, Revised (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1983)

RCC Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminarand Other Papers, ed. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and AndrzejWarminski (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)

RR The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1984)

RT The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1986)


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Part I:

Aesthetic Ideology


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Chapter 1

Allegories of Reference: An Introduction to Aesthetic Ideology

“La fonction reférentielle est un piège, mais inévitable”

1

Aesthetic Ideology

The texts collected in Aesthetic Ideology were written, or delivered aslectures on the basis of notes, during the last years of de Man’s life,between 1977 and 1983. With the possible2 exception of the earliest text– “The Concept of Irony” (1977) – all of these essays and lectures were

produced in the context of a project that we might call for short-handpurposes a critique or, better, a “critical- linguistic analysis” of “aes-thetic ideology.”3 This project is clearly the animating force of all theessays de Man produced in the early 1980s – and not just those explic-itly concentrating on philosophical aesthetics to be included in the bookproject he called Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology,4 but also the essays onliterary critics and theorists like Riffaterre, Jauss, and Benjamin thatmade up a second of de Man’s book projects – part of which appeared

posthumously as The Resistance to Theory (1986) – as well as the twolate essays (on Baudelaire and Kleist) expressly written for the collec-tion The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984). Although the general projectis recognizable throughout these texts, it takes different forms in thecontext of the three particular book projects.

The essays on Riffaterre and Jauss, for example, demonstrate howboth the critic whose point of departure is based on “formalist” pre-suppositions and the critic whose point of departure is based on “her-meneutic” presuppositions depend on the category of the “aesthetic,”

indeed on a certain “aesthetization,” to negotiate the passage betweenthe formal linguistic structures and the meaning of the literary textsthey interpret. This “aesthetization” turns Riffaterre into something of“a classical metaphysician, a Platonic swan disguised in the appearance


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4 Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

of a technician of teaching” (RT 40), and it allows Jauss to arrive at a“condensation of literary history and structural analysis” (RT 64) – asthough, for both, “the hermeneutics of reading” could indeed be madecompatible with “the poetics of literary form” (RT 31). But since this

compatibility depends on the stability of the category of the aesthetic, itbecomes questionable once this category is shown to be as problematicas it has in fact always been for literary texts like those of Baudelaire,for “theoreticians” of the literary and of allegory like Benjamin, and fortruly critical philosophers like Kant and Hegel. In the case of Riffaterre,the uncritical confidence in the stability of the category of the aestheticcomes at the price of a certain “evasion” – “a figural evasion which,in this case, takes the subtly effective form of evading the figural” (RT

51); and in Jauss it is thanks to a certain “omission” – characteristic ofwhich is “Jauss’s lack of interest, bordering on outright dismissal, in anyconsiderations derived from what has, somewhat misleadingly, come tobe known as the ‘play’ of the signifier, semantic effects produced on thelevel of the letter rather than of the word or sentence and which there-fore escape from the network of hermeneutic questions and answers”(RT 65). And whether by “evasion” or “omission,” the recourse of eachto the stability of the category of the aesthetic ends up turning awayfrom that which de Man calls the “materiality” of the text and which,

in the case of both the Riffaterre and the Jauss essays, is given the name“inscription.” It is inscription, the “literalism of the letter,” that rendersBaudelaire’s (and Benjamin’s) allegory “material or materialistic” and“cuts it off sharply from symbolic and aesthetic syntheses” (RT 68),that renders the song of the sphinx in Baudelaire’s “Spleen II” “not thesublimation but the forgetting, by inscription, of terror, the dismember-ment of the aesthetic whole into the unpredictable play of the literaryletter” (RT 70).

We could say, then, that the essays on Riffaterre and Jauss dem-onstrate how their projects rest upon an unwarranted confidence inthe stability of the category of the aesthetic and how this uncriticalconfidence itself depends upon an evasion or omission of factors andfunctions of language that resist being phenomenalized and that there-fore disable any sublation or sublimation of texts to the status of “aes-thetic objects” which would afford a cognition proper to them. But ifthese essays go a long way toward demonstrating the instability of thecategory of the aesthetic – with the help of Benjamin and Nietzsche,

and, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, “literary” texts like Kleist’s“Marionettentheater” and Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” – the essaysand lectures collected in Aesthetic Ideology – in particular the essayson Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Hegel’s Aesthetics – examine the


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Allegories of Reference 5

nature of this instability in texts whose project is not an uncriticalacceptance or use of the aesthetic for pedagogical or ideological pur-poses but rather a critique of the aesthetic as a philosophical category.For both Kant and Hegel, the investment in the aesthetic as a category

capable of withstanding “critique” (in the full Kantian sense) is consid-erable, for the possibility of their respective systems’ being able to closethemselves off (i.e., as systems) depends upon it: in Kant, as a principleof articulation between theoretical and practical reason; in Hegel, as themoment of transition between objective spirit and absolute spirit. Onedoes not need to be all that familiar with the divisions of Kant’s andHegel’s systems or their terminology to recognize that such articulationand such transition are crucial. For without an account of reflective

aesthetic judgment – its grounding as a transcendental principle – inKant’s Third Critique, not only does the very possibility of the criticalphilosophy itself get put into question but so too does the possibility of abridge between the concepts of freedom and the concepts of nature andnecessity, or, as Kant puts it, the possibility of “the transition from ourway of thinking in terms of principles of nature to our way of thinking interms of principles of freedom.”5 To put it in stark and downright brutalterms, what this means is that the project of Kant’s Third Critique and itstranscendental grounding of aesthetic judgment has to succeed if there is

to be – as “there must after all be,” says Kant, “it must be possible” (myemphasis) – “a basis uniting [Grund der Einheit ] the supersensible thatunderlies nature and that the concept of freedom contains practically”6 – in other words, if morality is not to turn into a ghost.7 And Hegel’sabsolute spirit (Geist ) and its drive beyond representation (Vorstellung )on its long journey back home from the moment of “objective spirit” –i.e., the realm of politics and law – to dwell in the prose of philosophicalthought’s thinking itself absolutely would also turn into a mere ghost if

it were not for its having passed through the moment of the aesthetic, itsphenomenal appearance in art, “the sensory appearance of the Idea.” Inother words, it is not a great love of art and beauty that prompts Kantand Hegel to include a consideration of the aesthetic in their systems butrather philosophically self-interested reasons. As de Man put it in oneof his last seminars, with disarming directness and brutal good humor:“Therefore the investment in the aesthetic is considerable – the wholeability of philosophical discourse to develop as such depends entirelyon its ability to develop an adequate aesthetics. This is why both Kant

and Hegel, who had little interest in the arts, had to put it in, to makepossible the link between real events and philosophical discourse.”8

