Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For de Man 9780748681273

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Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

The Frontiers of Theory Series Editor: Martin McQuillan Available Titles Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces Derek Attridge Of Jews and Animals Andrew Benjamin Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida Geoffrey Bennington

Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius Jacques Derrida Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human Barbara Herrnstein Smith To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida Peggy Kamuf

Dream I Tell You Hélène Cixous

Death-­Drive: Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art Robert Rowland Smith

Insister of Jacques Derrida Hélène Cixous

Veering: A Theory of Literature Nicholas Royle

Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972–2009 Hélène Cixous

Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For De Man Andrzej Warminski

Poetry in Painting: Writings on Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics Hélène Cixous, ed. Marta Segarra and Joana Masó

Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory Andrzej Warminski

The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-­­Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the later Gadamer Timothy Clark About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time Mark Currie The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise Mark Currie The Post-­Romantic Predicament Paul de Man, ed. Martin McQuillan

Forthcoming Titles Working with Walter Benjamin: Recovering a Political Philosophy Andrew Benjamin Readings of Derrida Sarah Kofman, trans. Patience Moll Hélène Cixous’s Semi-­Fictions: At the Borders of Theory Mairéad Hanrahan Against Mastery: Creative Readings and Weak Force Sarah Wood The Paul de Man Notebooks Paul de Man, ed. Martin McQuillan

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

Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics For De Man

Andrzej Warminski

For Katia and Adrian

© Andrzej Warminski, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI 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 Warminski to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Series Editor’s Prefacevi Author’s Prefaceviii Acknowledgementsxii List of Abbreviationsxiv PART I  Aesthetic Ideology   1. Allegories of Reference: An Introduction to Aesthetic Ideology3   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   6. Man and Self-­Consciousness: Kojève, Romantic Ironist   7. Next Steps: Lukács, Jameson, Post-­Dialectics

99 127 137

PART III  Heidegger/Derrida   8. Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin   9. Discontinuous Shifts: History Reading History 10. Machinal Effects: Derrida With and Without de Man

159 173 185

Appendix 1: A Question of an Other Order: Deflections of the Straight Man203 Appendix 2: Response to Frances Ferguson215 Index220

Series Editor’s Preface

Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends and after-­life. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no longer resistant to Theory but a significant consensus has been established and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream of the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leaves so-­called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures of auto-­critique need to consider: what is the nature of this mainstream Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of a more-­ than-­ critical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, which thinks thought’s own limits? ‘Theory’ is a name that traps by an aberrant nominal effect the transformative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought in an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent: as a ‘name’, a word and a concept, Theory arrests or misprisions such thinking. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or to abandon Theory (on the contrary one must always insist on the it-­is-­necessary of Theory even if one has given up belief in theories of all kinds). Rather, this series is concerned with the presentation of work which challenges complacency and continues the transformative work of critical thinking. It seeks to offer the very best of contemporary theoretical practice in the humanities, work which continues to push ever further the frontiers of what is accepted, including the name of Theory. In particular, it is interested in that work which involves the necessary endeavour of crossing 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

Series Editor’s Preface    ­vii

exercise of critical thought as an attitude of inquiry which counters modes of closed or conservative opinion. In this respect the series aims to make thinking think at the frontiers of theory. Martin McQuillan

Author’s Preface

This is a book about the work of Paul de Man on the critique of aesthetic ideology and the strange “materiality” – a “materiality without materialism,” as Derrida has put it – that emerges from it. It consists of 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, and 10 – consists of an explication and a reading of crucial articulations in de Man’s project; and the other half would extend this project and its implications by a reading of “material” moments in Hegel, Marx, and the Marxian tradition (Lukács, Jameson) on the one hand and in Heidegger’s hermeneutics (and its radicalization by Derrida) on the other. The book’s subtitle – “For De Man” – could be read somewhat like Althusser’s Pour Marx. Paul de Man’s turn to questions of ideology and the political in his late work was anything but an arbitrary choice or an accident of biography. Rather it was a move that comes directly out of de Man’s particular kind of rhetorical reading – i.e., one which goes through and past tropes to demonstrate how tropological systems undo themselves and produce a material remainder or residue, what de Man comes to call “material inscription.”1 And since what gets undone in this self-­undoing of tropological systems is the phenomenality – including what de Man calls “the phenomenality of the linguistic sign” – that tropes on the one hand make possible, one main casualty is the value of the aesthetic (and of the aesthetic function of literature). This deconstruction of the aesthetic is to be read in those texts that take the aesthetic not as a value but as a philosophical 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 Reading in Practice and Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

Author’s Preface    ­ix

but consistently enough, the critique of aesthetic ideology is to be read already in the founding texts of aesthetic theory, and it is only thanks to a relapse and a regression – what de Man calls the “Schillerization of Kant,” for example – in the reception of these texts that we can blunt their critical thrust and continue to teach literature as an aesthetic function. “We are all Schillerians,” says de Man at a lecture occasion, “no one is Kantian any more.” In thus restoring the critical power of Kant’s and Hegel’s aesthetics, de Man accomplishes several things. For one, he begins what is perhaps the most serious and important rethinking of the question of ideology since Althusser’s essays of the 1960s and 1970s. He also provides us with a way to pose anew the (German Romantic) question about philosophy’s “presentation” (Darstellung) in a discourse that would lay claim to transparency on the basis of a taken for granted “phenomenalization of the sign” – i.e., an aesthetic moment that, once read, turns out to be anything but stable. Unfortunately, de Man was not able to complete his project and left us something like an outline and some (at times cryptic) hints and indications of paths to follow. The present volume attempts to clarify this project while doing justice to its rigor and to extend it in ways productive for critical thought. It comes with a certain modest confidence – or at least a willingness to take a certain risk – that the kind of reading represented in these essays and their attentiveness to the question of language is needed on the contemporary critical scene, and that rather than harkening back to a past over and done with, it may open up or point to a different future. Taking the place of an Introduction, Chapter 1 is a detailed exposition of de Man’s project in Aesthetic Ideology and how it relates to the rhetorical readings in his Allegories of Reading. The chapter ends with a 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 of view of the quadrivium” and as an anticipation of de Man’s essays on Kant and Hegel. Chapter 2 is a very close reading of de Man’s main essay 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 de Man’s argument, the chapter also needs to perform its own commentary on Kant’s difficult “Analytic of the Sublime.” Chapter 3 is a shorter piece that follows up on the reading of Kant in Chapter 2 to demonstrate that the aporetic structure of the Kantian sublime leaves traces both in the thought of Fichte and in the aesthetic theory of Schiller. The chapter shows how Fichte and, in particular, Schiller bring to resolution Kant’s unresolvable problematic of the sublime by resorting to

­x    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics what is in fact the beautiful – thus turning themselves into “aesthetic ideologists.” Chapter 4 is a commentary on what is perhaps de Man’s most difficult essay (“Hegel on the Sublime”) and it seeks to explain precisely how it is that de Man draws political implications out of Hegel’s sublime. Although the chapter is mostly an active paraphrase of de Man’s a­rgument – due, again, to its sheer difficulty – it may contain one bit of actual “reading” at the end in its response to Marc Redfield’s claim that de Man makes a mistake and tries to have Hegel’s text 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 how a certain “Marxian” material moment already inhabits Hegel’s very difficult argument in the Phenomenology of Spirit at the crucial point in the dialectic of “Self-­consciousness” where the text resorts to a phenomenalization of the sign in order to suture the break between “life” and “consciousness.” This material moment – something of a stutter in Hegel’s text – is what produces a remainder and a residue: among other things, Marx and the Marxian tradition. The shorter Chapter 6 shows how this “material moment” in Hegel’s argument “lives on” in Kojève’s famous interpretation of the dialectic of life and desire in the Phenomenology. In remediating what Hegel’s text in fact does not mediate, Kojève winds up to be “more Hegelian than Hegel.” Chapter 7 demonstrates how the “material moment” in Hegel recurs in Lukács’s very 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-­or other-­ than-­ dialectical materialism and an understanding of ideology as allegorical sign. The third section (“Heidegger/Derrida”) opens with Chapter 8’s critical reading of Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s hymn “Der Ister” (i.e., the river Danube). It turns out that Heidegger’s “ontologization” of Hölderlin cannot account for what is truly, materially, historical in Hölderlin. Chapter 9 is a reading of two of de Man’s 1967 Gauss lectures – one on Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin as an “apocalyptic” poet and one on Wordsworth and Geoffrey Hartman’s also rather “apocalyptic” interpretation of his poetry – which argues that de Man is pushed toward rhetoric and rhetorical terms by his reading of Heidegger’s failure to think “the temporality of poetic form” in Hölderlin. In de Man’s Wordsworth lecture we can almost “see” the turn to rhetoric take place in the text’s two “layers” – the original lecture of 1967 and some interpolated passages from 1971. Paradoxically but in fact consistently enough, de Man’s alleged turn (from history and) to rhetoric is legible as, in fact, always already a turn to history. Chapter 10 attempts to disentangle Derrida’s perversely argumentative account

Author’s Preface    ­xi

of de Man’s reading of Rousseau (in “Excuses”) from what de Man’s text actually says – which turns out to be not all that different from what Derrida says! – and in the process shows how both Derrida and de 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 like an act of forgiveness for “the unforgivable”: i.e., de Man’s wartime writings. The book includes two appendices from, as it were, the archive of “deconstructive reading”: one is a response to Carol Jacobs’s reading of Kleist and Kant; the other is a response to Frances Ferguson and what it takes as her misunderstanding of the zero in de Man’s reading of Pascal.

Acknowledgements

A number of the chapters that follow were published previously. Chapter 1 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 the Afterlife 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 Yale French 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. Appendix 1 appeared in Diacritics 9:4 (December 1979), pp. 70–8; Appendix 2 in Diacritics 17:4 (Winter 1987), pp. 46–8. The Johns Hopkins University Press 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 in invited lectures or essays written for various occasions. For these invitations 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, Haun Saussy, Carol Jacobs, and Cynthia Chase. Over the many years, I have accumulated particular debts for the intellectual and personal generosity of Dick Macksey, Cathy Caruth, Neil Hertz, Werner Hamacher, and Sam Weber. Without J. Hillis Miller’s persistently cheerful and unaccountable encouragement – and Tom Cohen’s well-­aimed nudges – neither this book nor Material Inscriptions would have seen the light of day. The same is especially true for Martin McQuillan’s understated

Acknowledgements    ­xiii

kindness and what I can only call (a demonstrably undeserved) faith in my work and me. At Edinburgh University Press, I am grateful for the help 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 and Kevin Newmark. The decades of electronic dialogue with Kevin have been particularly sustaining. I do know how lucky I am to have Cathrine Ji’s love and unrelenting admonishment. Katia and Adrian – to whom this book is dedicated – make it all worthwhile.

List of Abbreviations

Works by Paul de Man AI  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 of Minnesota Press, 1983) RCC  Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, ed. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) RR  The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) RT  The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986)

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 as lectures 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-­hand purposes a critique or, better, a “critical-­linguistic analysis” of “aesthetic ideology.”3 This project is clearly the animating force of all the essays de Man produced in the early 1980s – and not just those explicitly concentrating on philosophical aesthetics to be included in the book project he called Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology,4 but also the essays on literary critics and theorists like Riffaterre, Jauss, and Benjamin that made up a second of de Man’s book projects – part of which appeared posthumously as The Resistance to Theory (1986) – as well as the two late essays (on Baudelaire and Kleist) expressly written for the collection The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984). Although the general project is recognizable throughout these texts, it takes different forms in the context of the three particular book projects. The essays on Riffaterre and Jauss, for example, demonstrate how both the critic whose point of departure is based on “formalist” presuppositions and the critic whose point of departure is based on “hermeneutic” presuppositions depend on the category of the “aesthetic,” indeed on a certain “aesthetization,” to negotiate the passage between the formal linguistic structures and the meaning of the literary texts they interpret. This “aesthetization” turns Riffaterre into something of “a classical metaphysician, a Platonic swan disguised in the appearance

­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) – as though, for both, “the hermeneutics of reading” could indeed be made compatible with “the poetics of literary form” (RT 31). But since this compatibility depends on the stability of the category of the aesthetic, it becomes questionable once this category is shown to be as problematic as it has in fact always been for literary texts like those of Baudelaire, for “theoreticians” of the literary and of allegory like Benjamin, and for truly critical philosophers like Kant and Hegel. In the case of Riffaterre, the uncritical confidence in the stability of the category of the aesthetic comes 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 of which is “Jauss’s lack of interest, bordering on outright dismissal, in any considerations derived from what has, somewhat misleadingly, come to be known as the ‘play’ of the signifier, semantic effects produced on the level of the letter rather than of the word or sentence and which therefore escape from the network of hermeneutic questions and answers” (RT 65). And whether by “evasion” or “omission,” the recourse of each to the stability of the category of the aesthetic ends up turning away from 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 renders Baudelaire’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 the sublimation but the forgetting, by inscription, of terror, the dismemberment of the aesthetic whole into the unpredictable play of the literary letter” (RT 70). We could say, then, that the essays on Riffaterre and Jauss demonstrate  how their projects rest upon an unwarranted confidence in the s­tability of the category of the aesthetic and how this uncritical confidence itself depends upon an evasion or omission of factors and functions of language that resist being phenomenalized and that therefore disable any sublation or sublimation of texts to the status of “aesthetic objects” which would afford a cognition proper to them. But if these essays go a long way toward demonstrating the instability of the category of the a­ esthetic – with the help of Benjamin and Nietzsche, and, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, “literary” texts like Kleist’s “Marionettentheater” and Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” – the essays and lectures collected in Aesthetic Ideology – in particular the essays on Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Hegel’s Aesthetics – examine the

Allegories of Reference    ­5

nature of this instability in texts whose project is not an uncritical acceptance or use of the aesthetic for pedagogical or ideological purposes 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 considerable, for the possibility of their respective systems’ being able to close themselves off (i.e., as systems) depends upon it: in Kant, as a principle of articulation between theoretical and practical reason; in Hegel, as the moment of transition between objective spirit and absolute spirit. One does not need to be all that familiar with the divisions of Kant’s and Hegel’s systems or their terminology to recognize that such articulation and such transition are crucial. For without an account of reflective aesthetic judgment – its grounding as a transcendental principle – in Kant’s Third Critique, not only does the very possibility of the critical philosophy itself get put into question but so too does the possibility of a bridge between the concepts of freedom and the concepts of nature and necessity, or, as Kant puts it, the possibility of “the transition from our way of thinking in terms of principles of nature to our way of thinking in terms of principles of freedom.”5 To put it in stark and downright brutal terms, what this means is that the project of Kant’s Third Critique and its transcendental grounding of aesthetic judgment has to succeed if there is to be – as “there must after all be,” says Kant, “it must be possible” (my emphasis) – “a basis uniting [Grund der Einheit] the supersensible that underlies 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’s absolute 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 philosophical thought’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, its phenomenal appearance in art, “the sensory appearance of the Idea.” In other words, it is not a great love of art and beauty that prompts Kant and Hegel to include a consideration of the aesthetic in their systems but rather philosophically self-­interested reasons. As de Man put it in one of his last seminars, with disarming directness and brutal good humor: “Therefore the investment in the aesthetic is considerable – the whole ability of philosophical discourse to develop as such depends entirely on 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 make ­possible the link between real events and philosophical discourse.”8 What de Man’s work on Kant and Hegel shows, however, is that rather than being able to develop “an adequate aesthetics” – i.e.,

­6    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics adequate for the role prescribed it by their respective systems – both Kant’s Third Critique and Hegel’s Aesthetics wind up instead “undoing . . . the aesthetic as a valid category” (AI 89). Exactly how and why this happens and has to happen – and hence is in fact a real event, truly historical, for de Man – we can leave on the side for the moment. Suffice it to say that both Kant and Hegel cannot complete and close off their systems because they cannot ground their own philosophical discourses on principles internal to these systems. In the very attempt to ground or validate the aesthetic, both must have recourse to factors and functions of language that disarticulate the aesthetic and its linking or mediating role. Kant’s sublime is one example. Instead of being a “transcendental principle,” the mathematical sublime turns out to be a “linguistic principle” – in fact, a familiar metaphorico-­metonymical tropological system which cannot close itself off and which in turn issues in Kant’s dynamic sublime, whose linguistic “model” would be that of language as performative. Hence there would be “a deep, perhaps fatal, break or discontinuity” at the center of the Third Critique, for “it depends on a linguistic structure (language as a performative as well as a cognitive system) that is not itself accessible to the power of transcendental philosophy” (AI 79). But the aporia or disjunction between cognitive and performative familiar to readers of Allegories of Reading and its fatal break undergoes a new development in de Man’s reading of Kant on the sublime (a development in fact characteristic of the texts in this volume and of de Man’s other work in the 1980s). For this “disruption” or “disarticulation” becomes apparent or at least legible in the text of the Third Critique at the end of the analytic of the sublime in a general remark (section 29) where it occurs as a purely “material vision” – “devoid of any reflexive or intellectual complication . . . devoid of any semantic depth and reducible to the formal mathematization or geometrization of pure optics” (AI 83) – whose equivalent in the order of language would once again be “the prosaic materiality of the letter” (AI 90). Hegel’s Aesthetics contains – or, better, occurs as – a similar disruption or disarticulation. Officially “dedicated to the preservation and the monumentalization of classical art, it also contains all the elements which make such a preservation impossible from the start” (AI 102). These “elements” include the fact that the paradigm for art in the Aesthetics – once read – “is thought rather than perception, the sign rather 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 internalization and recollection of images. Hence the Aesthetics “turns out to be a double and possibly duplicitous text.” Since the only activity of

Allegories of Reference    ­7

the mind to occur as “the sensory appearance of the Idea” – Hegel’s “definition” of the beautiful – is a rather unaesthetic, if not downright ugly, mechanical memory by rote (which always entails some notation or inscription), such a memory is “a truth of which the aesthetic is the defensive, ideological, and censored translation” (AI 102). This reading of the “duplicity” of Hegel’s Aesthetics allows de Man to reconcile the two main statements of the text – “Art is the sensory appearance of the Idea”/“Art is for us a thing of the past” – for they turn out to be in fact the same statement: “Art is ‘of the past’ in a radical sense, in that, like memorization, it leaves the interiorization of experience forever behind. It is of the past to the extent that it materially inscribes, and thus forever forgets, its ideal content. The reconciliation of the two main theses of the Aesthetics occurs at the expense of the aesthetic as a stable philosophical category” (AI 103). In other words, as in the case of that which Riffaterre “evaded” and Jauss “omitted,” the “bottom line” of the factors and functions of language that disarticulate the aesthetic in both Kant and Hegel turns out to be material inscription, “the prosaic materiality of the letter,” which “no degree of obfuscation or ideology can 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 like what is commonly called “deconstruction” or “deconstructive reading” – and it is indeed that, but in a sense far more radical and far more precise than those who still use the “d-­word” are ready for – some precautions may be in order, lest we think that this is familiar, all-­ too-­familiar, and that we have read, digested, and understood all of this before and can therefore relegate it to the past (and a shady, if not downright 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, in the texts of Kant and Hegel – in short, its disarticulation – happens on account of some kind of weakness, lapse, or lack of rigor, and as though the critical-­linguistic or “deconstructive” reader had tools at his disposal to see better and know more. On the contrary, as is legible in every one of de Man’s essays, what happens in, and as, the texts of Kant and Hegel happens on account of the critical power of their thought, indeed, on account of their very “excess of rigor,” as de Man puts it in the Pascal essay. 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 demystifying “critique” from some external vantage point. Rather than ending up in “aesthetic ideology,” these truly critical texts instead leave us with

­8    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics a “materialism” whose radicality most later critical thinking (whether of the left or the right) has not been able to face. Indeed, because this disruption 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 a future. What does not happen, is not historical, and does not have a future is the ideologization of these (historical, material) text-­events in the recuperative non-­history of their reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – an ideologization for which Schiller’s (mis-­)appropriation of Kant is paradigmatic and that coincides with the way “we” still think about and teach literature, i.e., as an aesthetic function. “We are all Schillerians,” de Man quipped on one lecture occasion, “no one is Kantian any more.” (In the lecture “Kant and Schiller” de Man offers other instantiations of this paradigm – wherein the truly critical thrust of a thought is blunted in its reception – and its inverse – wherein a successor “de-­Schillerizes” or “re-­Kantizes” an ideologizing predecessor – with “Nietzsche/Heidegger” being possibly one example of the former and “Schopenhauer/Nietzsche” or “Heidegger/Derrida” examples of the latter.) Schiller’s ideologization of Kant amounts to his turning the philosophical category of the aesthetic – which, as a category, is something 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 not only an aesthetic anthropology but also an “aesthetic state.” The irony of this (mis-­)appropriation of Kant and its properly ideological moment comes in a certain (predictable) reversal: namely, Schiller’s utter lack of philosophical interest in Kant’s critical project and his empiricization, anthropologization, psychologization, indeed humanization, of the Kantian sublime ends up in sheer idealism, the separation of the mind from 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 up with materialism, whereas the thought of the humanist psychologizing anthropologizer Schiller issues in an utter, and frightening, idealism. It is worth stressing this reversal, its irony, and the difference between the “bottom line” of Kant’s and Hegel’s critical projects – i.e., material inscription, a radical materialism – and Schiller’s ideologizing aesthetization because they reach to the heart of de Man’s project in Aesthetic Ideology 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,

Allegories of Reference    ­9

because “critical,” vantage point. In such a case we could confine our “ideology-­critical” activity to what would amount to repeated demystifications of Schiller: demonstrating again and again how he had misunderstood the project of critical philosophy and its transcendental principles by empiricizing and thereby ideologizing Kant. Although always a pedagogically useful (and sometimes entertaining) exercise – it is clear this is what de Man means it as in “Kant and Schiller” – such an activity would, at best, be little more than an insistence upon relatively traditional “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 ideology in “The Resistance to Theory” – “What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism” (RT 11) – has been (mis-­)read and dismissed by critics on both the left and the right. For instance, in his Ideology (as well as in his The Ideology of the Aesthetic), Terry Eagleton characterizes de Man’s thought as an “essentially tragic philosophy” for which “mind and world, language and being, are eternally discrepant; and ideology is the gesture which seeks to conflate these quite separate orders, hunting nostalgically for a pure presence of the thing within the word, and so imbuing meaning with all the sensuous positivity of material being. Ideology strives to bridge verbal concepts and sensory intuitions; but the force of truly critical (or ‘deconstructive’) thought is to demonstrate how the insidiously figural, rhetorical nature of discourse will always intervene to break up this felicitous marriage. ‘What we call ideology,’ de Man observes in The Resistance to Theory, ‘is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism.’”10 Again, if this is all de Man meant by, or rather all that “we call,” ideology, Eagleton would be right to continue as he does by dismissing it as a blatant attempt to have “one particular paradigm of ideological consciousness . . . do service for the whole array of ideological forms and 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 that mind and world can never harmoniously meet is among other things a coded refusal of the ‘utopianism’ of emancipatory politics.”11 But to identify “what we call ideology” and “the confusion of linguistic and natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism” so hastily with “organicism” or the “spurious naturalization of language” (Eagleton’s wording) is in fact overhasty and mistaken as a critique of de Man. It is overhasty because it presumes to know ahead of time what it is we mean, what it is we are referring to, when we speak here of “language,”

­10    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics “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 difference to 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 “the insidiously figural, rhetorical nature of discourse” and its function in critical as well as ideological thought is an indication – as is his (again typical) literalization of de Man’s tone as “tragic” and “gloomy” – of where to look for the “aberrancy” of his (mis-­)reading. As always in the case of de Man, it has to do with rhetoric, the rhetorical dimension of language, and its relation to reference and the referential function of language.12 In other words, if we want to understand anything about de 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’s project from that of a mere “critique of aesthetic ideology.” De Man’s account of the “doubleness” or “duplicity” of Kant’s and Hegel’s texts on the aesthetic and their (self-­ )disarticulating critical power – and our attributing this disarticulation to “factors and functions 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, whatever it is that de Man’s readings of Kant and Hegel do, and whatever it is that happens (historically, materially) in (and as) their texts, it is not a matter of an external demystifying critique (“deconstructive” or otherwise) of a mystified viewpoint from the vantage point of superior knowledge and insight. As de Man’s texts make abundantly clear, what we are left with “after” the reading of Kant’s or Hegel’s disarticulation of the aesthetic is certainly neither an integrated critical or philosophical system (or “science”) – since its ability to close itself off and ground its own critical discourse depended upon the stability of the aesthetic – nor, equally ­certainly, mere ideology. One of de Man’s summaries of Kant on the sublime says it best: “The critical power of a transcendental philosophy undoes the very project of such a philosophy leaving us, certainly not with ideology – for transcendental and ideological (metaphysical) principles are part of the same system – but with a materialism that Kant’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 of the very strength and consistency of this power” (AI 89). It is because transcendental (or “critical”) and ideological thought and principles are interdependent, part of the same system, that any attempt at a mere

Allegories of Reference    ­11

demystification of the latter is in danger of collapsing “ideology into mere 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 superstructure,” 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”! – is the right citation here.13 For de Man, as for Althusser, we are never so much “in” ideology as when we think ourselves to be “outside” it14: for instance, when, like Terry Eagleton, we think that a presumably cheerful insistence 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 familiar in the twentieth century and that would make Schiller shudder. But if even a “critical” (“transcendental” or otherwise) thought cannot step “out” of ideology – or “by-­pass or repress ideology” (AI 72) – without losing its critical thrust and risking being repossessed by what it forecloses 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 leave us with different from such “merely” critical activity? Clearly enough, to the extent that they purport to “leave us with” a radical “materiality” or “materialism,” they have to be “different,” and they have to have some way of accounting for “the same system” of which critical and ideological thought and discourse are a part. And such “accounting” would indeed have to be an account of the production of the system, its putting into place on the basis of conditions of production that would be historical and material. This is where, again, the question of rhetoric – and its role in the confusion of “reference with phenomenalism” – comes in and is indispensable for an understanding of the specificity of what de Man has to say and teach about ideology. For when de Man speaks here of critical and ideological thought’s being “part of the same system,” there is no doubt that this “system” is, for him, always a tropological system, a system of tropological transformations and substitutions. In the case of critical and ideological principles and discourses, for example, this tropological system would want to include within itself – that is, reduce to its own principles of transformation and substitution – both the (purportedly) self-­defining and self-­validating semiosis of a critical discourse and what amounts to the symbolic phenomenal figuration of an ideological discourse.

­12    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics Kant’s characterization of the difference between and relation of what he calls “transcendental” and “metaphysical” principles – which de Man 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 the articulation of number and space or extension that Kant’s attempt to ground the mathematical sublime as a transcendental principle requires – and which can “take place” only as a “linguistic principle” (i.e., as a tropological system that is “purely formal,” cannot ground itself, and cannot be closed off) – would be another, more “local,” example. But global and local examples aside, the point should be clear: given such a “tropological system,” it cannot ever be sufficient to unmask or to demystify it because all such “critique” manages to do is to substitute one trope for another – even if it is the substitution of a “trope of the literal” (i.e., “real,” “true,” “demystified,” “critical,” and so on) for, as it 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” – and thereby to remain very much within (and hence to confirm) the tropological 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 or founding on the basis of principles that, wherever they may come from, cannot come from within the tropological system itself and cannot be reduced 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 phenomenalization made possible (and necessary) by tropes and their system but that nevertheless 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 “positional power” of language, “material inscription,” “the play of the letter” – are also necessarily always their conditions of impossibility; they leave marks and traces “within” (or “without”?) these tropological systems, marks and traces that may not be accessible to the knowing, consciousness, or science of “critical critics” but which nevertheless remain legible in 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 the truth, this excess or lack outs and has to out; and, like Hölderlin’s “the true” (das Wahre), it is what happens, what takes place, an event – like

Allegories of Reference    ­13

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, as the residue or excess of tropology is just another way of saying what de Man himself says about his apparently new “interest” or “turn to” questions of ideology, history, and politics in these essays. Asked in 1983 about the frequent recurrence of the terms “ideology” and “politics” 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 problems of ideology and by extension the problems of politics only on the basis of 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 the work contained in Aesthetic Ideology as an attempt to achieve a certain control “over technical problems of language, specifically problems of rhetoric, of the relation between tropes and performatives, of saturation of tropology as a field that in certain forms of language goes beyond that field” (RT 121). And, now that he has achieved a certain control over these problems – de Man is clearly referring to Allegories of Reading and his (still largely unread or grievously misread) work on Rousseau where he was “able to progress from purely linguistic analysis to questions which are really already of a political and ideological nature” – he finds that he can “do it [i.e., deal with questions of ideology and politics] a little more openly, though in a very different way than what generally passes as ‘critique of ideology.’” In other words, de Man’s “progress” or progression from apparently purely linguistic questions to talking more openly about ideology and politics itself takes place on the basis of a critical-­linguistic analysis of rhetoric – tropological systems, their inability to close themselves off, and their production of “forms of language” that “go beyond” their domain – and, as such, itself takes place as the residue or excess of tropology. In short, rather than just a “logical” (and historicizable) development, this progression is in fact a material event in 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 fact the impossibility of reducing texts to rhetoric, to tropes, to tropological models of language, and that therefore a simply “rhetorical reading”

­14    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics 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 everything to rhetoric and tropes and that his rhetorical readings only demonstrate again and again “how the insidiously figural, rhetorical nature of discourse will always intervene to break up [the] felicitous marriage”17 of mind and world, language and being, and so on. For instance, in the present context we could as easily say that it is in fact rhetoric that makes the “marriage” of mind and world, language and being, possible because such a meeting of mind and world is possible only thanks to a phenomenalizing (and hence aesthetico-­ideologizing) trope! Tropes accomplish the phenomenalization of reference that “we call” ideology, but, of course, because it is indeed tropes that do this, such phenomenalized reference cannot help but be “aberrant,” to use one of de Man’s favorite terms for it, and produce “ideological aberrations.” In any event, if we want to understand the role of rhetoric and tropes in de Man’s “critical-­linguistic analysis,” we need to clarify its relation to one of those “factors and functions” of language: namely, reference, the referential function, what one could call the irreducibility of reference in de Man. For reference is deeply involved, to put it still vaguely, not only in de Man’s “definition” of ideology – the confusion “of reference with phenomenalism” – but also in the double impossibility that runs like a leitmotif through all of de Man’s work: the impossibility of constructing an epistemologically reliable tropological model of language and text and, on the other side of the coin, the impossibility of constructing an epistemologically reliable purely semiotic (or grammatical) model of language and text. Although a number of the Rousseau essays in Allegories of Reading offer much help on the question of reference and the referential function, perhaps the most explanatory and suggestive discussion comes in “The Resistance to Theory,” its infamous “definition” of ideology, and the immediate context of this passage. The essay is most suggestive in part because its general, programmatic statement allows it to explain most succinctly both the project de Man is coming from (call it Allegories of Reading) and the one he is moving toward (the essays in Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology). In order to appreciate the considerable import of de Man’s “definition” (or, better, denomination – “we call”) of ideology as the confusion “of reference with phenomenalism” and the role of the rhetorical dimension of language in this definition, it is necessary to read what “follows” from it: “What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism. It follows that, more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics, the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the

Allegories of Reference    ­15

unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence” (RT 11). The claim being made here for “the linguistics of literariness” may certainly appear exorbitant to some, or, at the very least, surprising, given de Man’s trenchant critiques of semiology and what goes by the name of “structuralism” in literary study. And yet it is the linguistics of literariness that is said to be “a powerful and indispensable tool” not only in the unmasking or demystifying of ideological aberrations but also in “accounting for their occurrence” – that is, precisely the double operation that would qualify this activity as the “critical-­linguistic analysis” that not only demystifies ideology but also accounts for its necessity, i.e., its production and the (historical, material) conditions of its production. It certainly seems strange that de Man should attribute such power to the linguistics of literariness. Nevertheless, the claims make perfect sense once we try to understand the relation between reference and the linguistics of literariness in context, and they turn out to be rather less exorbitant once we read their own “referential,” not to say rhetorical, status. The relations among “the linguistics of literariness,” “reference,” and the possibility of a confusion “of reference with phenomenalism” are very 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 “The Resistance to Theory,” the advent of literary theory as such “occurs with the introduction of linguistic terminology in the metalanguage about literature,” and “contemporary literary theory comes into its own in such events as the application of Saussurian linguistics to literary texts” (RT 8). The difference that the advent, occurrence, or event of “literary theory” proper makes has very specifically to do with its different conception of “reference as a function of language and not necessarily as an intuition.” De Man’s “intuition” here should be read in German (as Anschauung), as the following sentences confirm: “Intuition implies perception, consciousness, experience, and leads at once into the world of logic and of understanding with all its correlatives, among which aesthetics occupies a prominent place. The assumption that there can be a science of language which is not necessarily a logic leads to the development of a terminology which is not necessarily aesthetic” (RT 8). In other words, what the “non-­phenomenal linguistics” of Saussure and 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” – but rather its ability to give us, or, better, to designate, the referent reliably, predictably, and epistemologically consistently enough to allow us to

­16    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics mistake what is a product of a function of language for an object of consciousness, its “faculties” (intuition, perception), and the logic, the phenomeno-­logic, that follows in its train. It is no surprise, then, that such a non-­phenomenal “linguistics of literariness” should be “a powerful 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 intuition and not as a function of language. As de Man points out in “Roland Barthes and the Limits of Structuralism” (1972), semiology’s demystifying power is genuine and undeniable: “One can see why any ideology would always have a vested interest in theories of language advocating correspondence between sign and meaning, since they depend on the illusion of this correspondence for their effectiveness. On the other hand, theories of language that put into question the subservience, resemblance, or potential identity between sign and meaning are always subversive, even if they remain strictly confined to linguistic phenomena” (RCC 170). What de Man calls the “correspondence between sign and meaning” in this essay is quite clearly what ten years later is called the 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 (the linguistics of literariness) being also “a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence” is a more complicated and overdetermined “claim.” The complications begin to unfold if we try to figure out what this determining factor’s “accounting for” amounts to. On a first level, the meaning seems relatively straightforward: the linguistics of literariness can “account for” the occurrence of referential aberrations in the sense 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 to unmask any undue phenomenalization of language’s referential function and to reveal the mechanics of an ideology’s workings. Nevertheless, the linguistics of literariness “accounts for” ideological aberrations in still another sense if it is a “determining factor” in accounting for their occurrence. In other words, and with only a slight shift of emphasis, the linguistics of literariness also “accounts for” ideological aberrations in the sense of being “the explanation or cause of,” as the dictionary puts it – of being a determining factor that itself “causes” or produces the ideological aberrations. This sense may seem a bit odd in the context of what seems to be unmitigated “praise” of the “linguistics of literariness,” but it is in fact a necessary sense, as predictable and inevitable as

Allegories of Reference    ­17

ideology itself. This becomes clear if we recall the immediate context of our ideology-­paragraph in “The Resistance to Theory.” For what de Man has just stated and demonstrated in the preceding paragraphs is that the non-­phenomenal linguistics of literariness itself succumbs to the temptation or the seduction of phenomenalism when it confuses “literariness” for “another word for, or another mode of, aesthetic response” (RT 9), to the point of a “Cratylism” of the sign which “assumes a convergence of the phenomenal aspects of language, as sound, with its 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 semiology or similarly oriented methods be considered formalistic, in the sense of being aesthetically rather than semantically valorized, but the inevitability of such an interpretation does not make it less aberrant. Literature involves the voiding, rather than the affirmation, of aesthetic categories” (RT 10). De Man’s use of the word “aberrant” to describe this (mis-­)interpretation brings us back, re-­fers us, as it were, to the ideology-­paragraph and our “ideological aberrations.” Quite clearly, as de Man has just pointed out, the linguistics of literariness itself undergoes a re-­phenomenalization of reference: in short, even the discourse of 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 necessary and inevitable moment. And de Man’s using Barthes – the Barthes of “Proust et les noms” – as the example of such self-­ideologization recalls an analogous move ten years earlier in “Roland Barthes and the Limits of Structuralism.” There de Man had demonstrated that (the early) Barthes’s own demystifying discourse suffers a self-­mystification on the level of method when, carried away by the headiness of the power that bracketing the referential function of literature grants it, it aspires to “scientific” status – as though all the “mess and muddle of signification,” its “referential, representational effectiveness,” and “referential suggestiveness” did not need to be “accounted for” because it could be “dismissed as contingency or ideology and not taken seriously as a semantic interference within the semiological structure . . . the reasons for 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 and how “scientific” its aspirations, comes back inevitably: That literature can be ideologically manipulated is obvious but does not suffice to prove that this distortion is not a particular aspect of a larger pattern of error. Sooner or later, any literary study must face the problem of the truth value of its own interpretations, no longer with the naive conviction

­18    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics of a priority of content over form, but as a consequence of the much more unsettling experience of being unable to cleanse its own discourse of aberrantly referential implications. The traditional concept of reading used by Barthes and based on the model of an encoding/decoding process is inoperative if the master code remains out of reach of the operator, who then becomes unable to understand his own discourse. A science unable to read itself can no longer be called a science. The possibility of a scientific semiology is challenged by a problem that can no longer be accounted for in purely semiological terms. (RCC 174)

I quote de Man’s summary (1972) of Barthes’s predicament at length for several reasons. First of all, it confirms our suspicions about the linguistics of literariness being a determining factor in “accounting for” the occurrence of ideological aberrations. The linguistics of literariness may be able to demystify ideological aberrations and it may be able to explain them, but because it cannot do so without its own discourse’s being subject to the very factors that determine the inevitability of ideological aberrations, it also cannot help but reproduce those aberrations in its own discourse. Barthes’s inability to cleanse19 his own “scientific” discourse of “referentially aberrant implications” means that “ideological aberration” is not something that comes from “outside” language but rather is very much “internal” to it, to its irreducible referential function and its inevitable aberrancy. If we ask what it is “about” reference, “about” the referential function, that makes it inevitable and yet inevitably 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 characterization of Barthes’s predicament as the inability to read his own discourse (because unable to “account for” its own referential aberrations). “A science 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 it would be quite clearly an allegory, an “account,” of its inability to read the story, the “account,” of its (quite legitimate) demystifying “science.” And since the targets of its demystifying, unmasking, operation are the unwarranted phenomenalizations of reference performed by tropes, by the rhetorical dimension of language, it is of course rhetoric, tropes, the rhetorical dimension of any and every demystifying discourse, that turns it into an allegory of the impossibility of reading – and very precisely, as page 205 of Allegories of Reading puts it, an allegory of the unreadability of “the prior narration,” i.e., the narrative of “a trope and its deconstruction.” However tortuously, we have arrived at a third sense of “accounting,” of how it is that the linguistics of literariness can be a determining factor in accounting for ideological aberrations: that is, it

Allegories of Reference    ­19

can be such only as an “account,” a story, a narrative, an allegory of (the impossibility of) reading and never a “science” or a critical discourse transparent to itself that could “account for” ideology by “balancing the books” of credit and debit without remainder. That accounting for ideological aberrations should turn into an allegory of (the impossibility of) reading is certainly no surprise for readers of Allegories of Reading, but what needs to be stressed here is that the inevitable aberrancy of the referential function, its inevitable phenomenalization and ideologization in and by tropes, the rhetorical dimension of language, is something that is very much “part of” reference, very much a “moment” of the referential function. This is most compactly 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, general potential for meaning to a specific unit” (AR 268). This undetermined, general potential for meaning is grammar, “the system of relationships that generates the text and that functions independently of its referential meaning” (AR 268), and “just as no text is conceivable without grammar, no grammar is conceivable without the suspension of referential meaning” (AR 268–9). But even though “the logic of grammar generates 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 the grammatical principles to which it owed its constitution” (AR 269). In other words, there is a “fundamental incompatibility between grammar and meaning” (AR 269), and this “divergence between grammar and referential 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 determining, however, necessarily diverges from and indeed “subverts” the text’s undetermined, general, non-­ referential potential for meaning, the grammar without which the text could not “come into being” in the 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 moment of reference, of the text-­producing referential function, “itself.” As the “moment” of reference that necessarily and inevitably produces aberrant 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

­20    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics perspective: as a generative, open-­ended, non-­referential grammatical system and as a figural system closed off by a transcendental signification that 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 we call ideology” in “The Resistance to Theory,” and it is the reason why the linguistics of literariness being a “determining factor” in accounting for ideological aberrations can also be only an allegorical “account” of the impossibility of defining or determining ideology – except in and as a 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 – but rather also a necessary “conclusion” to be drawn from everything we have 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 allegories are allegories of, the most “direct” answer would have to be that they are allegories of reference, which amounts to the same thing as saying that they are all “allegories of of,” since “of” is the very bearer of the referential function, the “carrying-­back” function, “itself.” Our stuttering repetition “allegories of of,” then, would suggest still a fourth (and “last”) meaning for the “accounting” that the linguistics of literariness as a determining factor can purportedly perform: the mechanical counting, re-­counting, numbering, enumeration, of ideological aberrations, one by one, one after the other, in order. Such purely “grammatical” (as in gramma) juxtaposition or notation is, indeed, finally the only material (and because material, historical) “accounting” for ideological aberrations 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 “demystifications” cannot help but amount to mere substitutions of one trope for another, one “consciousness” for another, to put it in the terms of The German Ideology – in short, even economics is never economic enough when dealing with the economy of phenomenalism and reference that we call ideology!). If this is so, then it is no wonder that, as de Man puts it in the Barthes essay, “The mind cannot remain at rest in a mere repertorization of its own recurrent aberrations; it is bound to systematize its own negative self-­insights into categories that have at least the appearance of passion and difference” (RCC 175). There is much to be read in this sentence, but I would underline only the fact that the mind is bound to do this – it has no choice, it is necessary and inevitable, for

Allegories of Reference    ­21

it is the irreducible referential function, its inevitable phenomenalization in 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 narrative endlessly tells the story of its own denominational aberration and it can only 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 of rigor rather than for lack of it.” de Man, “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion”

The characterization of de Man’s “accounting” as a stuttering repertorization, repetition, enumeration, or numbering of referential (i.e., ideological) aberrations takes us back to the project of Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology and its specificity in relation to de Man’s previous work. Our attempt to explain, or at least to account for, the “relation” of reference and rhetoric in de Man’s “definition” of ideology (as the confusion of reference with phenomenalism) and its ending up in “allegories of reference” 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 distinguishes it from the critical-­linguistic analyses in Allegories of Reading. One way to formulate this distinctive feature is by returning once again to “The Resistance to Theory” and its characterization of “the most familiar and general of all linguistic models, the classical trivium, which considers the sciences of language as consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and logic (or dialectics)” in its relation to “the quadrivium, which covers the non-­verbal sciences of number (arithmetic), of space (geometry), of motion (astronomy), and of time (music)” (RT 13). To put it directly though a bit proleptically: whereas the project of Allegories of Reading comes from the side of the trivium – the sciences of language – that of Aesthetics, 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 the way that rhetoric, the rhetorical dimension of language, always comes to interfere “between” grammar and logic, thereby making impossible any easy, unbroken passage between the formal structures and the

­22    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics (universalizability of the) meaning of texts, these analyses would be demonstrations of the instability of the linguistic model of the trivium (as a model of language). Whether out to show how the rhetorical dimension always interferes with attempts to set up grammatical models of language or how grammar (in various forms) interferes with attempts to set up closed tropo-­logical models of language – for instance, most programmatically, in “Semiology and Rhetoric”20 – or how the performative function (or “performative rhetoric,” as de Man calls it on occasion) does not easily co-­exist with reliable epistemological claims to truth, the essays in Allegories of Reading can, for the most part, be said to 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 than texts of systematic philosophy like treatises of logic or ­epistemology – would be consistent with this observation. The texts contained in Aesthetic Ideology, on the other hand, are, I would say, quite clearly coming from the other side of the artes liberales, and not for thematic reasons only – that is, not just because nearly all of them are “about” texts that take a determinate place in philosophical systems. The texts in this volume come from the side of the quadrivium in the more particular 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 the aesthetic, is a rigorous philosophical discourse’s way of attempting to ground its own discourse on principles internal to its system and thereby to close it off as a system: i.e., as a logic. Philosophical aesthetics is in fact the attempt to verify that a science of language does indeed have to be a logic (something that “literary theory,” with its “non-­phenomenal linguistics,” necessarily puts into question). Logic, as de Man summarizes in “The Resistance to Theory,” would provide the “link” between the 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 discourse about itself matches up with the rigor of the mathematical discourse about the world. Seventeenth-­ century epistemology, for instance, at the moment when the relationship between philosophy and mathematics is particularly close, holds up the language of what it calls geometry (mos geometricus), 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 reasoning 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 of which only geometrical minds can be aware.” This is a clear instance of the

Allegories of Reference    ­23 interconnection between a science of the phenomenal world and a science of language conceived as definitional logic, the pre-­condition for a correct axiomatic-­deductive, synthetic reasoning. The possibility of thus circulating freely between logic and mathematics has its own complex and problematic history as well as its contemporary equivalences with a different logic and a different mathematics. What matters for our present argument is that this articulation of the sciences of language with the mathematical sciences represents a particularly compelling version of a continuity between a theory of language, as logic, and the knowledge of the phenomenal world to which mathematics gives access. In such a system, the place of aesthetics is preordained and by no means alien, provided the priority of logic, in the model of the 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 and the quadrivium – since it is “the area where the rigor of the linguistic discourse about itself matches up with the rigor of the mathematical discourse about the world” – and his quotation of Pascal’s De l’esprit géométrique help to explain what is at stake in epistemo-­logic. For what the discourse of epistemology would want is to be able to construct a logical model to ground and verify itself as rigorously as the definitional self-­ verifying logic of the mathematical sciences. This is how the rigor of the linguistic discourse about itself could “match up” with the rigor of the mathematical discourse about the world. If in the seventeenth century the “geometric method” is held up as a model for epistemological discourse, it is because this method’s own discourse as definitional logic would be precisely non-­referential or, better, self-­referential enough not to leave a remainder of reference or the “referential aberrations” we have been worrying above. (It should come as no surprise even to delirious 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 would claim to be able to cleanse itself of aberrant reference – i.e., ultimately, the rhetorical dimension of language – by basing itself on the “linguistic” (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 would bypass or repress or displace or transform the irreducible referential function of language, its inevitable phenomenalization in trope, and its production of referential, ideological aberrations. Nevertheless, as we have seen, these philosophical discourses cannot do this without in fact de-­stabilizing the category of the aesthetic – since they can “ground” their tropological systems only by resorting to factors and functions

­24    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics of language that resist phenomenalization – and ending up in a radical materialism irreducible to the phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judgment. To be added at this point is the fact that de Man understands and formulates the project of the sought-­after articulation of aesthetics and epistemology and its “failure” or disarticulation very much in the terms of the problematics of seventeenth-­century epistemology (which, of course, is not surprising, since both Kant [especially] and Hegel take it upon themselves to resolve the problems they have inherited from seventeenth-­century thought). De Man’s account of Kant’s mathematical sublime as an attempt to articulate number with extension – which turns out to “work” only as a tropological system that cannot close itself off and necessarily produces the “dynamic sublime” of a performative “model” of language – would be one obvious example; but even his reading of Hegel’s sublime takes place against the background of the principles and problems of the quadrivium. This is also the case of the opening essay in Aesthetic Ideology – “The Epistemology of Metaphor” – with its treatment of the “theme” of “rhetoric and epistemology” in Locke, Condillac, and Kant. But the text most explicitly concerned with the question of an epistemological discourse’s being able to model itself on 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 only does it act as a bridge between the “themes” of “rhetoric and epistemology” 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 we have called “allegories of reference” – from the side of the quadrivium. “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion” plays itself out in the space between its opening words – “Attempts to define allegory keep reencountering a set of predictable problems” – and its very last words – “. . . is what we call allegory” (my emphasis). It in fact turns out that the predictable problems in attempts to define allegory are such that they make any “definition” impossible and leave us instead with allegory’s being that which we can only “call.” That these predictable problems are, one, allegory’s “referential status” and, two, “a recurrent ambivalence in [allegory’s] aesthetic valorization” very precisely deposits the essay’s problematic within the space of our concerns: between “rhetoric and epistemology” and “rhetoric and aesthetics.” Let us take up the first “theme” first, for, as we already know, it will take us back to the second all too predictably – in numerical order, as it were, one by one. “What is it,” de Man asks at the outset, “in a rigorous epistemology, that makes it impossible to decide whether its exposition is a proof or an allegory?”