What de Man’s work on Kant and Hegel shows, however, is thatrather than being able to develop “an adequate aesthetics” – i.e.,


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adequate for the role prescribed it by their respective systems – bothKant’s Third Critique and Hegel’s Aesthetics wind up instead “undoing. . . the aesthetic as a valid category” (AI 89). Exactly how and why thishappens and has to happen – and hence is in fact a real event, truly his-

torical, for de Man – we can leave on the side for the moment. Sufficeit to say that both Kant and Hegel cannot complete and close off theirsystems because they cannot ground their own philosophical discourseson principles internal to these systems. In the very attempt to ground orvalidate the aesthetic, both must have recourse to factors and functionsof language that disarticulate the aesthetic and its linking or mediatingrole. Kant’s sublime is one example. Instead of being a “transcenden-tal principle,” the mathematical sublime turns out to be a “linguistic

principle” – in fact, a familiar metaphorico-metonymical tropologicalsystem which cannot close itself off and which in turn issues in Kant’sdynamic sublime, whose linguistic “model” would be that of languageas performative. Hence there would be “a deep, perhaps fatal, break ordiscontinuity” at the center of the Third Critique, for “it depends on alinguistic structure (language as a performative as well as a cognitivesystem) that is not itself accessible to the power of transcendental phi-losophy” (AI 79). But the aporia or disjunction between cognitive andperformative familiar to readers of Allegories of Reading and its fatal

break undergoes a new development in de Man’s reading of Kant on thesublime (a development in fact characteristic of the texts in this volumeand of de Man’s other work in the 1980s). For this “disruption” or “dis-articulation” becomes apparent or at least legible in the text of the ThirdCritique at the end of the analytic of the sublime in a general remark(section 29) where it occurs as a purely “material vision” – “devoid ofany reflexive or intellectual complication . . . devoid of any semanticdepth and reducible to the formal mathematization or geometrization of

pure optics” (AI 83) – whose equivalent in the order of language wouldonce again be “the prosaic materiality of the letter” (AI 90).Hegel’s Aesthetics contains – or, better, occurs as – a similar disrup-

tion or disarticulation. Officially “dedicated to the preservation andthe monumentalization of classical art, it also contains all the elementswhich make such a preservation impossible from the start” (AI 102).These “elements” include the fact that the paradigm for art in theAesthetics – once read – “is thought rather than perception, the signrather than the symbol, writing rather than painting or music” (AI 103)

and hence also mechanical memory by rote, memorization (Gedächtnis),rather than a memory (Erinnerung ) that would work by the internali-zation and recollection of images. Hence the Aesthetics “turns out tobe a double and possibly duplicitous text.” Since the only activity of


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the mind to occur as “the sensory appearance of the Idea” – Hegel’s“definition” of the beautiful – is a rather unaesthetic, if not downrightugly, mechanical memory by rote (which always entails some notationor inscription), such a memory is “a truth of which the aesthetic is the

defensive, ideological, and censored translation” (AI 102). This readingof the “duplicity” of Hegel’s Aesthetics allows de Man to reconcile thetwo main statements of the text – “Art is the sensory appearance ofthe Idea”/“Art is for us a thing of the past” – for they turn out to be infact the same statement: “Art is ‘of the past’ in a radical sense, in that,like memorization, it leaves the interiorization of experience foreverbehind. It is of the past to the extent that it materially inscribes, andthus forever forgets, its ideal content. The reconciliation of the two main

theses of the Aesthetics occurs at the expense of the aesthetic as a stablephilosophical category” (AI 103). In other words, as in the case of thatwhich Riffaterre “evaded” and Jauss “omitted,” the “bottom line” ofthe factors and functions of language that disarticulate the aesthetic inboth Kant and Hegel turns out to be material inscription, “the prosaicmateriality of the letter,” which “no degree of obfuscation or ideologycan transform . . . into the phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judgment”(AI 90).

Since this account of de Man’s “critical-linguistic” analysis of Kant

and Hegel on the category of the aesthetic may sound very much likewhat is commonly called “deconstruction” or “deconstructive reading”– and it is indeed that, but in a sense far more radical and far moreprecise than those who still use the “d-word” are ready for – someprecautions may be in order, lest we think that this is familiar, all-too-familiar, and that we have read, digested, and understood all ofthis before and can therefore relegate it to the past (and a shady, if notdownright abject, past at that).9 First of all, it would be a mistake to

think that what happens to the aesthetic, as a philosophical category, inthe texts of Kant and Hegel – in short, its disarticulation – happens onaccount of some kind of weakness, lapse, or lack of rigor, and as thoughthe critical-linguistic or “deconstructive” reader had tools at his disposalto see better and know more. On the contrary, as is legible in every oneof de Man’s essays, what happens in, and as, the texts of Kant and Hegelhappens on account of the critical power of their thought, indeed, onaccount of their very “excess of rigor,” as de Man puts it in the Pascalessay. And this means, for starters, that, however double or duplicitous

these texts may be, they are in fact not to be confused with documents of“aesthetic ideology” on which we could exert the power of our demys-tifying “critique” from some external vantage point. Rather than endingup in “aesthetic ideology,” these truly critical texts instead leave us with


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a “materialism” whose radicality most later critical thinking (whetherof the left or the right) has not been able to face. Indeed, because thisdisruption or disarticulation of the aesthetic is something that happens,a “real event” as it were, it is what renders these texts truly historical

and insures that they have a history or, better, are history and have afuture. What does not happen, is not historical, and does not have afuture is the ideologization of these (historical, material) text- events inthe recuperative non-history of their reception in the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries – an ideologization for which Schiller’s (mis-)appro-priation of Kant is paradigmatic and that coincides with the way “we”still think about and teach literature, i.e., as an aesthetic function. “Weare all Schillerians,” de Man quipped on one lecture occasion, “no one

is Kantian any more.” (In the lecture “Kant and Schiller” de Man offersother instantiations of this paradigm – wherein the truly critical thrustof a thought is blunted in its reception – and its inverse – wherein a suc-cessor “de-Schillerizes” or “re-Kantizes” an ideologizing predecessor –with “Nietzsche/Heidegger” being possibly one example of the formerand “Schopenhauer/Nietzsche” or “Heidegger/Derrida” examples ofthe latter.) Schiller’s ideologization of Kant amounts to his turning thephilosophical category of the aesthetic – which, as a category, is some-thing susceptible to “critique” but which is not something one can be

for or against – into a value, and a value on which he can found notonly an aesthetic anthropology but also an “aesthetic state.” The ironyof this (mis-)appropriation of Kant and its properly ideological momentcomes in a certain (predictable) reversal: namely, Schiller’s utter lack ofphilosophical interest in Kant’s critical project and his empiricization,anthropologization, psychologization, indeed humanization, of theKantian sublime ends up in sheer idealism, the separation of the mindfrom the body, and a conception of an “aesthetic state” all too cozy for

the likes of some later aesthetico-politicians, such as Joseph Goebbels.The irony is that the inhumanly “formalist” philosopher Kant winds upwith materialism, whereas the thought of the humanist psychologizinganthropologizer Schiller issues in an utter, and frightening, idealism.It is worth stressing this reversal, its irony, and the difference betweenthe “bottom line” of Kant’s and Hegel’s critical projects – i.e., materialinscription, a radical materialism – and Schiller’s ideologizing aestheti-zation because they reach to the heart of de Man’s project in AestheticIdeology and distinguish it from what is often taken as mere “ideology-

critique” or “critique of ideology.”If what de Man calls “ideology” were just some kind of mystified

“naturalization” of the linguistic and conventional, then its “critique”would indeed be little more than a demystification from a more reliable,


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because “critical,” vantage point. In such a case we could confine our“ideology-critical” activity to what would amount to repeated demys-tifications of Schiller: demonstrating again and again how he had mis-understood the project of critical philosophy and its transcendental

principles by empiricizing and thereby ideologizing Kant. Althoughalways a pedagogically useful (and sometimes entertaining) exercise – itis clear this is what de Man means it as in “Kant and Schiller” – such anactivity would, at best, be little more than an insistence upon relativelytraditional “philosophical” rigor and would not even begin to account(allegorically or otherwise) for the radicality of Kant’s (or Hegel’s)“materialism.” This is in fact how de Man’s “definition” of ideologyin “The Resistance to Theory” – “What we call ideology is precisely

the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phe-nomenalism” (RT 11) – has been (mis-)read and dismissed by criticson both the left and the right. For instance, in his Ideology (as well asin his The Ideology of the Aesthetic), Terry Eagleton characterizes deMan’s thought as an “essentially tragic philosophy” for which “mindand world, language and being, are eternally discrepant; and ideology isthe gesture which seeks to conflate these quite separate orders, huntingnostalgically for a pure presence of the thing within the word, and soimbuing meaning with all the sensuous positivity of material being.

Ideology strives to bridge verbal concepts and sensory intuitions; butthe force of truly critical (or ‘deconstructive’) thought is to demonstratehow the insidiously figural, rhetorical nature of discourse will alwaysintervene to break up this felicitous marriage. ‘What we call ideology,’de Man observes in The Resistance to Theory, ‘is precisely the confusionof linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism.’”10 Again, if this is all de Man meant by, or rather all that “we call,” ide-ology, Eagleton would be right to continue as he does by dismissing it

as a blatant attempt to have “one particular paradigm of ideologicalconsciousness . . . do service for the whole array of ideological formsand devices” and by identifying de Man’s thought with such a one:“There are styles of ideological discourse other than the ‘organicist’ –the thought of Paul de Man, for example, whose gloomy insistence thatmind and world can never harmoniously meet is among other thingsa coded refusal of the ‘utopianism’ of emancipatory politics.”11 Butto identify “what we call ideology” and “the confusion of linguisticand natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism” so hastily with

“organicism” or the “spurious naturalization of language” (Eagleton’swording) is in fact overhasty and mistaken as a critique of de Man. Itis overhasty because it presumes to know ahead of time what it is wemean, what it is we are referring to, when we speak here of “language,”


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“linguistic,” and “reference” (as distinguished from but confusable with“natural” and “phenomenalism”) when it is precisely the referential,not to say rhetorical, status of these terms that makes all the differenceto de Man’s account of ideology and deposits it well beyond Eagleton’s

(it is true typical) mis-characterization of de Man and “truly critical(or ‘deconstructive’) thought.” That Eagleton has to misrepresent “theinsidiously figural, rhetorical nature of discourse” and its function incritical as well as ideological thought is an indication – as is his (againtypical) literalization of de Man’s tone as “tragic” and “gloomy” – ofwhere to look for the “aberrancy” of his (mis-)reading. As always inthe case of de Man, it has to do with rhetoric, the rhetorical dimensionof language, and its relation to reference and the referential function of

language.12

In other words, if we want to understand anything aboutde Man’s project in his last essays, we need to begin to read the term“rhetoric” in his title Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology, for it is indeed“rhetoric” that makes all the difference and that distinguishes de Man’sproject from that of a mere “critique of aesthetic ideology.”

De Man’s account of the “doubleness” or “duplicity” of Kant’s andHegel’s texts on the aesthetic and their (self-)disarticulating criticalpower – and our attributing this disarticulation to “factors and func-tions of language” that resist phenomenalization – already provides us

with a hint of how to read rhetoric “between” aesthetics and ideology.For as should be clear even from our preliminary sketch above, what-ever it is that de Man’s readings of Kant and Hegel do, and whateverit is that happens (historically, materially) in (and as) their texts, it isnot a matter of an external demystifying critique (“deconstructive” orotherwise) of a mystified viewpoint from the vantage point of superiorknowledge and insight. As de Man’s texts make abundantly clear, whatwe are left with “after” the reading of Kant’s or Hegel’s disarticulation

of the aesthetic is certainly neither an integrated critical or philosophicalsystem (or “science”) – since its ability to close itself off and ground itsown critical discourse depended upon the stability of the aesthetic – nor,equally certainly, mere ideology. One of de Man’s summaries of Kant onthe sublime says it best: “The critical power of a transcendental philoso-phy undoes the very project of such a philosophy leaving us, certainlynot with ideology – for transcendental and ideological (metaphysical)principles are part of the same system – but with a materialism thatKant’s posterity has not yet begun to face up to. This happens, not out

of a lack of philosophical energy or rational power, but as a result ofthe very strength and consistency of this power” (AI 89). It is becausetranscendental (or “critical”) and ideological thought and principlesare interdependent, part of the same system, that any attempt at a mere