Allegories of Reference    ­25

(AI 55). That the rigorous epistemology’s exposition should be what makes it impossible to decide it as proof or as allegory already provides us with an indication of where the problem lies: it of course “has to do” with the epistemology’s own discourse, indeed with the referential (and thus rhetorical) status of its own language of definition and proof. The “rigorous epistemology” in question is Pascal’s in the first part of a text entitled Réflexions sur la géométrie en général; De l’esprit géométrique et de l’art de persuader, translated as “The Mind of the Geometrician” in de Man’s English version. De l’esprit géométrique begins its exposition in clear and classical terms: with the distinction between nominal and real definitions, définitions de nom and définitions de chose. The advantage of the geometric method, according to Pascal, is that it recognizes only nominal definitions, “giving a name only to those things which have been clearly designated in perfectly known terms.” Nominal definition would be a simple process of denomination, “a kind of stenography,” as de Man puts it, “a free and flexible code used for reasons of economy to avoid cumbersome repetitions, and which in no way influences the thing itself in its substance or in its properties” (AI 55). If “we call every number which is divisible by two without a remainder an even number,” this is a nominal, geometrical definition, says Pascal, “because, after having clearly designated a thing – for example, every number divisible by two without a remainder – we give this thing a name from which we exclude any other meaning it may have, in order to apply to it only the meaning of the thing indicated.”23 In other words, with nominal definitions we know what it is we are talking about at all times because it amounts to a simple process of naming whose designation is clear and unambiguous. Should there be any doubt about what “even number” designates, we can always reiterate its definition. In short, the system of nominal definitions would be a closed semiotic system, non-­ referential in the sense that its signs do not carry us back to anything outside its system of arbitrary, conventional linkings between “chose” and “nom,” or, better, self-­or auto-­referential in the sense that its terms or units, names, always take back to other units or names constituted not by some essence or substance but only by their clear, determined and determinable relation (of désignation) to other terms internal to the system. What could be clearer? Real definitions (définitions de chose), on the other hand, are really not definitions at all but rather axioms, propositions in need of being proven, because they make claims about the existence and the nature of things outside of, other than, the sign system of the definitions themselves. Rather than being non-­or auto-­ referential, real definitions are clearly referential; they take us “out” or back to something other than the relations among signs in that they

­26    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics try to say something about the nature of the chose signified by the sign. (Hence they can be contradicted, they are not “free,” they may occasion confusions, and so on.) The geometrician, then, in order to know what he is talking about, must be able to keep nominal definitions and real definitions apart. Can he really do so? As we might anticipate, the answer is: “Not for very long.” As soon as the distinction between nominal and real definitions is instituted – or “enunciated,” as de Man puts it – it runs into problems on account of Pascal’s having to introduce what he calls “primitive terms” into his epistemological discourse. These terms are so basic and so elementary that they cannot be defined, indeed need not and should not be defined, because they are clear as day, perfectly intelligible by natural light; and they “include the basic topoi of geometrical discourse, such as motion, number, and extension.” In geometric discourse, primitive terms are “co-­ extensive” with nominal definitions because their designation, according to Pascal, would be as clear and as unarguable as that of nominal definitions. Nevertheless, the truly Pascalian complication in the “definition” of primitive terms arises because Pascal does not take the dogmatist’s route. In the case of primitive terms, he insists, it is not that all men have the same idea of the nature or essence of the thing designated, but rather only the relation between the name and the thing: upon hearing the word “time,” for example, “all turn (or direct) the mind toward the same object” (tous portent la pensée vers le même objet). They may disagree about what time is or about the “nature” of time, but each time they hear or say “time,” their thought, the mind, is carried toward the same object. Pascal’s having to use a figure – the mind of all being carried toward the same spot – provides de Man with the first turning point of his reading, for, quite clearly, the primitive term is not a sign constituted by its relation to other signs – not like a nominal definition – but rather a trope: “Here the word does not function as a sign or a name, as was the case in the nominal definition, but as a vector, a directional motion that is manifest only as a turn, since the target toward which it turns remains unknown. In other words, the sign has become a trope, a substitutive relationship that has to posit a meaning whose existence cannot be verified, but that confers upon the sign an unavoidable signifying function. The indeterminacy of this function is carried by the figural expression ‘porter la pensée,’ a figure that cannot be accounted for in phenomenal terms” (AI 56). That the sign here is “a vector” or a “directional motion” that can manifest itself only as a turn or a trope means, in short, that the determination of its referential, carrying-­back, function necessarily and inevitably takes place as a trope, and a phenomenalizing trope at that. In other words, it has

Allegories of Reference    ­27

acquired, or has “conferred” upon it, a “signifying function,” as de Man says, which function has to be understood very precisely in terms of the Saussurian distinction between the “signification” and the “value” of a given utterance. (Signification always takes back to the context, the referential context, of an utterance – and is like the exchange of a dollar for a quantity of bread – whereas value is purely intra-­semiotic – and is like exchanging a dollar for four quarters or 76 euro cents. As always in the case of Saussure, the distinction goes back to the founding langue/parole distinction.) De Man’s conclusion is inescapable: “in the language of geometry, nominal definition and primitive terms are coextensive, but the semantic function of the primitive terms is structured like a trope. As such, it acquires a signifying function that it controls neither in its existence nor in its direction” (AI 57). If it cannot control the signifying function introduced into it by primitive terms, geometric discourse turns into a referentially aberrant discourse. The consequences are considerable. Since primitive terms were supposed to be coextensive with the system of nominal definitions, that system is parasitized, contaminated, from the start by real definitions and the potentially aberrant reference of their phenomenalizing tropes. And there would be a further consequence for the system of nominal definition, for the inaugural definition of nominal definition itself: namely, that it can take place only by, as, a real definition. This should be no surprise since, after all, the very institution of the distinction between nominal and real definition necessarily takes place by the definition of a relation between a purportedly closed semiotic system of nominal definitions and an indeterminate world of natures and essences “outside” it that would be the object of real definitions. As the reading of primitive terms demonstrates, this relation cannot be controlled; the borderline between nominal and real definition is itself divided, perforated, for the very means by which we draw the border is itself a real definition (or a “primitive term”) that introduces aberrant reference (on the back of an aberrant trope) into the system of nominal definitions. The upshot is that the system of nominal definitions, as a system of signs, cannot account for itself as a system, i.e., as closed off, because it cannot render itself homogeneous as a sign system. It is contaminated from the start, from the very first definition of nominal definition, by tropes, the signifying function, and the real definition.24 This does not mean, of course, that the “system” of Pascal’s epistemological discourse and its “geometric method” falls apart or collapses under the pressure of a “self-­deconstruction.” On the contrary, one could go so far as to say that it is the very rigor of its critical discourse (and the rigor of de Man’s account of it) – with its refusal of dogmatic

­28    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics solutions like those of Arnauld and Nicole in La Logique de Port-­ Royal25 – that is responsible for Pascal’s text’s occurring, its taking place as a historical, material event. Its “excess of rigor” means rather that the referential/rhetorical status of Pascal’s epistemological discourse is other than, different from, what literalists call philosophy or philosophical discourse – more like allegory than like proof. In the case of “The Mind of the Geometrician,” the initial complication of definitional logic inevitably leaves traces and a residue “within” the geometric discourse of Pascal’s epistemology – a (material) residue of (aberrant) reference, one might call it, that renders the text an allegory. One place this residue is legible is in Pascal’s refutation of the Chevalier de Méré, who would put into question the principle of double infinity (infinite smallness and infinite bigness) that subtends Pascal’s cosmos and grounds the “necessary and reciprocal link” among the intraworldly dimensions of motion, number, space, and time. What Méré does, in brief, is to use “the principle of the homogeneity between space and number, which is also the ground of Pascal’s cosmology, to put the principle of infinitesimal smallness into question” (AI 58). If it is possible to make up numbers out of units that are themselves devoid of number (i.e., the one), then it is possible in the order of space to conceive of an extension made up of parts that are themselves devoid of extension, “thus implying that space can be made up of a finite quantity of indivisible parts, rather than of an infinity of infinitely divisible ones” (AI 58). Pascal’s work is cut out for him: on the one hand, he has to dissociate the laws of number from the laws of geometry “by showing that what applies to the indivisible unit of number, the one, does not apply to the indivisible unit of space” (AI 58); but, on the other hand, he has also to suspend the separation between number and space while maintaining it “because the underlying homology of space and number, the ground of the system, should never be fundamentally in question” (AI 59) for theological reasons. Pascal accomplishes the former easily enough by demonstrating that the one, despite being (nominally) a nonnumber, “a nominal definition of nonnumber,” is nevertheless also homogeneous to the system of number since it is of the same “species” (genre) as number. In which case the relation between the one and the number system would not be like that of the relation between the “indivisible” of extension and space, since the “indivisible” would be heterogeneous to space as extension. A “unit” of extension that cannot be divided must be heterogeneous to the order of extension, whereas the one, in being both a number and a nonnumber, is (dialectically) homogeneous to the order of number. Pascal’s demonstration works well enough, but it does so because it reintroduces “the ambivalence of definitional language,” in which the nominally

Allegories of Reference    ­29

indivisible number (the one) is distinguished from the really indivisible space, “a demonstration that Pascal can accomplish easily, but only because the key words of the demonstration – indivisible, spatial extension (étendue), species (genre), and definition – function as real, and not as nominal, definitions” (AI 58–9). This ambivalence returns – and with incalculable effects – in Pascal’s second demonstration, in which he in turn must heal the break he has introduced between number and space by coming up with an “element” in the order of number that would nevertheless be heterogeneous to the order of number just as the indivisible is heterogeneous to the order of space as extension. This element is the zero, which, unlike the one, is “radically not a number, absolutely heterogeneous to the order of number.” With its equivalences in the order of time and motion – instant and stasis – the zero would re-­establish the necessary and reciprocal link among the four intraworldly dimensions: “At the end of the passage, the homogeneity of the universe is recovered, and the principle of infinitesimal symmetry is well established.” But the price of this reconciliation is heavy: “the coherence of the system is now seen to be entirely dependent on the introduction of an element – the zero and its equivalences in time and motion – that is itself entirely heterogeneous with regard to the system and is nowhere a part of it” (AI 59). The zero, it turns out, is another moment of signification, of the signifying function or the real definition, without which “a theory of language as sign or as name (nominal definition)” cannot come into existence. It is worth quoting de Man’s difficult conclusion on the zero at length: The notion of language as sign is dependent on, and derived from, a different notion in which language functions as rudderless signification and transforms what it denominates into the linguistic equivalence of the arithmetical zero. It is as sign that language is capable of engendering the principles of infinity, of genus, species and homogeneity, which allow for synecdochal totalizations, but none of these tropes could come about without the systematic effacement of the zero and its reconversion into a name. There can be no one without zero, but the zero always appears in the guise of a one, of a (some)thing. The name is the trope of the zero. The zero is always called a one, when the zero is actually nameless, “innommable.” (AI 59)

The difficulty of this passage and de Man’s summary of the effects of the zero is due in part to the fact that his own reading, in its very “excess of rigor,” has itself introduced something of a “signifying function” into its own discourse, which threatens to carry it away, or rather back, to a most mechanical, repetitive, stuttering, indeed material, numbering and spacing. For despite de Man’s own apparent suggestion – at least at the beginning of the passage – that we should understand the disruption introduced by the zero as the same as, or at least as similar to, the

­30    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics disruption of the system of nominal definition by primitive terms, there is much more going on here – as the tropological agitation of the passage would already suggest. If “at the end of the most systematic exposition of the theory of the two infinites . . . we find once again the ambivalence of the theory of definitional language, which we encountered at the start” (AI 60, my emphasis), the repetition of our finding “once again” at the end what we encountered at the start has to be understood as a repetition with a difference – indeed, as an allegorical re-­counting (and re-­encountering – recall the predictable problems that attempts to define allegory “keep reencountering” at the start of the essay!) in which the “once” of “once again” should be read like the “once” of “Once upon a time . . .,” as though what we find “once again” and keep re-­encountering were the allegorical start of “Once upon a time . . .” time and time again. What is it, then, that we encounter once again in the reading of the zero and its disruption of the possibility of grounded knowledge? Whatever it is, it is not the one and not like the one, and explaining the zero’s difference from, or, better, heterogeneity in relation to, the one may help us to account for the genuine difficulty of de Man’s “ending” (and ending once again “at the start”). The one, we should remember, was in fact both a sign (or a name) and a trope: that is, as a mere name given to “the entity that does not possess the properties of number, a nominal definition of nonnumber,” the one is clearly a sign; but, as an entity that “partakes of number” and is homogeneous to the system of number, the one is a synecdochal trope that allows for the “synecdochal totalization of infinitude.” In other words, Pascal’s dissociating number and space and rendering them heterogeneous in relation to one another by demonstrating that the one is not like the indivisible of extension rests upon his homogenization of the one to the number system. And this homogeneity, we would stress, is that of a closed semio-­tropological system in which the “line” between sign and trope can be crossed thanks to the dialectical resources of determinate negation, the “non-­” of a nonnumber that is nevertheless of the same species as number (a “non-­” that was no doubt already the result of a “systematic effacement of the zero” which is not a nothing, not a negation . . .). The zero, however, is first of all neither a sign nor a trope. Although de Man’s saying that the zero introduces a “signifying function” into the order of number and his referring to “the zero of signification” may sound as though we should understand it on the model of primitive terms and their vector-­like “directional motion,” we should note that the signifying function of the zero is in fact what de Man calls “rudderless signification.” In other words, this may be a signifying function all right, but it is a signifying function deprived of precisely its directionality: as

Allegories of Reference    ­31

“rudderless,” its directional motion is not just indeterminate but non-­ existent. In short, if the zero is a trope, it is a still more “primitive” trope than that of primitive terms: at best, it is a trope for trope “itself,” or rather for the potentially always aberrant reference that tropes produce. That the zero is also not a sign is even more evident, since it is “by definition” (nominal or real? or either?) that which is heterogeneous to the number system in the same way that the indivisible is heterogeneous to space. The zero, one could say, is a bit of space or extension introduced into the system of number considered as a sign system; but, on the other hand, it is also a bit of “pure sign” introduced into the number system considered as synecdochal trope because the zero does not represent or “stand for” something or anything that could be numbered or counted (like the “one more” house in Pascal’s demonstration that by itself is not a city, “yet a city is made up of houses that are of the same species as the city, since one can always add a house to a city and it remains a city”). If the zero disrupts Pascal’s geometric epistemological discourse and the knowledge of the “marvels” of nature (that its principles of the double infinity and the homogeneity of the universe give access to), it disrupts its claim to being a totalized semio-­tropological system. It signifies too much (and too little) to be a sign; it designates too much (and too little) to be a trope. This would be at least some of the meaning contained in de Man’s ambiguous phrase: “the zero of signification.” That is, the trouble with the “signifying function” of the zero is not that it signifies (and hence is a trope for) something or nothing – for as soon as it is made to do so, it is always some name, some one, some thing, that it would signify – but rather that it is “really” a “zero of signification.” It signifies only signification “itself”; in this case, only the impossible attempt to have the number system, as a closed, homogeneous semio-­tropological system, “signify” reliably that which would be outside it, space, extension, the perceivable phenomenal world. In short, again, the “indivisible” may signify something mysterious and impossible to grasp in space, but the zero signifies nothing but that which is undefinable either nominally or really in number. Hence it dis-­joins, disrupts, interrupts the homogeneity between number as sign (nominal definition) and number as trope (real definition), in the case of the one, between the one as nominally nonnumber and the one as synecdochally homogeneous to number. This is where de Man’s saying later that the zero (like irony) is “a term that is not susceptible to nominal or real definition” (AI 61) may be of some help. The zero is not susceptible to nominal definition – this would be clear enough, for what does it name, what is it a sign of? It is a “sign” of the other than number, “something” outside the number system, that

­32    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics cannot be accounted for in terms of number. But it is also not susceptible to real definition, for in order for it to be a real definition, the zero would have to be a claim about the nature and properties of something outside the number system; it would have to be a trope for something, whereas it is rather a trope for nothing – but not the nothing of space so much as the “nothing” of number, the infinitude untotalizable for the closed sign/synecdochal trope system that would totalize infinity. One can give a name to infinity, but this name will not be definable in terms of other names; and one can signify infinity by means of a trope, but this trope cannot help but be drawn back in, reinscribed into, the sign/trope system that can signify only “the limit of the infinitely small, the almost zero that is the one,” as de Man puts it. If the zero is neither a sign nor a trope – and both (a sign in the number system as synecdochal trope; a trope in the number system as nominal definition) – but rather a cipher, or a counter, or a marker, that makes the crossing of the “line” between sign and trope (designation and signification) possible (and impossible – except by recourse to the zero), then what is it? Clearly enough, ­precisely that: a cipher, counter, marker, or place-­holder, a mere device or technique of writing, notation, inscription, a pre-­semiological and pre-­figural “element” of “language” that makes language as sign and language as trope (im)possible – une cheville syntaxique, as Derrida writes, “a syntactical plug,” or, better, “a syntactical dowel.”26 If the zero introduces a bit of “space” into number, as we put it folksily above, it is a rather peculiar spatiality – not that of space as extension, but rather the spatiality, the spacing, of writing, inscription, the utter exteriority and otherness to designation and signification of inscribed letters. So: it is the zero as material inscription, the zero as thing, rather than as sign or as trope, that is the material (and hence historical) condition of the knowledge based on the principles of the infinitesimal and the homogeneous. In the case of the zero we have not just the signifying function (trope) interfering within a system of signs, but rather “something” that is neither sign nor trope and (heterogeneously) both at once disrupting a semio-­tropo-­logical system. The best name (or trope?) for this something is once again material inscription, a bit of materiality in (and of) Pascal’s text that cannot but be reproduced (once again) in de Man’s account of it. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that de Man’s reading of the zero is the place or the moment in his text where his analysis gets pushed beyond its own presuppositions and anticipations to produce something that happens, an event. As it turns out, it is the historical, material event at the “origin” of the texts in Aesthetic Ideology – itself a material inscription, whose stutter of sheerly mechanical enumeration is somewhat legible in the sentence that says what it is “we are actually

Allegories of Reference    ­33

saying” here: “To say then, as we are actually saying, that allegory (as sequential narration) is the trope of irony (as the one is the trope of zero) is to say something that is true enough but not intelligible, which also means that it cannot be put to work as a device of textual analysis” (AI 61). That de Man’s saying what he wants to say here should interrupt itself with something of a parabasis that calls attention to the act of saying – in the phrase “as we are actually saying” – is most appropriate in the context of his own “sequential narration.” For he has just been discussing the rhetorical terms that “come close to designating” a disruption like that of the zero – i.e., anacoluthon and parabasis – as long as one remembers that the zero’s disruption is not topical, that it cannot be located in a single point, and that therefore “the anacoluthon is omnipresent, or, in temporal terms and in Friedrich Schlegel’s deliberately unintelligible formulation, the parabasis is permanent.” If what “we are actually saying” in de Man’s sentence is “not intelligible” – just as unintelligible as Schlegel’s “definition” of irony (which, like the zero, is not susceptible to either nominal or real definition) as a “permanent parabasis,” the constant possibility of a disruption of narrative intelligibility at every “point” of the narrative line – it is not least of all on account of a certain indeterminacy, a certain aberrancy, of reference here. For the parabasis of “as we are actually saying” refers, takes back, not only to the unintelligible “something” that follows (“that allegory . . . is the trope of irony (as the one is the trope of zero)”) but also inevitably to the mere act of saying “itself” – “To say . . ., as we are actually saying.” And this reference back to the act of saying ends up saying more (or less?) than something as idiomatic and as innocuous as “To say, then, that . . .,” and introduces a certain unaccountable aberrancy because the mere marker or place-­holder that calls attention to the act of speaking is already written in the sentence’s “then”: “To say then, as we are actually saying . . .” If we ignore the apparent mispunctuation for the moment – the poor Belgian should, after all, have written “To say, then, . . .” – this amounts to saying something already quite peculiar: a stutter like “To say, then, then . . .,” which only gets extended (permanently?) if we notice that the “actually” may also carry such a merely marking or place-­holding function. There seems to be no end to the self-­replicating power of saying mere saying, whatever it is one wants to say, whenever one says something or whenever one says anything at all. The missing comma after “To say” only enforces the madness of this mechanical repetition, for it insists quite clearly and grammatically that what we are actually saying when we say “To say then, as we are actually saying” is in fact only “then” – in which case what we are “actually” saying now (as in actuellement), in the present, is in fact only a certain weird pastness

­34    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics of saying “itself” (“To say then, then, then, then . . .”), as though all we could say were a certain disjunction between saying and itself, between saying (then) and saying that . . . we are saying (then). And the fact that whenever we say all we can say (“then”), we cannot tell whether we are saying “then” as a temporal (or causal) indicator or as a mere place-­ holder that calls attention to the act of saying only accelerates the maddening vertiginousness of our predicament. But however overdetermined and potentially vertiginous the stutter of what we are actually saying may be, it is clear enough what its bottom line amounts to: the narrativization of a stutter, as it were, an allegory of reference that is necessarily also always an “ironic allegory” and “the systematic undoing, in other words, of understanding” (AR 301). Perhaps most maddening, however, is the fact that our saying all we can say (when we say saying) is not just unintelligible (deliberately or otherwise) but also “true enough” – not “true” or “the truth” but only “true enough,” as though to say “true, in a sense” or “true, as it were” or “true, figuratively speaking.” To ask “How true is ‘true enough’?” is, of course, the wrong question, but it is one we are bound to ask over and over, and always once again. It is in any event an ironic, allegorical “Truth” that “far from closing off the tropological system . . . enforces the repetition of its aberration” (AR 301). As such, such a Truth or, better, “the true (enough)” is indeed what happens materially, historically – an event. No wonder that its reading will be resisted and deferred for now and for then.27

Notes   1. Last entry in de Man’s notebook for the last class he gave in a seminar on “Théorie rhétorique au 18ème et 20ème siècle” (Fall 1983).   2. I say “possible” here because “The Concept of Irony,” which is on Fichte and Schlegel, nevertheless covers part of the subject matter de Man planned for the seventh chapter of Aesthetic Ideology: “Aestheticism: Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel’s Misreading of Kant and Fichte.” See my note #4.   3. The phrase “critical-­linguistic analysis” is de Man’s in his 1983 interview with Stefano Rosso, reprinted in The Resistance to Theory. See below.   4. Although de Man certainly used the phrase “aesthetic ideology” on occasion, the title he provided for the projected book in a typed Table of Contents (sent with a letter dated 11 August 1983 to Lindsay Waters, then an editor at the University of Minnesota Press) was indeed Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology. The Table of Contents reads as follows: Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology   1. Epistemology of Metaphor *   2. Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion *   3. Diderot’s Battle of the Faculties o

Allegories of Reference    ­35        

4. Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant * 5. Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics * 6. Hegel on the Sublime * 7. Aestheticism: Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel’s Misreading of Kant and Fichte o   8. Critique of Religion and Political Ideology in Kierkegaard and Marx o   9. Rhetoric/Ideology (theoretical conclusion)   Completion expected by the summer of 1985.   * completed   o in progress

It may be worth noting that Aesthetic Ideology is very nearly complete – except for Chapters 3 (the essay on Diderot), 8 (the essay on Kierkegaard and Marx), and 9 (the theoretical conclusion on “Rhetoric/Ideology”) – since we can surmise a great deal about the missing Chapter 7 from the transcribed lectures on “Kant and Schiller” and “The Concept of Irony.” That de Man’s “theoretical conclusion” to the book was going to focus on the question of “Rhetoric/Ideology” is significant and supports my insistence on the inclusion of “Rhetoric” in his title. In his “Foreword, The Tiger on the Paper Mat” to de Man’s The Resistance to Theory, Wlad Godzich is vague about how the projected book “came to be entitled The Aesthetic Ideology” (RT xi).   5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 15.   6. Ibid. p. 15.  7. We should add, however, that there are ghosts and there are ghosts. What we would call “material ghosts” would have to be distinguished from the “idealist ghosts” we are talking about here. For some “material ghosts,” see my “Facing Language: Wordsworth’s First Poetic Spirits” and “Spectre Shapes: ‘The Body of Descartes?’.” Both are now in Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).  8. “Aesthetic Theory from Kant to Hegel” (Fall 1982), compiled from the notes of Roger Blood, Cathy Caruth, and Suzanne Roos.  9. On de Man’s “abjection,” see Tom Cohen, “Diary of a Deconstructor Manqué: Reflections on post ‘Post-­Mortem de Man’,” Minnesota Review 41/42 (March 1995), pp. 157–74. 10. Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London: Verso, 1991), p. 200. 11. Ibid. pp. 200–1. 12. I have made some preliminary steps toward clarifying the relation of reference, rhetoric, and ideology in “Ending Up/Taking Back (with Two Postscripts on Paul de Man’s Historical Materialism),” now in my Material Inscriptions. 13. Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-­Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 119. 14. The reference here is, of course, to Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127–86.

­36    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics 15. The phrase is from de Man’s “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” (RR 262). 16. To say this is by no means to criticize Althusser – only those who took him literally on “the epistemological break” and ideology vs science, something Althusser himself never did, even in “early” work like For Marx. Another essay, a critical-­linguistic analysis, is necessary to demonstrate this. 17. Eagleton, Ideology, p. 200. 18. See “Hegel on the Sublime”: “The phenomenality of the linguistic sign can, by an infinite variety of devices or turns, be aligned with the phenomenality, as knowledge (meaning) or sensory experience, of the signified toward which it is directed. It is the phenomenalization of the sign that constitutes signification, regardless of whether it occurs by way of conventional or by way of natural means. The term phenomenality here implies not more and not less than that the process of signification, in and by itself, can be known, just as the laws of nature as well as those of convention can be made accessible to some form of knowledge” (AI 111). 19. See de Man on “some preventative semiological hygiene” in “Semiology and Rhetoric” (AR 6). 20. See my “Ending Up/Taking Back (with Two Postscripts on Paul de Man’s Historical Materialism),” in Material Inscriptions. 21. Cf. the opening of de Man’s 1982 seminar “Aesthetic Theory from Kant to Hegel”:   This course is part of a cycle on aesthetic theory around Hegel. Precursor courses include: “Hegel’s Aesthetics” and “Hegel and English Romanticism.”    We’re concerned with the aesthetic as a philosophical category – a category in the Aristotelian sense. As a category, it is not something that one can be for or against; it is not open to valorization.    And, with the relationship of the category of the aesthetic to questions of epistemology in the existing general philosophical tradition.    And, to the elements of critical philosophy, which involves a testing of a variety of categories against an epistemological truth and falsehood.    Critical philosophy here is thus the testing of the categories in terms of questions of epistemology.   . . .  What we have here is an explicit philosophical theme: the relation of the category of the aesthetic to epistemology. The implicit question is the relation of the category of the aesthetic to the theory of language.    “Language” here means consideration of sign, symbol, trope, rhetoric, grammar, etc.    Therefore, the relation of the category of the aesthetic to the theory of language is implicit but ungedacht: the place of the theory of language is unarticulated – it’s inscribed in other concerns.    Our object, then, will be a critique of the Kritik in terms of linguistic categories. Our interest will be in how Kant uses grammar and trope and see (because I’m giving the course) if there’s a tension between the

Allegories of Reference    ­37 explicit formulation and the usage of tropes, or a tension between the explicit theses and the implicit assumptions about language. 22. “Rhetoric and Aesthetics” was the title of de Man’s Messenger lecture series delivered at Cornell in February and March of 1983. The titles of the lectures were announced as:   I. Anthropomorphism and Trope in Baudelaire  II. Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater   III. Hegel on the Sublime   IV. Kant on the Sublime   V. Kant and Schiller   VI. Conclusions

“Kant on the Sublime” was entitled “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” by the time de Man wrote it. “Conclusions” was the lecture on Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” now included in The Resistance to Theory. On the unity of the Messenger lectures, see Kevin Newmark’s extraordinary “Bewildering: Paul de Man, Poetry, Politics” in Irony on Occasion (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 23. Blaise Pascal, “The Mind of the Geometrician,” in Great Shorter Works of Pascal, trans. Emilie Caillet (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1948), p. 190. 24. Again, the act of suspending the referential function is itself referential and leaves traces within the system so constituted. Cf. Kevin Newmark on Saussure in his Introduction to Beyond Symbolism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 25. See Louis Marin’s La Critique du discours (Paris: Minuit, 1975) on the relation between Pascal’s epistemology and that of the Logique. De Man clearly profited a great deal from his reading of Marin’s Chapter 8 – and went further. 26. This is a phrase that occurs in the context of Derrida’s “definition” of the undecidable. See Jacques Derrida, “La double séance,” in La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 250. It is translated by Barbara Johnson as “syntactical plug” in Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 221. 27. On irony as “permanent parabasis” and on Friedrich Schlegel’s “authentic language” as the language of “error, madness, and simpleminded ­stupidity,” see “The Concept of Irony” in Aesthetic Ideology.

Chapter 2

“As the Poets Do It”: On the Material Sublime

The entrance of “the poets” onto the scene of Kant’s attempt to ground aesthetic reflexive judgments of the sublime as a transcendental ­principle – in his phrase “as the poets do it” (wie die Dichter es tun) – could hardly be more peculiar and more enigmatic.1 Paul de Man’s reading of this moment in the Third Critique is no less enigmatic and, if anything, even more peculiar, not least of all because the vision of the ocean “as the poets do it” – “merely by what appears to the eye” (bloß . . . nach dem, was der Augenschein zeigt – “merely according to what the appearance-­to-­the-­eye shows,” to put it more “literally,” or “according to what meets the eye”) – is termed by him a “material vision” whose “materiality” is linked to what de Man calls Kant’s “materialism” (or “formal materialism”): “The critique of the aesthetic,” he writes, “ends up, in Kant, in a formal materialism that runs counter to all values and characteristics associated with aesthetic experience, including the aesthetic experience of the beautiful and of the sublime as described by Kant and Hegel themselves” (AI 136). That it might be better not to assume anything about our understanding of de Man’s difficult “materiality” and “materialism” is certainly confirmed by the way the term gets introduced in “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant.” After characterizing the architectonic vision of the heavens and the ocean – “The heavens are a vault that covers the totality of earthly space as a roof covers a house,” writes de Man – as being neither “a trope or a symbol” nor “literal, which would imply its possible figuralization or symbolization by an act of judgment,” de Man writes that “The only word that comes to mind is that of a material vision, but how this materiality is then to be understood in linguistic terms is not, as yet, clearly intelligible” (AI 135). Since the “material” is a word, the only word, that comes to mind here, one can already suspect that its intelligibility will indeed have a lot to do with its being understood “in linguistic terms.” We will get to those terms soon enough, but it is already worth remarking that

“As the Poets Do It”    ­39

the word “material” is one that merely “comes to mind,” as though on account of the lack of a word, the proper word, to designate the peculiarly unfamiliar nature of this vision. I say “unfamiliar” advisedly, for de Man goes to some pains – both before and after the word that comes to mind – to explain at length what this material vision is not and is not like. It is a vision entirely devoid of teleological interference, it is not a metamorphosis, not a trope or a symbol, heavens and ocean as building are a priori, previous to any understanding, to any exchange or anthropomorphism, there is no room for address in Kant’s flat third-­person world, this vision of the natural world is in no way solar, it is not the sudden discovery of a true world as an unveiling, as the a-­letheia of Heidegger’s Lichtung, “we are not to think of the stars as suns moving in circles,” nor are we to think of them as the constellation that survives at the apocalyptic end of Mallarmé’s Coup de Dès, and so on. The list of what this vision and its materiality are not (and are not like) could be extended; as de Man says, “It is easier to say what the [Kant] passage excludes and how it is different from others than to say what it is.” Indeed, since “no mind is involved in the Kantian vision of ocean and heaven,” it is no wonder that the only word to characterize it (apparently) non-­negatively can only “come to mind” – as though “by accident,” as one says, no doubt simultaneously utterly random and yet completely determined, that is, overdetermined like the nightmarish hypograms of Ferdinand de Saussure.2 But what is most striking (for the “mind” or the “eye” or whatever?) about de Man’s elegiac-­sounding and yet non-­elegiac enumeration of what the poets’ material vision of heaven and ocean is not and not like is his going out of his way to insist that it is not like the poet Wordsworth’s, for example, apparently similar intuitions in passages like the nest-­robbing episode of the Prelude where the destabilized sky is nevertheless still a sheltering sky. “Kant’s passage is not like this,” asserts de Man, “because the sky does not appear in it as associated in any way with shelter.” Dwelling poetically in Kant’s architectonic world would seem to mean precisely not dwelling in the building constructed of heavens and ocean when it is seen merely as the poets do it, according to what the Augenschein shows: “The poet who sees the heavens as a vault is clearly like the savage [in Kant’s Logic3], and unlike Wordsworth. He does not see prior to dwelling, but merely sees. He does not see in order to shelter himself, for there is no suggestion made that he could in any way be threatened, not even by the storm – since it is pointed out that he remains safely on the shore. The link between seeing and dwelling, sehen and wohnen, is teleological and therefore absent in pure aesthetic vision” (AI 134). Nor, de Man insists, is the Kantian vision like

­40    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics the “sense sublime” in the famous passage of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” which is “an instance of the constant exchange between mind and nature, of the chiasmic transfer of properties between the sensory and the intellectual world that characterizes [Wordsworth’s] figural diction.” No mind being involved in the Kantian vision, “to the extent that any mind, any judgment intervenes, it is in error.” And since Kant’s architectonic world is not a metamorphosis, not a trope, not a symbol, and prior to any exchange or anthropomorphism, it cannot be addressed the way the poet Wordsworth does it in Book V of the Prelude as “the speaking face of nature.” (Actually, in Wordsworth it is “the speaking face of earth and heaven” [and not “the speaking face of nature”] and it is not, at that moment, addressed!4) So: not a sheltering sky or earth, not in an economy or tropology of exchange in relation to the mind, and not anthropomorphized or to be addressed. Such would be the materiality of what the Augenschein shows in Kant’s, for lack of a better word, material vision. I recapitulate de Man’s examples here in order to give some sense of how far he goes in his insistence that what the poets do in Kant is not (like) what the exemplary poet Wordsworth does. What are we to make of this apparently stark divergence between a material vision “as the poets do it,” according to Kant, and a figuralized aesthetic vision and a sublime that is everything the material vision is not, as one poet, Wordsworth, does it, according to de Man? And we don’t have to know all that much about the special status of “Wordsworth” in de Man’s private “canon” to know better than to think that Wordsworth is somehow being given as an example of an insufficient or “inauthentic” poet! The fact that Wordsworth comes back still later in the essay to serve quite different purposes – this time as an example of other texts in which there is a “blank” like the “blank” de Man reads between sections 27 and 28, i.e., between the accounts of the mathematical and the dynamic sublime, in Kant’s Third Critique – should be enough for those who can read. But how Wordsworth comes back here is certainly telling. This time it is not so much what Wordsworth wrote, what is there on the page, as what he did not write but was nevertheless able to articulate: i.e., “the blank between stanzas 1 and 2 of the Lucy poem ‘A slumber did my spirit seal . . .’ or between parts 1 and 2 of the Boy of Winander poem.”5 As it happens, what he articulates here is an example of a moment when “articulation is threatened by its undoing,” when there is “a shift from a tropological to a different mode of language,” as in the case of the “blank” between mathematical and dynamic sublimes, where “one could speak of a shift from trope to performance” (AI 89). Given that Wordsworth, of all poets, is able to do this, to do what Kant,

“As the Poets Do It”    ­41

or at least Kant’s (formal materialist) text, does, it would be worse than premature to relegate him to merely aestheticist status as though he were only another aesthetic ideologist, only another Schiller.6 It would be more helpful perhaps to recall that de Man’s insistence that what the poets do in Kant is not what the poet Wordsworth does is very much like his equally stark declaration in “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” that whatever Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” may be, “it is, emphatically, not a lyric” but rather something of “an infra-­text, a hypogram” underneath lyrics like “Obsession” (or “odes,” “idylls,” or “elegies”) or, for that matter, pseudo-­historical period terms such as “romanticism” or “classicism” which are “always terms of resistance and nostalgia, at the furthest remove from the materiality of actual history” (RR 262). If Wordsworth can be both unlike “the poets” of Kant – in seeing the sky as a sheltering sky and nature in terms of phenomenal figures that enter into a tropological system of exchange with the mind or the Imagination and that can be anthropomorphized and addressed – and yet also like them – in being able to articulate, if not to say, the moment of disruption, “the material disarticulation not only of nature but of the body” and thus “the undoing of the aesthetic as a valid category,” then “Wordsworth” is very much also “like” the Baudelaire, or, one could better say, the Baudelaires, of de Man’s “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric.” As the “author” – or rather the signatory – of both the “lyric” “Obsession” and the emphatic non-­lyric “Correspondances” that is legible like an infra-­text or a hypogram “underneath” it, Baudelaire clearly both does and does not do what the poets are supposed to do in de Man’s account of Kant’s material vision. And he does and does not do it because he writes two texts: the lyric “Obsession” and the emphatic non-­lyric “Correspondances.” By writing the latter, Baudelaire writes a text of “true mourning,” as de Man puts it at the end of “Anthropomorphism and Trope,” that allows for non-­comprehension and enumerates “non-­anthropomorphic, non-­ elegiac, non-­celebratory, non-­lyrical, non-­poetic, that is to say, prosaic, or, better, historical modes of language power” (RR 262). In doing so, “Correspondances” constructs something like that architectonic world of Kant’s material vision – in this case, not so much a building that is not for dwelling and does not shelter as a temple in which no sacrifice that could transport us from the world of the senses to the world of the spirit takes place. Yet by writing the second text, “Obsession,” Baudelaire also writes a lyric of recollection and elegiac mourning that adds remembrance to the flat surface of time in “Correspondances” and that engages the full panoply of lyric tropes and devices – anthropomorphism, apostrophe, exclamation, a je-­tu structure, specular symmetry

­42    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics along an axis of assertion and negation, and so on – to result in “the reconciliation of knowledge with phenomenal, aesthetic experience” (RR 258), which, historicized, issues in “the aesthetic ideologization of linguistic structures” (RR 253). In writing both texts, Baudelaire is indeed like Wordsworth the phenomenalizing “romantic” poet and like Wordsworth the formal materialist who would be as non-­lyrical and non-­poetic as those most prosaic poets of Kant. (So: the more “poetic” Wordsworth and Baudelaire, the less they are like “the poets” of Kant; the more “prosaic,” the more material and historical.) But, of course, we should not take the doubleness of the two here – two texts, two Baudelaires, two Wordsworths – too literally, as though these Wordsworths and Baudelaires were Schillerian aesthetic ideologists in some “poetic” poems and Kantian formal materialists in some other, rather “prosaic,” poems. No, insists de Man, “whenever we encounter a text such as ‘Obsession’ – that is, whenever we read – there always is an infra-­text, a hypogram like ‘Correspondances’ underneath” (RR 262). In other words, again, “There always are at least two texts, regardless of whether they are actually written out or not; the relationship between the two sonnets, obligingly provided by Baudelaire for the benefit, no doubt, of future teachers invited to speak on the nature of the lyric, is an inherent characteristic of any text” (RR 260–1). This is certainly borne out by de Man’s reading of “Correspondances” – a text that turns out to be as thoroughly double and duplicitous as the double register of the articulating (and disarticulating) word comme in its function as both a term of comparison and metaphorical transport based on substances and their properties and a more metonymical syntactical marker of aimless enumeration – as a “metaphor aspiring to transcendental totality” gets stuck in “an enumeration that never goes anywhere” (RR 250). In other words, the infra-­text or hypogram of “Correspondances” has already (and always again) produced the lyric “Obsession” – whether “Obsession” were ever actually written out or not. And, one should quickly add, whether “Correspondances” were ever actually written out or not! Clearly enough, the “materiality” of the infra-­text, or the hypogram, or of what de Man calls the “prosaic materiality of the letter” or “material inscription” (or, for that matter, “the materiality of actual history”) is not accessible in phenomenal experience and what appears in empirical space and time. Materiality – or the infra-­text or hypogram or the letter or the inscription or actual history or the prosaic language power of the poets – is not something we are going to put our finger on. It is also not something that we can give more than inadequate, provisional, names to. Just as the “material” of “material vision” is “the only word that comes to mind,” so “In the

“As the Poets Do It”    ­43

paraphernalia of literary terminology, there is no term available to tell us what ‘Correspondances’ might be” (RR 261), and the terms “infra-­text” and “hypogram” are clearly also makeshift stand-­ins. All the same, this does not mean that de Man’s “materiality” – however difficult and even enigmatic it may be – is as mysterious as all that. The various formulations of what it is not and what it is . . . like, both in the Kant essays and in “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” (and in other essays of the 1980s), indicate where to look for it or at least how to read it. And that it has indeed everything to do with reading should already be clear. For what else is one going to do to understand the “disruption” or the “blank” – whether between stanzas or parts of Wordsworth poems or between the mathematical and dynamic sublimes or in the juxtaposition of seeing according to what the Augenschein shows with an allegorical narrative of how the imagination sacrifices itself for reason – except to try to read them? And how read these moments in Kant (or Wordsworth or Baudelaire or whatever) where “articulation is threatened by its undoing” except by making them intelligible “in linguistic terms,” as de Man puts it, if at these moments we encounter passages “that could be identified as a shift from a tropological to a different mode of language”? The poets can help us here again – in this case, de Man’s compact account of how we are (and, as always, are not) to understand the relation between the always two texts that there always are whenever we encounter a text, that is, whenever we read. Going over this account should make it easier for us to go finally back to Kant’s sublime and to read the poets and their purportedly material vision in the context of de Man’s reading of the mathematical, the dynamic, and the – for lack of a better word – “material” sublimes. As it happens, the relation between the two texts that there always are whenever there is text – between an intelligible lyric like “Obsession” and its infra-­ text or hypogram like the forever unintelligible “Correspondances” – is far from simple. And the question of the order of their relation – its reversibility or irreversibility – is especially difficult, which is perhaps not surprising since it is the same question as that of the relation between critical and ideological discourse: in short-­hand, like the paradigmatic relation between Kant and Schiller or, in this case, between “Correspondances” and “Obsession” in relation to one another and in relation to themselves (as, say, “Correspondances”/“Obsession” and “Obsession”/“Correspondances”). How does it work? On the one hand, the relation is clear: whenever we encounter a text like “Obsession,” there is always an infra-­ text, a hypogram, like “Correspondances” underneath. The lyric “Obsession” and its entire tropological system of devices – that is nothing so much as the “defensive motion of

­44    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics understanding, the possibility of a future hermeneutics” (RR 261) – is a reading, what de Man calls here “a lyrical reading-­motion” and “a lyrical reading” of “Correspondances.” “Obsession” would be the Schiller to the Kant of “Correspondances.” De Man spells out the one hand: “We all perfectly and quickly understand ‘Obsession,’ and better still the motion that takes us from the earlier to the later text. But no symmetrical reversal of this lyrical reading-­motion is conceivable; if Baudelaire, as is eminently possible, were to have written, in empirical time, ‘Correspondances’ after ‘Obsession,’ this would change nothing. ‘Obsession’ derives from ‘Correspondances’ but the reverse is not the case. Neither does it account for it as its origin or cause. ‘Correspondances’ implies and explains ‘Obsession’ but ‘Obsession’ leaves ‘Correspondances’ as thoroughly incomprehensible as it always was” (RR 261). Nevertheless, however irreversible this defensive motion of understanding and its lyrical reading-­motion, it would be an error and, indeed, a similar phenomenalizing ideologization to understand this order and its irreversibility in phenomenal (spatial or temporal) terms: “Whenever we encounter a text such as ‘Obsession’ – that is, whenever we read – there always is an infra-­ text, a hypogram like ‘Correspondances’ underneath. Stating this relationship, as we just did, in phenomenal, spatial terms or in phenomenal, temporal terms – ‘Obsession,’ a text of recollection and elegiac mourning, adds remembrance to the flat surface of time in ‘Correspondances’ – produces at once a hermeneutic, fallacious lyrical reading of the unintelligible. The power that takes one from one text to the other is not just a power of displacement, be it understood as recollection or interiorization or any other ‘transport,’ but the sheer blind violence that Nietzsche, concerned with the same enigma, domesticated by calling it, metaphorically, an army of tropes” (RR 262). As far as the materiality of the actual history, i.e., whatever it is that happens “between” “Correspondances” and “Obsession,” is concerned, the spatial or temporal phenomenality of which text is “underneath” which and which text comes after which does not matter and changes nothing, that is, does not happen – and understandably enough at that, for, as I said, it also does not matter whether the two texts were ever actually written out or not! Indeed, even if the “lyrical” reading-­motion can go only from “Correspondances” to “Obsession,” it is also the case that a reading-­motion like de Man’s of “Correspondances” goes from the all-­too-­poetic lyric of historicizing literary history that declares, performs (in its synaesthesia), and values sheer aesthetic ideology to an infra-­text underneath that threatens to disarticulate the poem’s transcendentalizing tropes and end up in “the stutter, the piétinement of aimless enumeration” (RR 254). In other words, de

“As the Poets Do It”    ­45

Man’s own (material? what shall we call it?) “reading-­motion” goes from trope to another mode of language and thus, in a sense, from the lyric “Obsession” to the hypogram “Correspondances.” This does not mean, of course, that “Correspondances” and “Obsession” are in fact materially, historically, reversible. What is reversible is only the order of which precedes which and which follows which in the temporality of reading (whether lyric or otherwise), that is, in the temporality of an act of understanding and its inevitable temporalization in an allegory that narrates this act (which involves an inevitable phenomenalization – as de Man remarks in his own language when he says that the infra-­text or hypogram is “underneath” the lyric or that the lyric adds remembrance to the flat surface of time in “Correspondances”). What is not reversible, however, is the power “that takes one from one text to the other” in these reading-­motions, whether they go from the saturation and emptying out of tropes as the text moves from a tropological to another mode of language – from trope to performative, say – or from the material inscription of the hypogram in a defensive lyrical reading-­motion to phenomenalizing aesthetic ideologizations of a celebratory or elegiac, apostrophizing and anthropomorphizing, poetic lyric. Both are inevitable, irreversible, what happens. What happens is the power that, as de Man puts it, “takes one from one text to the other” – whether there are empirically one or two or more or fewer texts, or whether they “exist,” i.e., were ever actually written out, or not! – the sheer blind violence of the inaugural act that put the tropological system into place in the first place and that gets repeated whenever we necessarily and inevitably go from one text to the other, that is, whenever we read. De Man’s account of the always two texts of Baudelaire and of reading takes us back to his reading of Kant and helps us to understand, in particular, the itinerary, the order, of that reading – that is, the reading of the mathematical and dynamic sublimes and their issuing in the “material sublime” of the poets. Needless to say, understanding this reading, its order, and how the “materiality” of “material vision” emerges from it depends a great deal on making it intelligible “in linguistic terms.” The terms are “linguistic” because it turns out that all three moments of Kant’s sublime – mathematical, dynamic, and, for lack of a word, material – are to be understood not as philosophical (transcendental or even metaphysical) principles but as what de Man calls a “linguistic principle.” In order: the mathematical sublime becomes ­ ­intelligible – all too intelligible (like Baudelaire’s “Obsession”) – and can “work,” but to a formal extent only, as a linguistic principle. The “linguistic model” of this principle is that of discourse as a tropological system – a very familiar metaphorico-­ metonymical system of

­46    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics substitution and exchange on the axes of selection and combination, paradigmatic and syntagmatic. In brief, this system would articulate “the infinity of number” with “the totality of extension” – which is the burden of “proving” the mathematical sublime – in terms of two acts of the imagination: apprehension and comprehension, Auffassung and Zusammenfassung. “Apprehension proceeds successively, as a syntagmatic, consecutive motion along an axis, and it can proceed ad infinitum without difficulty. Comprehension, however, which is a paradigmatic totalization of the apprehended trajectory, grows increasingly difficult, as the space covered by apprehension grows larger” (AI 77). This amounts to a system of exchange and substitution “as the paradigmatic simultaneity substitutes for the syntagmatic succession, an economy of loss and gain which functions with predictable efficacy” but, adds de Man, “only within certain well-­defined limits.” The limits are clear. Although the power of number can indeed progress to infinity on the level of apprehension – i.e., logically, in terms of numerical concepts – the imagination which is to totalize this infinity in one comprehension soon reaches a point at which it is saturated and can no longer make additional apprehensions: “it cannot progress beyond a certain magnitude which marks the limit of the imagination.” It is at this privileged point which “avoids both excessive comprehension and excessive apprehension” that the imagination makes its stand, as it were, and takes it as a trope, an impossible trope that is in fact not a metaphor but a catachresis, of a totalized, bordered-­off infinity, as though it could comprehend it in one intuition. (Kant’s example of Savary’s account of one’s experience of pyramids is well known.) What this means is that the mathematical sublime, as such a tropological system of substitution, is in fact not a judgment of the “absolutely large” but rather a somewhat subreptitious displacement, transposition (Kant’s German in fact says versetzen here), and substitution of the “almost too large” that is not yet “the too large” – in Kant’s terms, of the “colossal” that is not yet the “monstrous” – for the “absolutely large.”7 It would be an impossible phenomenal trope of infinity, of that which is, by definition, not susceptible to being exhibited (dargestellt) in one sensory intuition. (In the terms of de Man’s reading of the zero in Pascal, this would be once again the substitution of one as a trope of the zero, in that case a substitution of number as trope for that which marks the limit of number, that is the beyond-­number, the zero as pure sign.8) It is right for de Man to say that this certain magnitude “marks” the limit of the imagination, for what is going on here is indeed the phenomenalization of a mere marker of ­infinity – like a zero, say – in a perceptible, imaginable, conceivable trope – like, say, a one. If the articulation of number and extension

“As the Poets Do It”    ­47

seems to take place, it does so as such a tropological system of substitutions that are impossible except in the terms of such a purely formal system. De Man summarizes: “The desired articulation of the sublime takes place, with suitable reservations and restrictions, within such a purely formal system. It follows, however, that it is conceivable only within the limits of such a system, that is, as pure discourse rather than as a faculty of the mind. When the sublime is translated back, so to speak, from language into cognition, from formal description into philosophical argument, it loses all inherent coherence and dissolves in the aporias of intellectual and sensory appearance. It is also established that, even within the confines of language, the sublime can occur only as a single and particular point of view, a privileged place that avoids both excessive comprehension and excessive apprehension, and that this place is only formally, and not transcendentally, determined. The sublime cannot be grounded as a philosophical (transcendental or metaphysical) principle, but only as a linguistic principle. Consequently, the section on the mathematical sublime cannot be closed off in a satisfactory manner and another chapter on the dynamics of the sublime is needed” (AI 78). So: if the mathematical sublime is “possible” only within the confines of such a purely formal tropological system, it is no wonder that the epistemological and the eudaemonic proofs of the mathematical sublime – that de Man treats before his discussion of Auffassung and Zusammenfassung and Kant treats after – end up in the assertions of the possibility of the sublime by dint of its impossibility and failure: “The sublime cannot be defined as the failure of the sublime, for this failure deprives it of its identifying principle” (AI 75). The “section on the mathematical sublime cannot be closed off in a satisfactory manner” because its (linguistic) principle of discourse as a tropological system cannot itself be closed off. For what happens is this: in its purely positional trans-­position of number into extension, of inscribed markers into phenomenal tropes, of catachreses into impossible metaphors, the tropological system of the mathematical sublime introduces into itself an excess or a lack that cannot be mastered or controlled or accounted for by the resources – by the principles of substitution and combination – of that system and therefore prevents itself from ever being able to close itself off as a system. (This is an excess – of marking, of substitutions other than trope, purely differential relations and entities; and a lack – of the one metaphor that could complete the tropological system and allow it to close itself off.9) De Man’s way of putting it is that “the transition from the mathematical to the dynamic sublime, a transition for which the justification is conspicuously lacking in the text . . . marks [again, marks] the saturation of the tropological field as language frees itself of

­48    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics its constraints and discovers within itself a power no longer dependent on the restrictions of cognition” (AI 79). In other words, it is precisely the impossible tropes of the infinite – of that which is overdeterminately exterior to the tropological system of Auffassung and Zusammenfassung – that prohibit the tropological system of the mathematical sublime from closing itself off – that is, prevent it from being able to account for its own principles of substitution and exchange in terms of principles internal to its (tropological) system. This means that the one thing this tropological system cannot account for is its own production, the “principle” according to which it was put into place in the first place. Hence this system opens up radically, and empties out in the force, violence, and power of the dynamic sublime – which force, violence, and power in the end (as at the beginning) are only the repetition of the inaugural act that put the tropological system into place “in the first place.” According to de Man, this is “the only way to account for . . . the extension of the linguistic model beyond its definition as a system of tropes”: “From the pseudo-­cognition of tropes, language has to expand to the activity of performance, something of which language has been known to be capable well before Austin reminded us of it” (AI 79). Hence the “linguistic model” of the dynamic sublime – where the mind overpowers the might of nature and discovers itself independent of nature – would be that of discourse as performative. Although the passage, the transition – which is in fact a “break” and a “discontinuity” and hence not a transition at all – from mathematical to dynamic sublime, from cognition to act, from trope to performative, is called “irreversible” in de Man’s sense (as he elaborates at the beginning of “Kant and Schiller”), there is no doubt that to the extent that this passage is something that happens, an event, and thus truly (and, as we know, materially) historical, it is indeed also a “repetition,” as I have already put it, a repetition “in the Kierkegaardian sense,” as de Man might put it, of the inaugural act that put the tropological system into place, again, “in the first place.” This is most vividly legible right away at the outset of the discussion of number, of numerical concepts, as Kant writes that “the power of numbers progresses to infinity” – die Macht (the same word that abruptly begins section 28 on the dynamic sublime: “Macht ist ein Vermögen, welches großen Hindernissen überlegen ist” [Power is an ability that is superior to great obstacles]) der Zahlen geht ins Unendliche.10 If numbers have this power, then there was something of a “dynamic sublime” always already (and always not yet) there in the mathematical sublime and its attempt to border off and exhibit this unimaginable and non-­phenomenal power in one intuition (which it cannot do except in impossible, catachrestic tropes

“As the Poets Do It”    ­49

that are more markers than metaphors). And, of course, that “power” of number to progress to infinity is its entirely mechanical, automatic ability to “designate” the infinite by writing it, inscribing it, in an arbitrary differential mark. In short, the mathematical sublime too has at its “origin” a power that is itself put into place by an inaugural act of material inscription – minimally, the (aesthetic reflective) judgment that determines the magnitude of the measure by, say, dividing up the extension of a ruler into inches by marking and inscribing them. But, again of course, that the three “linguistic models” of the sublime – tropological, performative, and, call it, inscriptional – are intricated together and in a sense already “there” at the outset becomes legible only if de Man’s – and, indeed, Kant’s own – “reading-­motion” and its narration in what can only be called an allegory (of reading and unreadability, yes) are allowed to unfold in order. It is telling that the order of de Man’s presentation is not exactly, not quite, the same as Kant’s. Indeed, there is something like a “logic of the sublime” – or, better, a sublime program, pro-­gramma – at work in de Man’s own presentation as he first recounts the epistemological and the eudaemonic (failed) proofs of the sublime, identifies them as “subreptions” in which a metaphysical principle mistakes itself for a transcendental principle, and summarizes the difficulty by reference to the passage on “thinking” (denken) the impossibility of an exhibition of ideas in section 29 of the Critique – i.e., the section that contains the passage on material vision – and all this before going back to the opening paragraphs of section 26 and the discussion of Auffassung and Zusammenfassung. No wonder that de Man’s transition reads a little oddly; the first sentence of the paragraph begins: “Still in the mathematical sublime, in Section 26, next to the epistemology and the eudaemony of the sublime, appears another description . . .” (AI 77, my emphasis), which sounds like “Meanwhile, back in the mathematical sublime . . .” This is odd because Kant’s description of Auffassung and Zusammenfassung and the tropological system they constitute is not “next to” but rather before the epistemology and the eudaemony of the sublime. De Man’s getting to it only after he has discussed them as well as denken and thus reordering Kant’s presentation follows a certain “logic” of the sublime in that it provides a certain “privileged place” that itself allows an easier “comprehension” of his own reading-­motion’s difficult apprehensions and renders his reading of the mathematical sublime “intelligible in linguistic terms.” That is, de Man’s passage on the tropological system itself serves as something like a “metaphor” of comprehension that makes what precedes and follows in his reading of Kant easier to understand. That the one figure of the double operation of Auffassung and Zusammenfassung de Man provides should be what

­50    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics he calls a “simple phenomenology of reading” is, as one says, no accident: “The model reminds one of a simple phenomenology of reading, in which one has to make constant syntheses to comprehend the successive unfolding of the text: the eye moves horizontally in succession whereas the mind has to combine vertically the cumulative understanding of what has been apprehended. The comprehension will soon reach a point at which it is saturated and will no longer be able to take in additional apprehensions: it cannot progress beyond a certain magnitude which marks the limit of the imagination” (AI 77). Once this “simple phenomenology of reading” is understood in linguistic terms as precisely a tropological system that cannot close itself off – i.e., that can account for everything except its own principles of constitution and therefore cannot read itself – the phenomenology of reading turns into a veritable allegory of reading. And when this happens, the “eye” that cooperates with the “mind” so readily in the phenomenology of reading turns out to be completely disjunct from any mind whatsoever and not unlike the eye of the savage or the poets who see only according to the pure optics of what the Augenschein shows or what only meets the eye. I linger with the rhetorical structure of de Man’s own essay only to indicate how deep the “deep, perhaps fatal, break or discontinuity” that de Man reads at the center of the Third Critique runs. Its depending “on a linguistic structure (language as a performative as well as a cognitive system) that is not itself accessible to the powers of transcendental philosophy” (AI 79) is just one such “break.” It recurs (in section 29) in the stark juxtaposition of the passage on material vision with a story of how the imagination sacrifices itself for the reason, and, indeed, has always already occurred (as recurrence) whenever articulation is threatened by its undoing. The break or discontinuity, the disruption or disarticulation, gets repeated, happens, occurs – and is legible, in the order of reading, as “a shift from a tropological to a different mode of language” – whether it be the disarticulation of Kant’s sublime (as an aesthetic reflexive judgment), or of aesthetic judgment as such, or of the category of the aesthetic (as philosophical category), or of the articulating project of the Third Critique to serve as a “bridge” between the supersensuous underlying nature and the supersensuous underlying freedom – or, ultimately, the disarticulation of the critical philosophy itself when it turns out that the transcendental discourse, and thus the critical subject itself, cannot ground itself transcendentally (which is the ultimate project of the mere “appendix” [Anhang] on the sublime, according to de Man).11 In any event, all this is at stake in the sublime and in de Man’s reading of the sublime as not a transcendental but rather a “linguistic” principle. And this means that what happens in this

“As the Poets Do It”    ­51

reading is not at all a “reduction” of Kant’s analytic to “language” or “linguistic models.” For these models turn out to be not models at all, as each one fails to account either for itself or for its other – as cognition (and its tropological system) can never account for the act (and least of all for the act that put its tropological system of substitutions and exchanges of meaning into place in the first place), and the power of the act can never be strong enough to verify (i.e., to make true) that it took place, happened, was in fact an event. The point is rather that the transcendental discourse needs to have recourse to (always defective) linguistic models precisely at the moment when it would claim to be able to ground itself transcendentally – and thereby complete and close off the critical philosophy – and that this self-­grounding project therefore fails and has to fail like any and every attempt to define and determine “language” as a theoretical object of study. So: perhaps we are now in a better position to go back to what the poets do when they see only that which the Augenschein shows. Let us look again at what de Man calls “our question”: “Our question then becomes whether and where this disruption, this disarticulation, becomes apparent in the text, at a moment when the aporia of the sublime is no longer stated, as was the case in the mathematical sublime and in the ensuing general definitions of the concept, as an explicit paradox, but as the apparently tranquil, because entirely unreflected, juxtaposition of incompatibles. Such a moment occurs in the general remark or recapitulation (section 29) that concludes the analytics of the sublime” (AI 79). At first glance, what de Man has in mind by “such a moment” seems relatively straightforward: namely, the curious and unexpected passage on “material vision” that occurs in section 29. The “purely formal” and thus “purely material” vision of heaven and ocean would indeed be the “apparently tranquil, because entirely unreflected, juxtaposition of incompatibles” insofar as it would be the tranquil vision “devoid of any reflexive or intellectual complication” in which “no mind” at all is involved. The judgment of the sublime here would be precisely non-­ reflective and non-­ aesthetic (or other-­ than-­ reflective and other-­ than-­ aesthetic). And it would be the juxtaposition of incompatibles at least in the sense that the architectonic vision of nature as a building – the heavens as a vault and the ocean as bounded by the horizon like by the walls of a building – that is not for dwelling and that does not shelter would be the mere juxtaposition (and utter disjunction) of nature and its purposiveness, as though the eye that sees only according to what the Augenschein shows were reading a figure or a trope (i.e., nature as a building) completely emptied out of its meaning. “No mind is involved in the Kantian vision of ocean and heavens,” de Man writes. “To the

­52    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics extent that any mind, that any judgment intervenes, it is in error – for it is not the case that heaven is a vault or that the horizon bounds the ocean like the walls of a building. That is their appearance to the eye and not to the mind” (AI 82). But perhaps the “unreflected juxtaposition of incompatibles” refers most directly not so much to the thematics of the passage on material vision as to the juxtaposition of the passage itself with the allegorical tale of how the imagination sacrifices itself for reason – where we deal, says de Man, not “with mental categories but with tropes” (AI 87). The diction of de Man’s summary would suggest that this is “such a moment” in section 29: “What makes this intrusion of linguistic tropes particularly remarkable is that it occurs in close proximity, almost in juxtaposition, to the passage on the material architectonics of vision, in the poetic evocation of heaven and ocean, with which it is entirely incompatible” (AI 87, my emphasis). This would indeed be another version of the break or discontinuity, disruption or disarticulation, where there is “a shift from a tropological to a different mode of language.” Still, perhaps one should not hurry quite so much to accept de Man’s characterization of this vision as purely formal, purely material, devoid of intellectual complication and semantic depth, and utterly non-­tropological. After all, as a number of commentators have pointed out, Kant’s evocations of the heavens as a vault that encompasses everything (alles befaßt) and borders off (begrenzt) the ocean, and the ocean as an abyss that threatens to swallow up everything (including, presumably, the sky) are clearly figures, tropes. Tropes, first of all, for the mathematical and dynamic sublimes, respectively, with the bordered-­off infinitude of the starry sky an apt figure for the mathematical sublime and the overpowering natural force of the turbulent ocean (that needs to be overpowered in turn by the power of the mind) an appropriate figure of the dynamic sublime. And the passage’s proliferating tropology does not stop there. As more than one commentator has also pointed out, the sky as a bow-­or arch-­shaped “vault” (Gewölbe, from wölben) is a kind of bridge, in this case a bridge over an abyss figured by the ocean, and thus a strangely allegorical figure for the project of the critical philos­ophy and its dominant architectonic figures: the immense gulf between the domains of the concept of nature and the concept of freedom that is to be, that must be, bridged and articulated so that the latter can have, as it should, an influence on the former, and that there be a “ground of unity” (Grund der Einheit) – and not an abyss – for the supersensible that underlies nature and the supersensible that underlies freedom.12 However neat this tropology, it does leave out the ocean when it is at rest and seen, according to what the Augenschein shows, as a clear water-­mirror (als einen klaren Wasserspiegel). Between

“As the Poets Do It”    ­53

the all-­framing starry sky and the all-­engulfing abyss of ocean, there is the flat, placid, sheer surface of a mirror without depth. “The sea is called a mirror,” writes de Man, “not because it is supposed to reflect anything, but to stress a flatness devoid of any suggestion of depth” (AI 83). This placid flatness does not fit so easily into the tropologies that can account for sky and sea as mathematical and dynamic sublimes or as the bridge of the Third Critique over the abyss between the First and Second Critiques. But it does indeed provide a nice figure for the mere juxtaposition of incompatibles – like the mathematical and the dynamic sublime or the understanding and reason, or First and Second Critiques, and so on – the purely formal, purely material, vision of what the Augenschein shows, or, even better, the phlegmatic, a-­pathetic vision of a calculating, counting Dutchman. In other words, legible here are de Man’s three linguistic “models” of Kant’s sublime, with the vaulted sky a figure of the mathematical sublime as tropological system (that would border off infinity), the abyssal ocean a figure of the dynamic sublime as performative force, and the clear water-­mirror a figure of the “material sublime” whose model would be that of language as material inscription. But, needless to say, this is all too figural, too tropological; there is all too much purposiveness and too much mind in such a reading. Such a reading would not be how the poets do it. If we ask, in the spirit of de Man’s reading, what is the equivalence on the level of language, in linguistic terms, of this placid, flat water-­mirror as seen by the apathetic Dutchman – “described as a phlegmatized kind of German interested only in the dreariest of commercial and moneymaking activities” (AI 85) in Kant’s pre-­ critical (1764) “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime”13 – we get some direction from de Man’s own account of how “meaning-­producing tropes are replaced by the fragmentation of sentences and propositions into discrete words, or the fragmentation of words into syllables or finally letters.” Where to find, how to read, such a “dismemberment of language” in Kant’s text? Another hint from de Man helps: “But just try to translate one single somewhat complex sentence of Kant, or just consider what the efforts of entirely competent translators have produced, and you will soon notice how decisively determining the play of the letter and the syllable . . . is in this most unconspicuous of stylists” (AI 89, my emphasis). And, indeed, if we go back one more time to the sentence on the poets and try to translate it, we find very quickly that it does not in fact say what we and all the translators I have checked – Bernard, Pluhar, Philonenko – want to see there. For the sentence does not say, “we must be able to view the ocean as poets do . . . and yet find it sublime” (Pluhar), nor does it say, “To call the ocean sublime we must regard it as poets do” (Bernard), nor

­54    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics does it say, “il faut parvenir à voir l’océan seulement, comme le font les poètes, selon le spectacle qu’il donne à l’oeil, soit, lorsqu’il est contemplé au repos tel un clair miroir d’eau qui n’est limité que par le ciel et, lorsqu’il est agité, soit comme un abîme menacant de tout engloutir, qu’il nous est quand même possible de trouver sublime” (Philonenko).14 Without exception, the translators want to link what we must do to seeing – we must see as the poets do – and invariably relegate our nevertheless being able to find the ocean sublime to secondary, subordinate status by supplying a linking or a transitional word: Pluhar an “and,” Bernard a “to” (in the sense of “in order to”), and Philonenko the relative pronoun “que.” In doing so, the translations link what is in fact not bridged in the German – i.e., must and seeing according to what the Augenschein shows – and conversely disjoin (by means of their supplementary linking words) what in fact is linked in the German: namely, must and nevertheless be able to find sublime. Stripped of the subordinate clauses and phrases, the sentence actually reads as follows: “rather one must nevertheless be able to find sublime [that is, find the ocean sublime] only, as the poets do it, according to what meets the eye, for instance . . .” In short, one, we, must not see (as the poets do it, etc. etc.) but rather must be able to find sublime. The link between what we must do – i.e., be able to find sublime – and seeing only according to the Augenschein may indeed be there, as it were “understood,” in the sentence, but, if so, it is there only in subordinated, mediated form. Indeed, the sentence never even says that we must do what we must do as the poets see it but rather as the poets do it, i.e., only according to what the Augenschein shows (and not what they or we see). The only actual, explicit seeing in the passage is in the sub-­ subordinate phrase “for example, when it [the ocean] is regarded at rest” (etwa, wenn er in Ruhe betrachtet wird)! The shift and, indeed, slippage from “must be able to find sublime” to “must see” – and its concomitant relegation of “be able to find sublime,” grammatically the main verb of the sentence, to a mere adjunct, a mere appendix – may appear slight. After all, isn’t this what the passage means, and aren’t the translators just helping Kant out a bit? Not quite and not just. For in linking seeing to the must, the translators are making things far too easy for us and helping out Kant by turning him into something of a Schiller! That is, they introduce the figures of the poets, of the Augenschein, and of the ocean precisely as figures, as phenomenalizing tropes that can make the difficult task easier: i.e., having, “must-­ing,” as it were, to nevertheless find sublime, having to have the “faculty,” as it were, of judgments of the sublime. In doing so, the translators, as is their job, carry over and throw up a bridge where there isn’t one in the Kant. In the Kant, what we must do is to be able to

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find sublime despite, whatever, the Augenschein shows, and the bridge between our must and our being able to find sublime is indeed a purely formal, only prosthetic bridge. This would mean or, better, only mark or inscribe that what the poets do is not even so much to see according to the Augenschein as to read an inscription, dismembered sentences, words, syllables, letters – like the illegible letter (or all too interpretable hieroglyph?) of the arching line of the sky on top of the straight or squiggly line of the ocean. Indeed, it would perhaps not be too perverse to suspend Kant’s sentence in the middle and identify the antecedent of “it” in “as the poets do it” as neither seeing nor being able to find sublime but rather “must”: one must (only) as the poets must (nevertheless be able to find sublime) as one must as the poets must. (I’ve tried out the German: “Man muß bloß, wie die Dichter es tun, müssen”; “Man muß müssen”; “One, we, must must.”) Which amounts to saying that what one must do to be able to find sublime is, above all, introduce, inter-­ject, “the poets” between the moral imperative and the sublime judgment. The supplying of the poets, as in Dichter or dictare – the only word that comes to mind, as it were – would be the always necessary and always impossible grammatical, gramma-­tical, bridge, the bottom line of the prosaic materiality of the letter.

Postscript: On the “Super-­Performative” “The Triumph of Life warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence. It also warns us why and how these events then have to be reintegrated in a historical and aesthetic system of recuperation that repeats itself regardless of the exposure of its fallacy.”15

As is legible in several places, Paul de Man’s title for what turned out to be his last book was Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology. How and why the book ultimately came to be called Aesthetic Ideology is a long and, at times, comical story. In the end, and as always, the matter was decided by a combination of contingency and necessity: the “random event” of de Man’s death and the (quite legitimate) preferences of “Marketing” at the University of Minnesota Press. The difference between the two titles, however, does invite a question: what difference would it make? Would the (re)insertion of the word “rhetoric” between “aesthetics” and “ideology” make any difference at all? Would it not be, at worst, trivial, and would it not, at best, merely reconfirm the suspicion or assumption that

­56    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics de Man’s notions of ideology and of the political never get beyond the analysis of purely linguistic phenomena and their reduction to rhetorical structures? Even beginning an answer to this question – and explaining the difference that rhetoric makes – is not a simple task, but it is always worth noting that de Man was certainly very aware of the question and in response always maintains “that one could approach the problems of ideology and by extension the problems of politics only on the basis of critical-­linguistic analysis” which has to be done in its own terms, and that such analysis is “truer” to Marx’s own procedures (for example and exemplarily, in The German Ideology) than what generally passes for “critique of ideology.”16 Rather than repeating or summarizing arguments made elsewhere,17 let us instead focus on just one moment of de Man’s project and his “critical-­linguistic” readings – the moment when and the sense in which something, an event, an occurrence, something happens, something occurs and, as an event, is genuinely historical with a “materiality” all its own. As always in the case of de Man, it turns out that rhetoric, the rhetoric of tropes, tropological systems and their attempt and inability to close themselves off, is what makes all the difference. After de Man’s readings – after reading tout court – what always happens and is thus predictable and inevitable (like death’s “random event” and its inevitable reintegration and recuperation?) is some version of the question “What now?” or “What next?” – “Now that we know the text is unreadable, its meaning indeterminate if not undecidable, what do we do now? How do we take the next step, the step beyond merely linguistic analysis of merely linguistic phenomena, to what really matters, to political stands and political programs and political power, to what really matters out there, beyond the confines of text and language, to us?” This is, of course, the wrong question. And it is wrong not only because it presumes to know ahead of time what “language” and “linguistic” mean, as though the reference of these words were stable and knowable above and beyond all other words – as though, in short, the referent of “language” and “linguistic” could be phenomenalized, could appear, as an object of consciousness and its phenomeno-­ logic without the inevitable interference of the rhetorical dimension of “language,” without its being turned into a trope. It is the wrong question above all because it is (always already) inscribed within the workings of reading and de Man’s “critical-­linguistic” analyses, for these are precisely analyses of how it is that something can, does, happen, how the “next step” actually occurs. But a word of precaution is necessary here: those who have read de Man (even a little) should not anticipate

“As the Poets Do It”    ­57

too much, for de Man’s next step, what actually occurs in (and as) de Man, is not the performative, it is not the performative speech act or the “performative rhetoric” which seems to be the issue of so many of de Man’s readings (from Allegories of Reading on) and their reception and use in the work of others. It is true that a correct enough but ultimately untrue or at least not “true enough” account of the typical “de Manian” reading and what it does with the relation between knowledge and act, the cognitive and the performative dimensions of a text – i.e., trope and performative – would run as follows: de Man’s readings start out by first setting up, reconstructing, the text as trope, as a tropological system (of substitutions and transformations of meaning) – or, most directly put, by interpreting the text as to be understood on the basis of (and as) a tropological system that would be closed, in the sense that its intelligibility is grounded in some ultimately stable meaning, an ultimately stable hermeneutic horizon of meaning. (In such a set-­up, the rhetoric of tropes would be continuous with, homogeneous with, logic – the possibility of universal and hence extra-­textual [and hence extra-­linguistic] meaning.) All this means is: de Man begins by interpreting the meaning of the text, figuring out what the text means and how its figural language works to produce that meaning (once one takes even a small step beyond sheer literal-­mindedness). De Man’s readings, in this account, proceed by, second, demonstrating how it is that the text as tropological system, as system of tropes, in fact cannot close itself off and remains “open.” The reason this happens, most directly and succinctly put, is that the tropological system of the text (i.e., that is the text) can’t close itself off (in a final stable meaning) because that system cannot account for its own production, that is, cannot account for the inaugural act that put it into place in the first place in its own terms, i.e., according to principles internal to itself as system. Hence, third, the text makes a sort of jump – it stutters, as it were – into another textual and linguistic model, that of the performative, of text as act – a model that diverges from the text as trope, as cognitive rhetoric, indeed, disrupts the cognitive dimension of the text. The upshot is that the text issues in the performative and that the text as performative disrupts the text as cognitive, as trope. This account is correct enough, and many of de Man’s readings – from the early 1970s to the early 1980s – would seem to authorize it. For instance, the end of the famous (or infamous) concluding essay of Allegories of Reading – “Excuses (Confessions)” – would certainly seem to fit: “the linguistic model cannot be reduced to a mere system of tropes,” writes de Man, since its “(negative) cognitions fail to make the performative function of the discourse predictable” (AR 300) and thus we find that “we are restating the disjunction of the performative

­58    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics from the cognitive” (AR 299–300). Or, for another example, one could adduce de Man’s reading of the Kantian sublime in “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant”: in the end, it turns out that the mathematical sublime is grounded not as a transcendental (or even a metaphysical) principle but rather as a “linguistic principle” whose model is that of a familiar metaphorico-­metonymical tropological system which, because it (is purely formal and) can’t close itself off, issues in the dynamic sublime whose linguistic model is that of language as performative. Nevertheless, even a cursory look at what actually happens in de Man’s readings cannot help but notice that something else, something more difficult, is going on and that the account above is so partial and so selective as to constitute a misreading of de Man. Indeed, it is a misreading that leads to all kinds of predictable aberrations, in particular a certain inflation and overvaluation of the performative – as though one could go to the text as act directly, immediately, and while bypassing the moment in the reading when the text’s tropological system gets reconstructed: in short, while bypassing the actual act of understanding the text, in other words, the text itself! In the case of de Man’s reading of the Kantian sublime, for instance, the correct enough focus on the disjunction between trope and performative as the “linguistic principle” underneath the mathematical and dynamic sublimes overlooks one rather prominent fact: namely, de Man’s reading of the mathematical and dynamic sublimes takes up only and exactly one half of his essay! After a typographical break, the entire second half of “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” is devoted to an attempt to identify whether and where the disruption or disarticulation at the center of the Third Critique – between cognitive and performative and thus, by extension, between pure and practical reason ultimately – “becomes apparent in the  text . . . as the apparently tranquil, because entirely unreflected, juxtaposition of incompatibles” (AI 79). And such a moment occurs, according to de Man, in the uncanny “material vision” of the sky and the ocean “as the poets do it,” a vision utterly devoid of reflection, ­internality, or mind, a purely formal “vision” reducible to the formal mathematization or geometrization of pure optics. This means, in short, that the radical “formal materialism” of Kant’s text and its strange “materiality” – a “materiality,” Derrida writes, “without materialism and even perhaps without matter” – as an event, an occurrence, what happens, is very explicitly not to be identified with the performative or the performative dimension or “model” of the text. Rather, whatever it is that happens in, and as, “Kant” happens at the point of the “transition” or the “intersection” of the disarticulation of two divergent systems, two divergent models, cognitive and performative.

“As the Poets Do It”    ­59

The same is true of “Excuses (Confessions)” and its complicated reading of Rousseau. The fact that Rousseau’s Confessions is not primarily a confessional text – i.e., the overcoming of guilt and shame in the name of truth and thus “an epistemological use of language” (AR 279) – but also and rather a text of excuse – and thus “a complex instance of what [Austin] termed performative utterances” (AR 281–2) – does not disrupt the text’s intelligibility because both knowledge and action, cognitive and performative, are incorporated in “a general economy of human affectivity, in a theory of desire, repression, and self-­analyzing discourse in which excuse and knowledge converge” (AR 287). Or, as de Man underlines, “Knowledge, morality, possession, exposure, affectivity (shame as the synthesis of pleasure and pain), and the performative excuse [my emphasis] are all ultimately part of one system that is epistemologically as well as ethically grounded and therefore available as meaning, in the mode of understanding” (AR 287). In short, rather than interfering with or disrupting the figural logic of the text, the “performative excuse” confirms it and is in fact part of it. But what does disrupt this system because it is outside of, foreign and heterogeneous to, the system of intelligibility and understanding is the radicalization of the excuse that takes place in Rousseau’s utterly random, contingent, utterance of the name “Marion” – an anacoluthon that “stands entirely out of the system of truth, virtue, and understanding (or of deceit, evil, and error) that gives meaning to the passage” (AR 289). It is this “foreign element,” continues de Man, “that disrupts the meaning, the readability of the apologetic discourse, and reopens what the excuse seemed to have closed off” (AR 289–90). If this truly disruptive random utterance of the name “Marion” is still to be taken as an “excuse,” then it would have to be an “excuse” in a way radically different from “the performative excuse” that was, according to de Man, still within the system of causes and effects, desires and repressions, hiding and revealing, and so on. And, in any case, it would not be its “performativity” that makes it foreign, radically exterior to and disruptive of the system of understanding. Or, if one still wants to speak of “performative” at all in relation to the random utterance “Marion,” then one would have to think of it as something of a “super-­performative” – that is, not one that functions within an established juridico-­political system (within which it can come off or not) but rather one that itself is the inaugural act of positing that puts such a system into place in the first place. In any case, what disrupts the figural chain and the text as system of tropes is not the performative dimension, not language as act, but rather the (impossible and yet necessary) moment of radical excuse, radical “fiction” (as de Man will call it after reading the Fourth Rêverie), at which two

­60    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics “systems” heterogeneous to one another – like meaning and grammar – “intersect.” It is at the point of the intersection that the text as system of intelligibility and understanding gets disrupted. But, once this “textual event” happens, occurs, it inevitably gets disseminated throughout the text, all along the narrative line, and turns into a permanent parabasis that de Man, following Friedrich Schlegel, calls irony – “the systematic undoing, in other words, of understanding” (AR 301). In other words, a certain radicalization of the disjunction or divergence between cognitive and performative, trope and performative, takes place in the course of de Man’s reading – which suggests that already in the case of “the performative excuse” that would be continuous with and part of the system of intelligibility, there was (always already) a trace of the radicalized “performative,” the pure positing power of language whose position – as in the case of the random utterance “Marion” – as an “excuse” is radically disjunct from, has nothing to do with, the “excuse” as linked to the affective feeling of shame and the understanding it makes possible. That what happens is not the performative is very explicitly and directly corroborated by de Man’s remarks at the beginning of his spoken lecture on “Kant and Schiller.” Using his Kant reading to articulate what he means by history as event, as occurrence, as what happens, de Man says that the model for such “historicity a priori” is “not the performative in itself . . . but the transition, the passage from a conception of language as a system, perhaps a closed system, of tropes, that totalizes itself as a series of transformations which can be reduced to tropological systems, and then the fact that you pass from that conception of language to another conception of language in which language is no longer cognitive but in which language is performative” (AI 132). And this is important enough for him to repeat it and insist on it: “and I insist on the necessity of this, so the model is not the performative, the model is the passage from trope to performative – this passage occurs always, and can only occur, by ways of an epistemological critique of trope” (AI 133). In other words, there is no passage, no occurrence, no event, no history – nothing happens – except as (or “by ways of”) an epistemological critique of trope. What happens – if it happens – does so thanks to the (self-­)critical power of the text as tropological system that would want to account for its own production – the only thing worth knowing, as de Man says at the end of “Excuses”18 – in terms internal to its system. Because the text cannot do this, cannot account for its own production, for the inaugural instituting act that put it into place, what happens instead is the “passage” to the performative, to language not as cognition but as act. In this emergence of a language of power out of a language of cognition, what emerges is in fact the very

“As the Poets Do It”    ­61

“origin” of the text, the material trace or the material inscription that would be the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of the text “itself.” In Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime” the attempt to ground the critical discourse, to found the very subject of the critical philosophy and transcendental method, instead ungrounds, unfounds, itself in the disarticulation of tropological and performative linguistic models by, ultimately, the “last” linguistic “model”: the prosaic materiality of the letter, material inscription. In Rousseau’s autobiographical project, the attempt to ground the confessional/apologetic discourse, to found the confessional subject, instead disarticulates itself and founders on the random utterance “Marion” – which, of course, is the material trace at the very “origin” of Rousseau’s autobiography, the reason, as he says explicitly, for his writing the Confessions in the first place (i.e., to confess the shameful act).19 Among other things, such an account helps to put the performative into better perspective. For what happens when the text “passes” from trope to performative – which is not a temporal progression but an event, an occurrence (as in “comes to pass”) – is a certain “repetition” of the violent, groundless and ungrounded, inaugural act that, again, put it into place in the first place. The event of this repetition is what gets disseminated all along the narrative line and thus renders the text an allegory of its inability to account for its own production (an allegory of unreadability, to coin a phrase) – with Rousseau’s autobiographer doomed to mindlessly, mechanically, repeating “Marion” over and over again, and Kant’s critical philosopher “I must be able to bridge pure reason and practical reason,” “I must exhibit the ideas of reason,” “I must be able to find sublime,” “I must must,” “Ich muß müssen, muß müssen, muß müssen . . .”20 So: that’s the difference the reinsertion of “rhetoric” between “aesthetics” and “ideology” makes. Without “rhetoric,” without the epistemological critique of trope, as de Man puts it, nothing happens. There is no direct, immediate, royal road to the performative, to action and the act, political or otherwise. Pretending that one can go to it directly is sheer delusion and a guarantee that nothing can happen, nothing will ever happen.21

Notes   1. It may be helpful to provide the passage from section 29 of Kant’s Third Critique that de Man reads in the second half of his “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant.” In Werner Pluhar’s uncorrected (see the end of this chapter) translation, it reads: “Therefore, when we call the sight of the starry sky sublime, we must not base our judgment upon any concepts of

­62    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics worlds that are inhabited by rational beings, and then [conceive of] the bright dots that we see occupying the space above us as being these worlds’ suns, moved in orbits prescribed for them with great purposiveness; but we must base our judgment regarding it merely on how we see it, as a vast vault encompassing everything, and merely under this presentation may we posit the sublimity that a pure aesthetic judgment attributes to this object. In the same way, when we judge the sight of the ocean we must not do so on the basis of how we think it, enriched with all sorts of knowledge which we possess (but which is not contained in the direct intuition), e.g., as a vast realm of aquatic creatures, or as the great reservoir supplying the water for the vapors that impregnate the air with clouds for the benefit of the land, or again as an element that, while separating continents from one another, yet makes possible the greatest communication among them; for all such judgments will be teleological. Instead we must be able to view the ocean as poets do, merely in terms of what manifests itself to the eye – e.g., if we observe it while it is calm, as a clear mirror of water bounded only by the sky; or, if it is turbulent, as being like an abyss threatening to engulf everything – and yet find it sublime.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 130.   2. See de Man’s brief but packed reading of Saussure’s ana-­(and para-­and hypo-­)grams in “Hypogram and Inscription” (RT 36–8).  3. De Man quotes Kant on the “savage” in the preceding sentence: “In a lesser-­known passage from the Logic Kant speaks of ‘a wild man who, from a distance, sees a house of which he does not know the use. He certainly observes the same object as does another, who knows it to be definitely built and arranged to serve as a dwelling for human beings. Yet in formal terms this knowledge of the selfsame object differs in both cases. For the first it is mere intuition [bloße Anschauung], for the other both intuition and concept’” (AI 81).  4. This is no doubt an overdetermined misquotation. See de Man’s many texts on (faces in) Wordsworth now in The Rhetoric of Romanticism and Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. See also my “Facing Language: Wordsworth’s First Poetic Spirits,” Diacritics 17:4 (Winter 1987), pp. 18–31, reprinted in Kenneth R. Johnston, Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson, and Herbert Marks (eds), Romantic Revolutions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 26–49. It is now Chapter 1 of Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).   5. It is worth remembering that the “blank” between stanzas 1 and 2 of the Lucy poem and between parts 1 and 2 of the Boy of Winander marks the transition from living Lucy and living Boy to dead Lucy and dead Boy. For de Man on “A Slumber Did My Spirit Heal,” see his “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” now in the second edition of Blindness and Insight (BI 223–5). De Man’s most extensive reading of the Boy of Winander is in his “Time and History in Wordsworth” in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, but see also the discussions in “Heaven and Earth in Wordsworth and Hölderlin” in the same volume and “Wordsworth and Hölderlin” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism.

“As the Poets Do It”    ­63   6. For de Man on “Schillerizing” and “re-­Kantizing,” see “Kant and Schiller” in Aesthetic Ideology.  7. Although the reading of Kant’s mathematical sublime in terms of such a subreptitious substitution – i.e., calling “sublime” what is in fact only “colossal” – is Derrida’s (in “Le colossal,” La Vérité en peinture [Paris: Flammarion, 1978], pp. 136–68), de Man’s own reading is very close to Derrida’s here. That de Man had read Derrida’s “Le colossal” is clear in the earlier “Kant’s Materialism,” also in Aesthetic Ideology.   8. On de Man’s reading of Pascal’s zero, see my “Allegories of Reference” above.  9. The locus classicus for understanding such “economies of the supplement” is, of course, Jacques Derrida, “La mythologie blanche,” in Marges (Paris: Minuit, 1972). See also my reading of Derrida and catachresis as the “syntax of tropes” in “Prefatory Postscript: Interpretation and Reading,” in Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. liii–lxi. 10. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 184. 11. And not just according to de Man. There are remarkable similarities between de Man’s understanding of the stakes of Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime” and Lyotard’s. Indeed, however different their terms, de Man’s and Lyotard’s readings coincide in many respects. See Jean-­ François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 12. Although he does not explicitly read the vaulted sky as a figure for the bridge between the supersensuous underlying nature and the supersensuous underlying freedom, Derrida does link the ocean in this passage to the abyss between them. See La Vérité en peinture, p. 148. 13. But whose phlegmaticity is then judged sublime in the Critique of Judgment! For more on de Man and the Dutchman, see “Kant’s Materialism” in Aesthetic Ideology (AI 124–5). It is worth noting that de Man’s joke in “Kant’s Materialism” about Kant’s characterization of the Dutch in the pre-­critical text – “I have never felt more grateful for the hundred or so kilometers that separate Antwerp from Rotterdam” (AI 125) – undergoes a slight arithmetical transposition in the later “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant”: “I have never felt more grateful for the fifty or so kilometers that separate the Flemish city of Antwerp from the Dutch city of Rotterdam” (AI 85, my emphasis). The Dutch – those “phlegmatized Germans” – seem to have moved closer to Antwerp by the time of the later essay! 14. J. H. Bernard’s and Alexis Philonenko’s translations are: Critique of Judgment (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), pp. 110–11; Critique de la faculté de juger (Paris: Vrin, 1984), p. 107. 15. Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured” (RR 122). 16. See Stefano Rosso’s interview with de Man (RT 121). 17. See my “Allegories of Reference” (above) and “Ending Up/Taking Back (with Two Postscripts on Paul de Man’s Historical Materialism),” in Material Inscriptions. 18. Cf. “Excuses”: “we are restating the disjunction of the performative from

­64    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics the cognitive: any speech act produces an excess of cognition, but it can never hope to know the process of its own production (the only thing worth knowing)” (AR 299–300). It’s worth noting that de Man here is restating the disjunction between performative and cognitive, which would support my contention that a radicalization of the performative takes place in the course of his reading. 19. Cf. “Excuses”: “Rousseau singled out the episode of Marion and the ribbon as of particular affective significance, a truly primal scene of lie and deception strategically placed in the narrative and told with special panache. We are invited to believe that the episode was never revealed to anyone prior to the privileged reader of the Confessions ‘and . . . that the desire to free myself, so to speak, from this weight has greatly contributed to my resolve to write my confessions.’ When Rousseau returns to the Confessions in the later Fourth Rêverie, he again singles out this same episode as a paradigmatic event, the core of his autobiographical narrative” (AR 278–9). 20. See the end of “‘As the Poets Do It’: On the Material Sublime” above. 21. In working on Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, I was pleased to find that in Lukács too, what he calls “the next step,” the step to action, to revolution if one likes, the step that is taken by the class consciousness of the proletariat, turns out in fact to be the passage to the step, indeed the step to the step. The action of the proletariat is the step to action. The step is the step to the step. That this “next step” emerges out of the system of bourgeois thought (i.e., classical German philosophy from Kant to Hegel) – that is, out of the inability of the (tropological) system to close itself off – is an indication that the class consciousness of the proletariat and the action that is the step to action, for him as for de Man, emerges out of an epistemological critique of trope – or, if you like, a rhetorical “deconstruction” of the tropological system that is bourgeois thought. See my “Next Steps: Lukács, Jameson, Post-­Dialectics” in the present volume. (That de Man’s late work on the philosophical category of the aesthetic is at least somewhat informed by his 1960s reading of Lukács’s early reflections on aesthetics is legible in his “Ludwig Binswanger and the Sublimation of the Self,” in Blindness and Insight [New York: Oxford University Press, 1971], especially pp. 41–4.)

Chapter 3

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

There is more than a little irony in an afterthought Fichte appends to his account and examples of what he calls thetic judgments. After having explained why “I am” constitutes “the first and foremost judgment of this type” and how all judgments subsumed under it, “i.e., under the absolute positing of the self,” are also of this type – “for example, man is free” – Fichte adds, after a dash: “The judgment of taste, A is beautiful (so far as A contains a feature [Merkmal] also present in the ideal of beauty), is likewise a thetic judgment; for I cannot compare this feature (Merkmal) with the ideal, since the latter is unknown to me. It is, rather, a mental task (eine Aufgabe meines Geistes) derived from the absolute positing of myself, to discover this ideal, though one that could only be discharged after a completed approximation to the infinite (nur nach einer vollendeten Annäherung zum Unendlichen). – Thus Kant and his followers have very properly described these judgments as infinite, though nobody, so far as I know, has explained them in a clear and determinate manner” (WL 37–8, 115).1 It is ­appropriate – and convenient for me – that Fichte here names both Kant and his followers, for the irony of his complaint – that no one has been able to explain aesthetic reflexive judgments in a satisfactory manner – points both backwards and forwards: back to the Kantian problematic and its inconclusive solution in the Third Critique; and forward to the solution – or non-­solution – of the German idealists, starting with Schiller and his peculiar appropriation of Kant (and of Fichte) in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. As always, the irony cuts several ways, sparing no one, and it is nicely legible here in Fichte’s Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre toward the end of his discussion of the third Grundsatz. Indeed, one could say with some justice that Fichte’s relatively off-­hand remark about aesthetic judgment represents something like a pivot or an articulating joint between the critical system of Kant and the German idealist systems to

­66    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics follow. In explaining how so we may also go some distance in understanding how ironic. First of all, back to Kant. Back to Kant because: in characterizing judgments of taste, i.e., aesthetic judgments of the beautiful, the way he does, i.e., as “infinite” thetic judgments, Fichte not only points to the unresolved and inconclusive (indeed, aporetic) status of the Third Critique – which, far from closing off the system of the critical philosophy, opens it up radically – but also manages to repeat the problematic structure that divides the Third Critique against itself irremediably: namely, the uncanny status of judgments of the sublime in relation to judgments of the beautiful. For what Fichte calls a judgment of taste here – “A is beautiful” – turns out very quickly to be what is in fact a judgment of the sublime for Kant – and a very particular sublime at that, what Kant calls the mathematical sublime. Insofar as the “ideal of beauty” (Ideal des Schönen) is utterly unknown to me – as unknown as the act of absolute positing of myself (which thus posits the entire system of knowing) – and as inaccessible as the infinite that I can only approach asymptotically, closer and closer but without ever reaching it, when I compare a feature (Merkmal) of an object with the in fact incomparable standard of the ideal of beauty, I am not judging it beautiful but rather sublime. The fact that this thetic judgment says, and can say, nothing about the object it judges but instead only testifies to a power of the subject – the absolute self-­positing of the I – confirms that, in Kantian terms, it would be a judgment of the sublime and not a mere judgment of taste: “A is sublime” and not “A is beautiful.” And it would be a case of the mathematically sublime because the impossible task of an asymptotic approach to the infinite names very precisely the imagination’s operation of Auffassung, apprehension, which, like the power of number, would progress to infinity if it were not for the lagging operation of Zusammenfassung, comprehension, which can take in and totalize into a unity of comprehension only up to a certain median point that would certainly not be the absolutely big – i.e., the properly sublime – or the too big – what Kant calls the “monstrous” – but rather only the almost too big, the almost too great for the imagination that Kant calls the “colossal.” It is at this point, when the imagination has the feeling that it is inadequate to exhibit the idea of a whole – of nature’s infinity as a unit – that it collapses back on itself and transposes the displeasure of its failed striving (to expand to the maximum) into the pleasure of the sublime. Although in Kant the exact mechanism of this transposition – of a displeasure into a pleasure, of an inability to present the ideas of reason into an ability, indeed a faculty – remains obscure and, in fact, transcendentally ungrounded, the ultimate import is clear: the judgment

Returns of the Sublime    ­67

of the sublime amounts to an impossible and necessarily failed striving to present the ideas of reason, but the failure of this striving “is itself a presentation (ist selbst eine Darstellung) of the subjective purposiveness of our mind (der subjektiven Zweckmässigkeit unseres Gemüts), in the use of our imagination, for the mind’s supersensible vocation, and compels us to subjectively think nature itself in its totality as the presentation of something supersensible, without our being able to bring this presentation about objectively” (KdU 193–4, 128).2 But why should this matter? Why should Fichte’s transposition of the sublime into the beautiful make any difference? Why should it make a difference, especially since, already in Kant, the status of the “Analytic of the Sublime” as a “mere appendix” (bloßer Anhang) to the “Analytic of the Beautiful” already raises the question of the extent to which j­udgments of the sublime are continuous with – or disjunct from –­­judgments of the beautiful.3 Indeed, one could say that the certain sleight-­of-­hand Kant performs in the mathematical sublime when he substitutes the merely colossal, i.e., the almost too big, for the sublime proper, i.e., the absolutely big, that which is big beyond all comparison, like infinity, already constitutes a certain transposition of the merely beautiful into that which is claimed as sublime – that which still testifies only to the purposiveness of nature and not to the purposiveness of the mind and its supersensible vocation. But this is where it helps to know what it is that actually happens in Kant’s text – as opposed to what we think we all know about it – and no one is of more help here than Paul de Man in his reading of the Kantian sublimes. Put as starkly and directly as possible, what happens is this: the epistemological and eudaemonic “proofs” of the mathematical sublime having failed – you can’t ground the sublime on the basis of its impossibility, especially when you eschew all ­dialectics – the only explanation of the mathematical sublime (as the attempt to articulate number and space as extension) that actually works is the account of the double operation of apprehension and comprehension, Auffassung and Zusammenfassung. But this account works only purely formally – and not as either a transcendental or even a metaphysical principle – because it is based on the purely formal possibilities of language, here of language as a familiar metaphorico-­metonymical tropological system of substitution and exchange. On the horizontal axis of combination the imagination can keep adding one more number and one more number, just one more, whereas on the vertical axis of substitution it needs to totalize the (potentially infinite) progression of number into one, bounded, bordered-­off, intuition which amounts to an impossible metaphor of infinity, and, as impossible, in fact a blind metonymy or, better, a catachrestic positing. But precisely because, in the case of

­68    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics the mathematical sublime, this tropological system produces impossible tropes of the infinite that cannot be accounted for in the terms of this system’s own principles of substitution and exchange, the tropological system of what would want to be the mathematically sublime cannot close itself off – and thus cannot be a system – and empties out into the force, power, and might (Macht) of the dynamic sublime whose linguistic “model” or principle would be that of language as performative. “The only way to account for” extending the model of the mathematical sublime to the model of the dynamic sublime, says de Man, “is as an extension of the linguistic model beyond its definition as a system of tropes . . . The transition from the mathematical to the dynamic sublime . . . marks the saturation of the tropological field as language frees itself of its constraints and discovers within itself a power no longer dependent on the restrictions of cognition” (AI 79).4 But more important for us in this context than just the disjunction between cognitive and performative is the disarticulation this disjunction would introduce not only into the project of the “Analytic of the Sublime” and the Third Critique but also into Kant’s entire critical system and his claim to having completed it, closed it off, with the Third Critique.5 For if the project and task of the Third Critique is in fact, in the end, to ground transcendentally the subject of the critical philosophy itself, i.e., the critical subject itself,6 and if the specific place of this specific project in the Third Critique is in fact the “Analytic of the Sublime” (and not the “Analytic of the Beautiful”) – an argument that many other worthy readers of Kant, beside de Man, have made convincingly – then the self-­disarticulation of the sublime in the aporia of the disjunction between cognitive and performative signifies the radical ungrounding (or “abyssing,” as it were, ab-­gründen) and disarticulation of the critical system itself and its demand for an articulation between the supersensuous underlying nature and the supersensuous underlying freedom, between First and Second Critiques. Just as the tropological system of the mathematical sublime can account for everything except the inaugural act that put it into place in the first place – and thereby empties out in the performative force of the dynamic sublime, which thus amounts to a repetition “within” the system of the ungrounded and ungroundable positing act that put it into place – so the Kantian critical system can account for the principles of all kinds of judgments, whether determinative or reflexive, but what it cannot account for in terms internal to the system and its critical, i.e., transcendental, principles is the act and positing power that put the critical, judging subject into place, again, in the first place. All it can do is push its self-­critical self-­reflexivity to a limit-­point at which it needs to repeat its ungrounded grounding act over and over again, like

Returns of the Sublime    ­69

in some kind of stutter or syncope. As de Man writes in an apparently very different context at the end of “Excuses,” but which is perfectly à propos here: “any speech act produces an excess of cognition, but it can never hope to know the process of its own production (the only thing worth knowing)” (AR 300). De Man’s reading of the Kantian sublimes helps us to appreciate the considerable import of Fichte’s putting the beautiful in the place of the sublime in his account of thetic judgments, as though by some kind of tropological operation according to which a beautiful object – “A is beautiful” – can be substituted for a sublime feeling that testifies to an infinite, absolute subject – “I am.” That this is indeed what happens could not be more explicit in Fichte’s text. The thetic judgment “A is beautiful” is derived from the absolute positing of the self, as is the case of all thetic judgments for which the third, presupposed, grounding term is always only a task, an Aufgabe. “The first and foremost judgment of this type,” writes Fichte, “is ‘I am,’ in which nothing whatever is affirmed of the self, the place of the predicate being left indefinitely empty for its possible characterization. All judgments subsumed under this, i.e., under the absolute positing of the self, are of this type (even if they should not always happen to have the self for logical subject)” (WL 36–7, 114). There having to be thetic judgments follows by analogy (der Analogie nach), says Fichte, from there being synthetic and antithetic judgments – which itself follows, it would seem logically (rather than analogically), from Fichte’s third Grundsatz, the principle that puts posited “I” and posited “not-­I” into relation with one another and thus into circulation on the basis of their divisibility into parts that in part oppose and in part do not oppose one another. What this means is that thetic judgments, which get produced apparently from within the tropological system of substitution and exchange that constitutes the third Grundsatz and its putting into circulation of like and unlike properties (or “features”) synthetically or antithetically, are in fact repetitions of the first Grundsatz and its absolutely self-­positing act – a groundless grounding act that would want to be as self-­grounding as all such instances of the purely positing power of language, like God’s infinite “I am” or sublime “Let there be light” and the law-­giver’s “Thou shalt” or “Thou shalt not.” But unlike God’s “I am” and “Let there be light,” the human law-­giver’s inaugural positing act is neither self-­grounding nor self-­verifying. Its only “ground” would be the groundless positing power of language; and its only verification (as in “making true”) would be the system of cognition that this groundless act puts into place as a system of unstable tropes, again, a tropological system of substitution and exchange that can account for (i.e., know) everything but the act that put the system

­70    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics of knowledge into place. No wonder that the law-­giver always needs to perform a sleight-­of-­hand and appeal to some transcendental authority, as when he performs a “theft in secret” and steals the voice of God in Rousseau’s Social Contract. So: what I’m saying is that Fichte, when he gives the supplementary example of “A is beautiful” as a thetic ­judgment – groundless except as an impossibly sublime task of asymptotic approach to the ideal or the infinite or the absolute (like the “I am”) – rather than closing off the tropological system of self-­limiting “I” and self-­limiting “not-­I” within the (absolutely posited) “I,”7 instead opens it up radically. Thetic judgments like “Man is free” and “A is beautiful” would be like performative applications of the law within an already constituted juridico-­political system. And like such judicial decisions – in fact, like all performatives – they would be not just applications of the law to be verified (as “felicitous” or not) by the given juridico-­political system but, insofar as they themselves are truly acts, truly decisions (and not calculations on the basis of knowledge), they would be repetitions of the groundless, indeed mad, inaugural acts that grounded the law.8 They would all be instances of the madness of the law; in Fichte, repetitions of the groundless act of the I’s positing itself absolutely. Rather than verifying and closing off the system – which, after all, would be the “foundation of the entire science of knowledge” (Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre) – thetic judgments would interrupt and disrupt it like the possibility of transcendentally ungrounded and ungroundable judgments of the sublime in Kant or like the permanent parabasis of what Friedrich Schlegel calls irony. (Recall that de Man in “The Concept of Irony” reads Schlegelian irony as the permanent parabasis that interrupts the “allegory of tropes” which constitutes the narrative of Fichte’s first three grounding principles.9) The judgment “A is beautiful” can be grounded (only) in the absolute self-­positing of the “I am,” but the “I am” in turn rests only on the ungrounded and ungroundable judgment “A is sublime” – a judgment that is impossible, indeed undecidable, because it itself is grounded not in an “I” or a subject but rather only in the subject-­less positing power of language and the tropological system of always aberrant cognition it puts into place. That the substitution of the beautiful for the sublime – that is, setting up a sublime problematic and “solving” it by recourse to the ­beautiful – can be taken as the idealist operation is vividly legible in Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man at a particularly sensitive and symptomatic point: i.e., the (apparently) transcendental deduction of the “play-­drive” and its object, beauty. “As soon as reason utters the pronouncement: Let humanity exist,” writes Schiller in the Fifteenth Letter, “it has by that very pronouncement also promulgated the law:

Returns of the Sublime    ­71

Let there be beauty” (Sobald sie demnach den Ausspruch tut: es soll eine Menschheit existieren, so hat sie eben dadurch das Gesetz aufgestellt: es soll eine Schönheit sein) (Letters 102–310). Reason does this “on transcendental grounds”: “Reason, on transcendental grounds, makes the following demand: Let there be a bond of union between the form-­drive and the material drive: that is to say, let there be a play-­drive, since only the union of reality with form, contingency with necessity, passivity with freedom, makes the concept of human nature complete” (Letters 102–3). In other words, to put it brusquely, my divided and alienated experience of human nature must have as its condition of possibility the concept of an undivided and unalienated human nature – otherwise I would not have the experience that I do (of human nature as divided and alienated). There must be a bond of union between the form-­drive (Formtrieb) and the material drive (Stofftrieb), which in turn means that there must be a play-­drive (Spieltrieb) since it is only by means of such a third, mediating drive that the form-­drive and the material drive can be united. And this must be so – otherwise, again, I would not have the experience of human nature that I in fact have. Now if we look back to the Fourteenth Letter, we discover that the actual purported deduction of the play-­drive takes place a bit differently, not so much as the promulgation of transcendental laws of the conditions of possibility of experience but rather as the much stranger positing of experience, indeed a positing not of transcendental laws but of (an impossible) transcendental experience. Let us proceed step-­by-­step. The Fourteenth Letter begins with the concept of a reciprocal action between the two drives, Formtrieb and Stofftrieb, “of such a kind that the activity of the one both gives rise to, and sets limits to, the activity of the other” (Letters 94–5). That the concept of “reciprocal action” (Wechselwirkung) and the mutual self-­limitation it entails comes from Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre of 1794 would be clear enough, even without Schiller’s long (and curious11) footnote to the Thirteenth Letter, where he writes: “This concept of reciprocal action, and its fundamental importance, is admirably set forth in Fichte’s Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, Leipzig, 1794” (Letters 84–5). The Fichtean provenance of this concept of reciprocal action (and the incipient dialectics in it) should be a signal to us that the allegedly transcendental method Schiller uses – already anthropologized, psychologized, and, indeed, empiricized12 – is undergoing some torsion here. In any case, the reciprocal action between the two drives “is, admittedly, but a task enjoined upon us by reason (ist zwar bloß eine Aufgabe der Vernunft),” continues Schiller, and, it turns out, the burden of this task, this Aufgabe, is the sublime: “Such reciprocal action between the two drives is, admittedly, but a task enjoined upon us by

­72    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics reason, a problem which man is only capable of solving completely in the perfect consummation of his existence. It is, in the most precise sense of the word, the Idea of his human nature, hence something infinite, to which in the course of time he can approximate ever more closely, but without ever being able to reach it” (Letters 94–5). Like the ideal of beauty in Fichte’s thetic judgment, the idea of his completed, fulfilled (Vollendung is the word), humanity remains for man an infinite, and because infinite impossible, task whose completion he can only approach, asymptotically, closer and closer but without ever being able to reach it in time. As such, this sublime task is again very precisely the task of Kant’s mathematical sublime. Like the power of number, which can progress to infinity, imagination’s mechanical operation of apprehension can always add one more apprehension to the last one, but its ability to comprehend these apprehensions in one, bordered-­off, intuition very soon reaches a limit it cannot go beyond. How then is this infinite task to be completed when it is by definition impossible, since its completion means reaching the infinite, indeed experiencing the infinite in an intuition that would be able to present it? Well, it would be possible, hypothesizes Schiller, if there were cases in which man were to have the full experience of both of his drives at work reciprocally and simultaneously, then, in such cases and in such cases only, he would have “a complete intuition of his human nature (eine vollständige Anschauung seiner Menschheit).” And the object that would afford him this “intuition” (again, Anschauung) “would become for him a symbol of his accomplished destiny and, in consequence (since that is only to be reached in the totality of time), serve him as a manifestation of the Infinite” (Letters 92–3). But this symbol that would afford man an intuition of an infinite Idea (of his humanity) and thus serve as a presentation of the infinite (Darstellung des Unendlichen) would not be the object of a sublime feeling but rather a beautiful object. In other words, although the task Schiller sets up is a sublime task, its (purported) solution is the beautiful. Of course, it is quite appropriate to call such a symbol beautiful. Whatever the sublime may be in Kant, it is never, and can never, be a presentation (Darstellung) of the Ideas of reason in an intuition (Anschauung). The imagination strives to make the presentation of the senses adequate to the idea of totality, but this striving always necessarily fails to attain the idea, and, again, according to Kant, this striving and failing to present is itself a presentation of the subjective purposiveness of our mind and its supersensible vocation. In short, what is impossible in Kant becomes possible in Schiller thanks to the beautiful symbol and its presentation of the infinite. One could say that what “does not fall together” in Kant – “asymptote” is from a-­sun-­piptein, “not falling

Returns of the Sublime    ­73

together” – gets “thrown together” (“symbol” is from sun-­ballein, “to throw together”) in Schiller. What doesn’t fall together has to be thrown together – like necessity and freedom, time and infinity, and so on, or, as always in the case of the mathematical sublime, the infinity of number and the bordered-­off totality of space as extension. (It is worth noting that Schiller’s characterization of the two drives, Formtrieb and Stofftrieb, very explicitly takes place in the terms of the problematic of the mathematical sublime in Kant: under the sway of the Stofftrieb, man is a “unit of quantity” [Grössen-­Einheit]; whereas under the sway of the Formtrieb, he becomes a “unity of ideas” [Ideen-­Einheit].13) But are there cases in which man has the double and reciprocally active experience of himself as at once conscious of his freedom and sensible of his existence, when he feels himself matter and comes to know himself as mind? And are there objects that afford him this intuition of himself and thus can serve as symbols of infinity? Schiller introduces the possibility of such experience and such a symbol in the hypothetical mode and the subjunctive mood: if there were cases . . . then he would . . . (Gäbe es aber Fälle, wo . . . so hätte er . . .). How does this hypothesis of a possible experience become a thesis, the law (Gesetz), that there ought to be such experience and hence that there must be beauty? Well, clearly enough, it can take place only by “theticizing” the hypothesis, as it were, by the sheer positing of such experience and thus such a beautiful symbol. And this is indeed how the actual “deduction” of the play-­ drive and its object, beauty, takes place in Schiller’s text – based not on the transcendental grounds of Reason but on the ungrounded grounding power of pure positing. In the following paragraph, Schiller continues: “Assuming (Vorausgesetzt – it having been presupposed, it having been pre-­posited) that cases (Fälle) of this sort could actually occur in experience, they would awaken in him a new drive” which would, of course, be the play-­drive. In other words, and again, what happens here is not the grounding of the play-­drive and beauty on transcendental laws but rather the “verification” of an admittedly impossible hypothesis on the sheer positing of an experience as not only possible but necessary. Rather than the transcendental condition of possibility of an experience, we get the positing of a transcendental experience – as it were, symbolically speaking. Schiller’s juxtaposition in this sentence of positing (Vorausgesetzt) and of cases (Fälle) – “Vorausgesetzt, daß Fälle dieser Art in der Erfahrung vorkommen” – is symptomatic of what is going on. Earlier, in characterizing the two drives, he had written that the Stofftrieb “makes cases” (Fälle macht) and that the Formtrieb “gives laws” (Gesetze gibt). Here, in the context of an Aufgabe that “gives up” to us the impossible task of reaching the infinite, it is not laws (Gesetze)

­74    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics that are given but rather cases – “Gäbe es aber Fälle . . .,” begins the hypothetical statement. And what “gives” these hypothetical cases is not a play-­drive grounded on the transcendental laws of Reason but rather the power of a positing (of experience) without law – as though the transcendental concept of humanity, rather than grounding our empirical experience, were itself the product of an empirical experience that is not experienced but rather only claimed, posited, as taking place. Of course, given Schiller’s project, none of this is an accident. If the Ideas of Reason are to be presented, if infinity is going to be available for intuition, presented in a beautiful sensory object that can serve as the symbol of infinity, then a moment of idealization, in the form of a properly ideo-­logical imposition, necessarily has to take place. There has to be, there has to have been, a moment when the absolute appears, presented and available to intuition, the veritable “sensory appearance of the Idea” (das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee), to coin a phrase. And this properly idealist, and properly aesthetic ideological, imperative necessarily has to transform the Kantian problematic of the sublime by pretending to be able to solve it with recourse to the beautiful. That this “solution” of the Kantian sublime problematic manages only to repeat it over and over – and thereby to interrupt its own discourse with something of a stutter – is perhaps most legible much later in Schiller’s Letters, as his text celebrates the successful aesthetic mediation of beauty and truth at the end of the Twenty-­Fifth Letter: “But since in the enjoyment of beauty, or aesthetic unity, an actual union and interchange between matter and form, passivity and activity, momentarily takes place, the compatibility of our two natures, the practicability of the infinite being realized in the finite, hence the possibility of sublimest humanity, is thereby actually proven” (Letters 188–9). Actually, nothing has been proven, as we know, since the aesthetic unity has only been posited, pre-­posited, as taking place. But what is of more theoretical interest here in Schiller’s wording is the phrase “the possibility of sublimest [my emphasis] humanity” (die Möglichkeit der erhabensten Menschheit). That the concept of humanity is indeed a sublime concept we have already seen at the outset of the Fourteenth Letter when Schiller characterizes it as an infinite, asymptotic approach to the infinite Idea. But the superlative suffix tacked onto the word “sublime” gives the game away. For “sublimest” suggests that there could be a “sublime,” a “sublimer,” and a “sublimest” – as though something could be more and less sublime, comparatively and, indeed, superlatively sublime! As we know from Kant on the mathematical sublime, nothing of the sort is possible because the sublime is not the big or the bigger, not relatively or comparatively big, but rather the absolutely big, that which is

Returns of the Sublime    ­75

big beyond all comparison, in comparison to which everything else is small. In other words, the sublime is by definition “the biggest.” There is no such thing as the sublimer or the sublimest. To qualify the sublime by introducing into it the concept of a comparative measure (whether determinative or reflexive, it does not matter) is to degrade it to the status of the beautiful. In the very use of the word sublime – with his “sublimest” – Schiller demonstrates not only that he has tried to solve the problem of the sublime by recourse to the beautiful but also that, rather than “proving” the possibility of humanity, he has only repeated its impossibility as an infinite (or rather endless), and sublime, task. The unreadable word “sublimest” would be a trace of the incommensurability and non-­mediatability of the sublime task and the beautiful solution, the mark of a stutter in the text, the permanent parabasis of an irony that interrupts and disrupts all systems of logic aiming to close themselves off in allegories of trope, whether purportedly transcendental or purportedly dialectical.14 Schiller’s ironically hyperbolic “sublimest” – ironic because it is a hyperbole that rather than “throwing beyond” (huperballein, “to throw beyond”) the sublime instead falls short of it – is not a mere slip of the pen. That it is programmed by the logic of the text – and its recourse to rhetoric at the crucial juncture – becomes legible if we recapitulate the sequence of propositions that makes up Schiller’s alleged “proof” of “the possibility of sublimest humanity.” 1) Reason utters the pronouncement “Let humanity exist” – where “humanity” is an infinite “Idea” that can only be approached asymptotically and thus constitutes a sublime task. 2) By this very pronouncement, reason also promulgates the law “Let there be beauty.” 3) There is beauty. 4) There is (“sublimest”) humanity. The trouble with this sequence and what makes the “proof” stutter is the “There is” (conveniently for me, it would be “Es gibt” in German) in “There is beauty” because it amounts to a cipher for the disjunction between a hypothesized experience – “If there were cases . . . then he would . . .” (Gäbe es aber Fälle . . . so hätte er . . .) – and the (pre-­)positing of that experience – “It having been presupposed that cases of this sort could actually occur in experience . . .” (Vorausgesetzt, daß Fälle dieser Art in der Erfahrung vorkommen können . . .). Since the hypo-­thesis necessarily brings with it a symbol – indeed, an entire symbolic system of exchange between infinite and finite, freedom and contingency, and so on – it introduces a model of language as trope, whereas the thesis of a pre-­posited experience clearly rests on a model of language as performative. In short, if the disjunction between the hypothesis and the thesis is one between tropological and performative models of language, then Schiller’s “proof” rests on shaky ground

­76    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics indeed. Rather than proving the existence of beauty – which would in turn prove the possibility of (a sublime and not a sublimest) humanity – Schiller’s text instead repeats the aporetic (rhetorical) structure of Kant’s sublime (mathematical and dynamic). It is a predicament that augurs ill for the idealist systems to follow insofar as they too depend upon a phenomenalized principle of articulation – in short, the category of the aesthetic, beauty – to close themselves off as systems: for instance, and above all, Hegel’s.15

Notes   1. All page references marked as WL are to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, [1794] 1997); and J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, ed. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). The first page number refers to the German text, the second to the English translation. Occasionally I have had to modify the translation.  2. All page references marked as KdU are to the German and English of Kant’s Third Critique: Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974); Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987). Occasionally I have modified the translation, in particular preferring “presentation” to “exhibition” in the rendering of Darstellung.  3. See the end of paragraph 23 of the Critique of Judgment. On the one hand, the concept of the sublime is a “mere appendix” to the beautiful and “not nearly as important and rich in implications as that of the beautiful in nature” (KdU 167, 100). On the other hand, since the sublime testifies not to a purposiveness in nature but only to “a purposiveness within ourselves entirely independent (ganz unabhängig) of nature,” it is in fact more important than the beautiful because, ultimately, it would ground the critical subject as such – i.e., the capacity to link appearance and intuition with the supersensible according to a rule that is not given but that the judging subject gives to itself. In fact, it is only the sublime and not the beautiful that can accomplish the ultimate task that the Third Critique sets for itself: not just showing how subjective reflexive judgments can make a claim to universality but rather bridging the supersensible underlying nature and the supersensible underlying freedom and demonstrating that the latter does have an effect on the former – as, according to Kant, it must.   4. On de Man’s essay and on Kant’s “Analytic of the Sublime,” see Chapter 2, “‘As the Poets Do It’: On the Material Sublime,” above.   5. Cf. the final paragraph of the Preface to the Third Critique: “With this, then, I conclude my entire critical enterprise. I shall proceed without delay to the doctrinal one, in order to snatch from my advancing years what time may yet be somewhat favorable to the task” (KdU 77, 7–8).  6. Cf. paragraph viii of the Introduction to the Third Critique: “Aesthetic judgment, on the other hand, contributes nothing to the cognition of its objects; hence it belongs only to the critique that is the propaedeutic to

Returns of the Sublime    ­77 all philosophy – viz., to the critique of the judging subject and his cognitive powers insofar as these are capable of [having] a priori principles, no matter what their use may be (theoretical or practical)” (KdU 106, 35).  7. It may be worth recalling the exact wording of the third Grundsatz: “I oppose [or “op-­posit”] a divisible not-­I to the divisible I in the I” (Ich setze im Ich dem teilbaren Ich ein teilbares Nicht-­Ich entgegen) (WL 30, 110). Alexis Philonenko’s reminder about the formulation of this principle is helpful – even if he hurries (and Hegelianizes) too much in identifying the subject that opposes I and not-­I as “le philosophe” and the I within which this opposition takes place as “consciousness”: “On a toujours relevé avec raison que nous étions en présence d’une pure contradiction, principe de l’antithétique de la raison pure spéculative, mais on n’a pas prêté attention à la structure philosophique de la phrase qui établit le troisième principe. Le moi divisible (A) est opposé au non moi divisible (B) dans le Moi (C) par un “Je” (D). Que les termes A et B soient opposés dans le Moi (A & B in C) cela est concevable si un sujet (D) les oppose. Or ce sujet ne peut être que le philosophe et le “Ich” par lequel débute la phrase signifie le rôle actif du philosophe dans la série idéelle. Le terme C, le moi en lequel se développe l’opposition ne signifie nullement l’idéalisme, mais simplement le fait que tout réel pour être reconnu doit être posé dans la conscience et reconnu en même temps par celle-­ci comme indépendant d’elle.” Alexis Philonenko, L’Oeuvre de Fichte (Paris: Vrin, 1984), p. 28.   8. My understanding of the mutual “contamination” of inaugural, grounding “super-­performatives” – i.e., ones that found a juridico-­political system – and performative utterances “proper” – i.e., ones that can be said to “come off,” to use Austin’s terms, and be “felicitous” within an already established juridico-­political system – comes from Jacques Derrida’s work on the performative in many texts, in particular “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority’,” published in French and English in “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice,” an issue of the Cardozo Law Review 11:5/6 (July/August 1990), pp. 919–1,045. This text was republished as a book in French: Force de loi (Paris: Galilée, 1994). On the difference between positing “super-­performatives” and performatives in the “narrow” sense in de Man’s work – and on their inevitable mutual contamination – see the “Postscript: On the Super-­Performative” to my “‘As the Poets Do It’: On the Material Sublime” above.   9. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony” (AI 163–84). 10. All references to the bilingual edition of Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), will be indicated by Letters followed by the page numbers. Occasionally I have modified the translation. 11. I call this footnote “curious” because, on the one hand, it gives credit to Fichte (for the concept of Wechselwirkung) and to Kant (for the transcendental method) while, on the other hand, it manages to misunderstand and to distort both. See my note #15. 12. On Schiller’s “empiricization” of Kant and his misunderstanding of the Kantian sublime, I am much indebted to Paul de Man’s lecture “Kant and Schiller” in Aesthetic Ideology.