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demystification of the latter is in danger of collapsing “ideology intomere error and critical thought into idealism” (AI 72). In other words,such a demystification and its collapse cannot account for the production of ideology, its necessity – as a necessary “formation of the superstruc-

ture,” to put it in Althusserian terms – precisely the historical, material conditions of its production. And late Althusser – the (self-allegorizing)Althusser of the Autocritique who “confesses” his “theoreticist error”of having taken “ideology” in The German Ideology as “error”! – isthe right citation here.13 For de Man, as for Althusser, we are never somuch “in” ideology as when we think ourselves to be “outside” it14: forinstance, when, like Terry Eagleton, we think that a presumably cheerfulinsistence on the possibility or the promesse that mind and world can

harmoniously meet (vs de Man’s “gloomy” insistence on the opposite)would necessarily be tantamount to an acceptance (vs de Man’s coded“refusal”) of “the ‘utopianism’ of emancipatory politics” – and not the“politics” of the kind of totalitarian “aesthetic state” that is all too famil-iar in the twentieth century and that would make Schiller shudder. Butif even a “critical” (“transcendental” or otherwise) thought cannot step“out” of ideology – or “by-pass or repress ideology” (AI 72) – withoutlosing its critical thrust and risking being repossessed by what it fore-closes because it is “part of the same system” as the ideology it would

“critique,” then how is what de Man’s readings do, end up in, or leaveus with different from such “merely” critical activity? Clearly enough, tothe extent that they purport to “leave us with” a radical “materiality” or“materialism,” they have to be “different,” and they have to have someway of accounting for “the same system” of which critical and ideo-logical thought and discourse are a part. And such “accounting” wouldindeed have to be an account of the production of the system, its puttinginto place on the basis of conditions of production that would be histori-

cal and material. This is where, again, the question of rhetoric – and itsrole in the confusion of “reference with phenomenalism” – comes in andis indispensable for an understanding of the specificity of what de Manhas to say and teach about ideology.

For when de Man speaks here of critical and ideological thought’sbeing “part of the same system,” there is no doubt that this “system”is, for him, always a tropological system, a system of tropologicaltransformations and substitutions. In the case of critical and ideologicalprinciples and discourses, for example, this tropological system would

want to include within itself – that is, reduce to its own principles oftransformation and substitution – both the (purportedly) self-definingand self-validating semiosis of a critical discourse and what amountsto the symbolic phenomenal figuration of an ideological discourse.


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Kant’s characterization of the difference between and relation of whathe calls “transcendental” and “metaphysical” principles – which deMan does not hesitate to identify with “critical” and “ideological”respectively – would be one, global, example of such a “system” (and

the one that de Man is referring to in the quotation above). And thearticulation of number and space or extension that Kant’s attempt toground the mathematical sublime as a transcendental principle requires– and which can “take place” only as a “linguistic principle” (i.e., as atropological system that is “purely formal,” cannot ground itself, andcannot be closed off) – would be another, more “local,” example. Butglobal and local examples aside, the point should be clear: given sucha “tropological system,” it cannot ever be sufficient to unmask or to

demystify it because all such “critique” manages to do is to substituteone trope for another – even if it is the substitution of a “trope of theliteral” (i.e., “real,” “true,” “demystified,” “critical,” and so on) for, asit were, a “trope of the figural,” or, if one likes, in the more traditional,but insufficiently understood, terms of The German Ideology’s critique,a “true” or “critical” consciousness for a “false consciousness” – andthereby to remain very much within (and hence to confirm) the tropo-logical system it would want to criticize. What is needed, therefore,is a different activity, one that could begin to account for the putting

into place of the tropological system itself, its inaugural grounding orfounding on the basis of principles that, wherever they may come from,cannot come from within the tropological system itself and cannot bereduced to its principles of transformation, substitution, or exchange.This is where our “factors and functions of language” finally return –those factors and functions of language that resist the phenomenaliza-tion made possible (and necessary) by tropes and their system but thatnevertheless lie at the bottom of all tropological systems as their material

condition of possibility. But as their material , non-phenomenal and non-phenomenalizable, conditions of possibility, these factors and functions– and they have several names in de Man, such as the “positionalpower” of language, “material inscription,” “the play of the letter” –are also necessarily always their conditions of impossibility; they leavemarks and traces “within” (or “without”?) these tropological systems,marks and traces that may not be accessible to the knowing, conscious-ness, or science of “critical critics” but which nevertheless remain legiblein the texts of these systems: in their inability to close themselves off,

for instance, which always produces an excess (or lack) of tropology,a residue or remainder of trope and figure irreducible to them. Like thetruth, this excess or lack outs and has to out; and, like Hölderlin’s “thetrue” (das Wahre), it is what happens, what takes place, an event – like


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the text of Kant’s sublime, for instance, or, we might add, like the text of de Man’s readings of Kant and Hegel.

Reference and Rhetoric

That the “materiality of actual history”15 gets produced, happens, asthe residue or excess of tropology is just another way of saying whatde Man himself says about his apparently new “interest” or “turn to”questions of ideology, history, and politics in these essays. Asked in1983 about the frequent recurrence of the terms “ideology” and “poli-tics” in his recent work, de Man replies: 1) that he was never away from

these problems (“they were always uppermost in my mind”); and 2)that he has always maintained “that one could approach the problemsof ideology and by extension the problems of politics only on the basisof critical-linguistic analysis, which had to be done in its own terms”(“An Interview with Paul de Man,” RT 121). He characterizes the“critical-linguistic analysis” that has been, for him, preparatory for thework contained in Aesthetic Ideology as an attempt to achieve a certaincontrol “over technical problems of language, specifically problems ofrhetoric, of the relation between tropes and performatives, of saturation

of tropology as a field that in certain forms of language goes beyond thatfield” (RT 121). And, now that he has achieved a certain control overthese problems – de Man is clearly referring to Allegories of Reading andhis (still largely unread or grievously misread) work on Rousseau wherehe was “able to progress from purely linguistic analysis to questionswhich are really already of a political and ideological nature” – he findsthat he can “do it [i.e., deal with questions of ideology and politics] alittle more openly, though in a very different way than what generally

passes as ‘critique of ideology.’” In other words, de Man’s “progress” orprogression from apparently purely linguistic questions to talking moreopenly about ideology and politics itself takes place on the basis of acritical-linguistic analysis of rhetoric – tropological systems, their inabil-ity to close themselves off, and their production of “forms of language”that “go beyond” their domain – and, as such, itself takes place as theresidue or excess of tropology. In short, rather than just a “logical” (andhistoricizable) development, this progression is in fact a material eventin its own right, the product of a critical-linguistic analysis, a reading , of

rhetoric rather than a critique, or self-critique, of a former “ideological”or “theoreticist” (or pre-“epistemological break”) self.16 That it is in factthe impossibility of reducing texts to rhetoric, to tropes, to tropologicalmodels of language, and that therefore a simply “rhetorical reading”