­78    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics 13. Cf. the end of the Twelfth Letter: “Where, then, the formal drive holds sway, and the pure object acts within us, we experience the greatest enlargement of being: all limitations disappear, and from the mere unit of quantity to which the poverty of his senses reduced him, man has raised himself to a unity of ideas embracing the whole realm of phenomena. During this operation we are no longer in time; time, with its whole never-­ending succession, is in us (sondern die Zeit ist in uns mit ihrer ganzen nie endenden Reihe). We are no longer individuals; we are species. The judgement of all minds is expressed through our own, the choice of all hearts is represented by our action” (Letters 82–3). 14. One could say that in the Letters Schiller’s “method” is an attempt at a synthesis of transcendental method and dialectics. But it is an empiricized (anthropologized and psychologized) “transcendental method” and a “dialectics” that would want to work without the labor of the negative. As such, it necessarily deprives itself of philosophical rigor and depends all the more on an aesthetic “solution” that cannot help but take the aesthetic not as a philosophical category subject to critique but as a value. This is why de Man is right in advancing the “Schillerization” of Kant as paradigmatic of a regression in critical insight that he calls “aesthetic ideology.” 15. On the sense in which Hegel’s Aesthetics – like Kant’s Third Critique – also disarticulates the category of the aesthetic, see de Man’s two essays on Hegel in Aesthetic Ideology: “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics” and “Hegel on the Sublime.” See also my “Aesthetic Ideology and Material Inscription” in Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

Chapter 4

Lightstruck: “Hegel on the Sublime”

On the final examination of my undergraduate literary theory course I sometimes include a short ID for extra credit: “/i/ or /u/.” It’s from a moment in Roman Jakobson’s “Linguistics and Poetics” when he claims that “Sound symbolism is an undeniably objective relation founded on a phenomenal connection between the visual and auditory experience.” If results of research in this area have been vague or controversial, says Jakobson, “it is primarily due to an insufficient care for the methods of psychological and/or linguistic inquiry.” According to Jakobson, a proper attention to the phonological aspect of speech sounds – in particular, to their ultimate components, i.e., phonemes – will confirm such “sound symbolism”: “when, on testing, for example, such phonemic oppositions as grave versus acute we ask whether /i/ or /u/ is darker, some of the subjects may respond that this question makes no sense to them, but hardly one will state that /i/ is the darker of the two.” So: if hardly anyone will state that /i/ is the darker of the two, then it is as clear as day that /u/ must be darker and /i/ must be lighter. Although poetry “is not the only area where sound symbolism makes itself felt,” says Jakobson, “it is a province where the internal nexus between sound and meaning changes from latent to patent and manifests itself most palpably and intensely.” The Russian language – which has /d,en,/ for “day” and /noc/ for “night” – seems to agree with Jakobson’s claim, but French, as Mallarmé already noted, is rather perverse since in “jour” and “nuit” the distribution of grave and acute vowels is inverted. Jakobson’s claim is peculiar, to say the least, and it is rather ironic given the fact that his project in this essay is based on Saussurian linguistics whose basic principle is the arbitrariness of the sign. Jakobson’s retraction, not to say betrayal, of this principle is explicit just a few lines earlier when he says that the “codified contiguity” between signans and signatum is “often confusingly labeled ‘arbitrariness of the verbal sign’.”1 The confusion is all Jakobson’s, and his synesthesia, rather than being founded on a

­80    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics phenomenal connection between different sensory modes, amounts to an outright hallucination. This hallucination is, of course, inevitable and predictable from the first page of his essay insofar as Jakobson assumes the aesthetic function of literature and poetry when he calls it “verbal art.” In his /i/ or /u/ test, he should have listened to those subjects who responded that this question made no sense to them, for they clearly show some aptitude for the study of literary theory (as literary theory in Paul de Man’s sense in “The Resistance to Theory,” i.e., one based on a “non-­phenomenal linguistics” like Saussure’s). On my test this past winter one hapless student identified the item as follows: “‘/i/ or /u/.’ Schiller. If not I then it is you.” Although the student clearly had not a clue, he nevertheless manages to outdo Jakobson at his own game by immediately transposing the phonemes /i/ and /u/ into lexical, meaning-­ carrying units, i.e., words – the grammatical first person subject “I” and the grammatical second person subject “you” which get inscribed into a self/other relation and hence potentially into a dialectic. And it is most appropriate that the student identifies the author as Schiller, for he thereby returns Jakobson’s hallucinatory aesthetification to the right address by laying it at the doorstep of the arch-­aesthetic ideologist Schiller. Schiller had his own hallucinations, including believing that Kant’s ideas of reason could become available to intuition (Anschauung) in the form of beauty and that the beautiful object would thereby become a symbol and the veritable presentation (Darstellung) of the infinite.2 So: the clueless student got something right and deserves some extra credit. But what does this have to do with the sublime, in particular the Hegelian sublime as read by de Man? Everything, as it turns out, for Jakobson’s “symbolism” and Schiller’s “symbol” take us directly to the problematic of sign and symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics as read by de Man not only in the essay of that title (“Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics”) but also in its follow-­up “Hegel on the Sublime.” Indeed, “Hegel on the Sublime” amounts to an “application” of the first essay’s findings to Hegel’s Aesthetics since, despite the essay’s title, “Sign and Symbol” does most of its reading of Hegel not in the Aesthetics but in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, i.e., paragraph #20 of the Introduction and then the passages on the sign (as distinguished from the symbol) and a mechanical memory by rote in the section “Psychologie” of the Encyclopedia’s third part, the Philosophy of Mind. Whereas “Sign and Symbol” makes some assertions about the Aesthetics – on the basis of a reading of other texts – “Hegel on the Sublime” tries to demonstrate the validity of these assertions by reading a particular moment in the Aesthetics: the pages on the “Symbolism of the Sublime,” which is the penultimate chapter of the section on symbolic art. But in

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“Hegel on the Sublime” de Man supplements the findings and insights of “Sign and Symbol” by framing the discussion of the aesthetic here in terms of its relation to the political. Indeed, de Man uses the “passage from the aesthetic theory of the sublime to the political world of the law” (AI 115) that takes place in Hegel’s text to demonstrate, rather than merely asserting, how “truly productive political thought is accessible only by way of critical aesthetic theory” (AI 107). This demonstration may make “Hegel on the Sublime” de Man’s most explicitly political text. Perhaps it is no accident that it may also be de Man’s most difficult text. There are at least three reasons for this difficulty. It stems in large part from de Man’s attempt to present a certain conflictual doubleness or even duplicity in Hegel’s account of the sublime. It may also be due to the fact that the Hegelian sublime is to be taken as the critical undoing of the Longinian sublime, at least the Longinian sublime as appropriated by a certain “tradition” in the American interpretation of Romanticism, one wholly invested in what de Man calls “the ideology of the symbol” (AI 100). In other words, in taking up the Hegelian sublime, de Man is also taking on this tradition (which is very much a Yale-­Cornell tradition). But the ultimate reason for the difficulty of de Man’s reading must surely be the apparently simple “fact” that de Man cannot perform his reading of Hegel without doing violence to Hegel’s text, making Hegel say what his text plainly does not say. In the eyes of some, this “mistake” – if that’s what it is – is such that it would render de Man’s reading a non-­reading or a mere “performance” of reading without any cognitive validity. Let me try to recount and unpack de Man’s extremely condensed reading of the Hegelian sublime, unravel the intricate strands of its implications, and then try to account for de Man’s apparent mistake. De Man’s first step in “Hegel on the Sublime” is to reject “the principle of exclusion that is assumed to operate between aesthetic theory and epistemological speculation or, in a symmetrical pattern, between a concern with aesthetics and a concern with political issues” (AI 105). In actual philosophy – for instance, in both Kant and Hegel – the aesthetic, rather than being a principle of exclusion, is a principle of articulation: in Kant, between First and Second Critiques, between the schemata of theoretical reason and those of practical reason; and in Hegel, between objective spirit and absolute spirit, between the world of ethics, law, and politics and philosophical thought. Or, as de Man puts it rather brutally in a 1982 seminar on “Aesthetic Theory from Kant to Hegel”: “This is why both Kant and Hegel, who had little interest in the arts, had to put it [aesthetics] in, to make possible the link between real events and philosophical discourse.” So: if the aesthetic – once it is taken not as a

­82    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics value invested with (pedagogical, religious, and political) authority but as a philosophical category capable of withstanding critique – is such a principle of articulation, then what is it in Hegel and where and how does it appear in his Aesthetics? Although it may be easy enough to say what the aesthetic is in Hegel – as de Man likes to remind us, it is “the sensory or (better) the phenomenal manifestation of the idea” (das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee) (AI 108) – determining where and how the idea appears in Hegel’s system is far from self-­evident. Since Hegel’s Aesthetics provides only banal and empirical answers as it “historicizes the problem in the ideologically loaded genealogy of the modern as derived from the classical, Hellenic past” – in short, it seems to answer “The Greeks,” Greek art, the highest excellence of which art is capable – a detour is needed “into other texts in which the discussion of the same issues is less blurred by romantic ideology” (AI 108). The detour allows de Man to go over and summarize the findings of “Sign and Symbol” directly and vigorously: “Most clearly in the Encyclopedia, but in the Logic as well, the idea makes its appearance on the mental stage of human intelligence at the precise moment when our consciousness of the world, which faculties such as perception or imagination have interiorized by way of recollection (Erinnerung), is no longer experienced but remains accessible only to memorization (Gedächtnis). At that moment, and no other, can it be said that the idea leaves a material trace, accessible to the senses, upon the world. We can perceive the most fleeting and imagine the wildest things without any change occurring to the surface of the world, but from the moment we memorize, we cannot do without such a trace, be it as a knot in our handkerchief, a shopping list, a table of multiplication, a psalmodized sing-­song or plain chant, or any other memorandum. Once such a notation has occurred, the inside-­outside metaphor of experience and signification can be forgotten, which is the necessary (if not sufficient) condition of thought (Denken) to begin. The aesthetic moment in Hegel occurs as the conscious forgetting of a consciousness by means of a materially actualized system of notation or inscription” (AI 108–9). If nothing even remotely similar seems to be stated in the public theses or arguments of Hegel’s Aesthetics, it may be because “similar or equivalent assertions” occur in passages that have been “overlooked, misunderstood, or censored” (AI 109). One such moment is Hegel’s chapter on “The Symbolism of the Sublime.” Although it is still a merely formal consideration, the very placing of the sublime in Hegel’s Aesthetics is telling. “We find the sublime,” writes Hegel, “primarily in the Hebraic state of mind and in the sacred texts of the Jews” (XIII 480). The association of the sublime with the poetry

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of the Old Testament may be a commonplace, but Hegel’s reasons are of interest: “Hebraic poetry is sublime because it is iconoclastic; it rejects art as plastic or architectural representation, be it as temple or as statue” (AI 110). Since no image of the divine could possibly be adequate to it, says Hegel, “there is no place for the plastic arts in the sublime sacred art of the Jews. Only the poetry of a representation that manifests itself by means of the word will be acceptable” (XIII 480). Since this “word” is explicitly separated from anything that could be perceived or imagined, de Man does not hesitate to identify it immediately with ­inscription – which, according to de Man’s reading of the Encyclopedia, is the first and only phenomenal manifestation of the idea. “Monuments and statues made of stone and metal,” writes de Man, “are only pre-­ aesthetic. They are sensory appearances all right, but not, or not yet, appearances of the idea. The idea appears only as written inscription. Only the written word can be sublime, to the precise extent that the written word is neither representational, like a perception, nor imaginative, like a phantasm” (AI 110). De Man claims that Hegel’s chapter confirms this formal affirmation and develops some of its implications and consequences. And, if this is Hegel’s sublime, then it differs considerably from the post-­Longinian sublime of his predecessors. De Man borrows from Meyer Abrams’s very useful chapter on the sublime in The Mirror and the Lamp and lists among them John Dennis, Bishop Lowth, and Herder – “a tradition which has survived in the American interpretation of Romanticism in Wimsatt, Abrams, Bloom, Hartman, and Weiskel.” De Man adds that this tradition was “finally ironized, though not necessarily exorcised, in Neil Hertz’s remarkable essay ‘Lecture de Longin’ – which remains conveniently hidden from the tradition by appearing, of all places, in Paris, where no one can appreciate what is at stake in this closely familial romance” (AI 110). Hegel’s sublime differs from this tradition and its interpretation of the Longinian sublime for the same reasons it also diverges from the apparent theses and arguments of the Aesthetics: that is, “it marks an open break with the linguistic model of the symbol that pervades all sections of the Aesthetics” (AI 110). As the radical and definitive separation between the order of discourse and the order of the sacred, the moment Hegel calls sublime is decidedly un-­ Longinian and unsymbolic. De Man is very helpful in spelling out and generalizing what he means by “the concept of language as symbol to which the Aesthetics is firmly committed” – and from which the section on the sublime marks an open break: “The phenomenality of the linguistic sign can, by an infinite variety of devices or turns, be aligned with the phenomenality, as knowledge (meaning) or sensory experience, of the signified toward which it is directed. It is the phenomenalization of

­84    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics the sign that constitutes signification, regardless of whether it occurs by way of conventional or by way of natural means. The term phenomenality here implies not more and not less than that the process of signification, in and by itself, can be known, just as the laws of nature as well as those of convention can be made accessible to some form of knowledge” (AI 111). This is all that the phenomenalization of the sign requires – the claim that the process of signification can be known – and it amounts to a certain degré zéro of symbolicity, one could say. In marking an open break with the linguistic model of the symbol, Hegel’s sublime abandons this claim. The constraint to abandon this claim – and break with the model of the symbol – comes, in Hegel, from epistemological considerations: “from the classical and, in this case, Kantian critical process to discriminate between modes of cognition and to separate the knowledge of the natural world from the knowledge of how knowledge is achieved, the separation between mathematics and epistemology” (AI 111). In Hegel’s history of art this corresponds to the passage from pantheism to monotheism – “the moment when the infinite difference and dispersal of what Hegel calls the ‘single substance’ (die eine Substanz) that stands beyond the antinomy of light and the shapeless, singularizes itself in the designation of this absolute generality as the sacred or god” (AI 111). Indeed, de Man repeats, the relationship between pantheism and monotheism is like the relationship between natural science and epistemology: “the concept of mind (be it as Locke’s understanding, Kant’s Vernunft, or Hegel’s Spirit) is the monotheistic principle of philosophy as the single field of unified knowledge” (AI 111). This is a first difficult moment in de Man’s reading, but in order to understand what follows it is essential to get it right. It is difficult in part because Hegel’s chapter on the sublime nowhere makes this analogy, at least not explicitly. But if we again remember the larger context in which art takes its place in Hegel’s system, de Man’s assertion is borne out. Art in Hegel’s system is the first manifestation of absolute spirit; art expresses the same, absolute contents and meanings as religion and philosophy, its signal distinction being that it does so in sensuous form. But in order that those absolute contents and meanings may find a sensuous form adequate to them – that is, adequate as the contents of art as art, which is what happens in the following section of the Aesthetics on classical art – the absolute meaning or content has first to come into consciousness on its own account, says Hegel right at the beginning of the chapter on the sublime, “separated from the entire world of appearance”; and “the first decisive purification of the absolute [meaning] and its express separation from the sensuous present, i.e., from the empirical individuality of external

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things, is to be sought in the sublime” (XIII 466). And this separation and withdrawal of the absolute from the world of sensuous appearance begins with the passage from pantheism to monotheism: “The monotheistic moment (which in Hegel is not or not yet the sublime) is essentially verbal and coincides with the fantastic notion that die eine Substanz could be given a name – such as, for instance, die eine Substanz, or the One, or Being, or Allah, or Jahwe, or I – and that this name could then function symbolically, yielding knowledge and discourse” (AI 111). De Man’s including the “I” at the end of his list is helpful, for it indicates that what happens here in the “monotheistic moment” of the Aesthetics is the same thing as what happens in the self-­positing of the “I” in de Man’s reading (in “Sign and Symbol”) of paragraph 20 of the Encyclopedia. That is, and in short, in its initial self-­positing the “I” is like a sign but it states itself as a symbol. De Man’s summary in “Sign and Symbol” helps us with this passage in “Hegel on the Sublime”: “The I, in its freedom from sensory determination, is originally similar to the sign. Since, however, it states itself as what it is not, it represents as determined a relationship to the world that is in fact arbitrary, that is to say, it states itself as symbol. To the extent that the I points to itself, it is a sign, but to the extent that it speaks of anything but itself, it is a symbol” (AI 100). In other words, when the one substance is given a name, this corresponds to the moment of the sign; and the fantastic notion that this name could function symbolically, yielding knowledge and discourse, is clearly the moment when it states itself as symbol. And just as in the case of de Man’s reading of the “I” in paragraph 20 this happens because the I “states itself as what it is not” and thus “represents as determined a relationship to the world that is in fact arbitrary,” so here Hegel would want to understand the monotheistic moment “as a relationship between mind and nature constituted by negation” (AI 111). But, according to de Man, something else is going on, for “behind this familiar and historically intelligible dialectical model stands a different reality” (AI 111). De Man first explains why this is not a dialectic mediated by determined negation in logical terms: “For it is one thing to assert that absolute knowledge accomplishes its labor by way of negation, another thing entirely to assert the possibility of negating the absolute by allowing it, as in this passage, to enter in an unmediated relationship with its other” (AI 111). That is, as soon as the absolute enters into a relationship with its other, it is negated as the absolute. Since the absolute is that which, by definition, goes beyond the relation of the one to the other, there is no other to the absolute. Hegel’s quandary may be somewhat understandable in these logical terms, but it becomes still more comprehensible once we remember that what is going on here, in

­86    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics terms of the positing of the “I,” is the sign mistaking itself for a symbol as soon as it states anything about itself by attaching predicates to the “I.” In short, once this moment is understood in linguistic terms, as it has to be, since we are talking about the word here – as de Man says, the monotheistic moment is “essentially verbal” – “Hegel’s narrative resembles that of dialectical sublation or upheaval (Aufhebung) only on a first level of understanding” (AI 111). In Hegel’s account of the sublime properly speaking – the sub-­section titled “The art of the sublime” – de Man indeed finds an “interference of a dialectical with another, not necessarily compatible, pattern of narration” (AI 112). And it is by reading this interference that de Man gets to that second, or at least other, level of understanding. Needless to say, that interference is legible only in linguistic terms, indeed, as the combination of two incompatible rhetorical modes. It is worth following de Man’s steps here closely, for they lead directly to the political in Hegel. At first sight, Hegel’s account of the sublime proper would seem to be quite recognizable as a “dialectized sublime,” indeed the Longinian sublime of the tradition (and its survival in the Yale-­Cornell interpretation of Romanticism): “When we read of a hidden god who has ‘withdrawn into himself and thus asserted his autonomy against the finite world, as pure interiority and substantive power,’ or hear that in the sublime, the divine substance ‘becomes truly manifest’ (p. 479) against the weakness and the ephemerality of its creatures, then we easily understand the pathos of this servitude as praise of divine power. The language of negativity is then a dialectical and recuperative moment, akin to similar turns that Neil Hertz has located in Longinus’ treatise. Hegel’s sublime may stress the distance between the human discourse of the poets and the voice of the sacred even further than Longinus, but as long as this distance remains, as he puts it, a relationship (pp. 478, 481), however negative, the fundamental analogy between poetic and divine creation is preserved” (AI 112). In fact, Hegel refers to Longinus as he repeats one of his most famous quotations, the fiat lux from Genesis: “‘God said: Let there be light, and there was light’; this Longinus quoted long ago as in every way a striking example of the sublime” (XIII 481). What was already implicit in the monotheistic moment preparatory to the sublime becomes explicit here – though it seems at first to be re-­ dialecticized. De Man writes: “For zeugen (to engender) Hegel wishes to substitute schaffen (to create) . . . Creation is purely verbal, the imperative, pointing, and positing power of the word. The word speaks and the world is the transitive object of its utterance, but this implies that what is thus spoken, and which includes us, is not the subject of its speech act. Our obedience to the word is mute: ‘The word . . . whose

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command to be also and actually posits what is without mediation and in mute obedience’ (p. 481, italics mine)” (AI 112). But the muteness of the existent (das Daseiende) created by God’s word is rather talkative; “it speaks,” says de Man, “and even writes, a great deal in Hegel, and in an interesting variety of ways. First of all, it quotes” (AI 112). Scripture quotes Moses quoting God and in Genesis it uses the fundamental rhetorical modes of representation: both mimesis (“And God said ‘Let there be light’”) and diegesis (“And God called the light day”). But none of these utterances is mute “in the sense of being merely passive or devoid of reflexive knowledge” (AI 112). Quotations have a great deal of performative power – indeed, one could say that only quotations have such power – and carry considerable cognitive weight: “if, as Longinus implies, the sublime poet here is Moses himself, then the question of the veracity of Moses’ testimonial is bound to arise, that is to say, a cognitive critical inquiry is inevitably linked to the assertion of linguistic positional force” (AI 112). This is why in the fiat lux light is the privileged object of predication, for “‘light’ names the necessary phenomenality of any positing (setzen)” (AI 112). In short, in Hegel’s choice of quotation and his commentary on it, there is “a convergence of discourse and the sacred” which “occurs by way of phenomenal cognition” (AI 112): “No matter how strongly the autonomy of language is denied, as long as the language can declare and know its own weakness and call itself mute, we remain in a Longinian mode . . . A dialectized sublime is still, as in Longinus, an intimation of poetic grandeur and immortality” (AI 112). So: despite, or rather because of, the fact that the sublime from the side of God the Creator is to be understood in linguistic terms as a mimetico-­diegetic system of representation with considerable performative (though not positional) power and cognitive weight, such a sublime nevertheless still remains quite rigorously within the Longinian mode of a dialectized or dialectical sublime. As such, it is also a sublime that marks a return to the linguistic model of the symbol from which the monotheistic moment seemed to break for epistemological reasons. De Man clearly means us to understand that a convergence of discourse and the sacred which occurs by way of phenomenal cognition is an example of what he called the “phenomenalization of the sign” – a con-­vergence that is a veritable sun-­ballein. But the symbolic convergence of discourse and the sacred gets broken apart when Hegel passes to the consideration of the sublime “from the side of man” and quotes Scripture again. This time it is from a song of praise in the Psalms: “Light is your garment, that you wear; you stretch out the heavens like a curtain” (a translation of Martin Luther’s “Licht ist dein Kleid, das du anhast; du breitest den Himmel wie einen Teppich”

­88    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics [Psalm 104, ll. 2–3]). The juxtaposition of this quotation with the fiat lux from Genesis is, says de Man, quite amazing. As a garment, light is now an outside that conceals an inside: “One can understand this, as Hegel does, as a statement about the insignificance of the sensory world as compared to the spirit. Unlike the logos, it does not have the power to posit anything; its power, or only discourse, is the knowledge of its weakness. But since this same spirit also, without mediation, is the light (p. 481), the combination of the two quotations states that the spirit posits itself as that which is unable to posit, and this declaration is either meaningless or duplicitous. One can pretend to be weak when one is strong, but the power to pretend is decisive proof of one’s strength. One can know oneself, as man does, as that which is unable to know, but by moving from knowledge to position, all is changed. Position is all of a piece, and moreover, unlike thought, it actually occurs. It becomes impossible to find a common ground for or between the two quotations, ‘Let there be light’ and ‘Light is your garment’” (AI 113–14). De Man’s account of the incompatibility between the two quotations is clear enough: light cannot be both the spirit (or God) – as the positing word (logos) in which the power and the glory are one – and also a garment or veil that covers the spirit (or God) and is without positing power. And we would be right to hear in the statement “the spirit posits itself as that which is unable to posit” a repetition of de Man’s reading of the positing of the “I” in paragraph 20 of the Encyclopedia. The “I” posits itself as sign, but as soon as it speaks of anything other than itself it is a symbol. The relationship between them is that of “mutual obliteration” (AI 98). (Indeed, there is even something of an echo here of de Man’s reading of Hegel’s “Ich kann nicht sagen was ich nur meine” as “I cannot say I” [AI 98].) And any attempt to reconcile the two incompatible quotations by saying that the first one (“Let there be light”) is from the perspective or side of God and that the second (“Light is your garment”) is from the side of man is nixed from the start since “within the monotheistic realm of die eine Substanz, no such thing as a human perspective could exist independently of the divine, nor could one speak of a ‘side’ of the gods (as one speaks of the ‘côté de chez Swann’), since the parousia of the sacred allows for no parts, contours, or geometry” (AI 114). “The only thing the misleading metaphor of a two-­sided world accomplishes,” adds de Man, “is to radicalize the separation between sacred and human in a manner that no dialectic can surmount (aufheben). Such is indeed the declared thesis of the chapter, but it can only be read if one dispels the pathos of negation that conceals its actual force” (AI 114). In short, it is the juxtaposition of the two incompatible quotations that allows de Man to reconstruct the other pattern of narration that interferes with the dialectical pattern.

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Particularly significant for de Man’s reading – and the imminent arrival of the political out of it – is that it emerges “from a combination of two rhetorical modes, that of representation and that of apostrophe” (AI 114): “Paradoxically, the assumption of praise, in the Psalms, undoes the ground for praise established in Genesis,” and this happens on account of the passage from representation to apostrophe, from the Longinian mimetico-­diegetic system of representation with its performative power and cognitive weight to the mode of praise par excellence, the figure of the ode. “The strength of Hegel’s choice of example makes clear that what the ode praises is not what it addresses (‘la prise de Namur,’ Psyche or God) – for the light that allows the addressed entity to appear is always a veil – but that it always praises the veil, the device of apostrophe as it allows for the illusion of address. Since the ode, unlike the epic (which belongs to representation), knows exactly what it does, it does not praise at all, for no figure of speech is ever praiseworthy in itself. The passage reveals the inadequacy of the Longinian model of the sublime as representation” (AI 114). If the ground of praise established in Genesis is undone by the assumption of praise in the Psalms, it is on account of this passage from representation to apostrophe, from language as representation to language as trope. Why does this happen? It happens because the symbolic convergence of discourse and the sacred that is the essence of the Longinian sublime (as exemplified in “Let there be light”) gets undone when the light enters a transformational system of tropes – that is, when it is turned into a garment or a veil of the sacred. In entering a system of tropes, it enters a system of signification which is no longer that of the symbol, no longer one in which the relationship between sign and meaning is dialectical, i.e., mediated by determined negation. (Cf. de Man later: “The relationship between sign and meaning, however, in the symbol, is dialectical” [AI 116].) As a garment or a veil, the light is no more or less praiseworthy than any other trope, and, as a trope, it is exchangeable for any other veil or garment. Needless to say, as such – that is, as trope – the sacred gets desacralized; it undergoes a thorough secularization. Perhaps this becomes still more understandable if we recall the age-­old (Christian) analogy “garment is to body as body is to soul” and the metaphors it produces – for example, the body can be called “the garment of the soul.” It is clear that in the Judaic sublime – and the sublime as such is Judaic in Hegel – there can be no question of figuring the sacred as a body or by a body. The relationship cannot be one of body to soul, not any kind of incarnation. The sublime here is that of the sacred as the self-­positing word completely separated from the world of appearances and figuration. Nevertheless, understood as a dialectized, Longinian

­90    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics sublime in which a symbolic convergence of discourse and the sacred is supposed to take place (at least by negation), this resolutely disincarnate sublime would seem to want to be – or at least Hegel would seem to want it to be – also the body of the sacred. But it clearly cannot be both like the body in relation to a soul and simultaneously like the garment in relation to the body. It cannot be both a substantial symbol of the sacred and a trope that would be an allegorical sign for the impossibility of figuring the sacred, for the utter divergence of discourse and the sacred. (Or, to put it still another way: in positing the world and itself as light – the entire realm of phenomenal cognition – the absolute, which was to be separated from the order of the phenomenal other, from the order of discourse, enters into it [and thus in a sense reverts to symbolic pantheism], but the second quotation makes clear that when it did so, it entered a system of tropes and not a system of representation – meaning that the relation of sign to meaning [in the “symbol”] was not one of phenomenalization, of the alignment of the phenomenality of the sign and the phenomenality of meaning, but rather tropological, more like that of the sign [as distinguished from the symbol].) Hence the incompatibility between the “two” sublimes – a “Longinian” sublime and a “Hegelian” sublime already within the “Hegelian sublime,” as it were – and hence also the interference of two incompatible patterns of narration (dialectical and other-­than-­dialectical) as well as of language as representation and language as trope – and also, if the proper distinctions and transitions are made, of positing and trope, symbol and sign. “As the section develops,” writes de Man, “the divergence between Hegel and Longinus becomes nearly as absolute as the divergence between man and God that Hegel calls sublime. Yet the discourses remain intertwined as by a knot that cannot be unraveled. The heterogeneity of art and of the sacred, first introduced as a moment in an epistemological dialectic, is rooted in the linguistic structure in which the dialectic is itself inscribed” (AI 115). The last sentence of de Man’s summary statement is important to remember both for the stakes of Hegel’s system and for appreciating what follows in the last sentences of Hegel’s sublime. It suggests that the absolute spirit, in having to pass through the moment of art, of the art-­spirit (Kunstgeist), inscribes itself (and its putatively dialectical progression) in a linguistic structure that undoes itself and, in the process, also undoes the absolute’s claim to absoluteness. As de Man had already said in his analysis of the monotheistic moment, an absolute that enters into an unmediated relation with its other is no longer the absolute. It is also important to remember this if we want to understand what happens at the end of Hegel’s sublime and de Man’s reading of it. For Hegel’s sublime does not end with the heterogeneity of art and of the

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sacred – with the “insurmountable aloofness of God” (XIII 484) and the “unworthiness” and “nullity” (Nichtigkeit) of man before God in fear and trembling. Rather in the final paragraph on the sublime Hegel would recuperate a positive value out of the very nullity of man: “within this nullity (innerhalb dieser Nichtigkeit) man nevertheless gains a freer and more independent position” (XIII 485). For, on the one hand, what arises from the “substantial peace and constancy of God in respect of his will and its commands for man” (XIII 485) is the law (das Gesetz); and, on the other hand, “in man’s exaltation (Erhebung) there lies at the same time the complete and clear distinction (better, differentiation [Unterscheidung]) between the human and the Divine, the finite and the Absolute, and thereby the judgment of good and evil, and the decision (Entscheidung) for one or the other, is deposited into the subject itself” (XIII 485). This is how man gains a freer and more independent position and, in his righteousness and adherence to the law, finds an affirmative relation to God. Before blaming or praising Hegel for his “conservative individualism,” writes de Man, “one should try to understand what is involved in this passage from the aesthetic theory of the sublime to the political world of the law” (AI 115). Although this passage seems to be a “recuperative corollary to the declared otherness of the divine,” a different economy is at work here: “But the definitive loss of the absolute experienced in the sublime puts an end to such an economy of value and replaces it with what one could call a critical economy: the law (das Gesetz) is always a law of differentiation (Unterscheidung), not the grounding of an authority but the unsettling of an authority that is shown to be illegitimate. The political in Hegel originates in the critical undoing of belief, the end of the current theodicy, the banishment of the defenders of faith from the affairs of state, and the transformation of theology into the critical philosophy of right” (AI 115). The law that arises here is not one imposed by the absolute power and authority of God or that of a law-­giver or legislator who speaks in God’s voice or steals the voice of God. Rather it emerges precisely out of a critical undoing of such a power and such authority, the dethroning of the illegitimate authority of usurpers. That God himself – or at least the God quoted by the “legislator of the Jews, no ordinary man” in the Longinian sublime – would be such a usurper should be clear enough. But lest we start humming “The Internationale” at this point and congratulate de Man on having extracted revolutionary force out of critical aesthetic theory – and start to think that if we “deconstruct” hard and well enough we can gain a good political conscience – we would do better to remember that the critical economy in which the power of the usurper gets undone is not the product of a dialectic but rather emerges out of a reading of the

­92    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics linguistic structure in which the dialectic is inscribed. De Man follows up the rousing sentences on the political in Hegel with: “The main monarch to be thus dethroned or de-­sacralized is language, the matrix of all value systems in its claim to possess the absolute power of position. Setzen becomes das Gesetz as the critical power to undo the claim to power, not in the name of absolute or relative justice, but by its own namelessness, its own ordinariness” (AI 115). In coming from its own namelessness and ordinariness, the critical power to undo the claim to power is essentially prosaic, and it is no accident that what immediately follows the chapter on the sublime in Hegel’s Aesthetics is a chapter on the despised “inferior” or “subordinated” genres (untergeordnete Gattungen), which are “deprived of spiritual energy, depth of insight, or of substance, devoid of poetry or philosophy” (AI 118). Hegel means the rhetoric of figuration and its individual devices, figures, and tropes. These are thoroughly prosaic – utterly unsublime and unpoetic – but they are the “infrastructures of language, such as grammar and tropes” and they “account for the occurrence of the poetic superstructures, such as genres, as the devices needed for their oppression” (AI 118). “The relentless drive of the dialectic [and its undoing, I might add] results in the essentially prosaic nature of art; to the extent that art is aesthetic, it is also prosaic – as learning by rote is prosaic compared to the depth of recollection, as Aesop is prosaic compared to Homer, or as Hegel’s sublime is prosaic compared to Longinus” (AI 118). As an essentially prosaic discourse, Hegel’s Aesthetics is very much the discourse of the slave “because it is a discourse of the figure rather than of genre, of trope rather than of representation.” But, of course, this is also where it gets its strength and critical power and “as a result, it is also politically legitimate and effective as the undoer of usurped authority” (AI 118). De Man’s ending sounds rather hopeful – especially coming from somebody who was characterized in the 1970s by some reviewer or other as “our best guide to the negative in every positive.” It’s hopeful in being put in Marxist terms – grammar and tropes are the “infrastructures of language” oppressed by the “poetic superstructures, such as genres.” And if Hegel’s Aesthetics in being prosaic is a discourse of the slave, then it is clearly a potentially liberating discourse, one inscribed in a master/slave dialectic. Still, our liberationist fervor cannot help but be tempered a bit if we remember that these structures are all inscribed within a linguistic structure. For despite the mind-­cracking difficulty of de Man’s two essays on Hegel, the matter can be put in rather simple terms: de Man sets up the competing interests of absolute spirit – which wants to be absolutely spiritual (and not trapped in sensuous form) – and art-­spirit – which wants an adequation between sensuous form and

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spiritual content – in terms of sign and symbol and then works out their mutual undoing. That he calls the labor of this undoing a “mutual obliteration” should be sufficient caution for anybody who would take the ­liberationist rhetoric of the end literally.

Postscript If de Man’s reading of the juxtaposition of the two quotations from Genesis and from Psalms – “And God said ‘Let there be light’” and “Light is your garment” – is to work, he clearly needs the first quotation to mean that God is the light: “But since this same spirit also, without mediation, is the light (p. 481), the combination of the two quotations states that the spirit posits itself as that which is unable to posit, and this declaration is either meaningless or duplicitous” (AI 113–14). In “Mistake in Paul de Man,” Marc Redfield points out that Hegel’s text never actually says that God is the light – it is nowhere to be found on the page (p. 481) of the Aesthetics de Man refers us to – and that de Man’s assertion is therefore a mistake which constitutes a misreading of Hegel on the sublime: “That is the whole point of the sublime: God is not one with the world, but has withdrawn, radically. The statement ‘God is light’ misunderstands the sublime as a version of what it is not – pantheism.”3 If correct, Redfield’s critique of de Man would have serious consequences: namely, de Man’s reading of Hegel would be based upon a violence done to Hegel’s text and hence would not be a reading at all. Although Redfield wants to avoid this conclusion, it is necessary to insist on it: if de Man is mistaken about this, then he is wrong about everything, and his “reading” is a sham. But de Man’s reading is not the empty “performance” of a reading. It is based not on a gratuitous violence done to Hegel’s text but rather on the rational power of the cognitive interpretive pressure he is able to put on that text. (And it could be demonstrated that this is so not only here in the case of “God is light” but also in the other instances Redfield mentions: the “drowning” of the “shape all light” in Shelley and the “ne” in Rousseau.) To reply fully to Redfield’s critique would take many pages, but let me at least try to outline a response. As Redfield points out, although Hegel never actually says that God is light, the closest he comes to it (and on p. 481) is in the sentence directly after the quotation from Genesis: “The Lord, the one substance, does indeed proceed to externalization (Äusserung), but the manner of manifestation is the purest, even bodiless, ethereal externalization: it is the word, the externalization of thought as the ideal power, and with its command of being (that the

­94    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics existent shall be) the existent is immediately and actually posited in mute obedience (das Daseiende wirklich in stummen Gehorsam unmittelbar gesetzt ist)” (Redfield’s translation, p. 109). But this sentence, Redfield points out, does not say that God is light, “it says that God is word, or externalizes himself as word” (p. 109). Redfield is utterly correct that God is the word or “manifests” himself as the word here, but what he seems to forget is that this word is the positing word. The word here – God, the Logos – is the power of positing. And in positing light, the positing power posits itself as light. There is no mediation, no negation, here. As de Man puts it, “Position is all of a piece, and moreover, unlike thought, it actually occurs” (AI 114). The positing power of the word – God’s “Let there be” – is what occurs, what happens, and what happens here is the light. In positing light, God – the power of linguistic positing – posits himself as light, for there is no way to separate positing from posited, positing from itself. Again, God is the power of the positing word, what occurs, what happens, and what happens is the light. This is what being “all of a piece” means. And as de Man notes, “light” is the right word, for “‘Light’ names the necessary phenomenality of any positing (setzen)” (AI 113, my emphasis). In positing light, the spirit posits itself as the phenomenality necessary for any positing – and for any phenomenal cognition. And it is “by way of” phenomenal cognition that the convergence of discourse and the sacred occurs and returns the Hegelian sublime here to the “dialectized sublime” (which is then undone by the reading of the quotation from Psalms). Three additional points: 1) de Man’s writing that light names the necessary phenomenality of any positing – emphasized in his also marking “light” as a name by putting it in quotation marks – is clearly meant to recall what he had said about the “monotheistic moment” in introducing Hegel’s section on “The Art of the Sublime”: “The monotheistic moment (which in Hegel is not or not yet the sublime) is essentially verbal and coincides with the fantastic notion that die eine Substanz could be given a name – such as, for instance, die eine Substanz, or the One, or Being, or Allah, or Yahweh, or I – and that this name could then function symbolically, yielding knowledge and discourse. From this moment on, language is the deictic system of predication and determination in which we dwell more or less poetically on this earth” (AI 111). Once the name (e.g., light) can function symbolically, yielding knowledge and discourse, it can also enter a system of tropes and itself turn into a trope, as when “light” becomes the garment of the spirit in the quotation from Psalms (and which is of course incompatible with its also being the positing power of the word). 2) That de Man’s page reference in the sentence that seems to do violence to Hegel’s text – “But since this

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same spirit also, without mediation, is the light (p. 481) . . .” (AI 113) – is indeed the reference he wants becomes clearer if we remember how de Man himself translated (a bit earlier) the last words of the long sentence about God’s manifesting or externalizing himself as the word that at the same time posits what is in mute obedience: “‘the word . . . whose command to be also and actually posits what is without mediation and in mute obedience’” (AI 112). For de Man, the positing that takes place “without mediation” (and hence without negation) here confirms that in this “monotheistic moment” the power of positing and that which is posited are one, all of a piece. But because this positing word posits itself first of all as light – the necessary phenomenality of any positing, i.e., the condition of possibility of phenomenal cognition and the mimetico-­ diegetic system of representation – this moment gets re-­dialecticized into a Longinian, dialectical sublime. 3) It is worth adding that the doubleness or duplicity de Man reads in Hegel’s sublime – a “Longinian” and a “Hegelian” sublime within the Hegelian sublime – is also to be read already within Longinus (and in Neil Hertz’s recuperative interpretation of Longinus) in the transition from the natural sources of the sublime (Chapters 8 through 15) – e.g., Moses’s quotation of God’s fiat lux – to the first artificial source of the sublime (Chapters 16 and 17), i.e., figures, where the first example is . . . apostrophe (i.e., Demosthenes’s apostrophizing the dead Greek heroes who were victorious in previous battles at the moment when he is trying to get out from under his own responsibility for the defeat at Chaeroneia). And as Kevin Newmark has pointed out to me in a fruitful exchange about de Man’s alleged mistake, the doubleness or duplicity de Man reads in Hegel is also to be read in the passage from Milton – a veritable ode to light – that Redfield quotes as underwriting (along with a “vast Christian tradition”) de Man’s mistaken assertion that God is the light. But this is to get things backwards. As Newmark puts it, de Man does not misread Hegel because he is steeped in a religious and literary tradition. Rather de Man’s reading of Hegel discloses the way that Hegel gives a philosophical “grounding” to complications and a duplicity that necessarily resurface in any religious or literary discourse. And why not add that Redfield’s own text seems also to recognize that de Man is right about this doubleness or duplicity at the very moment it reiterates that Hegel does not say God is the light: “But Hegel’s text does not say this, and for good reason: Hegel, at this point in this text, is committed to the (‘Hebraic’) sublimity of God as word. The word is of course the divine imperative ‘Let there be light’” (pp. 109–10). So: God is the word, and the word is the divine imperative “Let there be light” – i.e., the linguistic positing power. The word posits itself as the word light – which is not the “result” of the (positing) word

­96    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics but rather is (or “let-­there-­bes”) the word. God, the word, is, without mediation, the light.

Notes 1. Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Language in Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 87–8. The original version of Jakobson’s well-­known essay was presented at a conference on style held at Indiana University in 1958. It was then revised and published in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). 2. See the second paragraph of the Fourteenth Letter in Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), and my reading of it in “Returns of the Sublime: Positing and Performative in Kant, Fichte, and Schiller,” Chapter 3 above. 3. Marc Redfield, “Mistake in Paul de Man,” in Martin McQuillan (ed.), The Political Archive of Paul de Man: Property, Sovereignty, and the Theotropic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 109.

Chapter 5

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life

“For the philosophers relationship = idea. They only know the relation of ‘Man’ to himself and hence for them, all real relations become ideas.” “Verhältnis für die Philosophen = Idee. Sie kennen bloß das Verhältnis ‘des Menschen’ zu sich selbst, und darum werden alle wirklichen Verhältnisse ihnen zu Ideen.”1

To begin reading the Hegel/Marx relationship, we may as well start with their differing versions of the relation between consciousness and life: “It’s not consciousness that determines life,” writes Marx in a well-­ known sentence of The German Ideology, “but rather life determines consciousness” (Nicht das Bewußtsein bestimmt das Leben, sondern das Leben bestimmt das Bewußtsein).2 If the sentence is well known, it is no doubt because both in its content and in its form the sentence expresses what we all know about Marx’s relation to Hegel and the Hegelian philosophy: that is, an apparently straightforward substitution of “life,” “real life,” for “consciousness,” for the primacy of consciousness in the understanding of the human being, by means of an apparently equally straightforward (chiasmic) inversion or reversal of the terms (“life” and “consciousness”) in a hierarchical opposition or relation. Of course, in context the immediate targets of this operation are the Young Hegelians, but it is clear enough that they can be its targets because, despite their claims and pretensions, they do not challenge the primacy of consciousness (over life) and hence do not differ from the Old Hegelians (or, presumably, the Old Hegel). For despite their attempt to criticize everything – in particular the concepts of idealist philosophy – by taking it as the product of man’s self-­alienation in religious or theological projections, the Young Hegelians nevertheless agree with the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts, of the universal in the existent world. In other words, because all they do is to substitute one consciousness for another – for instance, a human, man-­centered consciousness

­100    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics for a religious, God-­centered consciousness – the Young Hegelians never challenge the primacy of consciousness itself. Rather than changing the world, they manage only to interpret it differently, that is, only to know it by means of another interpretation. All this is indeed very well known. If I rehearse it here one more time, it is only in order to remind us that from the outset of The German Ideology, the main thrust of Marx’s critique is directed against those who would criticize Hegel or the Hegelian philosophy by performing a species of inversion, of mere overturning, of setting the Hegelian philosophy back on its feet by substituting a purported materialism for a purported idealism. As The German Ideology never tires of telling us, a mere inversion does nothing to change either the terms inverted or the relation between them. A self-­proclaimed “materialism” that defines itself as the symmetrical inversion and negation of idealism winds up being defined and determined by that idealism as its own determinate negation. This is pithily illustrated by Feuerbach’s predicament: in short, because his stress on human sensuous existence, his conceiving man as an “object of the senses,” is an abstraction from human “sensuous activity” in given social relations, Feuerbach winds up with an abstract materialism that cannot account for men as products of a history of production and hence cannot provide a “criticism of the present conditions of life.” Whereas as soon as he does try to account for the historical conditions, Feuerbach has to have recourse to idealist conceptions: “[Feuerbach] gives no criticism of the present conditions of life. Thus he never manages to conceive the sensuous world as the total living sensuous activity of the individuals composing it; therefore when, for example, he sees instead of healthy men a crowd of scrofulous, overworked and consumptive starvelings, he is compelled to take refuge in the ‘higher perception’ and in the ideal ‘compensation of the species’ (‘ideelen Ausgleichung in der Gattung’), and thus to relapse into idealism at the very point where the communist materialist sees the necessity, and at the same time the condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social structure. As far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist.”3 The dialectical edge of Marx’s critique could not be clearer: an abstract “materialism” – the ahistorical reification of “man” and his sensuous existence – all too easily turns over into an equally abstract idealism. Rather than being a critique of Hegelian absolute idealism, such a materialism only comes up with a more naive, because undialectical, pre-­critical idealism. The upshot would be that whatever Marx may mean by all the formulations that suggest a reversal or an inversion of the terms of a hierarchical opposition – like “consciousness” and “life,” for instance

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– the one thing he cannot mean is a mere inversion, a mere reversal, for that is precisely the (non-­)critique of Hegel performed by the German Ideologists who thereby fall back into a pre-­Hegelian position. And, indeed, in the case of the life/consciousness relation, it is easy enough to see that for a dialectical thought it makes no difference which determines which as long as their relation remains one of determination. For Hegel – like for Spinoza – omnis determinatio est negatio, and therefore it does not matter whether consciousness is said to determine (bestimmen) life or life consciousness – as long as one determines the other, it is mediatable with it thanks to the work of the determinate negative. For life to determine consciousness means for it still to be the negation of consciousness, consciousness’s own negation that needs to be negated in turn so that consciousness can verify and become itself, consciousness (and so that life can be relegated to an essential, necessary moment [of truth, of verification] of consciousness: consciousness = life sublated, das aufgehobene Leben, one could say). So: if Marx’s statement that life determines consciousness (rather than vice versa) is going to make a difference, is going to mean anything different from the eminently sublatable differences of determinate negation, then both the nature of the terms (“life” and “consciousness”) and the nature of the relation (of “determination” [bestimmen]) between them before and after the inversion need to be rewritten, reinscribed: or, schematically put, Marx’s operation cannot be one of mere inversion, mere overturning – that is what the Young Hegelians do and he criticizes them for – but rather has to be an operation of inversion and reinscription – in short, a full-­scale “deconstruction” of both consciousness and life and the “relation” between them. In other words, however symmetrical the chiasmic reversal may seem – and however parallel the determining (bestimmen) before the inversion and after the inversion – what Marx is actually saying (and has to be saying if he is to be Marx and not just another Young Hegelian or German Ideologist) is that life, real life, determines consciousness in a way that consciousness cannot master, cannot come up against as a merely determinately negative object of consciousness, of itself as consciousness. In short, life overdetermines consciousness – it is made up of contradictions and a negativity, call it, that cannot be reduced to (i.e., mediated, sublated, into) one, simple, determined negation.4 And we do not have to look far in The German Ideology to begin to determine what the nature of this overdetermination is. Life, the real life of human beings, is not biological, appetitive existence but rather the product of a history of production: men distinguish themselves from animals not by consciousness, not by knowing, but by producing their means of subsistence. In other words, life is not a given, positive

­102    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics fact but rather produced by the labor of human beings who constitute themselves as human in this history of material production; whereas consciousness is the (historical, material) relation of these human beings first to nature and then to other human beings – a relation which is historical and material because it is one “mediated” not by knowing (and all the determinations that come with it: subject and object, truth and certainty, in itself and for itself, and so on) but by the historical materiality of relations of production (and its determinations: like the division of labor, class divisions, and so on). It is no surprise, then, that according to The German Ideology, consciousness and its products, when they come into existence, do so as the “conscious expression” (der bewußte Ausdruck) or the “direct efflux” (der direkte Ausfluß) of these relations of production, what the text calls “the language of real life” (die Sprache des wirklichen Lebens).5 Indeed, consciousness, when it comes on the scene, appears not as pure consciousness or as “pure spirit” but rather as “burdened” with matter “which here steps on the scene in the form of moving layers of air, sounds, in short, language.”6 Only if this language of real life is alienated from itself – only if in addition to the spirit (Geist) of real, material individuals a spirit apart (einen aparten Geist) is invented, only if a consciousness other than the consciousness of existent praxis is imagined – can consciousness free itself from the world and go over (überzugehen) by means of a species of metaphorical transport to the formation (Bildung) of “pure theory,” theology, philosophy, morality – i.e., ideologies.7 Much is implied about language – about the language of a material spirit or a material consciousness as distinguished from the language of a ghostly redoubled Geist or consciousness apart, the language of ideology – and not least of all a certain hint as to why a mere demystification of an ideological formation by an inversion or overturning always remains insufficient: that is, if the language of ideology is the projected figure for a second, spectral Geist or consciousness apart, then an interpretation of those figures that confines itself to unmasking them as figures, as projections, will only manage to uncover and return to the literality of the Geist or consciousness apart – a still abstract, reified consciousness like the sensuous consciousness of Feuerbach. (To demystify the religious realm in the clouds as an alienated projection, a figure, of the secular, earthly realm below – or to show that the Holy Family is an alienated projection of the earthly family – is still not to be able to explain why the earthly secular basis needed to divide itself from itself in this way and to project a heavenly realm in the clouds as its own symmetrical, determinate negation – as though it were one, unified, homogeneous, and not a “secular basis” riven by overdetermined contradictions like that of class divisions which

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life    ­103

need to be covered by being ideologized into determined contradictions like that between human and divine, earthly and religious, sensuous and spiritual, and so on.8) This amounts to saying, in other words, that the language of ideology is what one could call an “allegorical” language: one that represents, figures, one thing but that actually means, signifies, points to, refers to, something else. Hence it can never be enough to unmask or demystify its phenomenal appearance, its figural, representational function – this would be to fall into the trap that ideologies set for critics – rather its allegorical, pointing, re-­ferential (carrying back) function also needs to be read in its overdetermined historical materiality.9 But that’s easily said. That is, it may be easy enough to wield terms like “overdetermination” or “overdetermined contradiction” and to insist that what is necessary for Marx to become Marx is not only an inversion but also a “reinscription” of the life/consciousness relation; more difficult is to take the full measure of what lurks behind these more or less convenient ciphers or place-­holders – ciphers or place-­ holders for what actually happens, what is historical and material in the reading (or the writing) of a text. In the case of the text Hegel/ Marx, to say that what Marx performs is a “deconstruction” of the relation of consciousness and life in Hegel does not mean that there is a “deconstructible” Hegelian relation there “before” the operation (of inversion and reinscription) and a “deconstructed” Marxian relation there “after” the operation (of inversion and reinscription). In fact, to think that about Hegel/Marx (or, for that matter, about deconstruction) is precisely German Ideology – the operation that “critiques” not Hegel but a caricature of Hegel, not Hegel as the text that happens (historically, materially) but Hegel as a cliché of intellectual history. For indeed if “Hegel” were just some kind of subjective idealist who reduces “life” to “consciousness” – all sensuous otherness to sublatable moments in the progress of self-­consciousness to absolute knowing, to an utterly transparent self-­consciousness of self-­consciousness – then it would be hard to understand not only how such a Hegel could be Hegel (rather than, say, a relatively simple-­minded Fichte) but also how Marx could ever have become Marx by critiquing (however “deconstructively”) such a Hegel: that is, how Marx could have ever found the resources he needed in Hegel to become Marx, i.e., to happen (historically, materially) as Marx and not as a Young Hegelian.10 (As is already legible in the critique of Hegel in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, even the pre-­“epistemological break,” apparently Feuerbachian Marx knew better, read Hegel better, than that.) In short, I am asking about that which would be the historical, the material, in, of, “Hegel,” of Hegel’s text – whatever it is that made it happen. Or, in other words,

­104    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics what is it that could be said to be alive, living, in Hegel’s text? Whatever it is, this “life” of Hegel’s text – if it is understood in a Marxian (historical, material) sense – would be a life that exceeds consciousness by overdetermining it and hence a life that threatens to interrupt irrevocably the entire project of a “science of the experience of consciousness” or a Phenomenology of Spirit.11 So: how read the life of Hegel’s text, a life that would also be the death of the Phenomenology of Spirit? The moment of what Hegel calls “life” in the Phenomenology of Spirit is very precisely determined, and, as it turns out, even thinking its determinately negative relation to consciousness is no simple matter. That is, “life” appears in one of the most difficult passages in the entire Phenomenology: i.e., the short introductory section to the chapter on “Self-­ consciousness” entitled “The Truth of Self-­ certainty.” This eight-­page passage is so difficult, in fact, that many otherwise diligent commentators simply give up on it – sometimes very explicitly – and prefer immediately to go over to the master/slave dialectic which is its result.12 Those who do not just skip it and do manage to say something about it nevertheless do not really read it and instead content themselves with telling what should happen, what must happen, what must have happened, in order for us to understand why and how it is that we are reading about a fight for recognition between self-­consciousness and self-­consciousness that issues in one’s becoming master and the other slave. But even a perfunctory account of what should happen or should have happened in the dialectics of life and desire cannot occult the fact of this section’s absolutely crucial importance for the project of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The passage is crucial most obviously because it marks a moment of transition between the end of the section on “Consciousness” and the beginning of the section on “Self-­consciousness.” Marking this transition has particular importance because its burden amounts to being able to explain why and how self-­ consciousness as self-­ consciousness is possible. And explaining how and why self-­consciousness is possible is absolutely necessary because it turned out that consciousness in order to be what it is – i.e., knowing as knowing something – has to be, has to have already been, in truth, in essence, self-­consciousness, i.e., self-­knowing. In other words, consciousness can be what it is only because it is essentially self-­consciousness – self-­consciousness in its truth – and hence self-­consciousness is the new object of knowing that comes on the scene, appears, in this presentation of apparent knowing – the new object (which, clearly, is also a subject) of knowing whose claim to truth has to be examined and verified in turn. In short: self-­consciousness is; what would it have to be in order to be (in truth, in essence, in itself, an sich) self-­consciousness?

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life    ­105

Formally speaking, the answer is very easy: to go on the model of the dialectical movement of consciousness, if the truth of consciousness is self-­consciousness, the truth of knowing self-­knowing, then the truth of self-­consciousness, of self-­knowing, would have to be self-­consciousness of self-­consciousness, self-­knowing of self-­knowing – in other words, a necessary redoubling of self-­consciousness would be the necessary and the only sufficient condition of the existence of self-­consciousness as self-­ consciousness. We all know this – this is indeed what has to happen in order to issue in the dialectic of master and slave – but, of course, what we know is in fact only the formal side, the formal aspect, of the arising of the new figure (Gestalt) and the new object of apparent knowing (as the Introduction to the Phenomenology had put it).13 The content of this new figure of apparent knowing has to be gone through, and this can only be done by the consciousness going through the experience of knowing, of thinking that first this and then that is the true object of a certain knowing – the experience of itself, consciousness, on the way to absolute consciousness, absolute knowing. We can’t tell it what it has to be in order to be what it is but rather can only observe how on its own it comes to know what it is in and for itself. How does it? It does it by becoming desire (Begierde). That is, when self-­ consciousness arises as the new object, the new truth, the new in-­itself, of consciousness, it appears as desire: self-­consciousness is first of all desire. Why so? To paraphrase the second paragraph of “The Truth of Self-­certainty” (#167 in Miller’s numbering): when the truth of consciousness turns out to be self-­consciousness, knowing as the knowing of an other (Wissen von einem Andern) turns out to be knowing of itself (Wissen von sich selbst). In this dialectical movement of the experience of consciousness, the other that consciousness claimed to know in truth would seem to have disappeared – knowing of an other has become knowing of itself. But the moments of this other (of knowing) have at the same time been preserved; they are in fact present as they are in themselves, in their essence – which essence consists of their being essentially (in truth, in themselves) disappearing essences (verschwindende Wesen), essences whose essence is to disappear, or, better, to be disappearing. As such, these essences are preserved as moments of self-­ consciousness – a self-­consciousness which (as the result of the dialectic of consciousness) has turned out to be a reflection out of the being of the sensuous and perceived world and essentially a return out of other-­being (Aber in der Tat ist das Selbstbewußtsein die Reflexion aus dem Sein der sinnlichen und wahrgenommenen Welt und wesentlich Rückkehr aus dem Anderssein). “It [self-­consciousness] is as self-­consciousness movement” (Es ist als Selbstbewußtsein Bewegung). But – and this “but”

­106    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics articulates the negative moment in the dialectic of what will shortly be given the name “desire” – since these essences of other-­being are essentially disappearing essences, the movement of self-­ consciousness out of the sensuous and perceived world and of return out of other-­being remains a tautologous movement in which it goes out from and comes back to only itself because it differentiates only itself as itself from itself. The differentiation between itself and its other-­being is not, has no being, and hence it falls back into the movementless tautology of the “I am I.” And as bereft of movement, it is not self-­consciousness, since as self-­consciousness it is movement. This dialectic is in fact already the dialectic of self-­consciousness as desire. That is, self-­consciousness is here desire because it appears under the sign of a double lack, a negativity proper to itself as desire. In brief: because self-­consciousness at this (preliminary) stage has only itself, the unity of the tautologous “I am I,” as its truth, it does not have an other-­being that, simply put, is other enough for it to be able to verify itself (the unity of the “I am I”) in it, to make itself true in an essence (an in-­itself, a truth) that would have enough being, enough existence, to verify self-­consciousness, that is, an essence whose own being, truth, in-­itself, essence, did not consist in being a disappearing essence. Hence it is desire: desire first of all for self-­verification in an other that would be other enough as its own other – the other of itself (i.e., the unity of the “I am I”), of self-­consciousness. The other-­being of the other of itself, self-­consciousness, as desire always turns out to be not other enough: it is in fact all too easily annihilated, sublated, like the object of an appetitive desire for nourishment. Take the potato. The two moments of self-­consciousness as desire can be demonstrated on it – before and after eating. First, there is the moment of other-­being (Anderssein). I recognize myself in the otherness of the potato: this is my potato in which I can recognize myself, verify myself, it is my other, and so on. In this case – before eating – I depend on an other external to me, to the “I,” for my identity, my being, and therefore I cannot recognize myself in it as a self, as an “I.” I can recognize myself in it only as a potato. The “I” becomes a potato – i.e., not a self-­consciousness. Then, there is the second moment: the unity of self-­consciousness with itself, the “I am I.” That is, I eat the potato, thereby annihilating its otherness, negating the negativity of its other-­being; but, in doing so, I also negate that in which I recognized myself, the other on which I depended to verify myself (albeit as a potato), and hence I am thrown back on my sheer self, the empty, movementless tautology of the “I am I.” In short, I negate myself not as a self but as a potato – i.e., not a self-­consciousness. In the first moment – before eating – the other-­being of the other is too essential,

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that is, it negates me too immediately to be, to allow me to be, the negation of self-­consciousness. In the second moment – after eating – the other-­being of the other is not essential enough, and my negation of its otherness is too immediate. So: in the first case, the potato negates self-­ consciousness too immediately; in the second case, I negate the potato (my negation) too immediately. In the first case, I revert to the position of mere consciousness – i.e., that for which the truth of knowing is the otherness of the sensory outside; in the second case, I remain a merely one-­ sided, abstract, tautologous self-­consciousness. What’s the point? The point is that the potato is not yet essential enough for self-­consciousness. That is, it is essential enough for self-­consciousness as desire, but not for self-­consciousness as self-­consciousness. And the point becomes clearer perhaps once we recall that the objects of desire, of self-­consciousness as desire, are living, are life. The potato I desire to eat is the object of self-­ consciousness as living and desiring – in fact, as desiring to live – and not of self-­consciousness as self-­consciousness, as self-­knowing. This means that in the potato, for example, life is not yet essential enough for self-­consciousness. And this sentence has to be read in two registers, as it were, according to two emphases, two stresses: either on the word “self-­consciousness” or on the word “life.” On the one hand, we need to emphasize the word “self-­consciousness” – life is not yet essential enough for self-­consciousness – that is, life may be essential enough for self-­consciousness as living and desiring, but since the essence (truth, an sich) of self-­consciousness is not the otherness of life but rather the unity of itself with itself (the “I am I”), life cannot be essential enough for self-­consciousness. But, on the other hand, we need just as much to emphasize the word “life” – life is not yet essential enough for self-­ consciousness – that is, until self-­consciousness can make life essential for itself as self-­consciousness, it cannot become truly self-­consciousness but rather remains at the stage of the tautologous “I am I,” the merely immediate unity of itself with itself. Now the first hand – the stress on the word “self-­consciousness” (life is not yet essential enough for self-­ consciousness) – would certainly be obvious enough in the case of an idealism that would want to dissolve all non-­conscious otherness, all merely living existence, into knowing, consciousness, mind, spirit, and so on. It is no wonder that life would not be essential enough for self-­ consciousness! But the second, other hand – the stress on the word “life” (life is not yet essential enough for self-­consciousness) – should make us pause a bit and elaborate its considerable implications. Namely, first of all, the inescapable fact that whatever is going on here in the dialectics of desire and life is not your average, clichéd received idea of idealism. The burden of the passage is not at all a matter of self-­consciousness’s

­108    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics attempt to rid itself of any otherness that it cannot reduce to itself, but rather, if anything, precisely the opposite. That is, self-­consciousness does indeed have to rid itself of all merely immediate otherness (because such other-­being does not have enough existence, enough essence – it is a merely apparent, i.e., merely disappearing, essence) but in order that it may make otherness essential for itself. In short, it is not trying to annihilate, negate, the potato – that it can do easily enough, immediately enough, by eating it – but rather to make the potato essential, other enough, for self-­consciousness. Life itself has to become (essential for, the essential other of) self-­consciousness. Another, more general, way to put this is to say that Hegel here does not take the “easy” idealist way out. He does not begin with some kind of absolutely self-­positing “I” that can then take all “non-­I” as its own negation, but rather arrives at idealism’s formula “I am I” as the result of a dialectical movement of the experience of consciousness. And, to boot, this self-­consciousness, whose truth (essence) is the unity of the “I am I,” is not one that can be satisfied by, or verified in, an immediate negation of its other-­being. No, it has to make its other-­being – the object of self-­consciousness as desire that is life – essential for itself; it has to show how it is that self-­consciousness can emerge out of life itself, how self-­consciousness as self-­consciousness can emerge out of self-­ consciousness as desire (whose object is life). This is indeed quite a task that the Phenomenology has imposed on itself (by a dialectical necessity) at this point, and the enormity of the stakes has not gone unnoticed in the commentaries, especially in the “anthropologizing” or “existentialist” interpretations of readers like Kojève and Hyppolite, who see the enjeu as the question of how man, the human being (which they identify [too quickly] with self-­consciousness), can emerge out of merely biological, appetitive, desiring, animal being.14 How indeed? How will “life” itself become the essential other of self-­consciousness – again, the essential other of self-­consciousness as self-­consciousness and not of self-­consciousness as desire? How can life by itself produce, as it were, its other as self-­consciousness? And lest we think that the answer is easy – as “easy” as the answer to the question of how self-­consciousness is possible – and answer that the only way self-­consciousness can emerge out of life as self-­consciousness and not as desire is precisely by a negation of itself as desire, i.e., by means of a “desire of desire,” let me say straight away that this is not what happens in the Hegel. It may indeed be what should happen, what must happen, what must have happened, in order for us to arrive by the end of “The Truth of Self-­certainty” at the stage of a self-­consciousness for a self-­consciousness, but it is in fact not what happens in Hegel’s text. What in fact happens is weirder,

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odder, more overdetermined, hence something that produces a “Hegel” other than the successfully Hegelian Hegel of Kojève and Hyppolite. Let me begin to spell it out. What happens is this: in order to demonstrate how it is that life – the object of self-­consciousness as desire – can in fact become an other essential enough for self-­consciousness to emerge as self-­consciousness out of it, Hegel’s argument goes over to the one side of the dialectic of desire – namely, its object, life – and presents its dialectic. The burden on this presentation is clear: it has to be able to show that life itself, the object of self-­consciousness as desire, undergoes the same movement, the same process of reflection, into itself, as consciousness did in becoming self-­ conscious by a reflection out of the sensuous and perceived world and a return from other-­being. In other words, self-­consciousness is going to have to make the experience of the independence of its object – life – and learn that life is independent enough at this stage – other enough, say – in fact, as independent as self-­consciousness. And for it to be independent enough for self-­consciousness, life is going to have to be shown to be self-­negating enough for self-­consciousness: it will have to negate itself just as self-­consciousness does at the stage of desire. This is indeed what takes place, and it is certainly no surprise that it does so, for it is based on the most important element of Hegel’s phenomenological presentation of apparent knowing: namely, the fact that for this presentation, knowing is always essentially knowing of something, of an object and a truth that are always determinately the object and the truth of that particular form of knowing. In short, when the knowing changes, so does the object known, for a new object (of knowing) arises along with a new subject of knowing.15 So here if consciousness undergoes a movement of reflection into itself – i.e., it becomes self-­consciousness as desire – so does its object – the apparently disappearing essences of the figures of consciousness – undergo a dialectical movement of reflection into itself. And how it does so is for us of less interest here – in part because the dialectic of life amounts to something of a mirror repetition of what took place on the side of the dialectic of desire – than its result. For short-­ hand purposes, suffice it to say that in the end the determinations of life – like the subsistence and finitude of the individual and fluidity and infinity of the genus – wind up going through a dialectic of self and other at least like that of self-­consciousness as desire: a self-­constitution and a self-­annihilation of life like that of the desiring self-­consciousness and its potato. And whereas eating was an apt analogy for this process in the one case, so procreation is an appropriate analogy in the other: that is, in procreating, the individual living being annihilates itself as individual by rejoining the infinite fluidity of the genus (Gattung) and, at the same

­110    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics time, also reproduces itself as individual living being in the progeny that is the result of this procreative act. (In summary form: “Thus the simple substance of Life is the splitting-­up of itself into shapes and at the same time the dissolution of these existent differences; and the dissolution of the splitting-­up is just as much a splitting-­up and a forming of members” [Die einfache Substanz des Lebens also ist die Entzweiung ihrer selbst in Gestalten und zugleich die Auflösung dieser bestehenden Unterschiede; und die Auflösung der Entzweiung ist ebensosehr Entzweien oder ein Gliedern].16) This is all well and good for the task that the dialectic of life needs to accomplish. That is, it does indeed succeed in showing that life, in the result of its dialectic – i.e., genus (Gattung), the universal reflected (and hence no longer immediate) unity of itself with itself – seems to be independent enough for self-­consciousness insofar as it seems to be self-­negating enough for self-­consciousness. But, sooner or later, one has also to ask: is it knowing, conscious – self-­knowing and self-­conscious – enough for self-­consciousness? Or, another way to put it, does life when it negates itself know that it negates itself in such a way (i.e., determinately) that its other will have to be knowing, consciousness, self-­consciousness? Or, again, is there a necessity in life’s self-­negation (i.e., death!) that necessarily results in the production of knowing, consciousness, self-­ consciousness? Perhaps the awkwardness of the question can be lessened if we put it in the somewhat jocular terms of the analogy of procreation. In short, does the cat, for example, when it desires to eat and procreate know that what it desires is (essentially, actually) to dissolve itself into the genus (the cat-­ Gattung?) and yet dialectically be reborn as individual? I don’t know about you – or the cat – but I prefer to leave the question open. And, as it turns out, so does Hegel – or at least the “Hegel” that is the writing of the text. For, in fact, when the dialectic of life is finished up (in Gattung), when the argument is ready to take us back to the other side of the relation, namely back to self-­consciousness, the text does not make the transition by means of a determinate negation that could mediate life and self-­consciousness. Instead, what the text actually says is that life – in the result of its dialectic, i.e., genus (Gattung) – points to or indicates or beckons toward an other than it (life) is, namely consciousness, for which it (life) can be as this unity, or the genus (“in diesem Resultate verweist das Leben auf ein Anderes, als es ist, nämlich auf das Bewußtsein, für welches es als diese Einheit, oder als Gattung ist”).17 The implications of this pointing of life towards, at, an other than itself are far reaching, and I can only begin to outline them here. First of all, it means that whatever happens at this moment of transition, of return, from life back to consciousness and self-­consciousness, the transition

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itself does not take place, is not said to take place, by means of a determinate negation. Consciousness here is not the other of life as its determinate negation but rather an other pointed to, indicated, beckoned to, referred to, by life. The argument that would demonstrate the possibility of the existence of self-­consciousness (as self-­consciousness) certainly needs this pointing operation to be that of a determined negation – and it needs to have this other of life be life’s own other – but the text just as surely does not work this way, does not perform this operation. Rather what the text does is to introduce something of a “linguistic moment” into the relation of life and consciousness and, in doing so, threatens to render impossible not only the emergence of self-­consciousness (as self-­ consciousness) out of life but also the project of the Phenomenology of Spirit as such. Life’s pointing introduces this threat because it opens the possibility of an unmediatable break or gap between life and consciousness: that is, if the “relation” between life and consciousness is “mediated” not by a determinate negation but rather by an act of pointing that can, perhaps, point to many living things (just as it can point to their “other,” many dead things) but that can, by itself, never make the other of life – consciousness as consciousness, knowing as knowing – appear, then this “relation” would in fact be a disjunction, the falling apart of life and consciousness. (Another way to put it: life may indeed point, may indeed “speak,” but that this pointing or speaking “linguistic” function will make anything appear is doubtful – least of all that it can make the other of life itself – i.e., death itself – appear. Again: life can make living things appear and it can make dead things appear, but death itself? No.) And when life and consciousness are unmediated or “de-­ mediated” in this way, then the possibility of spirit’s appearing – the possibility of a phenomeno-­logic of spirit’s appearing in the phenomena of its own self-­negations – would also be very much in question. It is in question because a linguistic act or function of pointing or reference cannot make anything appear unless it is itself phenomenalized, only if it is given a figure, a face, as it were, only if the logos, speech, is made to, said to, appear – only if speaking is said to appear, only if the speaking (logos) of the apparent (phenomena) is said to be the appearance of speaking. But if the speaking of the apparent can turn into the appearance of speaking only thanks to the figural, rhetorical, function or dimension of language, then the authority for this tropological substitution or transfer – this trope or figure – is most unreliable. It is unreliable because the only authoritative ground for this figure – a figure that would turn life (in its result, Gattung) into a determinate figure for ­consciousness – would be the system of consciousness itself, i.e., the system of (apparent) knowing, here taken as a closed tropological

­112    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics system (i.e., a system of substitutions and exchanges based on a knowledge of entities and their exchangeable properties). In other words, the only way to stabilize the figure that would turn life’s pointing, referential function into a phenomenal appearance (and hence into an object that would be the determinate negation of consciousness) would be to ground it in the “proper sense” of consciousness itself: in short, to know “language” here, the “linguisticality” of life’s pointing, on the model of consciousness (“proper”) and its determinations. The trouble is, however, that the integrity and self-­identity of the system of consciousness as a closed tropological system cannot be taken for granted here, for it is precisely the linguistic function of pointing or reference that is said to make consciousness possible and not vice versa. That is, according to the text, it is only by virtue of life’s pointing that anything like “consciousness proper” – i.e., a system of consciousness that would include life within itself (as its own determinately negative other) and thereby constitute itself as a closed tropological system – can come into existence in the first place. In other words, consciousness is the only thing that could authorize the trope that turns life into a reliable phenomenal figure for consciousness, but consciousness can emerge, be itself, i.e., become itself (self-­consciousness), appear, only thanks to this trope. Since it is the very burden of this passage to demonstrate how consciousness, and thereby self-­consciousness (i.e., consciousness in its truth), is possible in the first place as a system of knowing that emerges, as it were, out of life itself and thereby includes life within itself as its own other, consciousness cannot be called upon to validate and verify (as in “make true”) this demonstration as though it were already existent in its truth, as though we already knew what consciousness was in its truth – as though we had already verified it as self-­consciousness!18 In other words, how understand, how know, “language” on the basis of the model of consciousness, when “language” is that which is supposed to make consciousness possible in the first place? And if “language” turns out to be a disjunction between reference (life’s pointing) and phenomenalism (the appearance of consciousness as the determinately negative other of life) mediatable only by a trope that is necessarily aberrant because it is not grounded in any proper sense (but rather is an arbitrary imposition of sense), then “language” is here also that which makes consciousness impossible.19 That the very “linguisticality” of this “linguistic moment” would prohibit the emergence of consciousness as the determinate negation of life is finally not all that surprising, for what Hegel’s claim amounts to here is that the limit of life (i.e., in its result, Gattung), namely death, is the determinate negation of life and therefore can become the object of consciousness: death is, death becomes,

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consciousness, insofar as it is the limit of life which pushes consciousness beyond its own immediate existence to its (self-­)mediated essence, self-­ consciousness. But, as Bataille and others well knew, death can become (self-­)consciousness – that is, can appear as the limit (and therefore the determinate negation) of life rather than occur as the random violence of sheer exteriority – only thanks to a subterfuge, a spectacle, a comedy of sacrifice which will allow me both to die and, at the same time, to watch myself die.20 The subterfuge or comedy of sacrifice here consists in Hegel’s wanting to turn an act of sheer linguistic imposition – indeed, the giving of a name (to death!): “in its result, at its limit, life points to an other than it is, call it consciousness” – into an apparent, knowable, reliable, phenomenal figure of consciousness. To put it as bluntly as possible: at the moment that Hegel’s text says that life (in this result: Gattung) points to an other than it is, consciousness, “Hegel,” or at least the Hegel who would want this to be a self-­determination and self-­ negation of life – this Hegel hallucinates, he is seeing things; instead of death or the dead he sees ghosts (Geister). This Hegel is a Geisterseher, and the Phänomenologie des Geistes would be the confessions of a seer of ghosts, the speaking of the appearances of ghosts. The idealizing nature of Hegel’s impossible trope is nicely legible here in the word verweisen, to point. Even though Hegel presumably would never be caught trying “to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word ‘day’”21 – although let’s not be so sure – we can read him here, at least this Hegel, trying to make consciousness appear by the light of the verb verweisen which, conveniently enough, comes from the same root as wissen, to know, and hence as Bewußtsein, and which ultimately comes from the same root (weid) as Greek eidos – “visible appearance,” say – and Idea – visible appearance as visible, visibility as such. The proto-­ idealist operation is clear: the Idea, the spiritually (and truly) existent, is constituted (linguistically) by a (pseudo-­)metaphorical transport from that which is visible for the sensuous eye of the body to that which is invisible, non-­visible, except for the non-­sensuous eye of the soul – call it Idea. (One could ask, only half-­jokingly, why not something like “Smell-­ eia,” say, or “Audea”? And Heidegger might answer, “For very good reasons embedded in the destiny [Geschick] of Western metaphysics as the history of the forgetting of Being . . .”22) Like all such idealizing operations, this is an arbitrary act of linguistic imposition of meaning. And as an imposition, it works not by the determinate negation of the sensuous and physical but rather by a blind marking, naming, which is then taken as the mark or the name of the blindness, of the blindness as a negation of seeing and visibility, and so on. In short, it is a catachrestic act, not a substantial metaphor at all but a “blind metonymy,”

­114    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics as Paul de Man would put it,23 a mutilated and mutilating metaphor that brings monsters into the world, precisely the monsters necessarily created by the language that does nothing so much as to figure our own self-­mutilation by figures, our own self-­blinding as we go about our business giving legs, arms, feet, faces, mouths, and eyes to things that are legless, armless, footless, faceless, mouthless, and eyeless.24 But the catachrestic nature of the aberrant trope that would “mediate” reference (as a function of language) and phenomenalism (reference taken not as a function of language but as an intuition) in this idealizing operation is not the point here. The point is rather that this idealizing operation – the phenomenalization of a linguistic function – would be quite clearly an ideological operation, and ideo-­logical in the most basic sense: making speech appear, and appear as an ideal entity, which is ideological through and through (the representation of an imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence, to coin a phrase) because speaking, if and when it appears, does not “appear” as ghost or Geist but, say, as moving layers of air (in Marx’s phrase) or as inscribed letters – that is, as historically, materially overdetermined, i.e., made up of contradictions that will not be returned to a master negation, a master dialectic, dia-­logos, of determinate negation. In other words, although “Hegel” here might indeed want to be the German super-­Ideologist who would transform life into consciousness, the text does not, cannot, make the mediation by self-­negation of life and consciousness – of self-­consciousness as desire and self-­consciousness as self-­consciousness. Instead, the text writes a “properly” linguistic moment into the workings of the dialectic of desire – “linguistic” because it amounts to the introduction of a moment of reference which can be phenomenalized, which can appear, only thanks to an aberrant trope (i.e., catachresis) – and thereby threatens not only to make the emergence of self-­consciousness (as self-­consciousness and not as desire) impossible but also to turn Hegel’s history of the experience of consciousness into an allegory of the mutual interference and inevitable ideologization of linguistic functions. But in not making the mediation, in being unable to make the transition between life and (self-­)consciousness – except by way of a “linguistic moment” – the text introduces what could be called a material “moment” into “itself,” indeed, the moment of text as text. “Material” – because it is a moment when “Hegel,” the text, is simply too much of a materialist, too intent upon having (self-­ )consciousness emerge out of life, from within life, to “fake” the transition here (by saying something like: life determines or negates itself here in such a way that consciousness itself, the other or negation of life itself, appears). Instead, the moment is “material” because what “appears” is neither “life” nor

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life    ­115

“consciousness” nor the mediation by negation of the two but rather . . . what? The text appears, or, more precisely, text happens here as a linguistic artifact, a bit of material produced by the workings neither of life and appetitive desire nor of consciousness and its negations but rather the work (in a fully Marxian sense) of language in its materiality – i.e., the irreducible referential function, its overdetermined potential for meaning, and its inevitable phenomenalization and ideologization in an aberrant trope. And as material, this moment is also truly “historical” in the sense that it is what happens – and it happens precisely because it will not allow itself to be inscribed as a moment into Hegel’s history of the experience of consciousness, of the presentation of apparent knowing. (If it did allow it, it would by definition be a non-­happening, a non-­event, something whose role is to be only a moment in a process whose meaning is the [self-­]negation of all moments as moments – i.e., whose meaning is the phenomeno-­logic of the process itself.) If we are right about this historical/material moment – better, event, happening – of the Phenomenology – that is, if reading has indeed taken place – then this Hegel, the text, would be a Hegel much closer to Marx than most Marxists, and especially closer to Marx than those Marxists who go one better than Hegel, out-­Hegel Hegel as it were, and do in fact accomplish the mediation of life and consciousness, of self-­consciousness as desire and self-­consciousness as self-­consciousness.25 But lest this “other Hegel” – a “Hegel” closer to Marx than to Hegel – get lost in my claims about “language,” let me recapitulate why and how life’s pointing makes such a difference – for Hegel, for Marx, and for us. Going back to the crucial sentence may be the most economical way to do this: “in this result [namely, the genus, the simple genus] life points to an other than it is, namely toward consciousness, for which it [life] is as this unity, or as genus” (in diesem Resultate verweist das Leben auf ein Anderes, als es ist, nämlich auf das Bewußtsein, für welches es als diese Einheit, oder als Gattung ist). If we bracket the phrase “life points to an other than it is, namely” for a moment, the essential appropriateness and adequation to one another of life as Gattung and consciousness is clear: this result can be only for consciousness because it is indeed only consciousness that can have this result – i.e., life as genus, as Gattung – for it, for an object that is consciousness’s own object. It is only for consciousness that life can be the “unity” (Einheit) that is genus (Gattung). This is certainly clear and understandable enough: life, that which is living, can be the identity of identity and difference that is genus only for a consciousness that knows this, that knows life as genus. But however clear this relation of genus and consciousness may be, it is equally clear that the being of life for consciousness (i.e., genus) is not life’s own for

­116    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics itself, it is not something that life can ever have as its own object, that could ever be a unity for life. No matter how much life may negate itself and no matter how much consciousness may want to recognize itself in this self-­negation of life (as its own, consciousness’s, negation), the fact nevertheless remains that life cannot have itself as the unity that is genus for an object. In short, life cannot have itself as an object of consciousness – because, quite simply, life is not (yet) consciousness, and it is precisely the burden of this passage to demonstrate how it is that it (life) can be consciousness. Again: this result, the unity that is genus, can be only for consciousness. This is why life points and can only point to consciousness. That is, life can be only a sign for consciousness – it can only signify it, refer to it – because by itself it will never be able to go beyond the limits of its immediate existence, as Hegel had put it in paragraph #8 (#80 in Miller’s numbering) of the Introduction to the Phenomenology, except when it is forced to do so by an other: death.26 And even though consciousness may be able to make this other – death – its own other, a negation in which consciousness can recognize itself, for life this death remains always other, a sheer exteriority in which life will never be able to recognize itself. Again: this is why life points and has to point to an other than it is. And that this other will be, will have to be, consciousness – that which can have life as genus, and therefore death, for an object, for its own object, a negativity proper to it, consciousness – is most uncertain once we take the full measure of this pointing into account. Life may indeed point to an other than it is, but this other will necessarily be consciousness – the determinate negation of life – only for life in its result, the unity that is genus, that is, only for a life, the life, that consciousness can make its own object, only the life that can be (only) for consciousness. In other words, the last thing that Hegel’s argument wants life to do is to point at an other than it is, for such a pointed-­at other need not be a consciousness that would be the result of life’s own self-­negation (the essential, true, determinately negative other of life) but rather could be “simply” (that is, overdeterminately) other – an other other, as it were, that could as well be called “consciousness” but that would not be a consciousness mediatable with life (as its determinate negation, as its essential other). This consciousness would indeed be a ghost, and all the more ghostly because when it appears, it can appear not in symbolic incarnations or phenomenal figures for the spiritual but rather can only signify itself, point to itself, by a sheer act of signification when it converts sensory appearances into signs, allegorical signs, for itself. If one could pinpoint this moment of arbitrary allegorical signification in the text’s sentence – the moment when spirit, rather than appearing

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life    ­117

in phenomenal form, signifies itself in an allegorical sign – it would have to be when “an other” (ein Anderes) that life is said to point to gets identified, determined, as the other that is and has to be consciousness: “life points to an other than it is, namely to consciousness” (verweist das Leben auf ein Anderes als es ist, nämlich auf das Bewußtsein). It’s in this “namely” (nämlich) perhaps that the mediation of life and consciousness is most legible as not a mediation by determinate (self-­)negation at all but as a disarticulation of life and consciousness in the act of an arbitrary imposition of a name: life points to an other than it is, writes the text (and in doing so overdetermines this other as the [historical material] product of “the language of real life”), “namely consciousness,” says the dialectic of self-­consciousness (and in doing so wants to determine this other as the determined other of a life that can be only for consciousness). So: instead of being able to mediate life and consciousness (and thereby bring us back to self-­consciousness) by demonstrating how it is that life could not be life except as consciousness, the text converts life into an allegorical sign for consciousness – which points to an other than it is, call it consciousness. In doing so, it brings into “existence” a ghostly consciousness or Geist apart, as Marx might (did) put it (the Marx that, in a sense, read this passage in Hegel very well), not consciousness as the product of the historical materiality of the work of Hegel’s text, but the shadow consciousness that would phenomenalize itself and appear as the essential (determinately negative) other of life, life’s own negation, death itself. This ideological ­consciousness – or, better, consciousness as ideology27 – nevertheless always bears the marks of its material production – and these marks, like life’s allegorical pointing, can always be read in turn on the body of the language of ideology, not in what that language represents but in what it points to, signifies, refers to – an allegory that has itself to be read allegorically in turn. This is especially the case here in the Phenomenology of Spirit at the moment when life catches up with consciousness, as it were, and demands that the arbitrary decision between man as a living creature (the object of anthropology) and man as knowing, as consciousness (the object of phenomenology) – a decision that one might as well locate in the very first sentence of the Introduction to the Phenomenology (“Es ist eine natürliche Vorstellung, daß . . .” or, to paraphrase loosely, “There is knowing, consciousness, what does it have to be to be what it is, for it is?”)28 – that this decision (or cutting or Unterscheidung) be accounted for. The account offered by the text is to be read allegorically, for it is itself an account of allegory (the allegory of allegory, one could say), the story of how consciousness at the stage of self-­consciousness as desire needs to verify itself (as itself) in the disappearing essences that are the

­118    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics (sublated) objects of consciousness and how its attempt to do so fails and has to fail. It fails because the attempt to verify self-­consciousness in disappearing essences can only make self-­consciousness itself disappear, or, better, itself be disappearing. In fact, it would not be going too far to say that this constant, persistent, disappearing is the very “truth” – the very allegorical truth – of self-­consciousness. Its disappearing essence is the truth of this infinitely (or rather [irreducibly] finitely) unhappy self-­ consciousness29 because the only way it has to appear, to verify itself as itself in an other that appears, is to mark, signify, point to, itself by converting this phenomenal other into an allegorical sign for itself. But as an always disappearing essence, this sign can ultimately be the sign only for self-­consciousness’s own disappearing essence, its constant wearing away and wearing down, the ceaseless erosion of material history. Although the chapter could end here (without ending), it may be helpful to append a version of some remarks that were written for a conference on “The Future of Deconstruction: Reading Marx’s German Ideology” held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in February 1992. Although these remarks may run the risk of self-­ideologization – as is inevitable whenever one would spell out the “theoretical implications” of a reading – they were most appropriate for a volume entitled Hegel After Derrida and remain appropriate today. Let me end by simply asserting what I think the implications of this reading are – for Hegel, for Marx, for us, and for the future of deconstruction. What this means for Hegel should be clear: namely, that, once read, consciousness in Hegel is the “same thing” as life in Marx insofar as it is produced, the product of a history of material labor, the work of the text. But if consciousness is just as much a product of a history of material production as life is – if, historically materially speaking, there is no difference between life and consciousness – then Hegel is no longer who we thought he was, or at least no longer just who we thought he was: i.e., the absolute idealist master of ideology incarnate, the German super-­Ideologist. Instead, “Hegel” would be divided against himself, as it were; his text would be heterogeneous to itself, fissured, cracked, different from itself in ways that no work of determinate negation can simply patch up, put together, or heal. In fact, Hegel would be heterogeneous to himself in a way that we could call, we do call, Hegel/ Marx. This other Hegel – the Hegel whose signature is legible in the marks and traces of the text’s remaindering (my translation of Derrida’s restance) – is the Hegel that Marx elaborates, works through, reinscribes – in a reinscription that allows him, Marx, to become Marx or, better, that produces Marx as Marx (and not as a mere inverter of Hegel or a German Ideologist). (In other words, what the reading says is: Hegel,

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the text, points to an other than he is, call him Marx. In saying this, the reading is a repetition – with a difference, or, better, with a remainder – of Hegel, the text, its reproduction, as it were.) But to say that Marx is in a sense the reinscription of the remainder or remaindering of Hegel’s text is not to say that Marx – whoever that would be – is the truth of Hegel, the essence of Hegel, and so on. It does not even mean to say that what Marx does is to think the “unthought” of Hegel. No, what Marx does is to read Hegel, to read Hegel’s text in its difference from itself. That’s what makes him Marx and not a Young Hegelian – his countersigning of Hegel’s text, as it were, is what allows him to sign Marx. But to sign “Marx” is different from being Marx – some sort of monolithic, homogeneous document whose own single, simple, liberating “truth” could be discovered by a hermeneutic activity of unpacking and u ­ nveiling – for Marx’s own signature needs itself to be read in turn, meaning that his text is also heterogeneous, is also riven by overdetermined contradictions that will forever prohibit any easy totalization of “Marx” into only Marx, just Marx, into Marx and nothing else. Marx’s text, like Hegel’s, is also living on in a species of after-­life;30 it too is still to come in the future, from the future. That’s what makes it Marx. And it’s also what makes deconstruction – or, better, deconstructions – something yet to come in and from the future. Its – their – future is also coming, on the way, yet to come, any day now – for instance, in the reserve or remainder of texts that as texts will have always already been the future of deconstruction(s), like Derrida’s Positions, which forty years ago (in answer to questions about Derrida’s “relation” to and silence about Marx) said not only that “the ‘lacunae’ . . . are explicitly calculated to mark the sites of a theoretical elaboration which remains, for me at least, still to come,” but also that: when I say “still to come,” I am still, and above all, thinking of the relationship of Marx to Hegel . . . Despite the immense work which already has been done in this domain, a decisive elaboration has not yet been accomplished, and for historical reasons which can by analyzed, precisely, only during the elaboration of this work . . . Now, we cannot consider Marx’s, Engels’s, or Lenin’s texts as completely finished elaborations that are simply to be “applied” to the current situation. In saying this, I am not advocating anything contrary to “Marxism,” I am convinced of it. These texts are not to be read according to a hermeneutical or exegetical method which would seek out a finished signified beneath a textual surface. Reading is transformational. I believe that this would be confirmed by certain of Althusser’s propositions. But this transformation cannot be executed however one wishes. It requires protocols of reading. Why not say it bluntly: I have not yet found any that satisfy me . . . I do not find the texts of Marx, Engels, or Lenin homogeneous critiques. In their relationship to Hegel, for example. And the

­120    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics manner in which they themselves reflected and formulated the differentiated contradictory structure of their relationship to Hegel has not seemed to me, correctly or incorrectly, sufficient. Thus I will have to analyze what I consider a heterogeneity, conceptualizing both its necessity and the rules for deciphering it; and do so by taking into account the decisive progress simultaneously accomplished by Althusser and those following him . . . We will never be finished with the reading or rereading of Hegel, and, in a certain way, I do nothing other than attempt to explain myself on this point. In effect I believe that Hegel’s text is necessarily fissured; that it is something more and other than the circular closure of its representation. It is not reduced to a content of philosophemes, it also necessarily produces a powerful writing operation, a remainder of writing, whose strange relationship to the philosophical content of Hegel’s text must be reexamined, that is, the movement by means of which his text exceeds its meaning, permits itself to be turned away from, to return to, and to repeat itself outside its self-­identity.31

So: despite all our misgivings, the title of the conference – “The Future of Deconstruction: Reading Marx’s German Ideology” – seems to me correct enough, as long as we remember to emphasize the word “reading” as well as the word “future.” Like Hegel, like Marx, indeed like “Hegel/Marx,” the only future “deconstruction” can have is the future produced by a reading that is transformational, i.e., that happens, and as something that happens is history – and as history has, is, will have been, a future. As anything else – as an institutional fashion, trend, movement, or method, or, for that matter, as a new “philosophy” (of the “limit” or whatever) – “deconstruction” is already over (because it didn’t happen) and may as well have no future.32

Notes   1. Marginal note by Marx in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, vol. 5 of Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1976), p. 91. The German can be found in Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften, ed. Siegfried Landshut (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1971), p. 411.  2. The German Ideology, p. 37; Die Frühschriften, p. 349.  3. The German Ideology, p. 41; Die Frühschriften, pp. 353–4.  4. For the distinction between simple and overdetermined contradiction, my reference is, of course, Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage, 1970), pp. 87–128.  5. The German Ideology, p. 36; Die Frühschriften, p. 348.  6. The German Ideology, pp. 43–4; Die Frühschriften, pp. 356–7.  7. The German Ideology, p. 45; Die Frühschriften, p. 358.   8. An extended reading of the Fourth Thesis on Feuerbach – which is itself something of a “rhetorical reading” of Feuerbach – would be necessary here. For some indications on how ideology is to be read as self-­undoing

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life    ­121 trope, see my “Ending Up/Taking Back (with Two Postscripts on Paul de Man’s Historical Materialism),” in Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and “Allegories of Reference”, Chapter 1 above.   9. For an attempt at an “allegorical reading” of what one could call Hegel’s “ideology of consciousness” in the Phenomenology of Spirit, see below. Althusser’s famous statement that “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” could be read as very much consistent with our account of it as an “allegorical” language. That is, ideology “represents” all right, but what it represents (in distorted form or otherwise) is not the real conditions, but rather the imaginary relation to those real conditions. This is why an operation of demystification can uncover only the imaginary relations and not the real conditions. A second operation is necessary to read not what ideology represents but what it actually means. Cf. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 10. That is, one of the “ingredients” that went into producing “Marx” (again, as Marx) would be missing. Cf. Louis Althusser, “Marx’s Relation to Hegel,” in Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, Politics and History, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1982), p. 170: “Which means very schematically that Marx (Capital) is the product of the work of Hegel (German Philosophy) on English Political Economy + French Socialism, in other words, the Hegelian dialectic on: Labour theory of value (R) + the class struggle (FS).” 11. “Science of the Experience of Consciousness” is, of course, one of the titles of the book that came to be called The Phenomenology of Spirit. On the question of the titles (and the title-­pages) – a question that, when read, not only renders the Phenomenology’s place within Hegel’s system most uncanny but also threatens to destabilize that system’s coherence – see Otto Pöggeler, “Zur Deutung der Phänomenologie des Geistes,” in Hegels Idee einer Phänomenologie des Geistes (Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 1973), and my “Parentheses: Hegel by Heidegger,” in Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 12. One example would be Richard Norman in his otherwise very helpful and extremely clear Hegel’s Phenomenology, A Philosophical Introduction (London: Chatto and Windus for Sussex University Press, 1976), p. 46: “The section on ‘Self-­certainty’ is extremely unrewarding, and since I find large parts of it unintelligible I shall say little about it. The one important point to be gleaned from it is the claim that in order to be conscious of one’s own existence one must experience desire . . . The experience of desire, however, does not constitute self-­consciousness in the full sense. Why is this? In ‘Self-­certainty’ Hegel offers a preliminary explanation, but the whole question is dealt with much more satisfactorily in the ‘Master and Slave’ section, to which we may now gratefully turn.” 13. See the end of the Introduction to Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 56: “Thus in the movement of consciousness there occurs a moment of being-­in-­itself or

­122    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics being-­for-­us which is not present to the consciousness comprehended in the experience itself. The content, however, of what presents itself to us does exist for it; we comprehend only the formal aspect of that content, or its pure origination. For it, what has thus arisen exists only as an object; for us, it appears at the same time as movement and a process of becoming.” The German is, as always, more precise. See G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), p. 74: “Es kommt dadurch in seine Bewegung ein Moment des Ansich-­ oder Fürunsseins, welches nicht für das Bewußtsein, das in der Erfahrung selbst begriffen ist, sich darstellt; der Inhalt aber dessen, was uns entsteht, ist für es, und wir begreifen nur das Formelle desselben oder sein reines Entstehen; für es ist dies Entstandene nur als Gegenstand, für uns zugleich als Bewegung und Werden.” 14. See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), and Jean Hyppolite, “The Concept of Existence in the Hegelian Phenomenology,” in Studies on Marx and Hegel, ed. and trans. John O’Neill (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). 15. That the testing of (various figures of) apparent knowing is also always a test of the object of that knowing is stated with all possible clarity in the thirteenth paragraph (#85 in Miller’s numbering) of the Introduction to the Phenomenology (p. 54): “But, in fact, in the alteration of the knowledge, the object itself alters for it too, for the knowledge that was present was essentially a knowledge of the object: as the knowledge changes, so too does the object, for it essentially belonged to this knowledge . . . Since consciousness thus finds that its knowledge does not correspond to its object, the object itself does not stand the test; in other words, the criterion for testing is altered when that for which it was to have been the criterion fails to pass the test; and the testing is not only a testing of what we know, but also a testing of the criterion of what knowledge is.” The dialectic of sense-­ certainty is always the clearest example: sense-­certainty thinks its object is particular and that it knows this object immediately, but it turns out that its object is universal and it knows this object mediatedly. In short, sense-­ certainty is not sense-­certainty but rather a form of knowing that knows its object as universal and mediated: i.e., “perception” (Wahrnehmung), which now becomes the new figure of apparent knowing whose truth is to be tested. 16. Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 108; Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 137–8. 17. Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 109 (my translation); Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 138. 18. The commentators who do not just skip over life’s pointing in our passage and valiantly try to remediate the relation between life and consciousness (into a determinately negative relation) can do so only by having recourse, in one way or another, to self-­consciousness, when the burden of this passage is precisely to demonstrate how it is that self-­ consciousness (as self-­consciousness) is possible! One intelligent example would be that of Johannes Heinrichs in Die Logik der “Phänomenologie des Geistes” (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974), p. 176: “Wieso verweist das Leben auf die fürsichseiende, sich wissende Einheit? Der Übergang ist nicht ein solcher der Bewußtseinserfahrung, sondern ein solcher für uns. Selbst der

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life    ­123 Phänomenologe scheint hier aufgefordert, die Sache logisch zu nehmen, d.h. von der bloß ansichseienden substantiellen Einheit als Möglichkeit (Leben) zur fürsichseienden Einheit überzugehen, die das Selbstbewußtsein ist: als die sich selbst wissende und somit wissend-­wirkliche Gattung seiner selbst.” Although to say that the transition takes place not for consciousness but rather for us is an ingenious solution, its questionable character becomes apparent when we remember who the “we” of the Phenomenology is. If we follow the rigor of Hegel’s logic (in the Introduction) to its end, it turns out that the “we” of the phenomenological presentation – who observe the progression of consciousness through the various figures of apparent knowing and who put themselves in by leaving themselves out – are not some vague “philosophical observer” or “phenomenologist” but none other than self-­ consciousness! This is so because the single indispensable determination of the “we” is “our” being those who give up the position of consciousness in relation to the consciousness “we” are observing when we realize that “our” relation to it is a relation internal to consciousness. In other words, “we” are the negation of consciousness, consciousness’s self-­negation, i.e., self-­consciousness. But the positing of this “formal” self-­consciousness has to be verified in turn when consciousness’s essence and truth turns out to be self-­consciousness, and this is precisely the burden of the dialectic of life and desire. In any event, a painstaking reading of the Introduction is necessary to demonstrate this, and I will do so elsewhere. It should be noted, however, that many interpretations of the Phenomenology fall short of Hegel’s rigor and precision because their understanding of the “we” is far too vague. For a helpful survey of various (insufficient) interpretations of the “we,” see Kenley Royce Dove, “Hegel’s Phenomenological Method,” The Review of Metaphysics 23 (1970), pp. 615–41. 19. Putting this disjunction in terms of “reference” and “phenomenalism” is intentional, for I want to mark explicitly the close relation between our reading here and Paul de Man’s “definition” of ideology in “The Resistance to Theory” as the confusion “of reference with phenomenalism” (RT 11). Indeed, the reading can be taken as just a commentary on or an elaboration of de Man’s hints in this essay and in the short but packed and very difficult reading of sense-­certainty in “Hypogram and Inscription”: “Consciousness (‘here’ and ‘now’) is not ‘false and misleading’ because of language; consciousness is language, and nothing else, because it is false and misleading. And it is false and misleading because it determines by showing (montrer or démontrer, deiknumi) or pointing (Zeigen or Aufzeigen), that is to say in a manner that implies the generality of the phenomenon as cognition (which makes the pointing possible) in the loss of the immediacy and the particularity of sensory perception (which makes the pointing necessary): consciousness is linguistic because it is deictic. Language appears explicitly for the first time in Hegel’s chapter in the figure of a speaking consciousness . . . The figure of a speaking consciousness is made plausible by the deictic function that it names” (RT 41–2). For some steps toward a reading of de Man on ideology, see “Allegories of Reference,” Chapter 1 above. For a precise understanding of the “proper sense,” see de Man’s footnote on the tripartite structure of metaphor in “Reading (Proust)”: “When Homer calls Achilles a lion, the literal meaning of the figure signifies an animal of

­124    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics a yellowish brown color, living in Africa, having a mane, and so on. The figural meaning signifies Achilles and the proper meaning the attribute of courage or strength that Achilles and the lion have in common and can therefore exchange” (AR 65). 20. See Georges Bataille, “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” Deucalion 5 (October 1955), pp. 32–3: “Pour que l’homme à la fin se révèle à lui-­même il devrait mourir, mail il lui faudrait le faire en vivant – en se regardant cesser d’être. En d’autres termes, la mort elle-­même devrait devenir conscience (de soi), au moment même où elle anéantit l’être conscient. C’est en un sens ce qui a lieu (qui est du moins sur le point d’avoir lieu, ou qui a lieu d’une manière fugitive, insaisissable), au moyen d’un subterfuge. Dans le sacrifice, le sacrifiant s’identifie à l’animal frappé de mort. Ainsi meurt-­il en se voyant mourir, et même en quelque sorte, par sa propre volonté, de coeur avec l’arme du sacrifice. Mais c’est une comédie!” 21. Cf. Paul de Man, “The Resistance to Theory”: “It would be unfortunate, for example, to confuse the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies. This may seem obvious enough on the level of light and sound, but it is less so with regard to the more general phenomenality of space, time or especially of the self; no one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word ‘day,’ but it is very difficult not to conceive the pattern of one’s past and future existence as in accordance with temporal and spatial schemes that belong to fictional narratives and not to the world. This does not mean that fictional narratives are not part of the world and of reality; their impact upon the world may well be all too strong for comfort. What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism” (RT 11). 22. For Heidegger on eidos and the Idea, see his Nietzsche, Volume I: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), pp. 171–99. 23. Paul de Man, “Genesis and Genealogy (Nietzsche)” (AR, 102). 24. On catachresis and its (self-­ )mutilations, see my “Prefatory Postscript: Interpretation and Reading,” in Readings in Interpretation, pp. liii–lxi, and the reading of Aristotle’s Poetics in “The Future Past of Literary Theory,” in Material Inscriptions. 25. The most famous successfully “Hegelian” remediation of self-­consciousness as desire and self-­ consciousness as self-­ consciousness – by means of a “desire of desire,” i.e., by means of a rigorously “Hegelian” negation of negation – would, of course, be that of Kojève. The ironies attendant upon this interpretation are many: in being more Hegelian than Hegel and “succeeding” where Hegel “failed,” Kojève winds up being closer to “Hegel” than “Hegel” is to “Marx.” Ironically (but consistently and predictably) enough, Kojève’s anthropologization of phenomenology – i.e., his identification of man and self-­consciousness – ends up with neither man nor self-­consciousness. That is, he ends up with the thesis of the end of man in either animal (or the automaton) or god, an utter falling apart of life and consciousness. By mediating life and consciousness – by phenomenologizing “man” and anthropologizing “consciousness” – successfully, Kojève ends up with an utter abstract “materialism” (not unlike Feuerbach’s) that immediately turns over into an equally abstract “idealism.” End of man,

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life    ­125 end of history. (The moral being: real materialists don’t mediate.) But a long, careful exposition of Kojève would be necessary to demonstrate this; I try to make a beginning in the next chapter. In the end, Kojève may be the ultimate romantic ironist; and a comparison with the end of Kleist’s Marionettentheater would be most appropriate: recall that the last chapter of the history of the world ends up with the marionette (no consciousness) or the god (infinite consciousness). 26. Cf. Hegel’s distinction here between that which would be death for “natural life” and that which would be the “death” of consciousness: “Whatever is confined within the limits of a natural life cannot by its own efforts go beyond its immediate existence; but it is driven beyond it by something else, and this uprooting entails its death. Consciousness, however, is explicitly the Notion of itself. Hence it is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself . . . Thus consciousness suffers this violence at its own hands: it spoils its own limited satisfaction” (Phenomenology, p. 51). The German is, as always, more precise: “Was auf ein natürliches Leben beschränkt ist, vermag durch sich selbst nicht über sein unmittelbares Dasein hinauszugehen; aber es wird durch ein anderes darüber hinausgetrieben, und dies Hinausgerissen werden ist sein Tod. Das Bewußtsein aber ist für sich selbst sein Begriff, dadurch unmittelbar das Hinausgehen über das Beschränkte und, da ihm dies Beschränkte angehört, über sich selbst . . . Das Bewußtsein leidet also diese Gewalt, sich die beschränkte Befriedigung zu verderben, von ihm selbst” (Phänomenologie, p. 69). In a sense, at this moment of decision (i.e., cutting apart), Hegel here sets himself the task of transforming the sheer exteriority of death into a “death” proper to consciousness: in short, he has to transform death into consciousness. This is the “decision” that catches up to him in “The Truth of Self-­certainty” and needs to be verified. It is no wonder that it “fails,” for the sheer exteriority, otherness, of death can be transformed into the self-­limiting of life only thanks to an impossible, aberrant trope. 27. See Louis Althusser, “On Marx and Freud,” Rethinking Marxism 4:1 (Spring 1991), pp. 24–5: “In the category of the self-­conscious subject, bourgeois ideology represents to individuals what they must be in order for them to accept their own submission to bourgeois ideology . . . ­consciousness is necessary for the individual who is endowed with it to realize within ‘himself’ the unity required by bourgeois ideology, so that every subject will conform to its own ideological and political requirement, that of unity, in brief, so that the conflictual violence of the class struggle will be lived by its agents as a superior and ‘spiritual’ form of unity.” 28. On the first sentence of the “Einleitung” to the Phenomenology, see my “Parentheses: Hegel by Heidegger,” in Readings in Interpretation. 29. That our reading should, in a sense, collapse the first figure of self-­ consciousness (i.e., desire) and the last figure of self-­consciousness (i.e., the unhappy consciousness) is no accident, for the disarticulation of the dialectic of life and consciousness would indeed mean that self-­consciousness gets stuck here, as though in a stutter or a “syncope” that can only repeat allegories of its self-­erosion, the impossibility of constituting itself as self-­ consciousness.