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is in fact never a sufficient activity may come as a surprise to (non-)readers of de Man who think that what he does is to reduce everythingto rhetoric and tropes and that his rhetorical readings only demonstrateagain and again “how the insidiously figural, rhetorical nature of dis-

course will always intervene to break up [the] felicitous marriage”17 of mind and world, language and being, and so on. For instance, inthe present context we could as easily say that it is in fact rhetoric thatmakes the “marriage” of mind and world, language and being, possiblebecause such a meeting of mind and world is possible only thanks toa phenomenalizing (and hence aesthetico-ideologizing) trope! Tropesaccomplish the phenomenalization of reference that “we call” ideol-ogy, but, of course, because it is indeed tropes that do this, such phe-

nomenalized reference cannot help but be “aberrant,” to use one of deMan’s favorite terms for it, and produce “ideological aberrations.” Inany event, if we want to understand the role of rhetoric and tropes inde Man’s “critical-linguistic analysis,” we need to clarify its relation toone of those “factors and functions” of language: namely, reference, thereferential function, what one could call the irreducibility of reference inde Man. For reference is deeply involved, to put it still vaguely, not onlyin de Man’s “definition” of ideology – the confusion “of reference withphenomenalism” – but also in the double impossibility that runs like a

leitmotif through all of de Man’s work: the impossibility of construct-ing an epistemologically reliable tropological model of language andtext and, on the other side of the coin, the impossibility of constructingan epistemologically reliable purely semiotic (or grammatical) modelof language and text. Although a number of the Rousseau essays inAllegories of Reading offer much help on the question of reference andthe referential function, perhaps the most explanatory and suggestivediscussion comes in “The Resistance to Theory,” its infamous “defini-

tion” of ideology, and the immediate context of this passage. The essayis most suggestive in part because its general, programmatic statementallows it to explain most succinctly both the project de Man is comingfrom (call it Allegories of Reading ) and the one he is moving toward (theessays in Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology).

In order to appreciate the considerable import of de Man’s “defini-tion” (or, better, denomination – “we call”) of ideology as the confu-sion “of reference with phenomenalism” and the role of the rhetoricaldimension of language in this definition, it is necessary to read what

“follows” from it: “What we call ideology is precisely the confusionof linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism. Itfollows that, more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics,the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the


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unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor inaccounting for their occurrence” (RT 11). The claim being made herefor “the linguistics of literariness” may certainly appear exorbitant tosome, or, at the very least, surprising, given de Man’s trenchant cri-

tiques of semiology and what goes by the name of “structuralism” inliterary study. And yet it is the linguistics of literariness that is said tobe “a powerful and indispensable tool” not only in the unmasking ordemystifying of ideological aberrations but also in “accounting for theiroccurrence” – that is, precisely the double operation that would qualifythis activity as the “critical-linguistic analysis” that not only demysti-fies ideology but also accounts for its necessity, i.e., its production andthe (historical, material) conditions of its production. It certainly seems

strange that de Man should attribute such power to the linguistics ofliterariness. Nevertheless, the claims make perfect sense once we try tounderstand the relation between reference and the linguistics of literari-ness in context, and they turn out to be rather less exorbitant once weread their own “referential,” not to say rhetorical, status.

The relations among “the linguistics of literariness,” “reference,” andthe possibility of a confusion “of reference with phenomenalism” arevery clearly and carefully determined in “The Resistance to Theory.”By “linguistics of literariness” de Man means primarily the application

of Saussurian linguistics to literary texts. Indeed, according to “TheResistance to Theory,” the advent of literary theory as such “occurswith the introduction of linguistic terminology in the metalanguageabout literature,” and “contemporary literary theory comes into itsown in such events as the application of Saussurian linguistics to liter-ary texts” (RT 8). The difference that the advent, occurrence, or eventof “literary theory” proper makes has very specifically to do with itsdifferent conception of “reference as a function of language and not

necessarily as an intuition.” De Man’s “intuition” here should be read inGerman (as Anschauung ), as the following sentences confirm: “Intuitionimplies perception, consciousness, experience, and leads at once intothe world of logic and of understanding with all its correlatives, amongwhich aesthetics occupies a prominent place. The assumption that therecan be a science of language which is not necessarily a logic leads to thedevelopment of a terminology which is not necessarily aesthetic” (RT 8). In other words, what the “non-phenomenal linguistics” of Saussureand its application in literary study (“the linguistics of literariness”)

suspend is not the referential function of language – that is always there,irreducibly, whenever we talk about anything called “language” – butrather its ability to give us, or, better, to designate, the referent reliably,predictably, and epistemologically consistently enough to allow us to


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mistake what is a product of a function of language for an object ofconsciousness, its “faculties” (intuition, perception), and the logic, thephenomeno-logic, that follows in its train. It is no surprise, then, thatsuch a non-phenomenal “linguistics of literariness” should be “a power-

ful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations”if ideology, or rather what we call ideology, is precisely the confusion“of reference with phenomenalism” – i.e., taking reference as an intui-tion and not as a function of language. As de Man points out in “RolandBarthes and the Limits of Structuralism” (1972), semiology’s demystify-ing power is genuine and undeniable: “One can see why any ideologywould always have a vested interest in theories of language advocatingcorrespondence between sign and meaning, since they depend on the

illusion of this correspondence for their effectiveness. On the otherhand, theories of language that put into question the subservience,resemblance, or potential identity between sign and meaning are alwayssubversive, even if they remain strictly confined to linguistic phenom-ena” (RCC 170). What de Man calls the “correspondence between signand meaning” in this essay is quite clearly what ten years later is calledthe confusion of reference with phenomenalism or, still more precisely,“the phenomenalization of the sign” in “Hegel on the Sublime.”18