­126    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics 30. On this “after-­life,” see Jacques Derrida, Les Spectres de Marx (Paris: Flammarion, 1993). 31. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 62–4, pp. 77–8. 32. For Derrida’s “definition” of deconstruction as “what happens,” see the 1984 interview “Deconstruction in America: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Critical Exchange 17 (Winter 1985), 1–33.

Chapter 6

Man and Self-­Consciousness: Kojève, Romantic Ironist

The “anthropologization” of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in twentieth-­century French thought is well known; equally well known are its apparent mistakes and misunderstandings. Perhaps none of the French readings of the Phenomenology manages to be quite as immediately anthropologizing and (therefore) quite as apparently mistaken as that of Kojève – both in his celebrated courses on the Phenomenology in the 1930s and in the book (Introduction à la lecture de Hegel) that comes out of these courses. And yet, by the same token, there is no denying the obvious power of Kojève’s reading and its widespread influence on several generations of French thinkers (and not just the to-­be-­illustrious figures who attended the courses1). How can this be – to get things so wrong and yet to wield such power and such influence? And don’t get me wrong here! The power and the influence are such that they are not to be explained away by the clichés of intellectual history (about “influence” of one thinker’s “ideas” on another), or by reference to institutional factors (a favorite of academics), or by imputing some kind of mesmerizing charisma to Alexander Vladimirovitch Kojevnikov (or, as he preferred to refer to himself, “Moi, Kojève . . .”2). Indeed, it is not too much to say that, with “Kojève,” i.e., with Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit – or, to be still more specific, with Kojève’s reading of the “Self-­consciousness” chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology – something occurs, something happens, and because it does so and is therefore genuinely historical, accounting for this “something” and its truly historical (and therefore material) reasons is a very overdetermined matter. Again, how can this be, what does it mean, that an anthropologizing reading of Hegel should be both “a mistake in one entire respect, perhaps the most serious mistake,” as Derrida puts it in “Les fins de l’homme,” and at the same time should be able to furnish postwar French thought with “its best conceptual resources”?3 To begin

­128    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics to answer the question, it is necessary to understand both the “mistake” and the excess or residue of historical force it leaves behind (or over). An economical way to do this is to go back to the beginning – which, of course, is also an end – i.e., the first sentence of Kojève’s book: “Man is Self-­consciousness” (L’homme est Conscience de soi).4 The anthropologization of Hegel could not be clearer in the sentence’s immediate identification of “man” and “self-­consciousness.” And one does not have to read much further to see that Kojève takes Hegel’s dialectic of self-­consciousness – in particular the dialectics of life and desire, master and slave – as an “anthropogenetic” account of how man, the human being as human, emerges out of merely animal life. Indeed, this is what allows him to conceive of Hegel’s project in the Phenomenology of Spirit as that of a “phenomenological anthropology.” Now this immediate anthropologization of Hegel’s Phenomenology and its immediate identification of man and self-­consciousness would be, to say the least, most un-­Hegelian! The Phenomenology of Spirit is, for starters, not about “man” at all but rather about consciousness and self-­consciousness, knowing and self-­knowing, which, in a sense, are not “human” at all. Indeed, one could say that in Hegel consciousness – and its truth or essence, self-­consciousness – begins where man ends. As a presentation of apparent knowing (Darstellung des erscheinenden Wissens),5 the Phenomenology begins precisely where anthropology leaves off; it is what issues (dialectically) out of anthropology’s self-­ negation and self-­ sublation. Consciousness – the object of a phenomenology and where it begins – is man as aufgehoben, sublated, no longer a “natural,” “feeling,” or “real soul” (Seele), which are the objects of “anthropology” in Hegel’s terms, but rather as knowing and self-­ knowing. Even a glance at the table of contents of the Philosophy of Spirit – the third part of Hegel’s mature system as formulated in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences – will confirm that what Hegel calls “phenomenology” is rigorously distinguished from what he calls “anthropology.” In the dialectic of “subjective spirit,” the “phenomenology of spirit” follows (i.e., issues from) “anthropology” as the second moment – i.e., the moment of negation or “antithesis” to anthropology’s position or “thesis” – in a triad whose third moment – the moment of “synthesis,” if one likes – is “psychology,” whose object is properly “spirit” (Geist) as such and which, in the form of theoretical, practical, and free spirit, marks the transition to “objective spirit” (and then on to “absolute spirit” and so on). In short, the dialectic of consciousness and self-­ consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is not about man as such, i.e., as anthropo-­logical entity, nor is it about psyche or spirit, i.e., a psycho-­logical entity, but rather it is

Man and Self-­Consciousness    ­129

about “man” only insofar as he is a knower and self-­knower and the determinations proper to knowing and self-­ knowing, consciousness and self-­consciousness. The Phenomenology of Spirit begins by asking what is knowing, what does knowing have to be (in truth, in essence) in order to be what it is, knowing, for there is knowing, there is consciousness. And it continues by answering: knowing as knowing of an object is in essence, in truth, self-­knowing. Consciousness is possible only as self-­consciousness – which brings up the second moment and its own question: there is self-­knowing, self-­consciousness; what does self-­consciousness have to be (in truth, in essence) in order to be what it is, self-­consciousness? Obviously enough, to go on the model of consciousness, it can be only as self-­consciousness of self-­consciousness, it can be only as redoubled, only as double: self-­consciousness is possible only as a self-­consciousness for a self-­consciousness – the only point being that in this speculative-­dialectical deduction of consciousness and self-­consciousness there would apparently be no need for the question of “man” or of the “human” (as differentiated from the “animal,” for instance) to arise at all. In fact, any talk about self-­consciousness and its necessary redoubling in the master/slave dialectic in terms of a fight for prestige between two human beings would seem to be way off the mark, indeed, something of a “relapse” from the stage of phenomenology back to anthropology, from man as self-­knowing back to man as feeling. That’s what an anthropologization of phenomenology and the attempt to read Hegel’s project as a “phenomenological anthropology” would amount to – an utter misunderstanding of the properly philosophical project and its stakes. Of course, Kojève knows this very well, and his anthropologization is not as wrong-­headed as all that. In his reading of the first moments of self-­consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the apparently immediate identification of man and self-­consciousness would indeed be an attempt at something like a speculative deduction of self-­consciousness as self-­ consciousness – i.e., the truly “human” – out of a merely desiring (and hence not yet truly human) self-­consciousness. That is, Kojève’s effort is also to read the sentence “Man is Self-­consciousness” as a speculative proposition – one in which the copula is taken as a determinately negative movement that mediates the (self-­negating) subject with its predicate. He does this by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to have self-­consciousness proper – self-­consciousness for a self-­consciousness – emerge out of a self-­mediation by (determinate) self-­negation of the first figure of self-­consciousness (which, in fact, is not yet self-­consciousness proper), namely, desire, self-­consciousness as desire. The demonstration is well known and downright spectacular. For man to be truly human,

­130    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics he cannot be a merely desiring creature capable of a “Sentiment of self” (Selbstgefühl) – this the animal can also do – but must rise to “Self-­ consciousness” (Selbstbewußtsein). And, according to Kojève, the only way the human animal can rise from mere desire to self-­consciousness is by means of a desire not for the thing but, as it were, for the self, a desire of desire, a desire that desires not the thing but rather another desire: the desire of the desire of the other. A desire of desire, a desire directed at another desire, is the necessary premise of man as self-­ consciousness. As Kojève puts it: “To be anthropogenetic, then, Desire must be directed toward a nonbeing – that is, toward another Desire, another greedy emptiness, another I . . . Action that is destined to satisfy an animal Desire, which is directed toward a given, existing thing, never succeeds in realizing a human, self-­conscious I. Desire is human – or, more exactly, ‘humanizing,’ ‘anthropogenetic’ – only provided that it is directed toward another Desire and an other Desire” (168/40). In other words – and a bit closer to Hegel’s text in the introductory section to the chapter on self-­consciousness (“The Truth of Self-­certainty”) – if self-­consciousness is not to remain stuck at the stage of mere desire, of self-­consciousness as desire, and is instead to move forward to self-­ consciousness proper, it can do so only by a mediation of itself as desire with itself. In any case, this mediation of desire with itself as a desire of desire would be a rigorously dialectical mediation because it works as a determinate negation, indeed as a negation of negation. As a lack that wants to be filled not by the thing but by the self, desire of desire would be a lack that lacks a lack. This would be a determinate negative because the object of desire is, again, always a negative object – desire is by definition “to designate with the negative,”6 as Hegel puts it – and hence a desire of desire would be the desire to negate a negation, to negate the negating of the other. Self-­consciousness as desire can move beyond mere desire by negating (i.e., desiring) an other who is other enough for it as self-­consciousness to be able to recognize itself, know itself, in it. This can be only an other desire (and, as Kojève emphasizes, another desire and an other desire). Thanks to the negation of negation operated by a desire of desire, Kojève can move from a merely desiring self-­ consciousness to a properly self-­conscious self-­consciousness, one that can be what it is (and it is) only as double, only as a self-­consciousness for a self-­consciousness. The battle for prestige and the master/slave dialectic follow directly thereupon. If this reading of Hegel is spectacular, it is not least of all on account of its managing to beat Hegel at his own game, as it were, to out-­Hegel Hegel and, in a sense, to be more Hegelian than Hegel. For as a matter of fact, and as is known (at least among Hegel scholars), this is not how

Man and Self-­Consciousness    ­131

Hegel makes the transition from the dialectics of desire and life to the emergence of a self-­consciousness for a self-­consciousness and the consequent battle for recognition which issues in one’s becoming master and the other slave. Whatever it is that would afford the transition from the mirror dialectics of desire on the one hand and life on the other, it is in fact not desire or at least is no longer anything that Hegel would still call desire (whether of the thing or of the self). Less well known is the fact – or at least the reading that would demonstrate it – that whatever “Hegel” (or the “super-­Hegel” that Kojève would be) may want here, Hegel’s text does not make the transition from the dialectics of desire and life to a self-­consciousness for a self-­consciousness by means of a determinate negation. In fact, it is an open question as to whether the transition is made at all, whether Hegel’s argument is in fact able to get past the moment of self-­consciousness as desire. It can be shown – or at least read – that when Hegel’s presentation finishes up demonstrating that the object of self-­consciousness as desire – i.e., life – goes through the same dialectical process of self-­negation as the desiring self-­consciousness – and therefore proves to be independent enough for self-­consciousness – it goes back to the subject (knowing, self-­knowing) not by anything that could be taken as a determinate negation but rather by something of a “linguistic moment” of phenomenalized reference that would make consciousness emerge, appear, out of life itself. Life, in its result (genus, Gattung), writes Hegel, points to an other than it is, namely consciousness. In other words and in short, the dialectic of life and desire can get back to consciousness and self-­consciousness only thanks to a phenomenalization of reference in an impossible and aberrant trope. Impossible and aberrant because: although life in its result – the genus (Gattung), the moments when the individual dissolves back into the genus (i.e., in procreation and in death) – can certainly make many living things appear, just as it can make many dead things appear, it cannot make death itself appear – death as the determined limit and negation of life, and hence as a super-­sublated life, das aufgehobene Leben, i.e., knowing and self-­ knowing, consciousness and self-­ consciousness. But let me not recount this reading – which I have worked out at length and in detail in the previous chapter – for it is in any case not necessary for an understanding of how and why the transition from the dialectics of life and desire to a self-­consciousness for a self-­consciousness cannot take place by any kind of determined negation – and least of all by a desire of desire. All that’s necessary is simply to recall what Hegel means by desire, the very definition of self-­consciousness as desire. For Hegel, desire, self-­consciousness as desire – the first figure of self-­ consciousness to step on the stage of the presentation – is by definition

­132    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics the name of a disjunction, a non-­mediation, between self-­consciousness – the immediate self-­consciousness of the “I am I” – and the other, the “other-­being” (Anderssein) as Hegel calls it, the whole expanse of the sensuous world that it, self-­consciousness, goes out to and comes back from. This relation is a disjunction or a non-­mediation because the being of the other that self-­consciousness goes out to and comes back from here is not existent enough, its essence is to be a disappearing essence, and hence its otherness is not other enough for self-­consciousness to be able to verify its own essence (the unity of the “I am I”) in it. Hence in Hegel’s terms self-­consciousness differentiates only itself as itself from itself here, and it goes out to and comes back from the movementless tautology of the “I am I.” As movementless, self-­consciousness is not self-­consciousness, for self-­consciousness was by definition movement (out to and back from the other). This is the dialectic of self-­ consciousness as desire. And because it is a dialectic, whatever happens on the side of the object – here the disappearing essences of the sensuous world – happens also on the side of the subject – here self-­consciousness as the unity of the “I am I.” If the object is disappearing, so is the self-­ consciousness that would be the subject of such a disappearing object. If desire is by definition such a movement (such a movementless movement) of ceaseless disappearing – the disappearing of self-­consciousness in disappearing essences that, as disappearing, cannot ever be essential enough for self-­consciousness as self-­consciousness (i.e., as self-­knowing rather than as self-­desiring) – then desire, and, a fortiori, desire of desire, cannot ever provide us with the mediating term that would be able to mediate desire and self-­consciousness, self-­consciousness as desiring and self-­consciousness as knowing, and to take us from self-­consciousness as desire to a self-­consciousness for a self-­consciousness. A desire of desire is just one disappearing self-­consciousness for another disappearing self-­consciousness – each one not other enough for the other and hence also not other enough for itself, and hence at the same time also too self-­identical, too at one, with itself. A desire of desire can produce – and keeps reproducing – only a self-­consciousness as desiring and self-­ desiring, not a self-­consciousness as knowing and self-­knowing. Or, to put this in still more Hegelian terms, the whole point of the dialectics of desire and life in Hegel’s Phenomenology is not that immediate self-­ relation, the unity of the “I am I,” is essential for self-­consciousness, but rather that the other, the other-­being of the sensuous world, life, is as essential for self-­consciousness as the unity of the “I am I.” This is why in the dialectic of life, writes Hegel, self-­consciousness as mere desire will make the experience of the independence of its object, life; it will discover that life is as essential to it as mere desiring self-­consciousness

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(i.e., the unity of the “I am I”). In short, again, the one thing that self-­ consciousness cannot verify itself in, make itself true in, is desire.7 One telling symptom of Kojève’s predicament is his paradigm for desire of desire – even though he gives it as just an example – namely, love as both analogous to and yet different from sexual (i.e., “animal”) desire. He writes: “In the relationship between man and woman, for example, Desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the Desire of the other . . . that is to say, if he wants to be ‘desired’ or ‘loved,’ or, rather, ‘recognized’ in his human value, in his reality as a human individual” (13/6). The sequence of quoted terms is indicative: Kojève can make the passage from Hegelian “desire” proper – which would indeed be like animal desire – to “recognition” – i.e., a self-­ consciousness for a self-­consciousness – only by way of something called “love.” He needs love to get beyond mere appetitive desire because there is indeed no necessity, no necessity of a determined negation, that will make knowing and self-­knowing (i.e., “recognition”) emerge out of the experience of desiring to be desired – at least not a self-­knowing that would be a knowing of the self as knowing rather than a knowing of the self as desiring. What’s love got to do with it indeed? As Rousseau and the romantics who follow in his train well knew, love is not a determined self-­negation of desire but rather an impossible, overdetermined, and hence aberrant, trope. “We do not see what we love,” writes the late romantic Paul de Man, “but we love in the hope of confirming the illusion that we are indeed seeing anything at all.”8 And, in fact, the spectacular predicament in which Kojève finds himself with his desire of desire is what renders him too such a late romantic. The predicament and its double binds would go like this: in successfully making the transition from self-­ consciousness as desire to self-­ consciousness as self-­consciousness by what at least seems to be a determined negation, Kojève is more Hegelian than Hegel and succeeds where Hegel fails. But insofar as he is able to perform this operation only by means of a too immediate anthropologization of self-­ consciousness, Kojève is not Hegelian at all, for he would attempt to ground self-­consciousness by doing away with self-­ consciousness in its specificity, that is, as self-­knowing rather than as self-­desiring. So: on the one hand, Kojève is too much of an anthropologizer; he “successfully” grounds self-­ consciousness by turning it back into man and phenomenology back into anthropology. But this is only the one hand. For in apparently being able to demonstrate that the essence of life and desire really is knowing and self-­ knowing, consciousness and self-­ consciousness, Kojève also “phenomenologizes,” as it were, life and desire. He also makes life and desire disappear in their specificity by turning them into mere moments

­134    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics in the speculative-­dialectical history of knowing and self-­knowing. In other words, if on the one hand Kojève makes self-­consciousness disappear (in life and desire), he also, on the other hand, makes life and desire disappear (in self-­consciousness). If on the one hand he, as it were, embodies self-­consciousness too immediately, then on the other hand he also at the same time has self-­consciousness ground itself as utterly disembodied. In the one case, he is too much of an empiricist; in the other, he is too much of an idealist. In both cases he is more Hegelian than Hegel and therefore in any case not Hegelian at all. Lest this sound like an overstatement and an exaggeration, it may be useful to recall that Kojève’s payoff, what he ends up with, corroborates the double bind – and, as always, spectacularly at that. For, in the end – or rather ends – Kojève winds up with neither man nor self-­ consciousness. With the possibility of man as self-­ consciousness successfully deduced – thanks to desire of desire – so is his full satisfaction in universal recognition that marks the end of man and the end of history (as human history). At the end of history – with man and history over – left are only two possibilities: bestiality or divinity, to be an animal (or an automaton) or a god. In a letter to (the horrified) Leo Strauss of 19 September 1950, Kojève writes: “Besides, ‘not human’ can mean ‘animal’ (or, better – automaton) as well as ‘God.’ In the final state there naturally are no more ‘human beings’ in our sense of an historical human being. The ‘healthy’ automata are ‘satisfied’ (sports, art, eroticism, etc.), and the ‘sick’ ones get locked up. As for those who are not satisfied with their ‘purposeless activity’ (art, etc.), they are the philosophers (who can attain wisdom if they ‘contemplate’ enough). By doing so they become ‘gods.’ The tyrant becomes an administrator, a cog in the ‘machine’ fashioned by automata for automata.”9 Elsewhere, Kojève identifies these two possibilities as the “American” model – i.e., animal or automaton – and the “Japanese” model – pure contemplative existence, divinity, a whole nation of snobs (as Kojève claims to have discovered on a trip to Japan in the 1950s).10 Or, as I like to call it, absolute slobbery and absolute snobbery – either the automaton or the god, either no consciousness at all or infinite consciousness, with both winding up the same: the automaton-­god (see the film Blade Runner, for example). In any case, at this end(s) there is room neither for man nor for self-­ consciousness (i.e., a self-­consciousness for which life is essential – the “god” here would clearly be a self-­satisfied master self-­consciousness). The immediate identification of man and self-­ consciousness issues in the immediate difference and utter disjunction of man and self-­ consciousness. Hegel would have predicted it: absolute identity is the same thing as absolute difference, an easy dialectic. And it was equally

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predictable, and pre-­dictated by Hegel, that desire, even as desire of desire, would get Kojève not a mediation of life and self-­consciousness, self-­consciousness as desire and self-­consciousness as self-­consciousness, but rather their de-­mediation, as it were, a disjunction between subject and predicate in the proposition “Man is Self-­consciousness” and thus the disappearance of both subject and predicate. For that’s what desire is – i.e., a ceaselessly disappearing self-­consciousness (the unity of the “I am I”) going out to and coming back from ceaselessly disappearing essences (the expanse of the sensuous world). That the identification of man and self-­consciousness should wind up with neither is indeed a nicely Hegelian irony. But the absolute resoluteness of Kojève’s desire both to mediate and to disarticulate them, to render man as self-­consciousness both possible and impossible, produces perhaps still another irony and still an other end. For Kojève’s ending in the disarticulation and the disappearance of man and self-­consciousness renders his story less a history – “human” or otherwise – than an allegory, the narrativization of the impossibility of mediating life and self-­ consciousness, self-­ consciousness as desire and self-­consciousness as self-­consciousness – an impossibility that is there already to be read, and always to be read again, in Hegel’s text. Kojève’s would be a weirdly allegorical discourse that maps out along a narrative line a disruption or disarticulation that interrupts the narrative all along the line – like a permanent parabasis, to coin a phrase, a romantic irony that would be more Kleist’s or Schlegel’s than Hegel’s. It would be the (impossible) story of a kind of stutter or syncope, the end of history as an unendingly repeated event – and a halting or stalling or idling of the Phenomenology of Spirit at the “moment” of desire. Insofar as this ironic allegory affords a glimpse of (perhaps) still an other history – a history no longer to be thought in terms of the dialectic of self-­consciousness – it is no doubt what inspired the likes of Bataille, Blanchot, and others, including those other others thinking a politics of difference differently (e.g., Derrida). It may be what turns the most serious mistake into our best resource.11

Notes  1. For a list of those “inscrit” (under different modalities) in the seminar, see Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 225–6. See also the detailed discussion of the seminar in Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève (Paris: Grasset, 1990).  2. See Stanley Rosen, “Kojève’s Paris: A Memoir,” Parallax 4 (February 1997), pp. 1–12.  3. Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins, trans. Alan Bass

­136    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 117. French in Marges (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 139.  4. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), p. 11. English translation by James H. Nichols, Jr., as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 3. Subsequent page references to the French and the English will be in the text.   5. See the fourth paragraph of the Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 49. German in G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), p. 66.  6. Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 135.   7. The above is a paraphrase of the opening paragraphs of the section “Die Wahrheit der Gewißheit seiner selbst” (“The Truth of Self-­certainty”) in Hegel’s “Self-­consciousness” chapter of the Phänomenologie, pp. 133 ff.   8. Paul de Man, “Hypogram and Inscription” (RT 53).   9. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (New York: The Free Press, 1991), p. 255. 10. Cf. the additional footnote to the second edition (1962) of Kojève’s Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, pp. 434–7. 11. The conception of irony here differs from the historicized (and, indeed, psychologized) “irony” of Michael S. Roth in his chapter on Kojève in The Ironist’s Cage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 148–52. The passage from what he calls “dramatic pragmatism” to “detached ironism” – or, better, the unmediatable disjunction between them – has already taken place, is always already inscribed, in Kojève’s reading of “Self-­consciousness” in Hegel’s Phenomenology. On the ends of the end of history (and the question of postmodernism), see Allan Stoekl, “The Future of the End of History,” Parallax 4 (February 1997), pp. 29–40.

Chapter 7

Next Steps: Lukács, Jameson, Post-­Dialectics

Lukács At the outset of “Hegel on the Sublime,” Paul de Man offers Lukács – in a list that also includes Benjamin, Althusser, and Adorno – as an example of an authentically critical aesthetic thinker who can make “the most incisive contributions to political thought and political action” precisely because of, and not in spite of, his concentration on aesthetic questions and literary texts. Such a characterization certainly makes sense, at least once we get past the platitudes of aestheticism and remember what intellectual history, “let alone actual philosophy,” will tell us: namely, that the category of the aesthetic is a principle of articulation rather than a “principle of exclusion” that is wrongly “assumed to operate between aesthetic theory and epistemological speculation, or, in a symmetrical pattern, between concern with aesthetics and concern with political issues” (AI 105–7). And the company in which Lukács is included would be equally apt. Less obvious and more suggestive, however, would be de Man’s juxtaposition of Lukács with one other truly critical aesthetic thinker, namely Derrida. Derrida’s and Lukács’s serving as good examples of productive political thought – because both are truly critical aesthetic thinkers – is suggestive in what it would imply about their work, especially in the context of de Man’s project of a critique of the “aesthetic ideology” that characterizes the reception of Kant’s and Hegel’s truly critical aesthetic thought. Compactly, if a bit tortuously, stated: according to de Man’s readings of Kant and Hegel, what renders their aesthetic theories politically productive is their pushing the critique of the philosophical category of the aesthetic to a point where rather than grounding this category (transcendentally, dialectically, or otherwise) both of them destabilize it and thereby disarticulate their respective systems rather than closing them off – and, as a residue of this disarticulation, produce

­138    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics a radical materiality and materialism that cannot be transformed into the phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judgment. If the texts of Derrida and Lukács are to be “critical” in a similar way, then they too must pursue a critique of the aesthetic to its breaking point in order to end up with materialism and what de Man calls “the prosaic materiality of the letter” (AI 90). That Derrida’s projects – “early” and “late,” under the name of the “d-­word” or other names – have entailed a thoroughgoing “critique” of all aesthetic ideologies (especially when it comes to the aesthetic function of what some still call “literature”) is clear enough. And it is particularly clear in what one could call the “strategies” of Derrida’s texts (early and late): that is, the demonstration (and the practice) of a certain “contamination” of irreducibly empirical and philosophical (or transcendental) discourses at the site of the inaugural decision (or “cutting apart”) between them, where the two cannot be extricated from one another and take on the character of an uncannily material discourse (with a history and a materiality all its own). Again and again in Derrida’s work, it is a certain irreducible empiricity or idiomaticity of language – a heterogeneity of language to itself (whether it be “the play of the letter” or the “irreducible excess of the syntactic over the semantic,” and so on) – that comes to interfere with the ideological projects and dreams of all totalizing discourses as both their condition of possibility and, irreducibly, their condition of impossibility.1 But that Lukács should be given as an example of a critical aesthetic – and therefore politically productive – thinker in this sense may be harder to swallow (at least for some). For with Lukács are we not in fact presented with a rather bleak choice between a pre-­or insufficiently Marxist, residually idealist, humanist thinker or a Stalinist apologist who “gave Marxism an irrational and anti-­scientific form”2 and whose concepts of the whole (or totality) and the dialectic amount to a blatant disregard of or even contempt for empirical facts that do not toe the party line? But even when we go beyond the clichés and the name-­ calling, it would seem that Lukács’s work presents obstacles to taking him as a truly critical rather than a merely pre-­critical or even dogmatic thinker. For Lukács indeed has answers – epistemological, aesthetic, and therefore political answers – to the questions of articulation or mediation of politics, aesthetics, and epistemology, but these answers seem to leave him open to fairly sharp critique, even from friendlier or at least less vicious quarters. For instance, in the case of his epistemological solution to the antinomies of bourgeois thought (“bourgeois thought” = classical philosophy since Descartes and especially what Lukács calls “classical German philosophy”) – namely, the class consciousness of the proletariat which, as the self-­consciousness of the commodity form

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itself and therefore of capitalist society as such, would be the “subject” (the subject-­object), the “we,” of history itself – Lukács seems to have a “logical problem” that Terry Eagleton characterizes as follows: “There is, however, a logical problem with Lukács’s notion of some ‘true’ class consciousness. For if the working class is the potential bearer of such consciousness, from what viewpoint is this judgement made? It cannot be made from the viewpoint of the (ideal) proletariat itself, since this simply begs the question; but if only that viewpoint is true, then it cannot be made from some standpoint external to it either. As Bhikhu Parekh points out, to claim that only the proletarian perspective allows one to grasp the truth of society as a whole already assumes that one knows what that truth is. It would seem that truth is either wholly internal to the consciousness of the working class, in which case it cannot be assessed as truth and the claim becomes simply dogmatic; or one is caught in the impossible paradox of judging the truth from outside the truth itself, in which case the claim that this form of consciousness is true simply undercuts itself.”3 In the case of the aesthetic solution – Lukács’s notion of reflection and his “doctrine of realism” – Lukács seems to come up with an aesthetic that, in Eagleton’s words, is only “a left mirror-­image of the dominant model of bourgeois aesthetics,” indeed only “a kind of dialecticized version of the Romantic ideology of the symbol.” Eagleton concludes: “It is as though Lukács, having tracked the embarrassments of bourgeois society to their material roots in a style quite at odds with that society’s own self-­reflection, then turns and advances much the same solutions to these difficulties. It is true that for him the relations between part and whole are always subtly mediated, never a matter of some intuited coalescence; but it is nevertheless remarkable that one with his formidable powers of historical materialist analysis should come up with an aesthetics which in broad outline faithfully reproduces some of the key structures of bourgeois political power.”4 We all know this, these critiques are familiar, but if we look (again) at some of Lukács’s prematurely dismissed texts, we may find that they tell a very different story – a story that may make Lukács also into a historical materialist of a different stamp, a figure less familiar than the Lukács we so readily kick around. The critique of Lukács’s epistemological solution in the class consciousness of the proletariat, for instance, is perhaps based on an insufficient understanding of the dialectical nature of all knowing – one of the central theses of History and Class Consciousness, which Lukács learned (very well indeed) from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, where it is also the one, indispensable, thing we have to understand in order to understand what knowing is. In

­140    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics short, because knowing is always knowing of something, of an object – a knowing determined by the object it knows, and an object determined by the knowing of which it is the object – it makes no sense to worry about whether we are “inside” or “outside” the object of knowing. The side of knowing (the “for-­itself”) and the side of “truth” (the object, the “in-­itself”) are the two immediate determinations of knowing, i.e., of consciousness, from the start, and the task is to compare and test the knowing – what it knows and how it knows it – against the object it claims to know, not to posit a divide between a reified object and an equally reified subject of knowing. As Hegel puts it in the Introduction to the Phenomenology, when we ask about the truth of knowing – about the truth of consciousness – we are in fact asking about the “in-­ itself” of the “for-­itself,” and we would seem unable to get beyond the screen of the “for us”: that is, we would want to know what an object is in itself, but anything we would say about its in-­itself would only be a truth for us and not a truth for it. The standard or criterion against which we would test knowing would not be its criterion but rather one that we imported from the outside, an external criterion. Nevertheless – and this is the properly dialectical moment of the Introduction to the Phenomenology – the nature of the object that we are examining here overcomes this “separation or this semblance of separation” and the appearance of a presupposed (external) criterion, for the differentiation between a truth of the object in itself and a knowing of the object for a knower in fact “falls into” the object itself: that is, knowing (our object) contains the differentiation between knower and known, subject and object of knowing, for-­itself and in-­itself, already within it. Hence the criterion, rather than falling into us, in fact falls into the object, knowing, that we are examining. In other words and in short, “we” in fact fall into the object and hence can leave ourselves and our contributions out of the examination of consciousness, and allow knowing, consciousness, to examine itself, for, as subject-­object of knowing, it is itself the testing. But the point to be stressed here is that the way we leave ourselves out of the process of examining consciousness is not just some vague self-­ limitation or self-­ negation but rather the properly dialectical moment of Hegel’s presentation. That is, in giving up the position of an external observer in relation to the object we are studying, we are in fact giving up the position of consciousness – which, in Hegel, is by definition a “knowing of something,” a differentiation between knower and known – in relation to our object. In short, we negate ourselves all right, but we negate ourselves in a determined way and as a determined subject: namely, we negate ourselves as those who have taken up the

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position of consciousness toward consciousness, we negate ourselves as, we in fact are, the negation of consciousness. And as the negation of consciousness – the negation of knowing as the knowing of something different from and separated from the knower – we are in fact already self-­consciousness, the truth of consciousness itself, what it is in truth in and for itself. But because we are the negation of consciousness as such, consciousness in general or, better, formally speaking – and not the negation proper to particular figures of consciousness like sense-­ certainty, perception, or understanding – the self-­ consciousness that we already are at the outset of the Phenomenology is also a general, indeed formal, self-­consciousness – and not a particular figure of self-­ consciousness like desire and its resolution in the master/slave dialectic, or stoicism, skepticism, or the unhappy consciousness. Which means that this “formal” self-­ consciousness of ours – which is absolutely superfluous and absolutely necessary as the “observer” of apparent knowing’s dialectical progression from one self-­ negating figure of knowing to another (and whose being able to see that the progression is mediated by determined negation is what raises the presentation of apparent knowing to the level of science) – will need to be filled with content and verified at the appointed moment in the Phenomenology – the moment when the inaugural decision or cutting apart of man as anthropological creature (as living, life) and man as knowing or consciousness catches up with the dialectical presentation of consciousness and self-­consciousness and asks to be verified and legitimated in turn. This takes place – or should take place – in the passage from the dialectics of life and desire to the dialectics of master and slave. In brief: there is self-­consciousness (for self-­consciousness turned out to be the truth of consciousness, self-­knowing the truth of knowing); how is self-­ consciousness possible? Only as doubled, only as a self-­consciousness for a self-­consciousness, as Hegel puts it, “an I that is We and a We that is I.”5 (As I argue in Chapter 5, Hegel’s text in fact stutters at this point and does not, cannot, make the transition – and for good reasons, I might add, reasons analyzed rigorously by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness when he talks about Hegel’s mythology of concepts like Spirit, Idea, and so on.) If I rehearse this lesson in elementary dialectics, it is not just to reiterate  what it is that one would have to understand first before going about anything like a “critique” of Lukács who, if he understood anything, understood precisely this, as is legible on every page of the crucial “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” chapter of History and Class Consciousness. (See, for example, Lukács’s critique of Engels’s deplorable misunderstanding of Hegel’s “in-­itself” and

­142    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics “for-­us” in an excursus whose place in Lukács’s own presentation is most intriguing and itself requires interpretation.6) Rather I also want to give some indication, some “picture,” of how it is that Lukács’s apparently dialectical deduction of the proletariat as the “we,” as the subject (the subject-­object) of history, should work, given the “dialectical method” he explicitly takes over from Hegel and given his account of how the proletarian (self-­)consciousness is a solution to the antinomies of bourgeois thought. That is, it would seem that the passage or the progression from the reified thought of classical philosophy to the class consciousness of the proletariat amounts to Lukács’s having run the bourgeoisie/proletariat relation through the first two sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology, with bourgeois thought’s “contemplative” (too immediate) stance toward the objects of its knowledge corresponding globally to the stage of mere “consciousness,” and the proletarian consciousness’s being forced into a mediated self-­ consciousness (the self-­ consciousness of the commodity form itself) corresponding to the stage of “self-­consciousness” – as though we could pass directly to the  master/slave dialectic and the slave-­ consciousness’s mediated relation to the fruits of its labor containing, in germ, the promise of authentic self-­recognition and self-­consciousness. The only difference is – and what a difference! – that, as Terry Eagleton puts it, “What Lukács has in effect done here is to replace Hegel’s Absolute Idea – itself the identical subject-­object of history – with the proletariat.”7 But if this were indeed the case, if this were “all” that Lukács did, or all that happened in Lukács, then it would be difficult to see how his solution to the antinomies of bourgeois thought was any different from Hegel’s. If Hegel’s philosophy fails to discover the identical subject-­object in history and is therefore forced to go out beyond history and there “to establish the empire of reason which has discovered itself” – that is, if it is “driven inexorably into the arms of mythology” (146–7/329) – then Lukács’s merely substituting the proletariat for Hegel’s Spirit, Absolute, or Idea would be little more than the substitution of one “conceptual mythology” (Begriffsmythologie) for another, to use Lukács’s own apt term for it. It would amount to a mythology of the proletariat, and it is certainly true that a great deal in Lukács’s tone at least sounds like one. Such a mere reproduction of Hegel’s mythologizing – with its concomitant betrayal of dialectical method and its falling back into a “contemplative” mode – would certainly be hard to understand, indeed almost incomprehensible, in the case of a Hegelkenner like Lukács (to paraphrase Lukács on Engels’s misunderstanding of Hegel8). Given Lukács’s very convincing demonstration of how classical philosophy issues in impasses, dead ends, and aporias that leave it with the bleak

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alternatives of either integrating the irrational content it cannot account for within its conceptual system (while saying that it is non-­existent) – and thereby ending up in dogmatic rationalism – or admitting that actuality, matter, content reach right into the form – and thereby ending up in having to abandon the system as system – and given his demonstration of how even Hegel’s solutions are in fact non-­solutions, we should perhaps not hurry to assume that Lukács simply relapses into a reified, ­contemplative, conceptual mythology without a clue.9 That something else is going on in, and as, “Lukács” begins to become legible if we simply, and very schematically, try out, test out, Lukács’s presentation of his argument (in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”) against Hegel’s. If in the last section of this long chapter Lukács identifies the self-­consciousness of the proletariat – which, as the self-­consciousness of the commodity itself is also the self-­consciousness (and self-­negation) of capitalist society itself – as the subject, the producer, the “we,” of history itself, then behind this self-­verification of the true subject-­object of history must lie a moment of self-­negation on the part of Lukács’s own “we,” the “we” of the dialectical presentation of contemplative knowing’s self-­dissolution due to its determined internal contradictions. If we ask where this happens, where the “we” of Lukács’s own presentation gives up and negates the standpoint of immediacy, the “false” consciousness of bourgeois thought, then we would have to say that it takes place in the very critique of classical philosophy (as, ultimately, only a manifestation of the contradictions internal to capitalist society’s rationalization and commodification of all existence). That is, the “we” of Lukács’s own text would be the product of a self-­negation of bourgeois thought. But a strange thing happens here. If we look for the moment in Lukács’s presentation where reified, contemplative bourgeois thought negates itself and is thereby dialectically pushed or lifted (aufgehoben) beyond itself to an authentic historical self-­consciousness – that of the proletariat – we look in vain. For bourgeois thought in its self-­negation – even in its incarnation as Hegel’s philosophy with its indispensable “dialectical method” – can do no more than point beyond itself, and this rhetoric of “pointing beyond” is consistent throughout “Class Consciousness” and “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” Just two examples of the latter from the end of section two (“The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought”): “Thus classical philosophy finds itself historically in the paradoxical position that it was concerned to find a philosophy that would mean the end of bourgeois society, and to resurrect in thought a humanity destroyed in that society and by it. In the upshot, however, it did not manage to do more than provide a complete intellectual copy and the

­144    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics a priori deduction of bourgeois society. It is only the manner of this deduction, namely the dialectical method that points beyond bourgeois society (weist über die bürgerliche Gesellschaft hinaus) . . . The continuation of that course which at least in method started to point the way beyond these limits (über diese Schranken hinauszuweisen begann), namely the dialectical method as the true historical method was reserved for the class which was able to discover within itself on the basis of its life-­experience the identical subject-­object, the subject of action; the ‘we’ of the genesis: namely the proletariat” (148–9/331). If this is the case, if no amount of self-­negating on the part of bourgeois thought is going to result in the appearance, the coming upon the scene, of proletarian (self-­) consciousness but rather is always going to be, at best, a mere pointing beyond (hinausweisen) – and for very good historical material reasons, I might add – then a different picture of the emergence of the proletariat as the subject, the “we,” of history in Lukács’s account begins to emerge. For despite Lukács’s injunction that to comprehend the unity of subject and object, thought and existence, and so on, “it is necessary not merely to indicate (hinweisen) the methodical site of the dissolution of all these problems [the antinomies of bourgeois thought] but rather to exhibit concretely (konkret aufzeigen) the ‘we,’ the subject of history, that ‘we’ whose action history actually is” (145/327–8), it turns out that the consciousness of the proletariat can also in fact only point beyond (hinausweisen) bourgeois society and bourgeois thought. Some quick examples from the “Class Consciousness” chapter: “the proletariat always aspires towards the truth [eine Intention auf das Richtige is the German, an intention, a stretching toward, the correct] even in its ‘false’ consciousness and in its substantive errors” (72/247); or “The dialectical cleavage in the consciousness of the proletariat is a product of the same structure that makes the historical mission of the proletariat possible by pointing forward and beyond (das Hinausweisen über) the existing social order” (73/248); or “Only the consciousness of the proletariat can point to the way that leads out of (den Ausweg zeigen) the impasse of capitalism” (76/251). Perhaps the most tropologically overdetermined passage is one at the end of “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”: “Only when the consciousness of the proletariat is in a position to indicate [or show] that step (jenen Schritt zu zeigen) towards which the dialectic of [historical] development is objectively impelled, without however being able to accomplish it by its own dynamics, does the consciousness of the proletariat grow to consciousness of the process itself, does the proletariat appear (erscheint) as the identical subject-­ object of history, does its praxis become a transformation of reality. If the proletariat is not able to take this step (diesen Schritt nicht zu tun),

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then the contradictions remain unresolved and will be reproduced by the mechanism of history at a higher level, in an altered form and with increased intensity. It is in this that the objective necessity of the process of development consists. The deed of the proletariat can thus always be only the concrete-­practical carrying out [or following through] of the next step (die konkret-­praktische Durchführung des nächsten Schrittes) of the development” (197–8/385). An ambiguous “indicating” or “demonstrating” (zeigen) of the “next step” – is it a pointing toward the next step or is it a taking of the next step? – is what allows the proletariat to “appear” (erscheinen), but the contradictions (of historical development) can be resolved only if the proletariat is able to take the step (diesen Schritt . . . zu tun). The suspension between pointing toward the next step and taking the next step is nicely condensed in the last formulation: “The deed of the proletariat can thus always be only the concrete-­practical carrying out [or following through] (Durchführung) of the next step.” Durchführung – literally, “leading through” – means, figuratively, a doing of the action, a doing of the deed, or, as my dictionary helpfully puts it, “Umsetzen in die Tat,” a “transposition into the deed.” In other words, the deed of the proletariat is the transposition, transference, carrying over, to the deed: the deed is the step to the deed, the step is the step to the step. The action of the proletariat is the passage – transposition, transference, carrying over – to action. Lukács’s “next step” allows us to take (or at least point to) one more step. For if the action of the proletariat consists of the passage to action, and if this passage can itself be realized, can itself appear, only thanks to some kind of trope – indeed, only thanks to the phenomenalization of a moment of pointing or reference in (and by) a trope – then a clearer picture emerges of the relation between bourgeois thought and proletarian (self-­)consciousness. Namely – to put it very directly – as a formal system that would want to be closed but that reaches its limits in its very formalism and thus turns into a closed partial system, bourgeois thought (along with bourgeois society) would be a tropological system that can’t close itself off, that can’t account for its own principles of genesis and production in terms internal to the system, and that therefore produces a residue of reference, of the referential function, that points beyond the system and toward the material remainder of content, the system’s material substratum. This residue of reference or the referential function is the consciousness of the proletariat that always points or refers to that which would be (or would become) beyond bourgeois thought and bourgeois society but whose reference cannot be determined, identified, and made to appear except by a phenomenalization of reference in a trope – which phenomenalization always amounts to a re-­ideologization

­146    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics and a relapse into the reified categories of the partially coherent but totally incoherent and irrational system. In other words, the proletariat and proletarian (self-­ )consciousness would be an allegorical sign of that which disarticulates the tropological system of consciousness/self-­ consciousness, of that which is the material basis that overdetermines consciousness (as its condition of possibility and impossibility) and that the system of consciousness cannot account for. Which means, in any event, that however we may want to characterize the production of this material remainder of bourgeois thought (and the bourgeois economic system), the one way in which it does not emerge is by a dialectical self-­ negation modeled on the consciousness/self-­consciousness relation in Hegel. In fact – as is suggested by Lukács’s repeated formulations that the precious dialectical method bequeathed to us by Hegel can itself only point beyond reified, bourgeois thought – the dialectical method itself functions as an allegorical sign of the beyond-­dialectics, the other-­than-­ dialectics, with an overdetermined negativity and a material history all its own. So much for Lukács’s epistemological solution. Needless to say, it necessarily has a bearing on Lukács’s aesthetic solution as well. In lieu of an extended discussion, let me simply say that I was pleased to see that Fredric Jameson’s nuanced account (in his Marxism and Form) of Lukács’s theory of reflection agrees with – or at least could be read as agreeing with – the above. Jameson writes: “But the various polemics to which the so-­called reflection theory of knowledge has given rise may be avoided by seeing in this figure of speech not so much a theory in its own right as the sign of a theory to be elaborated: ‘the discovery of a reflection . . . always indicates the existence of an articulated link between at least two systems of relationships; the notion of reflection at this point functions as an indication (“signal”) of this articulated link. But when it is a question of thinking this link as such . . . then the concept of process alone proves to be genuinely operative, that is to say productive of the knowledge of such a link.’ The figure of the reflection of reality in thought is therefore simply a kind of conceptual shorthand designed to mark the presence of that type of mental operation we have elsewhere described as a historical trope, namely the setting in contact with each other of two distinct and incommensurable realities, one in the superstructure and the other in the base, the one cultural and the other socio-­economic.”10 A figure of speech which is also a shorthand and a marker, a trope which is also a writing – whatever it is, it is not a dialecticization of the relation between superstructure and base but rather a “setting in contact with each other,” that is, a contamination. Insofar as his dialectics is a contaminated dialectics – the contamination

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of dialectics and the other-­than-­dialectics – Lukács indeed takes the next step . . . to the next step, and does the deed.

Jameson That Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism as the logic of “late capitalism” (a term he takes over from the title of Ernest Mandel’s book Late Capitalism) can be taken as an extension of Lukács’s analyses in History and Class Consciousness is clear enough and has been noticed by others. Indeed, Jameson himself explicitly marks the debt in several places – both in the Postmodernism book and in many essays written during the 1980s and early 1990s. The most obvious sign of the debt to Lukács comes in Jameson’s resounding defense of the concept of “totality” – a defense that takes on almost heroic proportions, given the overwhelming odds in the face of which it is mounted: namely, the total atomization and fragmentation of all experience due to its relentless commodification by late capitalism; and the concomitant repudiation of the concept of totality as hopelessly out of fashion and out of date in postmodern theoretical discourse that makes a value out of pluralism and celebrates heterogeneity. Jameson’s analyses are clear-­sighted and unsparing on this point. To capture the rhythm of their dialectical progression, it is worth quoting at length: The passionate repudiation of the concept of totality is also illuminated by the proposition that it is more interesting as an anxiety to be analyzed in its own right rather than as a coherent philosophical position. The postmodern moment is also, among other things, to be understood as the moment in which late capitalism becomes conscious of itself, and thematizes itself, in terms of extreme social differentiation, or in other words, of a “pluralism” which is constitutive rather than, as in an older liberalism, simply ideal. For this last, “pluralism” is a value, that expresses itself in terms of moral imperatives such as tolerance and democracy (in the sociological sense of the acknowledgement of multiple group interests). In late capitalism, however, it is the very complexity of social relations and the inescapable fact of the coexistence of unimaginably atomized and fragmented segments of the social, that comes to be celebrated in its own right as the very bonus of pleasure and libidinal investment of the new social order as a whole. (Consider, for example, the attraction of fantasy images of the United States, of California and Manhattan, for Europeans.)   “Pluralism” has therefore now become something like an existential category, a descriptive feature that characterizes our present everyday life, rather than an ethical imperative to be realized within it. What is ideological about current celebrations of “pluralism” is that the slogan envelops and illicitly identifies two distinct dimensions of social complexity. There is the vertical

­148    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics dimension of late capitalist or corporate institutions, and then the horizontal one of increasingly multiple social groups. Celebrations of pluralism pass the first off under the guise of the second, in whose joyous and Utopian street “heterogeneity” it decks itself out.11

Hand in hand with Jameson’s defense of the concept of totality – and his attempt to think or at least to “map” the totality of late capitalism’s cultural logic – goes his redeployment of Lukács’s concept of “reification” to analyze the extreme forms that the combination of partial rationality and overall irrationality takes in the period of late capitalism. Late capitalism’s reification is so global and so total that it saturates all corners of cultural production – thanks in part to the development of “the tele-­technical powers” and the collapse of media and market into one (a collapse that requires a complete reconfiguration of any superstructure/base model). In addition to his redeploying (and updating) the Lukácsian concepts of “totality” and “reification,” Jameson, on the last page of Postmodernism, for good measure explicitly identifies the “cognitive mapping” announced by his earlier essay (and now first chapter) on postmodernism with “class consciousness”: “This is the sense in which two seemingly different conclusions to my two historical essays on the current situation (one on the sixties and the other the first chapter of this volume, on postmodernism) are in reality identical: in the second, I called for that ‘cognitive mapping’ of a new and global type which has just been evoked here; in the first, I anticipated a process of proletarianization on a global scale. ‘Cognitive mapping’ was in reality nothing but a code word for ‘class consciousness’ – only it proposed the need for class consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind, while it also inflected the account in the direction of that new spatiality implicit in the postmodern” (P 417–1812). If the conclusions of the sixties essay – the anticipation of “a process of proletarianization on a global scale” – and the postmodernism essay – calling for a “cognitive mapping” that is nothing but a code word for class consciousness – are in reality identical, then clearly enough what Jameson would attempt here is to take that very Lukácsian “next step” to a “consciousness of the proletariat” (one that corresponds to our historical situation). One specific way in which Jameson’s analyses of the postmodern moment regularly bring us back to class consciousness is his insistent attempt to distinguish and to articulate the relation between the notions of “group” and “class.” The postmodern aesthetics (and ideology) of difference proposes that we now represent our social world to ourselves by way of the category of groups – “race, gender, ethnic culture, and the like” (P 345) – a representation which brings along with it certain gratifying advantages over the category of social class but only at the cost of

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the “new depthlessness” (P 6) and the “weakening of historicity” (P 6) peculiar to postmodernism. In another passage worth quoting at length, Jameson articulates the difference thus: Group representation is above all anthropomorphic and, unlike representation in terms of social classes, gives us to understand the social world as divided up and colonized down to the last segment by its collective actors and allegorical representatives, betokening a real world “as full as an egg,” as Sartre used to say, and as human as Utopia . . . Class categories are more material, more impure and scandalously mixed, in the way in which their determinants or definitional factors involve the production of objects and the relations determined by that, along with the forces of the respective machinery: we can thus see down through class categories to the rocky bottom of the stream. Meanwhile, classes are too large to figure as Utopias, as options you choose and identify with in phantasmatic ways. Besides the occasional stray fascism, the only Utopian gratification offered by the category of social class is the latter’s abolition. But groups are small enough (at the limit, the famous “face-­to-­face” plaza or city-­state) to allow for libidinal investment of a narrative kind. Meanwhile, the externality carried around within the category of the “group” like a skeleton is not production but rather institution, already, as we shall see, a more suspicious and equally anthropomorphic category – whence the superior mobilizing force of groups over classes: one can come to love one’s guild or fraternity and die for it, but the cathexis determined by the three-­field rotational system or the universal lathe is probably of a somewhat different and less immediately politicizable type. Classes are few; they come into being by slow transformations in the mode of production; even emergent they seem perpetually at distance from themselves and have to work hard to be sure they really exist as such. Groups, on the other hand, seem to offer the gratifications of psychic identity (from nationalism to neoethnicity). Since they have become images, groups allow the amnesia of their own bloody pasts, of persecution and untouchability, and can now be consumed: this marks their relationship to the media, which are, as it were, their parliament and the space of their “representation,” in the political fully as much as the semiotic sense. (P 346–7)

The reassuring complacencies and seductions that group representation necessarily brings along with it are clear: an anthropomorphizing, indeed humanizing, idealism that would make a claim to “the real world” of institutions and power while in fact (i.e., in relation to the “totality” of late capitalism) its (self-­)images are only consumer products on the media-­market – just one more shopping channel among others. But it’s not that Jameson rejects out of hand the representation of the social world in terms of group categories and denies it any analytic value. On the contrary, in several places he ascribes a particular epistemological value and precedence to theoretical discourses based on group identity. For instance, in his essay on Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, Jameson goes over three such discourses – feminist

­150    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics “standpoint theory” (gender), “Black theory” (race), and the theory that comes out of the experience of the German Jew (Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer are named) – and insists on the “new and positive epistemological possibilities” that these theories offer and on their being at least theoretically distinct from those enumerated by the Marxist tradition. These epistemological possibilities are distinct from those accounted for in the Marxist tradition because of the “very different structural submission to negative constraint from that of the workers” that constitutes these group identities. In the case of feminist standpoint theory, these include “an experience of the body radically distinct from that of men, or even of male workers,” “a capacity for non-­reified consciousness” (usually negatively characterized and caricatured: feminine “intuition” and feeling and so on), and “an experience of the collective which is different from the active collective praxis of workers.” In the case of the German Jewish experience, it is the “more primary experience” of fear and vulnerability, which, in all its radicality, “cuts across class and gender to the point of touching the bourgeois in the very isolation of his town houses or sumptuous Berlin apartments” and “is surely the very ‘moment of truth’ of ghetto life itself, as the Jews and so many other ethnic groups have had to live it: the helplessness of the village community before the perpetual and unpredictable imminence of the lynching or the pogrom, the race riot. Other groups’ experience of fear is occasional, rather than constitutive: standpoint analysis specifically demands a differentiation between the various negative experiences of constraint, between the exploitation suffered by workers and the oppression suffered by women and continuing on through the distinct structural forms of exclusion and alienation characteristic of other kinds of group experience.”13 Yet although Jameson is so ready to acknowledge the “specific epistemology,” the “specific view from below,” and the “specific and distinctive truth claims” of the group under constraint, he insists that this does not amount to relativism or pluralism on account of the “identity of the absent common object of such ‘theorization’ from multiple ‘standpoints.’” What is that absent common object? “What one therefore does not exactly have the right to call (but let it stand as contradictory short-­hand) ‘late capitalism.’”14 Jameson’s half-­abdication of the right to call it “late capitalism” notwithstanding – and his interesting resort to the rhetoric of proofreading (“let it stand”) and stenography (“short-­hand”) – his final move is clear. If these groups under constraint can produce a specific epistemology with a truth claim that has its own distinctive validity, it is only to the extent that their conditions of “constraint” and privation are at least (determinately) like that of the proletariat. Jameson’s “epistemological solution” here is certainly not

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to grant a privileged place to the proletariat as subject. Nevertheless, his ultimate move does consist in reading (or writing?) all of these groups “under constraint” – along with their specific epistemologies and truth claims – against the background of the ultimate hermeneutic horizon of what he calls (however tortuously) “late capitalism.” (Would one expect or want anything else from a resolute, consequent, and pretty wily Marxist?) As is legible in Jameson’s later “On Cultural Studies,” this solution already constitutes his “response” to cultural studies. While stressing that the “articulation” of different differences constitutes “the central theoretical problem or conceptual core of Cultural Studies,” Jameson remains vigilant lest we confuse the potentially idealist anthropomorphizing phantasms of a group identity represented by the market and consumption with the specific epistemology produced by the experience of constraint that these groups have to suffer. On the relation between ethnic and class categories, Jameson writes: it is only after the modulation of the ethnic into the class category that a possible resolution of such struggles is to be found. For, in general, ethnic conflict cannot be solved or resolved; it can only be sublimated into a struggle of a different kind that can be resolved. Class struggle, which has as its aim and outcome not the triumph of one class over another but the abolition of the very category of class, offers the prototype of one such sublimation. The market and consumption – that is to say, what is euphemistically called modernization, the transformation of the members of various groups into the universal consumer – is another kind of sublimation, which has come to look equally as universal as the classless one, but which perhaps owes its success predominantly to the specific circumstances of the postfeudal North American commonwealth, and the possibilities of social leveling that arose with the development of the mass media. This is the sense in which “American democracy” has seemed to preempt class dynamics and to offer a unique solution to the matter of group dynamics discussed above. We therefore need to take into account the possibility that the various politics of difference – the differences inherent in the various politics of “group identity” – have been made possible only by the tendential leveling of social identity generated by consumer society.15

That Jameson’s work in Postmodernism and after should have constituted a certain “response” to cultural studies is no surprise, given that The Political Unconscious can be taken as a certain response to, call it, textualist poststructuralism (or, more narrowly, “deconstruction”) and The Prison-­House of Language and Marxism and Form as responses to the moment of “structuralism.” And, as in the case of these earlier responses, there is plenty of genuine merit in it. Aside from the massively convincing (at least for me) global analysis or “mapping” of

­152    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics late capitalism’s “cultural logic,” and aside from Jameson’s admirable vigilance in trying to distinguish differences concocted by multinational capital from “real” (historical, material) differences (which, for him, always refer back to class), there are other local merits to Jameson’s efforts. Among others, I would single out the explanatory power of Jameson’s analysis: for instance, its ability to explain the decline in the fortunes and the usefulness of the term “ideology.” In the postmodern period, the old 1950s acquaintance “the end of ideology” returns with a new and unexpected kind of plausibility: “But ideology is now over,” writes Jameson, “not because class struggle has ended and no one has anything class-­ideological to fight about, but rather because the fate of ‘ideology’ in this particular sense can be understood to mean that conscious ideologies and political opinions, particular thought systems along with the official philosophical ones which laid claim to a greater universality – the whole realm of consciousness, argument, and the very appearance of persuasion itself (or of reasoned dissent) – has ceased to be functional in perpetuating and reproducing the system . . . one may also wonder, with Adorno, whether ‘in our time the commodity has not become its own ideology’ – that is to say, whether practices have not replaced ratiocination (or rationalization), and in particular whether the practice of consumption has not replaced the resolute taking of a stand and the full-­throated endorsement of a political opinion. Here too, then, the media meets the market and joins hands upon the body of an older kind of intellectual culture” (P 398). At a time when the commodity becomes its own ideology and the media meets the market, the ­intellectual – in particular, the humanist – is no longer needed to perform the role assigned him by the educational ideological state apparatus: to reproduce the relations of production (i.e., of capitalist relations of exploitation). This function is performed so much more ably and so much more efficiently by the tele-­technical powers of the media (a market that sells selling) and corporate advertizing and PR, which have their own “intellectuals.” In his cultural studies essay, Jameson quotes Ian Hunter: “The problem with aesthetic critique – and with cultural studies to the degree that it is still caught in its slipstream – is that it presumes to comprehend and judge these other cultural regions from a single metropolitan point, typically the university arts faculty. To travel to these other regions – to law offices, media institutions, government bureaus, corporations, advertising agencies – is to make a sobering discovery: They are already replete with their own intellectuals. And they just look up and say, ‘Well, what exactly is it that you can do for us?’”16 This may perhaps be a worthwhile reminder or admonition to academics all eager to set up their own shopping networks or websites in the

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form of Cultural Studies programs – even more eagerly supported by academic administrators – that celebrate difference, diversity, multi-­this and multi-­that, without asking about the dreary sameness all of this differentiation amounts to in the electronic or cyber-­eyes of those who have your credit card number on file and know where you live. If we ask about the problems or possible shortcomings of Jameson’s analysis, they no doubt have their origins in the same place as its strengths: perhaps first of all in what I would call the resolutely hermeneutic presuppositions of Jameson’s entire project. That is, all of the postmodernist phenomena that come on the scene are always to be interpreted and understood against the ultimate hermeneutic horizon of what is indeed the logic (“the cultural logic”) of late capitalism. One can certainly attribute the impressive historicizing power of Jameson’s ­analysis to this ultimate horizon of meaning, but it is also responsible for the general (and sometimes dismaying) shapelessness of Jameson’s ­argument – particularly in the 120-­page “Conclusion” to Postmodernism. In fact, thanks to the implacable logic of this horizon, Jameson need not make an argument; he needs only to refer individual phenomena back to the (only) logic that gives them meaning. One can already wonder about the extent to which such a hermeneutic can account for the poetics of postmodernism. How reliable and how convincing is the passage from the specific structures of individual postmodern phenomena to the meanings ascribed them by the logic of late capitalism? Doesn’t such a passage depend on precisely overlooking and not reading the phenomena in their specificity – in the same way that any attempt to move from the specific linguistic structures of particular texts to literary historical period categories and values depends on not reading the texts? This is another way of asking about the determinateness of the relation between the hermeneutic horizon and the phenomena that appear against it. While on the one hand Jameson seems acutely aware of the overdetermined nature of the artifacts he analyzes, on the other hand he consistently reduces these overdeterminations to what Althusser would call “simple negation” – the “determined negation” (bestimmte Negation) of Hegel – when it comes to the artifacts’ reference to the ultimate meaning-­ granting horizon. One example would be the way he brings the specific epistemologies with their specific truth claims of the various groups “under constraint” back to the identity of the ultimate “absent common object” – late capitalism – precisely by interpreting the negativity of this “constraint” as a determined negative whose content, in fine Hegelian fashion, is determined by that which it negates. (“Transcoding” and Jameson’s understanding of “structural causality” in The Political Unconscious ultimately work in the same way.) This would be at least

­154    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics one sense in which the production of “class consciousness” in Jameson’s analysis – despite its explicit genealogy in Lukács – in fact differs from that in Lukács, where, as I tried to show, it gets produced as the material remainder or excess of the tropological system that is bourgeois ideology. In short: whereas in Lukács “class consciousness” gets produced as an excess of trope (as excessive to the system of consciousness that is in fact always a tropological system), in Jameson it is trope (the phenomenalization and determination of an allegorical sign’s reference). Of course, there are plenty of signs that things in fact work the same way in Jameson: for instance, his persistent invocation of the term “allegory” to indicate both the possibilities and the limits of “representing” or “mapping” that which by definition is unrepresentable; and, indeed, his insistently allegorical use of the term “dialectic” (as in “the dialectic”) to designate that which in fact does not come into being by means of the work of the determinate negative and self-­consciousness. In fact, one could say that the irrepressibly “Utopian” dimension of Jameson’s work derives from this gap between the meaning of terms like “the dialectic” and the supplementary function they gain when they are put to work.17 It is somewhat ironic (if perhaps inevitable), then, that one of the things this inveterately allegorical writer should get wrong is precisely Paul de Man’s reading of allegory, which Jameson persists in understanding as an increase in self-­consciousness when it instead marks the utter disjunction between the subject – which in allegory becomes a purely “grammatical subject” – and the objects of its (self-­)knowledge.18 Perhaps equally and emblematically indicative and symptomatic is a slight shift Jameson makes between two quotations of Althusser’s famous “definition” of ideology. On page 51 of Postmodernism, Jameson quotes: “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.” Although the quotation is already approximate, it does preserve the triplicity of Althusser’s terms: ideology is the representation of an imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence.19 That is, ideology is not the false or distorted representation of something real but rather the representation of an already “represented,” i.e., imaginary, relation to the real. In other words, ideology for Althusser in this account is already allegorical insofar as it represents one thing but means (by a relation of precisely “relation”) another. The real conditions, in short, are unrepresentable, and one can have only an imaginary relation to them – which (imaginary) relation is represented in turn by ideology. Which means, among other things, that it can never be enough to demystify ideology, for such demystification does not take one back to the real conditions but only to the imaginary relations to those real conditions. Needed instead is an

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allegorical reading of this allegorical structure that represents one thing but that means, points to, refers to, another – and what it means is the destruction of what it represents. Both Benjamin and de Man would indeed be quite happy with Althusser’s “definition” of ideology. Jameson not so, for he changes it on page 415 of Postmodernism to read: “the Imaginary representation of the subject’s relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.” Aside from being still more approximate than the first quotation, this one moves the term “Imaginary” from serving as a modifier of “relation” to serving as a modifier of “representation.” In doing so, it threatens to turn into a two-­fold what is in fact a three-­fold in Althusser and thereby to restore all the binaries of vulgar Marxism – superstructure/base, ideology/science, to name just two. In other words, the change threatens to determine (and hence to phenomenalize) the reference of ideology and thereby to ideologize it in turn as, say, “error” or “false consciousness” – what Althusser would have called in nicely old-­fashioned terms “theoreticist error.”20 Jameson’s work seems to me suspended between taking “ideology” (or “cultural logic”) as “error” and reading it allegorically – a suspension that is no doubt the source of both its strengths and its weaknesses.

Notes   1. The original version of this chapter was presented at an MLA Convention session on “Lukács and Derrida” in 1995 – hence the unwieldy opening – where I chose to speak on Lukács rather than on Derrida for “strategic” and other reasons.   2. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 3, trans. P. S. Falla (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 299.   3. Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London: Verso, 1991), p. 97. Cf. Kolakowski’s critique in Main Currents, pp. 299–300.   4. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 324–5.  5. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), p. 140. English in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 110. My paraphrase of Hegel above is mostly of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth paragraphs of the Introduction to the Phenomenology. The deduction or “identification” of the “we” as a “formal” self-­consciousness is an interpretation that requires another (longer) essay.  6. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 131–3. Subsequent references to this book are given in the body of the text. The first page number refers to this English edition – whose translation I have had to modify on occasion – and the second page number to Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein in Lukács’s Werke (Neuwied and Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand, 1968).

­156    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics  7. Eagleton, Ideology, p. 98.  8. “Above all we must correct a terminological confusion that is almost incomprehensible in such a connoisseur of Hegel as was Engels. For Hegel the terms ‘in itself’ and ‘for us’ are by no means opposites; in fact they are necessary correlatives. That something exists merely ‘in itself’ means for Hegel that it merely exists ‘for us.’ The antithesis of ‘for us or in itself’ is rather ‘for itself,’ namely that mode of being posited where the fact that an object is thought of implies at the same time that the object is conscious of itself.” Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, pp. 132/311.  9. For Lukács’s formulation of this either/or, see History and Class Consciousness, pp. 118/295. 10. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 188–9. Jameson is quoting J. L. Houdebine, “Sur une lecture de Lénine,” in Théorie d’ensemble (Paris: Seuil, 1968), pp. 295–6. 11. Fredric Jameson, “History and Class Consciousness as an ‘Unfinished Project’,” Rethinking Marxism 1:1 (Spring 1988), p. 61. 12. All references to Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), will be given in the body of the text as P followed by the page number. 13. Jameson, “History and Class Consciousness as an ‘Unfinished Project’,” p. 70. 14. Ibid. p. 71. 15. Fredric Jameson, “On Cultural Studies,” in John Rajchman (ed.), The Identity in Question (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 275–6. 16. Quoted in Jameson, “On Cultural Studies,” pp. 283–4. 17. Cf. Louis Althusser on the need to distinguish the “suppletory theoretical function (la fonction théorique supplétive) of particular concepts from the concepts themselves” in the case of Marx’s “works of the break,” e.g., The German Ideology, in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage, 1970), p. 37. 18. See Jameson’s essay on de Man in Postmodernism, pp. 217–59, and the beginnings of a critique in my “Ending Up/Taking Back (with Two Postscripts on Paul de Man’s Historical Materialism),” in Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). See in particular note 26. 19. For the record, here is the exact wording in English translation: “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 162. 20. Cf. Althusser’s “autocritique” in Essays in Self-­Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: New Left Books, 1976).

Chapter 8

Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin

Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin’s late hymns – his third and last lecture course on Hölderlin, given in the summer of 1942 and published in 1984 as volume 53 of the Gesamtausgabe – follow a path from and back to a commentary on Hölderlin’s “Der Ister” by way of a long excursus on the Greek determination of man’s essence in Sophocles’s Antigone. This excursus to Greece – and hence Heidegger’s entire interpretation of Hölderlin – turns, as always, on a translation from the Greek. Here it is the well-­known second choral ode of Antigone, in particular one word in its opening, which Heidegger renders as follows: Vielfältig das Unheimliche, nichts doch über den Menschen hinaus Unheimlicheres ragend sich regt.

and which Ralph Manheim in turn translates as: “There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness.”1 This opening is something of a riddle – why is it, how is it, that man is stranger than strange, more uncanny than the uncanny? – and the lines that follow could hardly be taken as an answer: man goes out on the sea and on land, masters the earth and the animals, teaches himself language and thought, cures illnesses, and yet comes to nothing, for he cannot escape death. Whatever the “answer” to the riddle of man, it has to do with what he can do and what he cannot do anything about, his living and his dying. Heidegger’s translation of the Greek words deinon and deinataton by unheimlich (“uncanny,” say) is already an answer to the riddle: an account of man’s living and dying, his always going out to that which is different and his always coming back to the same. But before going over to Heidegger’s “answer” – to his determination of man’s essence as the most uncanny of that which is uncanny – we should note that it is a little different from, not quite the same as, Hölderlin’s own “answer.” That is, Hölderlin translates the opening of the choral ode by rendering the Greek word not as unheimlich but as ungeheuer:

­160    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics Ungeheuer ist viel. Doch nichts Ungeheuerer als der Mensch. Much is monstrous. But nothing more monstrous than man.

Heidegger is, of course, well aware of this difference and the apparent strangeness of interpreting Hölderlin’s dialogue with Sophocles and yet not using Hölderlin’s own translation of Sophocles: “Since Hölderlin himself translated the whole of Sophocles’ Antigone, it would seem appropriate to listen to this choral ode in Hölderlin’s own translation. Nevertheless, this translation (Übersetzung) is comprehensible only on the basis of the Hölderlinian translation (Übertragung) in its entirety and this in turn only in the immediate proximity of the original Greek word” (70)2. In other words, Heidegger does not quote Hölderlin’s own translation because he does not want to quote it out of context. But the “context” of Hölderlin’s translation in its entirety is not to be understood in any ordinary sense. As many scandalized philologists have pointed out, Heidegger has no trouble whatsoever quoting Hölderlin out of context – indeed, some would say that his whole project of interpreting Hölderlin rests on arbitrarily ripping lines out of context and making them mean something other than what they mean “in context.” No, Heidegger means more than that by “only on the basis of Hölderlinian translation in its entirety” (nur aus dem Ganzen der Hölderlinschen Übertragung) – as the switch from Übersetzung to Übertragung suggests. He means that Hölderlin’s translation of the choral ode would be understandable only on the basis of our already having understood Hölderlin’s interpretation of the Greeks’ historical specificity and our (“Hesperian”) historical specificity in their sameness and their difference. In other words, the real reason for Heidegger’s not quoting Hölderlin’s translation here is the nature, the essence, of translation itself. Translation, according to Heidegger’s “Note on Translation” which he interposes directly after his quotation of the choral ode, is not the substitution of a word in one language by a word in another language as though one could coincide with the other. All translation has to be interpretation (Auslegen), not the preparatory step to interpretation but always the result of interpretation. “But the reverse also holds,” continues Heidegger: “every interpretation, and everything that serves it, is a translation. For translation moves not only between two different languages, but rather there is a translation within the same language. The interpretation of Hölderlin’s hymns is a translation internal to our German language” (75). Heidegger summarizes: “All translation is interpretation. And all interpretation is translation. Insofar as it is necessary for us to interpret works of thought

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and of poetry of our own language, this indicates that every historical language in itself and for itself is in need of translation and not only in relation to a foreign language. This in turn indicates that a historical people is at home in its own language not of itself, that is, not without its contribution [its act in addition, Zutun]. Hence it can happen that we indeed speak ‘German’ and yet talk in nothing but ‘American’” (79–80). (And to talk “American” is according to these lectures of 1942 the worst thing one can do. What the lectures call Amerikanismus is bereft of history [geschichtslos] and unhistorical [ungeschichtlich], and even “Bolshevism” is only a degenerate form [Abart] of Amerikanismus.) If this is the case, if translation is not confined to what takes place between different languages but rather is what (always already) takes place within “one” and the same language, then it is no wonder that Heidegger, in his attempt to interpret the Greeks and Hölderlin, to interpret the dialogue of Hölderlin and the Greeks, does not (indeed, cannot) use Hölderlin’s “own” translation but rather has to retranslate both Sophocles’s Greek and Hölderlin’s German. For Hölderlin’s German is not his own, is not truly German, is not in an authentically historical sense, except in dialogue with Greek – just as “a historical people is only on the basis of the dialogue of its language with foreign languages” (Ein geschichtliches Volk ist nur aus der Zwiesprache seiner Sprache mit fremden Sprachen) (80). Hence when Heidegger retranslates the Greek word, the x of the Greeks’ determination of man’s essence, with his unheimlich (uncanny) rather than Hölderlin’s ungeheuer, it is no arbitrary substitution but an interpretation that would say the same thing as Hölderlin. For to say the same (das Selbe) is not to say the merely identical (das Gleiche): “the same is truly the same only in the differentiated” (155), says Heidegger. In order to think the same of what Hölderlin says, it is necessary to say what he leaves unsaid, in other words, to say it differently, to say it otherwise. This is why Heidegger says unheimlich and not ungeheuer (i.e., unheimlich says the same thing as ungeheuer but [precisely because] it says it in its difference). As is clear, all the weight of Heidegger’s ­thinking – of the same and the identical, of Dichten and Denken, of dialogue as Auseinandersetzung, and so on – and what Philippe Lacoue-­ Labarthe calls its “hyperbologic”3 – in short-­hand, the more it differs, the more it is the same – could be brought to bear in order to justify this retranslation. Nevertheless, questions remain. For one, it remains to be asked whether Heidegger’s unheimlich preserves the internal difference proper to ungeheuer, whether his retranslation translates the word’s self-­ translation. What happens when the x of the Greek, the x of the Greeks – their determination of the essential nature of man – is translated as unheimlich and not as ungeheuer? And since the question of the Greek

­162    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics x is precisely the question of translation – that is, going out to the different and returning to the same – this question also asks: what happens when the x of translation – the translation of translation, as it were – is translated as unheimlich and not as ungeheuer? Heidegger would, of course, have no trouble solving the riddle: what happens is that we begin finally to understand Hölderlin. In other words, Heidegger’s retranslation of the choral ode is thinking more Hölderlinian than Hölderlin – just as in order to understand the Greeks we have “to think more Greek than the Greeks themselves” (griechischer denken als die Griechen selbst) (100) – and many commentators have pointed out that in his retranslation of the Greek Heidegger only follows a path already marked out for him by Hölderlin’s own translation: that is, in the direction of a “pessimistic” reading of the choral ode – not as a hymn to the glory of man but as a putting into question of man as monstrous in his excesses as wielder of Technik when thought against the background of his essential finitude. How is unheimlich instead of ungeheuer more Hölderlinian than Hölderlin? Heidegger thinks man’s essential “uncanniness” (Unheimlichkeit) on the basis of what he calls the law of history, or, better, “the law of historicality” (das Gesetz der Geschichtlichkeit). This law is to be thought as “the altercation of that which is foreign and that which is one’s own” (Auseinandersetzung des Fremden und des Eigenen) which is “the grounding truth of history” (die Grundwahrheit der Geschichte) (61). If man is unheimlich – the most unheimlich of all that is unheimlich – it is because his essence consists in “coming to be at home” (Heimischwerden); and if his essence is “coming to be at home” (Heimischwerden), then this means that it is at the same time “not being at home” (Unheimischsein). “Coming to be at home” (Heimischwerden) and “not being at home” (Unheimischsein) are mutually implicated, mutually determine the essence of man: if man has to come to be at home, then he is not at home; if man is not at home, then he has to come to be at home. Coming to be at home in that which is one’s own (Das Heimischwerden im Eigenen) is the only concern [or “care,” Sorge] of the poetry of Hölderlin that has entered the form of the “hymn,” whereby of course “hymn” means no fixed literary and poetic schema, but rather determines its essence on the basis of the saying of coming into that which is one’s own. That which is one’s own (das Eigene) is the native (das Vaterländische) of the German. That which is native itself is at home with the mother earth. This coming to be at home (Heimischwerden) in that which is one’s own includes in itself that man first of all and for a long time and sometimes for always is not at home. And this in turn includes that man mistakes and denies and flees the at-­home (das Heimische), perhaps even must deny it. Thus coming to be at home (das Heimischwerden) is a passing through that which is foreign. (60)

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This “law of historicality” – the mutual implication and intrication of not being at home (Unheimischsein) and coming to be at home (Heimischwerden) – is given an ontological interpretation by Heidegger – i.e., in the terms of the fundamental ontological project of Sein und Zeit and the existential analytic of Dasein. That is, man’s uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) is grounded in his homelessness (Unheimischkeit) and this homelessness in turn has its hidden ground in man’s relation (Bezug) to Being. In short: “The uncanniness of man has its essence in homelessness, but this homelessness is what it is only through this, that man is at home at all in Being” (Die Unheimlichkeit des Menschen hat ihr Wesen in der Unheimischkeit, diese aber ist, was sie ist, nur dadurch, daß der Mensch überhaupt im Sein heimisch ist) (113–14). It is this reading of Unheimlichkeit on the basis of Unheimischkeit and in turn on the basis of man’s relation to Being that allows Heidegger to interpret the choral ode in terms of the ontological difference between Being and beings, Sein and Seiendes.4 That is, man goes out and seeks his home in beings (Seiendes), masters it through his technology, but is always called back to the same nothing by his essential finitude, his death, and this nothing is the nothing of Being – the only place he can be at home. In short, man’s Unheimlichkeit is grounded in his essential Unheimischsein (not being at home) and Heimischwerden (coming to be at home), and Heidegger has little trouble interpreting Hölderlin’s ungeheuer as meaning the same as unheimisch: “The monstrous is at the same time and properly speaking the unfamiliar. The familiar is the intimate, the at home. The monstrous is the not at home” (Das Ungeheure ist zugleich und eigentlich das Nicht-­ Geheure. Das Geheure ist das Vertraute, Heimische. Das Ungeheure ist das Un-­heimische) (86). If unheimlich means unheimisch and ungeheuer means unheimisch, then ungeheuer means unheimlich. Hence Heidegger can justify his retranslation: “In that we translate deinon with ‘unheimlich,’ we think in the direction of the not familiar” (Indem wir das deinon mit ‘unheimlich’ übersetzen, denken wir in die Richtung des Nicht-­ geheuren) (87). In short, Heidegger translates Hölderlin’s going over and coming back on the basis of the essence of going over and coming back and this means by himself going over and coming back: from Hölderlin to the Greek(s) and back. Hence it is no wonder that Heidegger also has no trouble in interpreting the enigmatic lines of “Der Ister”: Der [the Ister] scheinet aber fast Rükwärts zu gehen und Ich mein, er müsse kommen Von Osten. Vieles wäre Zu sagen davon.

­164    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics But it [the river Ister] seems almost To go backwards and I mean, it must come From the East. Much could Be said about this.

If the Ister – the Greek name for the Danube (Istros) – seems to hesitate at its source and origin in Germany before resuming its West to East itinerary and thus seems almost to go backwards (i.e., East to West, as though it had come from the East), it is not just on account of the difficulty (for a demi-­god) of forgetting the source. Rather it is also because the river Ister fulfills the law of historicity – in short, coming to be at home by going out to and back from that which is foreign, the altercation of Unheimischsein and Heimischwerden – and it has always already fulfilled the law of history at its source, at its origin, by having invited the Greek Hercules as a guest (den Herkules zu Gaste geladen), as the second strophe puts it, when he came from the hot isthmus (vom heißen Isthmos) to the shady source of the Ister looking for the shady olive tree to plant it in the shadeless festival arena of the Olympic games. “The Ister,” writes Heidegger, “is the river, for which that which is foreign is a guest and present already at the source, the river in whose flowing the dialogue of that which is one’s own and that which is foreign always speaks” (Der Ister ist jener Strom, bei dem schon an der Quelle das Fremde zu Gast und gegenwärtig ist, in dessen Strömen die Zwiesprache des Eigenen und Fremden ständig spricht) (182). If the Ister at its source seems almost to go backward, as though it had come from the East, it is because its foreignness is at the source, it has always already at its source gone out to the foreign and come back to the fatherland. The Ister does not want to go East because it has always already at its source gone to the East and come back to the West – thus fulfilling its authentically historical destiny, its essence as Halbgott, and hence as essentially poetic (dichterisch), and so on. This brief and insufficient sketch of Heidegger’s interpretation of going over and coming back by going over and coming back should nevertheless indicate the “law” governing his interpretation of Hölderlin. That “law” is the law of history itself – “according to which that which is one’s own is the most distant and the path to that which is most one’s own is the longest and most difficult” (derzufolge das Eigene das Fernste und der Weg zum Eigensten der längste und schwerste ist) (179) – and it is grounded in an ontological interpretation of historical man’s essence. This is why it is futile to object to Heidegger’s interpretation on the basis of any prematurely “philological” grounds: if Heidegger interprets

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Hölderlin “out of context,” he nevertheless thinks that poetry within a more rigorous “context” – that of fundamental ontology and its account of the relation between apparent and non-­apparent meaning, between said and unsaid, thought and unthought – than any mere philology can come up with (because as mere philology it cannot think its own essence and therefore always has to interpret on the basis of an unthought [i.e., metaphysical] interpretation of Being). Nevertheless, a question can still be asked. An oblique way to formulate it would be to ask whether Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s ungeheuer as nicht geheuer (and this in turn as unheimisch) leaves anything over, a self-­translating difference from itself that is not quite gotten across by changing un-­ to nicht. On a purely “verbal” level – when we translate ungeheuer into English or French and not into German – it is clear what does not make it across: it is the monstrous and the monster, the monstrous of man and the monster that is man. (And that Hölderlin does, to some extent, mean monster is corroborated by his famous statement of “the tragic” in the “Notes to Oedipus”: “The presentation of the tragic rests principally on the notion that the monstrous [das Ungeheure], the way in which god and man mate [“couple,” sich paart], in which the natural force and the most inner part of man become one, boundless, in rage, is understood through the purification, by a limitless scission, of the boundless act of becoming-­one.”5) A less oblique way to ask the question of this excess monstrosity (of translation6) would be in terms of Heidegger’s “law of history”: that is, if in thinking the same as Hölderlin, Heidegger remembers to say it differently, to say it in its difference from itself – in short, remembers that Hölderlin has “his own” language only in dialogue with the foreign language of the Greeks – does he also remember to think the same of the Greeks and of the Greek in its internal difference from itself – in short, does he remember that the Greeks also had “their own” language only in dialogue with a foreign language? In other words, we are asking about Hölderlin’s famous first letter to Böhlendorff (4 December 1801) and its interpretation of the conditions of poetry-­writing for the Greeks and for us “Hesperians” in terms of differing relations between that which is one’s own and that which is foreign, das Eigene and das Fremde, for the Greeks and for us. Heidegger not only refers to the letter and its scheme throughout the two hundred pages of his lectures – for instance in his abbreviated version of the “law of history”: “that which is one’s own the most distant – the path to that which is most one’s own the most difficult” (das Eigene das Fernste – der Weg zum Eigensten der schwerste) (179) – but also gives it a more elaborate explicit interpretation than anywhere else in his work. In brief, the scheme runs as follows: that which is national, natural, their own (das Eigene) for the Greeks,

­166    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics what they are born to, is what Hölderlin characterizes as the “fire from heaven” and “holy pathos”; whereas that which is foreign and needs to be appropriated for the Greeks is what he characterizes as “the clarity of representation” and “Junonian sobriety.” For us Hesperians, it is the reverse: our nature, what we are born with, that which is our own (das Eigene), is precisely “the clarity of representation” and “Junonian sobriety”; whereas that which is foreign and in need of appropriation for us is the “fire from heaven” and “holy pathos.” What is natural and das Eigene for the Greeks is foreign (das Fremde) for us; and what is foreign (das Fremde) for the Greeks is natural and das Eigene for us. There is a chiasmic reversal in the relations of das Eigene and das Fremde for the Greeks and for us, and the reason is easy to see: what we are born to, what is natural, national, and proper for us, is precisely that which the Greeks – whose nature was different from ours – appropriated: that is, their culture. Our nature is Greek culture. The ramifications of this reversal are far-­reaching: for one thing, it means that we Hesperian artists cannot simply imitate Greek art – treat it as though it were nature – because that art is the response to a different nature from ours. In short – as Peter Szondi puts it – it means a wholesale rejection of Winckelmannian  classicism.7 On the other hand, it does not mean a wholesale turning away from the Greeks, for that which is one’s own, says Hölderlin, has to be learned just as much as that which is foreign; and because it is that which is one’s own – natural, national, that which we are born with – it is the most difficult to use freely, and this is why we will never surpass the Greeks in the clarity of representation and Junonian sobriety that we are born with and that for them was foreign (and therefore easier to use freely). In any case, much could be said about this (and I have done so in three essays on Hölderlin).8 Here we are more interested in what Heidegger does – and what is done to Heidegger – when he comes to interpret this letter and its historical scheme. Although he follows the letter faithfully in his interpretation of it, Heidegger nevertheless makes a slight shift when he applies the letter’s scheme of das Eigene and das Fremde (“that which is one’s own” and “that which is foreign”) to interpret the “Ister” and the Greek determination of man’s essence. In short, whereas Hölderlin’s scheme maintains an internal doubleness of that which is one’s own and that which is foreign, das Eigene and das Fremde, both for the Greeks and for us, Heidegger identifies Hesperia (in these lectures on Hölderlin, he says simply “Germany” or the “Germans”) with that which is one’s own, das Eigene, and Greece with that which is foreign, das Fremde. In doing so, Heidegger not only changes Hölderlin’s bipolar scheme of a relation (by inversion) of bipolar terms into a simply bipolar scheme of us

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(Hesperians, Germans) and the Greeks, that which is one’s own and that which is foreign, das Eigene and das Fremde, that is to say, of simple terms – and thereby reduces Hölderlin’s version of the relation between the Greeks and us to one of the terms of that relation. No, more important than what this shift does to Hölderlin’s scheme is what it does to Hölderlin’s Greeks. That is, whereas Heidegger is able to preserve a certain doubleness of, a certain internal difference to, us Hesperians, Germans – insofar as we are ourselves, das Eigene, only in dialogue with the Greeks, das Fremde, and so on – in identifying the Greeks with the simply foreign, das Fremde, he nevertheless is not able to preserve the Greeks’ difference from themselves, their own “dialogue” between that which was their own, das Eigene, and that which was foreign for them, das Fremde. In other words, by calling the Greeks simply fremd, foreign, Heidegger collapses that which is their own and that which is foreign, das Eigene and das Fremde, for them. This is evident throughout his interpretation in his constant identification of the foreign, das Fremde, with the Greeks and the Greeks with the East and the South, the fire from heaven. In short, Heidegger – in calling the Greeks foreign, das Fremde, for us – quite simply reverses Hölderlin’s terms and calls that which for Hölderlin is our own, das Eigene – the clarity of representation, Junonian sobriety, i.e., Greek culture, say – foreign, das Fremde. And in doing so, he also renders that which is radically foreign for us – i.e., the Greeks’ nature, that which is natural and their own, das Eigene, for the Greeks: the fire from heaven, holy pathos – our own, that is to say, Greek. That this shift effaces the Greeks’ internal difference to themselves becomes clearer if we identify the Greeks’ nature, that which is their own, das Eigene – i.e., the fire from heaven, holy pathos: namely, as the East, the Orient, or, in some of Hölderlin’s texts (for instance, the Hyperion or the third version of the Empedocles drama), Egypt and the Egyptians. That is to say, the Greeks’ nature, that which is their own, das Eigene, is somebody else’s culture: the Oriental fire from heaven and holy pathos (just as our Hesperian nature, that which is our own, das Eigene, for us is also somebody else’s culture: the Greek clarity of representation, Junonian sobriety). If it is legitimate to read Hölderlin’s scheme in this way, then what happens in Heidegger’s identification of the Greeks as foreign, das Fremde, for us – as the fire from heaven and holy pathos, as the South and the East – is his turning of what is a three-­ fold historical scheme of Orient, Greece, and Hesperia into a two-­fold scheme of Greece and Hesperia: in other words, Heidegger turns a scheme of us (Hesperians) and them (Greeks) and their them (the Orient) into a scheme of us and them, Hesperia (or “Germany”) and Greece. To turn the Greeks into that which is simply foreign for us (when for

­168    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics Hölderlin it is that which is our own), then, means to collapse the Greeks’ nature and the Greeks’ culture, das Eigene and das Fremde, and thereby, quite simply, to suppress the radical difference of the nature of the Greeks: that is, to suppress the Orient, the East, Egypt, and so on. This suppression of the Orient is legible throughout Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin and the Greeks in his consistent reduction to a two-­fold scheme – Greece and Hesperia – of what is well marked everywhere in Hölderlin as a three-­fold scheme: Orient, Greece, Hesperia.9 In “The Ister,” for instance, the three-­fold is marked by the names of three rivers: one Oriental (the Indus), one Greek (the Alpheus), and one Hesperian (the Ister): Wir singen aber vom Indus her Fernangekommen und Vom Alpheus, lange haben Das Schikliche wir gesucht, Nicht ohne Schwingen mag Zum Nächsten einer greifen Geradezu Und kommen auf die andere Seite. Hier aber wollen wir bauen. But we sing from the Indus, Having come from afar, and From the Alpheus, long have We sought that which is fitting, Not without wings may one Seize what is nearest Straightaway And reach the other side. But here we want to build.

If we come here, to the West, to Hesperia, to the Ister – “Man nennet aber diesen den Ister. / Schön wohnt er” (But one calls this one the Ister. / Beautifully he dwells) – from the East and the Orient by way of Greece, then what this means, at the very least, is that our origin and source cannot simply be a matter of us and the Greeks – of the Ister and his Greek guest (Hercules) – cannot be a simply Graeco-­German origin. Rather the origin is, as it were, a Graeco-­Oriental (or Graeco-­Egyptian) origin, and this would offer a different way to read the lines about the Ister’s seeming to go backwards: Der scheinet aber fast Rükwärts zu gehen und Ich mein, er müsse kommen Von Osten.

Monstrous History    ­169 Vieles wäre Zu sagen davon. But it seems almost To go backwards and I mean, it must come From the East. Much could Be said about this.

That is, the Ister seems almost to go backwards not in its hesitating at the source and seeming almost to go East to West but rather in its natural itinerary, in its going from West to East – as though its historical origin were in Germany and the West and not in the East – whence (from the Indus through the Alpheus) we have historically come – and whence, historically, it must come: und / Ich mein, er müsse kommen / Von Osten (and, I mean, it must come from the East). In short, rather than going backwards – West to East – the Ister, as truly historical, must come from the East (and the antithesis between going [gehen] and coming [kommen] would support such a reading). This reading of Hölderlin’s historical scheme cannot help but have implications for Heidegger’s “law of history” – in short-­hand, again, “that which is one’s own the most distant” – and the hyperbologic of not being at home and coming to be at home, Unheimischsein and Heimischwerden. In other words, that which is the furthest, the most distant, the most foreign, for us is not Greece and the Greeks – strictly speaking, i.e., Hölderlin speaking, this is our own, das Eigene – but rather the East and the Orient. And it is most foreign for us because we are separated from it by our Greek nature – our Greek metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, and so on. If we are not at home, exiled, we are not not at home in relation to, or exiled from, Greece and the Greeks but rather “in relation to,” and exiled from, the East, the Orient. And because the relation of nature and culture, that which is one’s own and that which is foreign, das Eigene and das Fremde – i.e., the clarity of representation and Junonian sobriety on the one hand and the fire from heaven and holy pathos on the other – for the Orient was exactly the same as it is for us10 (how else could the Oriental fire from heaven have been natural, their own, das Eigene, for the Greeks?), to be not at home in relation to, or exiled from, the Orient means to be not at home in relation to, or exiled from, ourselves: i.e., not the Graeco-­Hesperians or Graeco-­Germans but the Hespero-­Orientals, Germano-­Orientals. In short, we are not at home not because we are exiled from Greece but rather because we are exiled by Greece from ourselves: the Orient, the East, Egypt, and so on.

­170    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics Again: it’s not just that we are not at home, but rather that we are not at home in relation to not being at home; or, better, we are not just exiled (from Greece, say) but rather exiled from exile (exiled from the Greeks’ exile, say), as Blanchot puts it in writing on Kafka. From such an exile (from exile), there is no return – not even a return to statements (or “laws”) of history like “Hesperia is the Orient,” “We are the Orientals (or the Egyptians),” and so on. For such statements would identify that which cannot be identified – that which makes all (self-­)identification ­impossible – in the terms of any ontology, no matter how fundamental. In other words, there is a radical disjunction between us Hesperians and the Orient, and Greece is it. To “identify” ourselves as Orientals would amount once again to reducing that which is radically foreign for us to that which is our own, the Oriental to the Greek. It would amount to the same thing as saying “We are dead” and meaning the (monumentalized) death of the Greeks – that which is natural and our own, a death in which we can (elegiacally) recognize and identify ourselves. To say “Hesperia is the Orient” or “We are the Orientals” is to say “We are dead” and to mean the death of the Orient – that which is radically foreign for us, a death in which we cannot identify ourselves because it is not our own death (i.e., the death of the Greeks), not being dead for ourselves, but an other death: being dead for somebody else, a death without death. This would be one way to read Hölderlin’s determination of man’s historical essence as monstrous: the monstrosity of history, history as the monster.11 A perhaps more straightforward way to put this would be by way of two quotations from Paul de Man’s “The Riddle of Hölderlin” – a review essay in The New York Review of Books that dates from 1970 and that remains, for those who can read, one of the best essays on Hölderlin. The first is an explanation of the attraction of Hölderlin’s scheme for critics with a utopian or apocalyptic bent: “Thus the transposition of Hölderlin’s philo-­Hellenism into a literal historical scheme yields an interpretation of the present that is, to some critics, reassuring; during a period of history that is part of our civilization, men could think of the gods as actual presences from which they were not separated by transcendental distances. If this was possible for a consciousness not essentially different from our own, it follows that the absence of gods, painfully experienced as everyday reality, may be only a passing dark phase between two stages of unity, one past but another still to come.”12 Although this statement does not apply to Heidegger’s interpretation immediately – not without some translation to make it fit (for example, of the terms “consciousness” and “essentially different”) – it is close enough to his law of history, being not at home and coming

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to be at home, and so on. De Man’s – that is, Hölderlin’s – answer is uncompromising: “True wisdom begins in the knowledge of its own historical ineffectiveness. When Hölderlin evokes the possibility of future moments of historical splendor, comparable to what Greece used to be in the past, such evocations are accompanied by the foreknowledge that people will be conscious of the achievement of these periods when they have ceased to be and have become in turn parts of the past. Nothing could be more remote from schemes that conceive of history as either apocalyptic failure or salvation.” To transpose this into the terms of our reading of Hölderlin’s scheme: if we as Hesperians can be the nature for an other Greece – other Greeks and other Greek gods to come after us – it is only as dead, as the Orient or the Egyptians: that is, as dead not for ourselves, but for somebody else, an other. The upshot would be that “Greece” and “the Greeks” is something we invent in order not to face this other death: an other death that reminds us that there never were any Greeks in the first place – and therefore no Orient or Hesperia (or Germany) in the first (or last) place either – but only a monstrous wearing away and wearing down, the ceaseless erosion of monstrous material history.13

Notes  1. In his translation of Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), p. 123.   2. All page references within the body of this chapter are to Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister” (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1984). This is volume 53 of the Gesamtausgabe of Heidegger’s works.  3. Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe, “La césure du spéculatif” and “Hölderlin et les Grecs,” in L’Imitation des modernes (Paris: Galilée, 1986). English in Lacoue-­Labarthe’s Typography, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).   4. I pluralize the translation of Seiendes (as “beings”) in order to distinguish it (aurally) from Being.  5. As quoted (and translated by Robert Eisenhauer) in Philippe Lacoue-­ Labarthe, “The Caesura of the Speculative,” Glyph 4 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 80.  6. Cf. Carol Jacobs, “The Monstrosity of Translation: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’,” now in Telling Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).  7. Peter Szondi, “Überwindung des Klassizismus,” in Hölderlin-­Studien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967). See my reading of Szondi in “Hölderlin in France,” in Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).  8. “Endpapers: Hölderlin’s Textual History,” “Hölderlin in France,” and “Heidegger Reading Hölderlin,” all in Readings in Interpretation.

­172    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics  9. See, for example, the itinerary of the eagle – the eagle of history – in “Germanien”: from the Indus, over the Parnassus, high above Italy, and then on to the Alps. 10. See my “Endpapers: Hölderlin’s Textual History” in Readings in Interpretation for more on this impossible “identification” and the scheme below: Egypt (Orient)



Greece

nature

“fire from heaven,” “holy pathos,”

culture

“Junonian sobriety,” “clarity of representation,”

Hesperia

11. “Monstrous” how? Most abruptly: as the allegory of a disjunction of self and other that cannot be mediated by any history of sense or sense-­making. 12. Paul de Man, “The Riddle of Hölderlin,” The New York Review of Books 15:9 (19 November 1970), pp. 47–52. Now reprinted in de Man’s Critical Writings, 1953–1978, ed. Lindsay Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 13. Perhaps this is the direction in which Heidegger thinks in a remark of the “Letter on Humanism” (1946): “We have still hardly begun to think the mysterious relations to the East, that were put into words in Hölderlin’s poetry” (Wir haben noch kaum begonnen, die geheimnisvollen Bezüge zum Osten zu denken, die in Hölderlins Dichtung Wort geworden sind). In Martin Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, Mit einem Brief über den “Humanismus” (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1947), p. 85. Something like an “Oriental,” “Egyptian,” reading of Heidegger – these words being read in a Hölderlinian sense – is Jacques Derrida on Heidegger on Trakl in his Paris seminar of spring 1985 and in the essay “Geschlecht 2: Heidegger’s Hand,” in John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). French in Jacques Derrida, Psyché, Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987).