But however legitimate and convincing its claim to being a powerful

tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, literary semiology’s (thelinguistics of literariness) being also “a determining factor in account-ing for their occurrence” is a more complicated and overdetermined“claim.” The complications begin to unfold if we try to figure out whatthis determining factor’s “accounting for” amounts to. On a first level,the meaning seems relatively straightforward: the linguistics of literari-ness can “account for” the occurrence of referential aberrations in thesense of being able “to render a reckoning” of them, to explain them and

their mechanisms. Based as it is on a non-phenomenal linguistic model,the linguistics of literariness could certainly be expected to be able tounmask any undue phenomenalization of language’s referential functionand to reveal the mechanics of an ideology’s workings. Nevertheless,the linguistics of literariness “accounts for” ideological aberrations instill another sense if it is a “determining factor” in accounting for theiroccurrence. In other words, and with only a slight shift of emphasis, thelinguistics of literariness also “accounts for” ideological aberrations inthe sense of being “the explanation or cause of,” as the dictionary puts

it – of being a determining factor that itself “causes” or produces theideological aberrations. This sense may seem a bit odd in the contextof what seems to be unmitigated “praise” of the “linguistics of literari-ness,” but it is in fact a necessary sense, as predictable and inevitable as


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ideology itself. This becomes clear if we recall the immediate contextof our ideology-paragraph in “The Resistance to Theory.” For what deMan has just stated and demonstrated in the preceding paragraphs isthat the non-phenomenal linguistics of literariness itself succumbs to the

temptation or the seduction of phenomenalism when it confuses “liter-ariness” for “another word for, or another mode of, aesthetic response”(RT 9), to the point of a “Cratylism” of the sign which “assumes aconvergence of the phenomenal aspects of language, as sound, withits signifying function as referent” (RT 9). This self-ideologizing re-phenomenalization of the sign is inevitable, and even a non-phenomenal“linguistics of literariness” is subject to it: “It is inevitable that semi-ology or similarly oriented methods be considered formalistic, in the

sense of being aesthetically rather than semantically valorized, but theinevitability of such an interpretation does not make it less aberrant.Literature involves the voiding, rather than the affirmation, of aestheticcategories” (RT 10). De Man’s use of the word “aberrant” to describethis (mis-)interpretation brings us back, re-fers us, as it were, to theideology-paragraph and our “ideological aberrations.” Quite clearly, asde Man has just pointed out, the linguistics of literariness itself under-goes a re-phenomenalization of reference: in short, even the discourseof literary semiology, for all its demystifying power, has ideology (and

aesthetic ideology at that) built into it, as it were, internal to it as a nec-essary and inevitable moment. And de Man’s using Barthes – the Barthesof “Proust et les noms” – as the example of such self- ideologizationrecalls an analogous move ten years earlier in “Roland Barthes and theLimits of Structuralism.” There de Man had demonstrated that (theearly) Barthes’s own demystifying discourse suffers a self-mystificationon the level of method when, carried away by the headiness of the powerthat bracketing the referential function of literature grants it, it aspires

to “scientific” status – as though all the “mess and muddle of significa-tion,” its “referential, representational effectiveness,” and “referentialsuggestiveness” did not need to be “accounted for” because it couldbe “dismissed as contingency or ideology and not taken seriously as asemantic interference within the semiological structure . . . the reasonsfor the recurrent aberration [being] not linguistic but ideological” (RCC 171–3). But the irreducibility of reference, of the referential function, as“internal” to any discourse, no matter how demystifying its power andhow “scientific” its aspirations, comes back inevitably:

That literature can be ideologically manipulated is obvious but does notsuffice to prove that this distortion is not a particular aspect of a largerpattern of error. Sooner or later, any literary study must face the problem ofthe truth value of its own interpretations, no longer with the naive conviction


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of a priority of content over form, but as a consequence of the much moreunsettling experience of being unable to cleanse its own discourse of aber-rantly referential implications. The traditional concept of reading used byBarthes and based on the model of an encoding/decoding process is inop-erative if the master code remains out of reach of the operator, who thenbecomes unable to understand his own discourse. A science unable to readitself can no longer be called a science. The possibility of a scientific semiol-ogy is challenged by a problem that can no longer be accounted for in purelysemiological terms. (RCC 174)

I quote de Man’s summary (1972) of Barthes’s predicament at lengthfor several reasons. First of all, it confirms our suspicions about thelinguistics of literariness being a determining factor in “accounting for”

the occurrence of ideological aberrations. The linguistics of literarinessmay be able to demystify ideological aberrations and it may be able toexplain them, but because it cannot do so without its own discourse’sbeing subject to the very factors that determine the inevitability of ideo-logical aberrations, it also cannot help but reproduce those aberrationsin its own discourse. Barthes’s inability to cleanse19 his own “scientific”discourse of “referentially aberrant implications” means that “ideologi-cal aberration” is not something that comes from “outside” languagebut rather is very much “internal” to it, to its irreducible referential func-

tion and its inevitable aberrancy. If we ask what it is “about” reference,“about” the referential function, that makes it inevitable and yet inevita-bly aberrant – what it is that makes a re-phenomenalization of reference,and hence ideology, inevitable even for the most “non-phenomenal”of linguistics – we already get an answer in de Man’s characterizationof Barthes’s predicament as the inability to read his own discourse(because unable to “account for” its own referential aberrations). “Ascience unable to read itself” can indeed no longer be called a science,

and instead would have to be called an allegory of science. And here itwould be quite clearly an allegory, an “account,” of its inability to readthe story, the “account,” of its (quite legitimate) demystifying “science.”And since the targets of its demystifying, unmasking, operation are theunwarranted phenomenalizations of reference performed by tropes, bythe rhetorical dimension of language, it is of course rhetoric, tropes, therhetorical dimension of any and every demystifying discourse, that turnsit into an allegory of the impossibility of reading – and very precisely,as page 205 of Allegories of Reading puts it, an allegory of the unread-

ability of “the prior narration,” i.e., the narrative of “a trope and itsdeconstruction.” However tortuously, we have arrived at a third senseof “accounting,” of how it is that the linguistics of literariness can be adetermining factor in accounting for ideological aberrations: that is, it


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can be such only as an “account,” a story, a narrative, an allegory of (theimpossibility of) reading and never a “science” or a critical discoursetransparent to itself that could “account for” ideology by “balancing thebooks” of credit and debit without remainder.

That accounting for ideological aberrations should turn into an alle-gory of (the impossibility of) reading is certainly no surprise for readersof Allegories of Reading , but what needs to be stressed here is that theinevitable aberrancy of the referential function, its inevitable phenom-enalization and ideologization in and by tropes, the rhetorical dimen-sion of language, is something that is very much “part of” reference,very much a “moment” of the referential function. This is most com-pactly legible in a few pages of de Man’s essay on The Social Contract

(“Promises [Social Contract]”) in Allegories of Reading . Reference,according to this essay, “is the application of an undetermined, generalpotential for meaning to a specific unit” (AR 268). This undetermined,general potential for meaning is grammar, “the system of relationshipsthat generates the text and that functions independently of its referen-tial meaning” (AR 268), and “just as no text is conceivable withoutgrammar, no grammar is conceivable without the suspension of refer-ential meaning” (AR 268–9). But even though “the logic of grammargenerates texts only in the absence of referential meaning” (AR 269),

the very “application” or determination of grammar’s undetermined,general, and non-referential potential for meaning “to a specific unit”– i.e., reference, the referential function necessary for the “generation”of a text – means that “every text generates a referent that subverts thegrammatical principles to which it owed its constitution” (AR 269). Inother words, there is a “fundamental incompatibility between grammarand meaning” (AR 269), and this “divergence between grammar andreferential meaning is what we call the figural dimension of language”

(AR 270). De Man’s account here could not be clearer or more precise:texts get generated by the determination of reference, which determin-ing, however, necessarily diverges from and indeed “subverts” thetext’s undetermined, general, non-referential potential for meaning,the grammar without which the text could not “come into being” inthe first place. And the necessity of this divergence or subversion is“what we call” the figural dimension of language, i.e., rhetoric. In short,rhetoric, the rhetorical dimension of language, is a necessary momentof reference, of the text-producing referential function, “itself.” As the

“moment” of reference that necessarily and inevitably produces aber-rant reference, the rhetorical dimension of language is also what makes“text” into “something” that we cannot “define” but can only “call”:“We call text any entity that can be considered from such a double


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perspective: as a generative, open-ended, non-referential grammaticalsystem and as a figural system closed off by a transcendental significationthat subverts the grammatical code to which the text owes its existence.The ‘definition’ of the text also states the impossibility of its existence

and prefigures the allegorical narratives of this impossibility” (AR 270).What goes for “text” in this passage holds equally well for “what wecall ideology” in “The Resistance to Theory,” and it is the reason whythe linguistics of literariness being a “determining factor” in accountingfor ideological aberrations can also be only an allegorical “account” of the impossibility of defining or determining ideology – except in and asa text to be read in turn, in an other allegory, an allegory of . . . an other. . . of. The potential stutter here is not just play with the “meaning” of

allegory – allos + agorein, other speaking, speaking of the other – butrather also a necessary “conclusion” to be drawn from everything wehave been saying above. Namely – in the case of what we call ideology,what we call the figural dimension of language, what we call text, and,we might add, what we call language – if we ask what these allegoriesare allegories of , the most “direct” answer would have to be that theyare allegories of reference, which amounts to the same thing as sayingthat they are all “allegories of of ,” since “of” is the very bearer of thereferential function, the “carrying-back” function, “itself.” Our stutter-

ing repetition “allegories of of ,” then, would suggest still a fourth (and“last”) meaning for the “accounting” that the linguistics of literarinessas a determining factor can purportedly perform: the mechanical count-ing, re-counting, numbering, enumeration, of ideological aberrations,one by one, one after the other, in order. Such purely “grammatical” (asin gramma) juxtaposition or notation is, indeed, finally the only material (and because material, historical) “accounting” for ideological aberra-tions possible (and it is also the reason why it is better at accounting for

ideological aberrations than the discourse of economics which, in brief,has to literalize and reify the “economic base” and whose “demystifica-tions” cannot help but amount to mere substitutions of one trope foranother, one “consciousness” for another, to put it in the terms of TheGerman Ideology – in short, even economics is never economic enoughwhen dealing with the economy of phenomenalism and reference thatwe call ideology!). If this is so, then it is no wonder that, as de Manputs it in the Barthes essay, “The mind cannot remain at rest in a mererepertorization of its own recurrent aberrations; it is bound to systema-

tize its own negative self-insights into categories that have at least theappearance of passion and difference” (RCC 175). There is much to beread in this sentence, but I would underline only the fact that the mindis bound to do this – it has no choice, it is necessary and inevitable, for


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it is the irreducible referential function, its inevitable phenomenalizationin tropes, and the production of referential aberrations, i.e., ideology.It happens and has to happen whenever we denominate something,anything – call it “ideology,” “the figural dimension of language,”

“text,” or even “allegory” (“we can call such narratives . . . allegories”[AR 205]), and attempt to account for it in a narrative: “A narrativeendlessly tells the story of its own denominational aberration and it canonly repeat this aberration on various levels of rhetorical complexity”(“Self [Pygmalion],” AR 162).

Excess of Rigor

“If it indeed reaches dead ends and breaking points, it does so by excess ofrigor rather than for lack of it.”

de Man, “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion”

The characterization of de Man’s “accounting” as a stuttering repertori-zation, repetition, enumeration, or numbering of referential (i.e., ideo-logical) aberrations takes us back to the project of Aesthetics, Rhetoric,Ideology and its specificity in relation to de Man’s previous work. Ourattempt to explain, or at least to account for, the “relation” of refer-

ence and rhetoric in de Man’s “definition” of ideology (as the confusionof reference with phenomenalism) and its ending up in “allegories ofreference” would certainly link this project to Allegories of Reading .Nevertheless, there is a definite and determinable specificity to the“allegories of reference” that make up Aesthetic Ideology, which distin-guishes it from the critical-linguistic analyses in Allegories of Reading .One way to formulate this distinctive feature is by returning once againto “The Resistance to Theory” and its characterization of “the most

familiar and general of all linguistic models, the classical trivium, whichconsiders the sciences of language as consisting of grammar, rhetoric,and logic (or dialectics)” in its relation to “the quadrivium, which coversthe non-verbal sciences of number (arithmetic), of space (geometry), ofmotion (astronomy), and of time (music)” (RT 13). To put it directlythough a bit proleptically: whereas the project of Allegories of Reading comes from the side of the trivium – the sciences of language – that ofAesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology comes from the side of the quadrivium –the non-verbal, mathematical sciences. This requires some explanation.

Insofar as the analyses in Allegories of Reading are concerned with theway that rhetoric, the rhetorical dimension of language, always comesto interfere “between” grammar and logic, thereby making impossibleany easy, unbroken passage between the formal structures and the


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(universalizability of the) meaning of texts, these analyses would bedemonstrations of the instability of the linguistic model of the trivium (as a model of language). Whether out to show how the rhetoricaldimension always interferes with attempts to set up grammatical models

of language or how grammar (in various forms) interferes with attemptsto set up closed tropo-logical models of language – for instance, mostprogrammatically, in “Semiology and Rhetoric”20 – or how the per-formative function (or “performative rhetoric,” as de Man calls it onoccasion) does not easily co-exist with reliable epistemological claims totruth, the essays in Allegories of Reading can, for the most part, be saidto take the trivium as their domain. The fact that they concentrate on“literary” texts so much of the time and that even the “theoretical” texts

they treat are mostly “hybrid” or “semi-literary” texts – rather thantexts of systematic philosophy like treatises of logic or epistemology– would be consistent with this observation. The texts contained inAesthetic Ideology, on the other hand, are, I would say, quite clearlycoming from the other side of the artes liberales, and not for thematicreasons only – that is, not just because nearly all of them are “about”texts that take a determinate place in philosophical systems. The textsin this volume come from the side of the quadrivium in the more par-ticular sense that their discussions of the category of the aesthetic are all

concerned with the relation of the aesthetic to epistemology.21 Indeed,as has already been suggested above, aesthetics, the category of theaesthetic, is a rigorous philosophical discourse’s way of attempting toground its own discourse on principles internal to its system and therebyto close it off as a system: i.e., as a logic. Philosophical aesthetics is infact the attempt to verify that a science of language does indeed have tobe a logic (something that “literary theory,” with its “non-phenomenallinguistics,” necessarily puts into question). Logic, as de Man summa-

rizes in “The Resistance to Theory,” would provide the “link” betweenthe trivium and the quadrivium:

In the history of philosophy, this link is traditionally, as well as substantially,accomplished by way of logic, the area where the rigor of the linguistic dis-course about itself matches up with the rigor of the mathematical discourseabout the world. Seventeenth-century epistemology, for instance, at themoment when the relationship between philosophy and mathematics is par-ticularly close, holds up the language of what it calls geometry (mos geome-tricus), and which in fact includes the homogeneous concatenation between

space, time and number, as the sole model of coherence and economy.Reasoning more geometrico is said to be “almost the only mode of reason-ing that is infallible, because it is the only one to adhere to the true method,whereas all other ones are by natural necessity in a degree of confusion ofwhich only geometrical minds can be aware.” This is a clear instance of the


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interconnection between a science of the phenomenal world and a scienceof language conceived as definitional logic, the pre-condition for a correctaxiomatic-deductive, synthetic reasoning. The possibility of thus circulatingfreely between logic and mathematics has its own complex and problematichistory as well as its contemporary equivalences with a different logic anda different mathematics. What matters for our present argument is that thisarticulation of the sciences of language with the mathematical sciences rep-resents a particularly compelling version of a continuity between a theoryof language, as logic, and the knowledge of the phenomenal world to whichmathematics gives access. In such a system, the place of aesthetics is preor-dained and by no means alien, provided the priority of logic, in the model ofthe trivium, is not being questioned. (RT 13)

De Man’s offering seventeenth-century epistemology as an example

of how logic would accomplish the “link” between the trivium andthe quadrivium – since it is “the area where the rigor of the linguisticdiscourse about itself matches up with the rigor of the mathematical dis-course about the world” – and his quotation of Pascal’s De l’esprit géo-métrique help to explain what is at stake in epistemo-logic. For what thediscourse of epistemology would want is to be able to construct a logicalmodel to ground and verify itself as rigorously as the definitional self-verifying logic of the mathematical sciences. This is how the rigor of thelinguistic discourse about itself could “match up” with the rigor of the

mathematical discourse about the world. If in the seventeenth centurythe “geometric method” is held up as a model for epistemological dis-course, it is because this method’s own discourse as definitional logicwould be precisely non-referential or, better, self -referential enough not to leave a remainder of reference or the “referential aberrations” wehave been worrying above. (It should come as no surprise even to deliri-ous formalists that if “literary” discourse is taken to be self- or auto-referential, then mathematical discourse would be the most “literary”

language of all!) In other words, the discourse of epistemology wouldclaim to be able to cleanse itself of aberrant reference – i.e., ultimately,the rhetorical dimension of language – by basing itself on the “linguis-tic” (i.e., logical) model of the mathematical sciences. It is no wonder,then, that in such a system the “place of aesthetics” – or, I would add,an “aesthetic moment,” a moment of aesthetization – is preordained,for the aesthetic is, as we know, the place where a rigorous logic wouldbypass or repress or displace or transform the irreducible referentialfunction of language, its inevitable phenomenalization in trope, and its

production of referential, ideological aberrations. Nevertheless, as wehave seen, these philosophical discourses cannot do this without in factde-stabilizing the category of the aesthetic – since they can “ground”their tropological systems only by resorting to factors and functions


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of language that resist phenomenalization – and ending up in a radicalmaterialism irreducible to the phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judg-ment. To be added at this point is the fact that de Man understandsand formulates the project of the sought-after articulation of aesthetics

and epistemology and its “failure” or disarticulation very much in theterms of the problematics of seventeenth-century epistemology (which,of course, is not surprising, since both Kant [especially] and Hegel takeit upon themselves to resolve the problems they have inherited fromseventeenth-century thought). De Man’s account of Kant’s mathemati-cal sublime as an attempt to articulate number with extension – whichturns out to “work” only as a tropological system that cannot close itselfoff and necessarily produces the “dynamic sublime” of a performative

“model” of language – would be one obvious example; but even hisreading of Hegel’s sublime takes place against the background of theprinciples and problems of the quadrivium. This is also the case of theopening essay in Aesthetic Ideology – “The Epistemology of Metaphor”– with its treatment of the “theme” of “rhetoric and epistemology” inLocke, Condillac, and Kant. But the text most explicitly concerned withthe question of an epistemological discourse’s being able to model itselfon the discourse of mathematics is the first half of the second essay:“Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion.” This essay could serve as something

of a “key” to the project and the other texts in the volume. Not onlydoes it act as a bridge between the “themes” of “rhetoric and epistemol-ogy” and “rhetoric and aesthetics,”22 but it also provides an “early”(1979) instance of the text’s producing what de Man will shortly call“materiality.” In doing so, it may also be the best example of what wehave called “allegories of reference” – from the side of the quadrivium.

“Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion” plays itself out in the space betweenits opening words – “Attempts to define allegory keep reencountering

a set of predictab

[Andrzej Warminski] Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

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