Chapter 9

Discontinuous Shifts: History Reading History

Surely one of the most valuable “Legacies of Paul de Man” is the genuinely critical conception of history he draws out of the texts of the romantics. As is well known, romantic literature was, for de Man, a privileged locus for asking the question of history (in particular, the question of our history). Indeed, one could say that de Man’s thinking of history – in fact, what he in his last essays calls “material history” or “the materiality of actual history” (and what no doubt constitutes one of the most valuable and enduring legacies he has bequeathed to us) – gets produced by his reflection on, and reading of, the romantics. But to say this may seem a bit odd, for de Man’s own verdict on this work sounds much rather like the confession of a failure, in particular the failure to arrive at a “historical definition” of Romanticism. Looking back with some misgivings upon the essays collected in The Rhetoric of Romanticism – for him a “somewhat melancholy spectacle” in that it offers “such massive evidence of the failure to make the various individual readings coalesce” (RR viii) – de Man writes that these readings seem always to “start again from scratch and that their conclusions fail to add up to anything” (RR viii). He continues: “If some secret principle of summation is at work here, I do not feel qualified to articulate it and, as far as the general question of romanticism is concerned, I must leave the task of its historical definition to others. I have myself taken refuge in more theoretical inquiries into the problems of figural language” (RR viii). De Man makes the same gesture in the opening sentences of the Preface to Allegories of Reading, and this time formulates the “failure” explicitly as a “shift” from history to reading (and thus to a “rhetoric of reading”): “Allegories of Reading started out as a historical study and ended up as a theory of reading. I began to read Rousseau seriously in preparation for a historical reflection on Romanticism and found myself unable to progress beyond local difficulties of interpretation. In trying to cope with this, I had to shift from historical definition to the

­174    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics problematics of reading” (AR ix). That this shift is once again a move from historical definition to the problems of figural language, i.e., to rhetoric, is clear enough in the following sentences of the Preface and their account of a “rhetoric of reading” where “rhetoric is a disruptive intertwining of trope and persuasion.” So: de Man’s own account of his work on the romantics and Romanticism would seem to indicate, if anything, a turn away from history and to the theoretical problematics of reading, rhetoric, and figural language. Nevertheless, it might be prudent not to take de Man’s own remarks about his alleged “failure” too literally. It might be better to take a page from de Man’s own book, as it were, and actually read what it is that happens, what takes place, in this alleged “shift” – and its necessity (“I had to shift”) – from history to reading and rhetoric. If we do so, it turns out that this shift is in fact already (always already) a shift past the rhetoric of reading and to history, indeed, to the material history of de Man’s last essays. Ironically (and undialectically) enough, the “failed” attempt at a historical definition of Romanticism turns into a certain “success” for de Man’s thinking of history. The mechanism and the necessity of de Man’s apparent shift from historical definition to the problematics of reading and rhetoric are best legible in his 1967 Gauss lectures on Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism (and not so much in the essays on Rousseau collected in Allegories of Reading, in which the shift has, in a sense, already been completed), in particular the lecture on Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin (“Patterns of Temporality in Hölderlin’s ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage’”) and the lecture on Wordsworth (and on Geoffrey Hartman’s interpretation of Wordsworth in his 1964 Wordsworth’s Poetry) called “Time and History in Wordsworth.” The latter is particularly helpful for understanding the shift because it consists of two “layers” – an original “pre-­shift” lecture written in 1967 and some “post-­shift” passages interpolated into the lecture around 1972 that reformulate the lecture’s thematic concerns (death, time, and history) in explicitly rhetorical terms. Nevertheless, the actual push to rhetorical terms and rhetorical reading occurs already in the lecture on Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s “Wie wenn am Feiertage,” and it occurs on account of the lack of other terms and the failure of any other reading to do justice to Hölderlin’s text. In short, the turn to rhetoric occurs on account of the lack in Heidegger’s terms and Heidegger’s failure to think the “temporality of poetic form,” as de Man puts it, when he comes to interpret Hölderlin’s poetry. How so? De Man begins his critical reading of Heidegger in a hopeful vein: Heidegger’s “ontological understanding of Hölderlin’s key concepts as

Discontinuous Shifts    ­175

they are seen to operate within the limits of particular poems” (RCC 56) is a promising development that could lead to a “reorientation of literary interpretation toward an ontological understanding.” Such an understanding is promising because it “does allow, in principle, for the combination of a sense of form (or of totality) with an awareness that poetic language appears as the correlative of a constitutive consciousness, that it results from the activity of an autonomous subject. Neither American formalist criticism nor European phenomenological criticism has been able to give a satisfactory account of this synthesis: the former had to give up the concept of a constitutive subject, the latter that of a constituted form” (RCC 57). De Man’s statement of the advantage of such an ontological orientation is pithy, as it calls to mind his critiques of the American New Criticism, its misunderstanding of the concept of intention, and its consequent reification of poetic form, and his critiques of a phenomenological criticism like that of the Geneva School which ignores questions of form and, in a sense, simply does not read.1 Now Heidegger, de Man’s argument continues, seems particularly qualified to undertake “this renewal of critical method” even though literary interpretation was not his own academic field. Although Sein und Zeit nowhere deals with literature, except for some passing references, “it does contain insights that can give a more concrete direction to an ontological interpretation of texts” (RCC 57). De Man’s statement of these insights amounts to an extremely compact summary of Sein und Zeit. Because it contains in germ everything to come in de Man – including the impetus for the shift from history to reading – it is worth quoting in full: Sein und Zeit, indeed, stresses not only the privileged, determining importance of language as the main entity by means of which we determine our way of being in the world, but specifies that it is not the instrumental but the interpretative use of language that characterizes human existence, as distinct from the existence of natural entities. And this interpretative language possesses a structure that can be made explicit. This structure is in essence temporal – a particular way of structuring the three dimensions of time that is constitutive for all acts of consciousness. The main task of any ontology thus becomes the description of this temporal structurization, which will necessarily be a phenomenology of temporality (since it is the description of consciousness) as well as a phenomenology of language (since the manner in which temporality exists for our consciousness is through the mediation of language). One understands that, as the “purest” form of interpretative language, the one least contaminated by empirical instrumentality and reification, poetic language is a privileged place from which to start such a description. And conversely, one sees that an approach to poetic language that would, by a description of its temporal structure, bring out its interpretative intent, would come closest to the essence of this

­176    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics language, closest to accounting for what Heidegger calls “das Wesen der Dichtung.” We could thus legitimately expect from the Heideggerian premises a clarifying analysis of poetic temporality, as it is seen to act within the poetic form. (RCC 57–8)

Although the terms de Man uses to summarize Heidegger may be a bit too phenomenological, too Hegelian phenomenological (e.g., “consciousness”), his account is precise and rigorous. And in its very precision and rigor it presents Heidegger’s fundamental ontology with a redoubtable task: namely, to be not only a “phenomenology of ­temporality” – something Heidegger manages quite well, thank you – but also a “phenomenology of language.” This latter half of the task is more difficult and has far-­reaching consequences because it necessarily entails, sooner or later, some account of “the manner [my emphasis] in which temporality exists for our consciousness,” and that “manner,” i.e., the way that language “mediates” consciousness and temporality, may include factors and functions of language irreducible to a hermeneutics of self-­understanding, no matter how fundamental the ontology it bases itself on: in short, that “manner” may include the rhetorical dimension of language. Although de Man does not yet put it that way, one could already say that the reason Heidegger’s interpretations of Hölderlin’s poetry are so disappointing – indeed, so downright wrong, according to de Man – is on account of his inability to read the manner (i.e., ultimately the rhetoric) in which temporality exists for the “consciousness” of Hölderlin’s poetic language. In any event, ironically (but, as always, rigorously and consistently) enough, the result is that the great thinker of temporality cannot think, cannot read, the temporality of the poetic form of Hölderlin’s poem. In his interpretation of “Wie wenn am Feiertage,” Heidegger’s misreading consists of his flattening out, leveling, the temporal articulations and tensions of the poem in the service of an apocalyptic pattern. De Man summarizes: “By its gradual widening out from particular physical nature to history, to the gods, and finally to being itself, the poem dramatizes a process of all-­encompassing totalization that stretches from the beginning to the end of the text. The progression takes place without discontinuity and moves in one single direction, toward the full disclosure of being. The pattern is apocalyptic, a temporal movement that culminates in a transcendence of time” (RCC 64). The poet, in Heidegger’s interpretation, is “someone who stands in the presence of being in the past (when he is waiting for the disclosure), in the present (when it takes place in the heroic acts of history), and the future (when, like the countryman caring for his land, the concern of his work will maintain, for others, a mediate form of contact with being)”

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(RCC 65). In short, Hölderlin would be an apocalyptic poet, “an eschatological figure, the precursor who, during a period of temporary alienation from being (Seinsvergessenheit), announces the end of this barren time and prepares a renewal” (RCC 65). Now, according to de Man, this interpretation of Hölderlin as an apocalyptic poet is wrong in general and, in the particular case of ­ Heidegger’s interpretation of “Wie wenn am Feiertage,” it is wrong in specific ways for specific reasons. It is wrong in general because Hölderlin, rather than being an apocalyptic poet, is precisely he who warns against the danger of believing that the poet can accomplish the kind of proximity to being Heidegger sees in the poem. Indeed, the poem instead “cautions against the belief that the kind of enthusiasm that animates a heroic act is identical with the predominant mood of a poetic consciousness” (RCC 67). But more important than the erroneous results of Heidegger’s interpretation is the specific way in which Heidegger manages to get things so wrong in his resolute misreading of “Wie wenn am Feiertage” in terms of an apocalyptic pattern. Heidegger is able to flatten out the temporal tensions of Hölderlin’s poem in two ways. First, Heidegger ignores and treats as unproblematic a certain “ambiguity of metaphorical reference” (RCC, 62) in the poem’s opening simile that makes it impossible to decide whether “they,” the poets, are like the countryman who goes out to look at his field after the lightning storm or whether they are like the trees that stand exposed during the storm and get blasted by the lightning. The ambiguity is important because its temporal tension is what gets unfolded in the rest of the poem – indeed, it is what constitutes the temporality of this poem’s poetic form. And it gets unfolded in terms of the triadic tonal pattern of Hölderlin’s theory of the alternation of tones (Wechsel der Töne), as the poem modulates from the “naive” tone of its opening scene, to the “heroic” tone of the heroic acts of history it describes later, to end in the reflective, meditative tonality that Hölderlin calls “ideal.” Heidegger cannot read the alternating tones of Hölderlin’s hymn because he ignores the poem’s Pindaric triadic structure and simply cuts off the fragmentary lines that would have constituted the strophes of the poem’s end – that is, makes the poem “whole” by truncating it. So: by glossing over the ambiguity of metaphorical reference in the poem’s opening simile and by ignoring the poem’s tonal structure and truncating its ending, Heidegger completely disregards its poetic form. And since its poetic form is the temporal structure of the poem’s self-­understanding, disregarding it means also disregarding the poem’s temporal structure. Again, it is a case of Heidegger – the thinker of temporality – not being “Heideggerian” enough! The consequences for

­178    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics Heidegger are clear: in short, there is a flaw in Heidegger’s method, as de Man puts it, “that leads to a misinterpretation of Hölderlin as an apocalyptic poet, when Hölderlin’s main theme is precisely the non-­ apocalyptic structure of poetic temporality” (RCC 71). This flaw, de Man concludes vigorously, is “the substitution of ontological for what could well be called formal dimensions of language. The ontologization of literary interpretation, which seemed so promising in the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit, does not mean that literature can be read, so to speak, from the standpoint of being, or from that of a poet who is said to act as a direct spokesman for being. The standpoint can only be that of a consciousness that is ontologically (and not empirically) oriented but that nevertheless remains a consciousness, rooted in the language of a subject and not in being” (RCC 71). But if the results for Heidegger’s “method” of his having substituted “ontological for what could well be called formal dimensions of language” are clear, the results for de Man’s own developing “method” are more complicated because they are double. On the one hand, what de Man ends up with is a still more thoroughgoing “ontologization” of language and of poetic form than Heidegger’s. The main difference would be that whereas for Heidegger the poem’s temporal movement takes place “without discontinuity” and moves “in one single direction” – again, according to an apocalyptic pattern whose temporal movement culminates in a transcendence of time – for de Man the poem’s temporal structure is one in which “beginning and end come together within the tension of the radical discontinuity that seemed to keep them apart” (RCC 70). In connecting the beginning of the poem with its end, the radically discontinuous temporality of the poem’s poetic form nevertheless remains a principle of totalization. Indeed, de Man goes so far as to call it a “hermeneutic circularity” (RCC 71) and to deposit its discontinuous temporality in the structure of being itself. “The principle of totalization is indeed ontological,” he writes, “in that it has to be sought in the discontinuous structure of being itself” (RCC 72). So, on the one hand, in his ability to read the discontinuous temporality of Hölderlin’s poem – and in his depositing of this discontinuity in the discontinuous structure of being itself – de Man would seem to be more “Heideggerian” than Heidegger. On the other hand, the conclusions of de Man’s reading of Heidegger nevertheless go in an entirely different direction and prohibit such a “super-­ Heideggerian” ontologization of poetic form. Indeed, what can de Man mean by charging Heidegger with having substituted ontological for what could well be called formal dimensions of language – and by saying that the poetic consciousness is rooted in the language of a subject and not in being – and then going on to deposit the

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discontinuous temporality of poetic form in the discontinuous structure of being itself? The tension – in fact, a certain discontinuity – between ontological and “what could well be called formal” dimensions of language, between a poetic consciousness rooted in being and a poetic consciousness rooted in “the language of a subject,” is legible throughout de Man’s attempt at an ending for his essay. For what de Man has come up with in his more-­Heideggerian-­than-­Heidegger thoroughgoing ontologization of language and poetic form is “formal structures” – the reversals and discontinuities of which they are capable – that work according to laws different from those of “the structure of being itself.” That these “formal” structures are specifically linguistic, indeed already rhetorical, structures is evident, as de Man tries out various names for the “discontinuous element” that constitutes the temporal structure of Hölderlin’s poetic form. Adorno’s “parataxis” is one possibility, which (parataxis) is linked by Auerbach to what he calls a “figural style.” Hölderlin’s own term for this discontinuous element is “the caesura referred to in the commentaries on the Oedipus tragedies, which marks a reversal of tone as well as a reversal of time and in which the end reestablishes with the beginning a contact which it seemed to have lost” (RCC 72). De Man’s ending needs to introduce these explicitly rhetorical terms – parataxis, caesura, figural style, and others – because the discontinuous temporality his reading of Hölderlin has disclosed is one whose reversals can no longer be accounted for in ontological terms. That de Man’s reading of Hölderlin has pushed Heidegger’s fundamental ontological terms to their breaking point is especially legible in an almost stuttering formulation de Man uses in trying to distinguish the totalizing yet discontinuous temporality proper to Hölderlin’s poetry from an organic unity (like that of Schelling’s philosophy of identity) and from a purely dialectical one (like that of Hegel): “Nor is it purely dialectical, in the Hegelian sense,” writes de Man, “for time itself, which remains unproblematically forward-­directed in Hegel, here becomes itself a discontinuous element of a structure that consists of a series of temporal reversals” (RCC 72). The tortuousness of the formulation becomes apparent if we try to paraphrase it: if time itself becomes itself a discontinuous element of a structure that consists of a series of temporal reversals, then time becomes a discontinuous element of a structure that consists of a series of discontinuous reversals that will never allow us to say how time itself could ever become, or be, itself! In short, de Man’s reading of the temporality of poetic form proper to Hölderlin’s poetic language has disclosed a discontinuous temporality and structures of reversal and substitution that cannot be accounted for in the terms of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology – or even in the rhetorical terms of Adorno and

­180    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics Auerbach insofar as these are still compatible with their fundamentally hermeneutic orientation. The tension or discontinuity in the double ending of “Patterns of  Temporality” comes to full fruition in “Time and History in Wordsworth,” de Man’s veritably “Hölderlinian” reading of Wordsworth. In fact, one could say that the double ending of “Patterns” produces the two layers of “Time and History.” De Man’s readings of the Boy of Winander and the Duddon sonnet can be called Hölderlinian because they consist of a certain “application” of Hölderlin’s “caesura” for an understanding of the reversals and substitutions that lie at the basis of both poems and that de Man, in a sense, “re-­reverses.” In the case of the Boy of Winander, the poem substitutes the death of a third person (the Boy) in the past for the death of the first person (“I”) which lies in the future. “Wordsworth is thus anticipating a future event as if it existed in the past. Seeming to be remembering, to be moving to a past, he is in fact anticipating a future. The objectification of the past self, as that of a consciousness that unwittingly experiences an anticipation of its own death, allows him to reflect on an event that is, in fact, unimaginable” (RCC 81). In the case of the Duddon sonnet, the poem substitutes one temporality – a movement that goes from nature to history – for another, more authentic, temporality – a movement that goes from nature to the dissolution of self and the loss of the name. In doing so it reverses middle and end (of the poem) and makes it seem as though the derived, secondary temporality (in short-­ hand, empirical “history”) could contain the more original, authentic temporality of dissolution, mutability, and ceaseless deathward progressing, when, in fact, it is the other way around: the authentic temporality (one clearly based on Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein and the finitude proper to it on account of its being fundamentally a being-­unto-­death) contains “history.” In other words, both poems perform a reversal and a substitution that makes the impossible – reflecting on one’s own death, history-­ as-­ progress overcoming mutability – possible. But already in the first, thematic layer of the lecture, de Man recognizes that the impossibility is made possible only thanks to a certain sleight-­of-­hand which, already, is clearly a linguistic, indeed rhetorical, sleight-­ of-­ hand. In the Boy of Winander, conquering the time, the surmise, that would allow one to reflect on one’s own death is possible only as a “fiction” which, “since it is a fiction . . . can only exist in the form of a language” (RCC 82). That this language is necessarily a figural language is legible in de Man’s formulations of how it is that this “fiction” can allow one to look back upon, as it were, one’s own death: “The poem is, in a curious sense, autobiographical, but it is the autobiography of someone who no longer

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lives written by someone who is speaking, in a sense, from beyond the grave” (RCC 81) and “it is the epitaph written by the poet for himself, from a perspective that stems, so to speak, from beyond the grave” (RCC 82). It is clear that speaking or writing from beyond the grave is “possible” only thanks to the rhetorical shifts of “in a sense” and “so to speak.” Although in the first-­layer reading of the Duddon sonnet the rhetorical shift is not as marked, the fact that the substitution and ­reversal – of history and temporality, of the poem’s end and middle – are in fact a rhetorical structure is, in a sense, still more explicit, since its reversal and substitution of container and contained, enveloppant and enveloppé, amounts to the very definition of a particular trope, namely metonymy. Indeed, it is no doubt the rhetorical shifts and rhetorical structures of his own language that push de Man to perform a self-­ reading which forces the thematic readings of the Boy of Winander and the Duddon sonnet to turn into readings “properly speaking” – that is, rhetorical readings in explicitly rhetorical terms – in the second layer of the lecture. In the Boy of Winander, the substitution of a first person subject by a third person subject, the “Boy” for “I,” is now said to be based on a “metaphorical substitution,” just as in the Duddon sonnet the reversal of “history” (contained) and authentic temporality (container) is said to be based on a “metonymic figure.” But this passage, this shift, from a thematic reading and its terms – death, finitude, history, temporality, and mutability – to a rhetorical reading and its terms – metaphor, metonymy, metalepsis – should not mislead us into thinking that the thematic has simply been left behind, surpassed, as though de Man had succeeded in reducing temporality and history to a question of merely tropological substitutions and transformations. If we read his second-­layer interpolations with any attention at all, we cannot make this mistake. For it is clear that in the Boy of Winander the “metaphorical substitution” of the first by a third person, of a living self by a dead self, “is, of all substitutions, the one that is, thematically speaking, a radical impossibility: between the living and the dead self, no analogical resemblance or memory allows for any substitution whatever” (RCC 201). In fact, as de Man goes on to say, “the metaphor is not a metaphor since it has no proper meaning, no sens propre” (RCC 201) and could more properly be called “the metonymic reversal of past and present that rhetoricians call metalepsis” (RCC 201). But even to call this reversal a metaleptic metonymy would be claiming to know more than one can about the radically discontinuous nature of this reversal. Just as there can be no analogical resemblance between the living self and the dead self, so there can be no contiguity or juxtaposition, no “next-­to-­ ness,” between a dead past and a living present that would allow for a

­182    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics “properly” metonymic substitution. In time the dead self may be “near to” the living self – just as the child, according to a sentence de Man crossed out, “being the father of man . . . stands closer [my emphasis] to death than we do” (RCC 202) – but this proximity has no empirical, phenomenal, thematic existence, and therefore the “metonymy” is a blind, mutilated metonymy – in fact, more of a catachresis than a metonymy. In short, the “metaphorical substitution” is in fact a self-­undoing trope that self-­deconstructs into the catachrestic imposition of a name. “The poem does not reflect on death,” de Man concludes, “but on the rhetorical power [my emphasis] of language that can make it seem as if we could anticipate the unimaginable” (RCC 201). In the same way, the metonymic reversal of the Duddon sonnet, because it “is a rhetorical device that does not correspond to a thematic, literal reality” (RCC 202), also gets undone in what de Man is already able to call (after his reading of Grammatology) a “de-­constructive rhetoricity” (RCC 203). This is thematically, literally, understandable: if the poem performs a reversal and a substitution of contained (empirical history) for container (the authentic temporality of dissolution), then its rhetorical device amounts to the equivalent of saying that the water or the wine can contain the glass. And if the “glass” here is the authentic temporality of ceaseless dissolution, then even “properly speaking,” as it were, it was not much of a “container” to begin with! In any event, the point is not to dwell on the mechanics and the details of this “de-­ constructive ­rhetoricity” – we can read all about it in Allegories of Reading and elsewhere – but rather to insist that already here, at the very pivot of de Man’s “shift” to rhetoric and rhetorical terms, the move to rhetoric is also a move past rhetoric, to an awareness that tropological textual models will also not be able to account for what actually happens, what actually occurs, in and as the texts of Hölderlin and of Wordsworth. And, as we can read in Aesthetic Ideology, what actually occurs – that which is truly, materially, historical – is not the textual linguistic model into which the tropological model empties out and passes (for example, of language as performative) but rather the passage, the passing, itself – a break, gap, or discontinuity like the one that cleaves Kant’s Third Critique (between the tropological “model” of the mathematical sublime and the performative “model” of the dynamic sublime).2 In “Kant and Schiller,” de Man does not hesitate to say directly what thinking history as event, as occurrence, ultimately means, and he does it in terms particularly resonant for our discussions of “Patterns of Temporality” and “Time and History”: “History is therefore not a temporal notion, it has nothing to do with temporality, but it is the emergence of a language of power out of a language of cognition” (AI 133). In saying starkly that

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history is not a temporal notion, that it has nothing to do with temporality, de Man draws out the full implications of his 1967 readings of Hölderlin and Wordsworth and their disclosure of reversals and substitutions whose discontinuity is not temporal but rhetorical. What this also means is that de Man’s alleged “shift” from history to reading and rhetoric – as one that is also a shift past rhetoric – is in fact a shift from history to history3 – a shift whose own discontinuous “passage” or passing “from” and “to” is what happens, what actually occurs, materially historically, in and as “de Man.” For a coda it would be good to offer an example or an emblem of de Man’s discontinuous shift from history to history. If we are right to call this shift material and historical, then what would be the equivalent of this moment “in the order of language” (AI 89)? In de Man’s last essays, this equivalent always turns out to be what he calls the materiality of inscription, the prosaic materiality of the letter. And the double-­ layered lecture on Wordsworth in fact provides a material inscription that renders the discontinuous shift – from history to reading, from rhetoric past rhetoric, from history to history – vividly legible. In passing from his reading of the “complex temporal structurizations” in the Boy of Winander to the Duddon sonnet in order to take one further step in an understanding of “his [Wordsworth’s] temporality,” de Man, in the second layer of the lecture, simply inscribes the word “rhetorical” above the word “temporal” (in “temporal structurizations”) and the phrase “rhetorical movement” above the phrase “his temporality” (RCC 202), in both cases without crossing out what he had originally written in the first version of the lecture. However legible this shift or passage “from” temporal “to” rhetorical may be, it also remains singularly unreadable and incomprehensible in terms of any narrative that would tell stories of from and to, before and after, or even “first layer” and “second layer.” What happens happens “between” the two inscriptions and, as such (i.e., as something that happens), is genuinely, materially, historical – de Man’s history and our legacy.

Notes 1. See de Man’s “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism” and “The Literary Self as Origin: The Work of Georges Poulet” in Blindness and Insight. 2. See de Man’s “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” (AI 79). On de Man’s reading of Kant’s sublimes, see “‘As the Poets Do It’: On the Material Sublime,” Chapter 2 above. 3. It is worth noting that the alleged shift from “history” to “reading” was, in fact, always already a shift from “reading” to “reading,” since the itinerary

­184    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics goes from de Man’s having begun “to read [my emphasis] Rousseau,” through his being “unable to progress beyond local difficulties of interpretation,” to end up with “the problematics of reading [my emphasis]” (AR ix). That this “shift” from reading to reading is in fact – also always already – a shift from history to history is the point!

Chapter 10

Machinal Effects: Derrida With and Without de Man

Toward the end of “Acts” – the third and what would have been the last lecture and the last chapter of Derrida’s Mémoires, for Paul de Man if it had not been for the necessity of adding “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War” in a revised edition of 1988 – Derrida quotes passages from two letters de Man wrote to him in 1970 and 1971 before and after the publication in Poétique (1970) of de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Derrida as Reader of Rousseau.”1 De Man’s first letter is itself a reply to a letter that Derrida wrote to de Man in responding to the critique of his (Derrida’s) reading of Rousseau in Grammatologie. In the excerpt Derrida quotes, de Man refuses to be put off by what he calls Derrida’s “kindness” (gentillesse) and emphasizes the areas of disagreement or at least divergence: “The other day was neither the time nor the place to speak again of Rousseau (pour reparler de Rousseau) and I do not know if you have any reason to return to the question. Your supposed ‘agreement’ (accord) [This is a word I must have written in my letter (Derrida interjects)] can only be kindness, for if you object to what I say about metaphor, you must, as it should be, object to everything.” And a bit later in the excerpt, de Man adds: “I do not yet know why you keep refusing Rousseau the value of radicality which you attribute to Mallarmé and no doubt to Nietzsche; I believe that it is for hermeneutic rather than historical reasons, but I am probably wrong” (M 129, 127).2 After the essay appeared in Poétique, Derrida must have thanked de Man once again, he says, and he gets in reply another letter from Zürich (dated 4 January 1971). In the extract Derrida quotes, de Man qualifies a bit his disagreement with Derrida, but he also attempts to correct whatever Derrida had said in his letter about de Man’s critique. We don’t have access to Derrida’s letter – it’s not in the de Man archive at UCI – but it clearly did more than just offer renewed thanks for de Man’s critique! I quote – Derrida’s quoting de Man – at a bit more length:

­186    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics There is no disagreement between us about the basis of your thinking but a certain divergence in our way of nuancing and situating Rousseau. This divergence is important to me for the notions that I had come to about the question of writing before having the benefit of your thinking came to me above all from Rousseau (and from Hölderlin) . . . The desire to exempt Rousseau (as you say) at all costs from blindness is therefore, for me, a gesture of fidelity to my own itinerary. Rousseau has led me to a certain understanding which, due allowance being made, seems to me near to that with which you have had the force to begin. As the Essai sur l’origine des langues is one of the texts upon which I have been relying for such a long time, I must have put a certain stubbornness into my defense of the relative insight which I have benefitted from. This having been said, I did not wish to exempt Rousseau from blindness but only wished to show that, on the specific question of the rhetoricity of his writing, he was not blinded. This is what gives to his text the particular status that we would both agree, I believe, to call “literary.” That this insight is accompanied by a perhaps more redoubtable blindness – and which could be, for example, madness – I didn’t feel obliged to say in this text, but I would talk about it in regard to the Dialogues and especially in regard to Émile, which seems to me one of the most demented texts there is. (M 130, 127–8)

In the second excerpt from this letter, de Man makes some additional remarks on the areas of their agreement and then finishes up by saying: “I incessantly return to this in what I am in the process of trying to do with Rousseau and Nietzsche and perhaps we can speak of this again later (et nous pourrons peut-­être en reparler plus tard)” (M 131, 128). What interests me here is not the disagreement or the divergence between Derrida and de Man on the question of Rousseau’s being blinded or not. Sorting it out would in any case be a very difficult ­undertaking – indeed, perhaps an endless and definitely a nightmarish task – and it would no doubt have to take into consideration de Man’s and Derrida’s differing conceptions of a text’s and a reading’s blindness or “blind spot.” For the de Man of Blindness and Insight, a critic’s blindness is something that can be “observed” by a reader “in the privileged position of being able to observe the blindness as a phenomenon in its own right” (BI 106), whereas for the Derrida of Grammatologie, the “blind spot” (tache aveugle) is something to be produced by the reading; it is the very “task of reading” (une tâche de lecture): “The reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the schemas of the language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantifiable distribution of shadow and light, of weakness and force, but a signifying structure that the critical reading should produce.”3 In any event, it is not this divergence that interests me here – perhaps I will have an opportunity to talk about it again another time – but rather what Derrida says

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about it – or, better, what he does with it. For after quoting these passages from de Man’s letter, Derrida in fact does not say anything about the disagreement or the divergence – as though to confirm that he has quoted from the letter only that which, as he put it in introducing these excerpts, “does not concern me” (ce qui, en somme, ne me concerne pas) (M 129, 126). Instead, Derrida takes up de Man’s final remark – “perhaps we can speak again (reparler) of this later,” which, we may recall, echoes the verb in the opening sentence of the first excerpt (“The other day was neither the time nor the place to speak again [reparler] of Rousseau”) – and tells us that the two of them never did speak about it again (je crois que nous n’en avons jamais reparlé), at least in the mode of conversation, direct discussion, or even of correspondence: “Such silences, he writes, belong to the vertiginous abyss of the unsaid in which is kept, I don’t say is grounded, the memory of a friendship, as the renewed fidelity of a promise” (M 131, 129). Nevertheless, Derrida continues, in a certain way “that of which Paul de Man says ‘perhaps we can speak of this again later’ and of which I have just said we never spoke again (nous n’en avons jamais reparlé), in truth, is what we have never ceased writing about ever since, as if to prepare ourselves to speak of it again one day (à en reparler un jour), in our very old age” (M 131, 129). So: they never spoke about it again and yet they did nothing but write about it again and again ever since. I emphasize this never again/ nothing but again and again structure for a reason – one obvious enough to readers of Derrida and de Man (Derridadaists and de Maniacs): namely, it is an echo or a repetition of the predicament Rousseau gets himself into in the very last words of Book Two of his Confessions. After recounting the shameful story of the purloined ribbon and his calumnious lie, Rousseau writes: “That is all I have to say on the subject. May I never have to speak of it again (Qu’il me soit permis de n’en reparler jamais)” (C 89, 87).4 Of course, as we have learned from de Man’s “Excuses” (the last chapter of Allegories of Reading), Rousseau has to speak about it again, and not only in the Fourth Rêverie. In a certain sense, he does nothing but speak about it again and again throughout the Confessions (and the other autobiographical writings) insofar as the need to confess this “crime” is, according to his own testimony, at the very root of his autobiographical project. So: if since 1970 de Man and Derrida write about nothing else but “it” – i.e., Rousseau and their disagreement or divergence about reading his text – it is fitting that the last chapter or the last act or the last word of this text – a text, let’s remember, in which the unsaid gets written – should be one “about” Rousseau, and about none other than the Rousseau of the last words of Book Two of the Confessions. I suspend the word “about” here (in

­188    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics “‘about’ Rousseau”) in quotation marks because the sense in which this last exchange between de Man and Derrida can in fact be said to be “about Rousseau” remains a question. It is as much (and no doubt as little) “about” de Man, “about” Derrida, and “about” their relationship as it is “about” Rousseau. But one cannot really say that Derrida’s “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)” (1998) – which is largely “about” de Man’s “Excuses” essay – is in fact “the last word” in their ceaseless writing about nothing else but “it.” At the end of his long text, Derrida writes: “I am so sad that Paul de Man is not here himself to answer me and to object. But I can hear him already – and sooner or later his text will answer for him” (TR 160, 147). Before we try to imagine what it is that Derrida hears here – it is perhaps too soon and too late – let us first remark the peculiarity of Derrida’s text. Originally written for a conference at UC Davis in 1998 organized by Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and me, it is a most peculiar text, as befits, perhaps, a most peculiar friendship (but then aren’t all friendships peculiar, I hear Derrida counter). It is peculiar, first of all, because it does not quite carry out the assignment given to the speakers: in short, to read de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology, think about “materiality,” and write something, anything, à propos of it. In his text Derrida thematizes this assignment and has great fun playing with and interrogating the phrase à propos from the conference’s description – a line that read “à propos of Paul de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology” – while spending nearly all of his one hundred plus pages on or around de Man’s “Excuses,” a text precisely not in Aesthetic Ideology. Only the last ten pages of “Typewriter Ribbon” are explicitly about “materiality,” and Derrida claims (seven pages from the end) that his “only ambition would thus be, on the basis of this text from Allegories of Reading [i.e., “Excuses”], to sketch out a kind of deduction, in the quasi-­philosophical sense, of the concept of materiality (without matter). It is not present here under that name but I believe one can recognize all its traits. In the texts gathered under the title Aesthetic Ideology, the concept will be thematized under that name” (TR 153, 137). But even if Derrida’s choosing to write about a topic in his own way, from another angle, is not so unusual for him, what strikes me as still more peculiar about “Typewriter Ribbon” – because so unlike him – is a certain carping, needling, nit-­picking, almost petty quality to the many apparently small reservations he expresses about, and the many minor complications he notes in, de Man’s reading of Rousseau. Derrida’s other texts on de Man’s work are nothing if not generous, and this would include not only the three original lectures in Mémoires but also the additional text on the wartime journalism (“Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell:

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Paul de Man’s War”). Indeed, Derrida refrains from criticizing even early texts like “Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin” (1955) – an essay whose account of Heidegger could have, must have, provoked at least some protest or some reservation in his mind. Not so for “Excuses.” In the case of this text Derrida seems to spot every omission, every hint of a false move, every bit of hurried short-­hand. A great many of these take the form of Derrida’s remarking of what de Man does not say, what he does not talk about, and perhaps should have. De Man does not quote or say anything about the paragraph immediately preceding the story of the ribbon – which is a paragraph about inheritance, about who gets what after the breaking up of Mme de Vercellis’s household. In quoting Rousseau’s description of the “little pink and silver ribbon,” de Man leaves out the words “already old” – “un petit ruban couleur de rose et argent déjà vieux” (C 86, 84) – as though to insist on the exchange value of the ribbon while effacing any hint of its use value. Some of Derrida’s reservations or hesitations about what de Man says or doesn’t say are more productive than others. For instance, Derrida takes to task de Man’s dismissal of any possibility of an “Oedipal situation” in Rousseau’s desire for possession of the ribbon and hence desire for possession of Marion and zeroes in on de Man’s symptomatic footnote: “The embarrassing story of Rousseau’s rejection by Mme de Vercellis, who is dying of a cancer of the breast, immediately precedes the story of Marion, but nothing in the text suggests a concatenation that would allow one to substitute Marion for Mme de Vercellis in a scene of rejection” (AR 285).5 Derrida quotes this footnote, underscores the phrase “nothing in the text,” and comments: No doubt de Man is right, and more than once. No doubt he is right to beware a grossly Oedipal scheme, and I am not about to plunge headfirst into such a scheme in my turn (although there are more refined Oedipal schemes). De Man may also be right to say that “nothing in the text suggests a concatenation that would allow one to substitute Marion for Mme de Vercellis in a scene of rejection.”   But what does “nothing” mean here? And “nothing in the text”? How can one be sure of “nothing” suggested in a text? Of a “nothing in a text”? And if really “nothing” suggested this Oedipal substitution, how does one explain that de Man thought of it? And that he devotes a footnote to it? À propos, is not every footnote a little Oedipal? In pure à propos logic, is not a footnote a symptomatic swelling, the swollen foot of a text hindered in its step-­by-­ step advance? How does one explain that de Man devotes an embarrassed footnote to all this in which he excludes that the “embarrassing story,” as he puts it, suggests an Oedipal substitution of Marion for Mme de Vercellis, that is to say, first of all of Mme de Vercellis for Maman? For Mme de Vercellis immediately succeeds Maman in the narrative, the same year, the year he turns sixteen. She succeeds Mme de Warens, whose acquaintance Rousseau

­190    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics had made several months earlier – and who had also recently converted to Catholicism, like the Calvinist Jean-­Jacques. (TR 91, 56–7)

What can I add to this? No doubt Derrida is right, and no doubt he is right to say that de Man is also right – at least by denegation, as in the case of the patient quoted by Freud: “You ask who the person in the dream can have been. It was not my mother.” Freud: “so it was his mother.”6 And, as it turns out, both are more right than either of them seems to know. For neither Derrida nor de Man seems to notice that the little pink and silver colored ribbon which alone tempted Rousseau has a predecessor in Book Two. When he arrives in Turin “Mme Sabran [one member of the couple that escorts him there] found means to strip me of everything down to a little silver ribbon (un petit ruban glacé d’argent) which Mme de Warens had given me for my small sword. This I regretted more than all the rest. They would even have kept my sword if I had been less obstinate” (C 65, 60). So: Rousseau’s theft of “a little pink and silver ribbon” (un petit ruban couleur de rose et argent) is clearly an attempt at some kind of restitution of the “little silver ribbon” (un petit ruban glacé d’argent) that Maman had given him for his little sword (and that meant so much to him). And in this nightmarish scenario, the substitution of one ribbon for another also triggers, as though mechanically, the inevitable substitution of Marion for Maman in Rousseau’s lying about Marion’s having given him the ribbon. But however productive Derrida’s additions, emendations, and supplementations of de Man may be at times – and they are certainly productive of more text at all times! – it is fair to say that they are all in one sense or another already included in de Man’s reading, at the very least as plausible extensions or corollaries of his argument. This is especially true of what seems to be Derrida’s central critical comment: namely, that de Man tries to maintain an untenable distinction between the avowal of the confessional text and the excuse of the apologetic text (and hence also between the cognitive and the performative dimensions of Rousseau’s text). De Man’s distinction is “useful,” Derrida writes at the beginning of his critique, but it needs to be further differentiated. If there is indeed an allegation of truth to be revealed, to be made known, thus a gesture of the theoretical type, a cognitive or, as de Man says, epistemological dimension, a declaration of Rousseau’s regarding the theft of the ribbon is not a confession or admission except on a strict condition and to a determined extent. It must in no case allow itself to be determined by this cognitive dimension, reduced to it, or even analyzed into two dissociable elements (one de Man calls the cognitive and the other, the apologetic).

Machinal Effects    ­191   To make known does not come down to knowing and, above all, to make known a fault does not come down to making known anything whatsoever; it is already to accuse oneself and to enter into a performative process of excuse and forgiveness. A declaration that would bring forward some knowledge, a piece of information, a thing to be known would in no case be a confession, even if the thing to be known, even if the cognitive referent were otherwise defined as a fault: I can inform someone that I have killed, stolen, or lied without that being at all an admission or a confession. Confession is not of the order of knowledge or making known. (TR 108, 79)

Derrida adds that he is “all the more troubled” by these passages “inasmuch as de Man seems to hold firmly to a distinction that he will later, in fact right after, have to suspend” (TR 110, 80) when he (de Man) says that “the interest of Rousseau’s text is that it explicitly functions performatively as well as cognitively, and thus gives indications about the structure of performative rhetoric; this is already established in this text when the confession fails to close off a discourse which feels compelled to modulate from the confessional into the apologetic mode” (AR 282). Derrida will have none of this. He asks if the confessional mode is not “already, always, an apologetic mode” (TR 110, 81) and reiterates his objection: “In truth, I believe there are not here two dissociable modes and two different times, in such a way that one could modulate from one to the other. I don’t believe even that what de Man names ‘the interest of Rousseau’s text,’ therefore its originality, consists in having to ‘modulate’ from the confessional mode to the apologetic mode. Every confessional text is already apologetic. Every avowal begins by offering apologies or by excusing itself” (TR 110, 81). Although he proposes to leave this difficulty in place – “it is going to haunt everything that we will say from here on” (TR 110, 81) – Derrida continues by making his case still more forcefully: This distinction organizes, it seems to me, his whole demonstration. I find it an impossible, in truth undecidable, distinction. This undecidability, moreover, is what would make for all the interest, the obscurity, the nondecomposable specificity of what is called a confession, an avowal, an excuse, or an asked-­for forgiveness. But if one went still further in this direction by leaving behind the context and the element of the de Manian interpretation, it would be because we are touching here on the equivocation of an originary or pre-­originary synthesis without which there would be neither trace nor inscription, neither experience of the body nor materiality. It would be a question of the equivocation between, on the one hand, the truth to be known, revealed, or asserted, the truth that, according to de Man, concerns the order of the pure and simple confessional and, on the other, the truth of the pure performative of the excuse, to which de Man gives the name of the apologetic. Two orders that are analogous, in sum, to the constative and the

­192    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics performative. By reason of this equivocation itself, which invades language and action at their source, we are always already in the process of excusing ourselves, or even asking forgiveness, precisely in this ambiguous and perjuring mode. (TR 110–11, 81–2)

I quote Derrida at some length here not only because it is better than paraphrasing him but also because doing so gives a better indication of what Derrida sees as the stakes of the argument and its theoretical (and practical) payoff. The tone, the rhetoric of the “always already,” and the talk of “an originary or preoriginary synthesis without which there would be neither trace nor inscription, neither experience of the body nor materiality” makes it clear enough that, for Derrida, these stakes are high. Now the fact is that the stakes are equally high for de Man – who himself has been known to talk about undecidability and the undecidable distinction between performative and cognitive – and the trouble is that his reading of Rousseau at this moment is nothing so much as a demonstration of the truth of Derrida’s assertions. De Man may not say it on quite the same level of generality – except perhaps in the very modest phrase “and thus gives indications about the structure of performative rhetoric” – but he does say the same thing. Derrida’s noting that de Man in fact suspends the distinction “right after” setting it up already admits this, and to a certain extent the “disagreement” stems only from Derrida’s somewhat perverse refusal to allow de Man to set up his argument. But how exactly de Man’s reading works out the relations between confessional text and apologetic text, avowal and excuse, and therefore cognitive and performative is a difficult movement that takes place in a series of steps. Rather than having the confessional text modulate into the apologetic text – and from the Confessions to the Rêveries, as Derrida seems to think – already the very first step of de Man’s reading of the story of the stolen ribbon in the Confessions suspends the distinction: “The first thing established by this edifying narrative is that the Confessions is not primarily a confessional text” (AR 279). In the narration of his story, “Rousseau cannot limit himself to the mere statement of what really ‘happened’” and already begins to excuse himself. But if he who accuses himself excuses himself, then this “ruins the seriousness of any confessional discourse by making it self-­destructive” (AR 280). And it is the self-­destructive nature of the confession in the mode of excuse – an utterance that, as de Man puts it, functions performatively as well as cognitively – that does not allow Rousseau to close off his confessional/apologetic discourse and compels him to go back to the story of the stolen ribbon in the Fourth Rêverie

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(despite his plea at the end of Book Two: “May I be allowed never to speak of it again”). But the real interest and the real difficulty of de Man’s reading begins here: that is, in how the avowal and the excuse, a cognitive and a performative use of language, are coupled together in Rousseau’s text. Shame (honte) is the key term here. It is not some gratuitous viciousness that makes Rousseau accuse Marion of doing what he had done but rather the inner feeling of shame. Rousseau fears shame “more than death, more than the crime, more than anything in the world . . . unconquerable shame was stronger than anything else, shame alone caused my impudence and the more guilty I became, the more the terror of admitting my guilt made me fearless” (de Man’s translation in AR 283). But then what is one ashamed of, asks de Man, and answers: “Since the entire scene stands under the aegis of theft, it has to do with possession, and desire must therefore be understood as functioning, at least at times, as a desire to possess, in all the connotations of the term. Once it is removed from its legitimate owner, the ribbon, being in itself devoid of meaning and function, can circulate symbolically as a pure signifier and become the articulating hinge in a chain of exchanges and possessions. As the ribbon changes hands it traces a circuit leading to the exposure of a hidden, censored desire” (AR 283). Although de Man already insists on the status of the ribbon as a pure signifier “in itself devoid of meaning and function,” it is first of all a desire to possess the ribbon which was, after all, the only object that tempted him (and for reasons we can surmise). But since it was Rousseau’s intention to give the ribbon to Marion, the desire is also a desire for Marion, to “possess” her, as de Man says. But, again, if the ribbon can stand for “Rousseau’s desire for Marion or, what amounts to the same thing, for Marion herself” (AR 283), then it also stands for the free circulation of desire between Rousseau and Marion, “for the reciprocity which, as we know from Julie, is for Rousseau the very condition of love; it stands for the substitutability of Rousseau for Marion and vice versa” (AR 283). In other words, the ribbon substitutes for a desire “which is itself a desire for substitution,” that is, for a “specular symmetry which gives to the symbolic object a detectable, univocal proper meaning” (AR 284). Such specular figures are metaphors, says de Man, “and it should be noted that on this still elementary level of understanding, the introduction of the figural dimension in the text occurs first by ways of metaphor” (AR 284). In short, this is a tropological system, a system of metaphor, and it is a system that works to produce meaning and sense, to bring the chain of substitutions back to that “univocal proper meaning.” De Man summarizes this step of the reading: “Substitution is indeed bizarre (it is odd to take a ribbon for a person) but since it reveals motives, causes, and

­194    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics desires, the oddity is quickly reduced back to sense . . . The delivery of meaning is delayed but by no means impossible” (AR 284). Yet Rousseau’s text does not stay confined within this pattern of desire (the desire of possession), says de Man in the next step of his reading, and everything in the latter part of Rousseau’s story – the part that “bears the main performative burden of the excuse” not just for the crime of theft but for the worse crime of slander – points to another structure of desire: “One is more ashamed of the exposure of the desire to expose oneself than of the desire to possess; like Freud’s dreams of nakedness, shame is primarily exhibitionistic. What Rousseau really wanted is neither the ribbon nor Marion, but the public scene of exposure he actually gets” (AR 285). This desire is truly shameful, “for it suggests that Marion was destroyed, not for the sake of Rousseau’s saving face, nor for the sake of his desire for her, but merely in order to provide him with a stage on which to parade his disgrace or what amounts to the same thing, to furnish him with a good ending for Book II of his Confessions” (AR 286). The structure of this desire of exposure, then, is self-­perpetuating, “for each new stage in the unveiling suggests a deeper shame, a greater impossibility to reveal, and a greater satisfaction in outwitting this impossibility” (AR 286). And it is this structure of desire as exposure that in turn explains why shame functions “as the most effective excuse, much more effectively than greed, or lust, or love” (AR 286). De Man tells us why and how in a difficult passage: “Promise is proleptic, but excuse is belated and always occurs after the crime; since the crime is exposure [i.e., self-­exposure], the excuse consists in recapitulating the exposure in the guise of concealment. The excuse is a ruse which permits exposure in the name of hiding, not unlike Being, in the later Heidegger, reveals itself by hiding. Or, put differently, shame used as excuse permits repression to function as revelation and thus to make pleasure and guilt interchangeable. Guilt is forgiven because it allows for the pleasure of revealing its repression. It follows that repression is in fact an excuse, one speech act among others” (AR 286). Much, too much, is going on in this passage. I paraphrase and quote at length from this moment of de Man’s reading because it is here that, finally, we can begin to understand how it is that the performative excuse gets reinscribed in a tropological system of figural displacement that would seem to have to do only with language as cognition and not with language as act. De Man lays bare the exact mechanism, the “ruse,” of how this takes place: it happens when shame – an interior disposition, feeling, or affect – is “used as excuse,” i.e., performatively, that the pain of the guilt for the crime of exposure (and its revelation) and the pleasure of the satisfaction of the desire for exposure (and its repression) become

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interchangeable. The implications of de Man’s “analysis of shame as excuse” (AR 286) are far-­reaching. Among other things, one should note the strongly de-­psychologizing (or de-­psychoanalysisizing) thrust of this analysis – despite the Lacanian echoes of de Man’s diction – as repression becomes in fact an excuse, one speech act among others. (This is perhaps the reason why Derrida can say – somewhat frustratedly perhaps – that de Man’s analysis is both “too Lacanian” and “not Lacanian enough”!) Although it is not as marked, de Man’s de-­ ontologizing move in this analysis should also be noted. If the ruse of shame used as excuse reveals itself by hiding “not unlike Being, in the later Heidegger,” then saying so, rather than elevating the ontological status of this ruse, instead makes Being, in the later Heidegger, look rather shame-­faced. But the ultimate upshot of de Man’s analysis – and the conclusion of the first half of his reading – comes in his formulation of how “desire as exposure” and “desire as possession” converge “towards a unified signification” in which “the shame experienced at the desire to possess dovetails with the deeper shame felt at self-­exposure” (AR 286–7). The mode of cognition as hiding/revealing is shown to be fundamentally akin to the mode of cognition as possession (and thus truth as a property of entities), and their linking turns the relatively “elementary” tropological system of figural displacement with which de Man begins into a redoubtable system that can make sense of most anything: The figural rhetoric of the passage, whose underlying metaphor, encompassing both possession and exposure, is that of unveiling, combines with a generalized pattern of tropological substitution to reach a convincing meaning. What seemed at first like irrational behavior bordering on insanity has, by the end of the passage, become comprehensible enough to be incorporated within a general economy of human affectivity, in a theory of desire, repression, and self-­analyzing discourse in which excuse and knowledge converge. Desire, now expanded far enough to include the hiding/revealing movement of the unconscious as well as possession, functions as the cause of the entire scene (“. . . it is bizarre but true that my friendship for her was the cause of my accusations” [86]), and once this desire has been made to appear in all its complexity, the action is understood and, consequently, excused – for it was primarily its incongruity that was unforgivable. Knowledge, morality, possession, exposure, affectivity (shame as the synthesis of pleasure and pain), and the performative excuse are all ultimately part of one system that is epistemologically as well as ethically grounded and therefore available as meaning, in the mode of understanding. (AR 287)

The final sentence of this passage identifies this system and the reason for its apparent strength. As a system that is epistemologically as well as ethically grounded, this system is quite recognizably the critical system

­196    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics of Kant’s three Critiques according to which the bridge between epistemology and ethics, First and Second Critiques, would also be accomplished by the faculty of the feeling of pleasure and pain, that is, the Third Critique and its transcendental grounding of reflexive aesthetic judgments. This is the system that Rousseau constructs by using shame as excuse and thereby synthesizing pleasure and pain. In other words, affectivity (shame in this case) plays the role of the Third Critique in Rousseau’s critical system. No wonder there is so much at stake here for Rousseau, for de Man, and for Derrida. For Kant, it is not just a question of demonstrating an analogy between the faculties of knowledge and desire, First and Second Critiques, but rather the necessity that practical reason and the domain of freedom ought to have an influence on theoretical reason and the domain of nature: “the concept of freedom ought (soll) to actualize in the world of sense the purpose enjoined by its laws. Hence it must (muß) be possible to think nature as being such that the lawfulness in its form will harmonize with at least the possibility of [achieving] the purposes that we are to achieve in nature according to the laws of freedom” (CJ 15, 83–4).7 Demonstrating that what ought to happen and what must be possible is indeed the case is the task of the Third Critique. Of course, in the second half of de Man’s reading, this system gets disrupted, disarticulated, by the anacoluthonic lie, Rousseau’s random utterance of the name “Marion” as the “first object” on which to excuse himself: “Je m’excusai sur le premier objet qui s’offrit” (C 86, 88). This sentence is phrased in such a way, says de Man, “as to allow for a complete disjunction between Rousseau’s desire and interests and the selection of this particular name” (AR 288). This means in turn that here “we are entering an entirely different system in which such terms as desire, shame, guilt, exposure, and repression no longer have any place” (AR 289). De Man emphasizes how the sound “Marion” uttered by Rousseau “stands entirely out of the system of truth, virtue, and understanding (or of deceit, evil, and error) that gives meaning to the passage, and to the Confessions as a whole. The sentence: ‘je m’excusai sur le premier objet qui s’offrit’ is therefore an anacoluthon, a foreign element that disrupts the meaning, the readability of the apologetic discourse, and reopens what the excuse seemed to have closed off” (AR 289–90). And it is in the Fourth Rêverie – a confession of confession, as it were, in which Rousseau confronts his own text – that the disruptive effects of this “random lie” and “what existed as a localized disruption in the Confessions” (AR 290) are disseminated over the entire text. This part of de Man’s reading is, I think, more familiar and, in any case, easier to understand, so it is not necessary to dwell on it. The disruption and the

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undoing of understanding is perhaps always easier to understand than the understanding of understanding! It should be clear, however, that the “foreign element” – the random or anacoluthonic lie that takes on the name “fiction” in the Fourth Rêverie, and that is as free of referential constraint and as machinal as grammar – in disrupting the system of meaning and readability is that which prevents the tropological system (of desire as possession and desire as exposure) from closing itself off. This is what de Man calls a deconstruction of metaphor or of the figural dimension: “The deconstruction of the figural dimension is a process that takes place independently of any desire; as such it is not unconscious but mechanical, systematic in its performance but arbitrary in its principle, like a grammar. This threatens the autobiographical subject not as the loss of something that once was present and that it once possessed but as a radical estrangement between the meaning and the performance of any text” (AR 298). This radical estrangement leads directly to de Man’s conclusions about the now restated and radicalized disjunction of the performative from the cognitive, and the dissemination of the isolated textual event in the Confessions throughout the entire text “as the anacoluthon is extended over all the points of the figural line or allegory” (AR 300). On all of this – i.e., the disruption and the undoing of the system of understanding in the second half of de Man’s essay – Derrida is more than just correct, for he is able to extend the reach of de Man’s reading of Rousseau to the questions and issues addressed in Aesthetic Ideology: for instance, by translating the localized “textual event” in the Confessions into what de Man calls “event,” “material event,” and “history as event, occurrence, what actually happens” in his last essays. (There is also, for example, Derrida’s apparent agreement with de Man about the status of the performative, at least the performative “in the strict and Austinian sense of the term,” in its relation to the actual event, to what happens: “It is often said, quite rightly, that a performative utterance produces the event of which it speaks. But one should also know that wherever there is some performative, that is, in the strict and Austinian sense of the term, the mastery in the first person present of an “I can,” “I may” guaranteed and legitimated by conventions, well, then, all pure eventness is neutralized, muffled, suspended. What happens, by definition, what comes about in an unforeseeable and singular manner, couldn’t care less about the performative” [TR 146, 128]. It is why one would need a term like “arche-­performative” – which Derrida in fact uses in “Typewriter Ribbon” – to distinguish the performativity of “random excuses’ like the anacoluthonic lie from the performative excuse that is still part of the system of understanding.8) Derrida has in any case less trouble with the “deconstructive” part of de Man’s reading

­198    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics – even though he does note that de Man’s use of the word “deconstruction” is not exactly his own – than with the setting up of the “system” that gets deconstructed by Rousseau’s random lie. As even a less than completely attentive reading (or hearing) of Derrida’s text will have to acknowledge, the cognitive dimension – what Derrida (or de Man) gets right or wrong – is not what actually happens in Derrida’s text, in de Man’s text, or in between them. But what does happen? A great deal happens, but it happens around the edges and on the margins of these texts. For instance, Derrida quotes de Man’s crucial paragraph on the excuse as ruse, on shame used as excuse, but it is only to underline de Man’s uses of the word “forgiven” in it. (“Or, put differently, shame used as excuse permits repression to function as revelation, and thus to make pleasure and guilt interchangeable. Guilt is forgiven because it allows for the pleasure of revealing its repression” [AR 286].) According to Derrida, this is one of only two times that de Man resorts to the lexicon of “forgiveness” (pardon). The other occurrence of the word is still more innocuous, and it is why Derrida can write: “So, unless I am mistaken, de Man almost never speaks of forgiveness, except in passing, as if it were no big deal, on two occasions” (TR 106, 75). As a matter of fact, de Man borrows from the lexicon of forgiveness still one more time in “Excuses.” It is in the passage I quoted that summarizes the “one system that is epistemologically as well as ethically grounded” (AR 287). Once desire has been understood in all its complexity – “now expanded far enough to include the hiding/revealing movement of the unconscious as well as possession” (AR 287) – Rousseau’s action is understood, writes de Man, “and, consequently, excused – for it was primarily its incongruity that was unforgivable” (AR 287). This occurrence of “unforgivable” may also be just in passing, no big deal, but it is odd that Derrida should have passed over it. And odd not just because he seems to have gone over de Man’s text very closely – as though he were looking for something (and as though he were annoyed at not being able to find it!) – but also because, as we know from Derrida’s “seminar on pardon, perjury, and capital punishment” (TR 75, 37), the only thing that can be, that demands to be, forgiven is indeed the “unforgivable.” We should also remember that once the system of understanding is disrupted, undone, “deconstructed” by the anacoluthonic lie, the “incongruity,” as de Man calls it, of Rousseau’s action becomes radical and irreducible – and hence absolutely “unforgivable.” I bring this up here – or rather it’s what comes up, what had to come up – because it is in fact what Derrida’s “Typewriter Ribbon” is all “about,” as one says, or rather it is what his text does, or would do: namely, to perform an act of impossible forgiveness for the unforgivable. Derrida says so, in his own

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way, from the beginning of his text and throughout: for instance, in the captatio benevolentiae at the outset when he excuses himself and asks for the listeners’ (or the readers’) forgiveness “for the compromise that I had to resolve to make in preparation of this lecture” (TR 74–5, 37). The compromise is that in order to save time and energy, he had to “reorient in the direction of this colloquium [“à propos of de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology,” recall] certain sessions of an ongoing seminar on pardon, perjury, and capital punishment” (TR 75, 37). Hence some traces of this seminar will remain in the lecture, and, in fact, “In a certain way, I will be speaking solely about pardon, forgiveness, excuse, betrayal, and perjury – of death and death penalty” (TR 75, 38). That Derrida takes de Man’s “Excuses” – an essay whose full title in Allegories of Reading gets printed as “Excuses (Confessions)” – as the text that de Man wrote in the place of a confession of, and hence an apology for, at least certain articles, paragraphs, sentences, phrases, and words in his wartime journalism is explicit in “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War”: “I even imagine him in the process of analyzing with an implacable irony the simulacrum of ‘confession’ to which certain people would like to invite him after the fact, after his death, and the auto-­ justification and auto-­accusation quivering with pleasure which form the abyssal program of such a self-­exhibition. He has said the essential on this subject and I invite those who wonder about his silence to read, among other texts, ‘Excuses (Confessions)’ in Allegories of Reading. The first sentence announces what ‘political and autobiographical texts have in common’ and the conclusion explains again the relations between irony and allegory so as to render an account (without ever being able to account for it sufficiently) of this: ‘Just as the text can never stop apologizing for the suppression of guilt that it performs, there is never enough knowledge available to account for the delusion of knowing’. In the interval, between the first and last sentences, at the heart of this text which is also the last word of Allegories of Reading, everything is said” (M 228, 209). But to do this, to take “Excuses (Confessions)” as the phantom proxy, the allegory, of de Man’s impossible confession/excuse, means that Derrida needs to take de Man’s text as itself politico-­autobiographical, and he says so explicitly several times. Toward the end of “Typewriter Ribbon,” he insists that de Man’s “writings can and should be read as also politico-­autobiographical texts” (TR 150, 133) and, a page later, announces the necessity of “showing the politico-­performative autobiographicity of this text” (TR 152, 135), i.e., “Excuses.” If de Man’s text is “politico-­ autobiographical” (or “autobiographico-­ political,” as Derrida puts it on the last page of his text), if he is talking about

­200    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics nothing but himself and his political past, then it is no wonder that Derrida can say at the very end that what he, Derrida, wanted to show was that “maybe he, Paul de Man, had no need of Rousseau in order to show and to demonstrate, himself, what he thought he ought to confide in us (ce qu’il pensait devoir nous confier)” (TR 160, 146). On the surface, this is something of a joke and a tit-­for-­tat response to de Man’s having said in the interview with Stefano Rosso: “Whatever happens in Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. He doesn’t need Rousseau, he doesn’t need anybody else” (quoted in TR 160, 146). After quoting these lines, Derrida writes: “As you have seen quite well, this is of course not true. De Man was wrong. I needed Paul de Man. And Rousseau and Augustine and so many others” (TR 160, 146). But, of course, as Derrida is quite aware, to read de Man’s text in this way as politico-­autobiographical means to identify and determine that which political and autobiographical texts have in common, according to the first sentence of de Man’s “Excuses”: “a referential reading-­moment explicitly built in within the spectrum of their significations, no matter how deluded this moment may be in its mode as well as in its thematic content” (AR 278). And determining such a “referential reading-­ moment” means in turn to write a politico-­autobiographical text oneself. Hence one could as well say that Derrida’s own text is not about de Man, or Rousseau, or Augustine, or anybody else but himself. What happens indeed happens between him and his own text insofar as one of the things that “Typewriter Ribbon” also does is to repeat, in a certain sense, Rousseau’s theft. That is, Derrida steals back what had been taken from him, from his own text, in the first place. This would include de Man’s appropriation of the term “deconstruction” first of all, as well as “dissemination,” and the critical wielding of Austin’s performative. Derrida marks these appropriations, says little about them, and then goes on to extend their theoretical scope, as though to correct de Man’s use of them for local or “technical” purposes.9 So: de Man may be wrong in Derrida’s eyes, but he is also right about Derrida: whatever happens in Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. Derrida doesn’t need anyone; he doesn’t need Rousseau because he is Rousseau. That is, in stealing back what was taken from him, Derrida repeats Rousseau’s theft of a small ribbon that had been taken away from him – a small ribbon, we should recall, that had been given to him by Maman and that he regretted more than anything else. So: both de Man and Derrida need to say that the other does not need Rousseau, and yet both need Rousseau to say what they need to, and yet cannot, say to one another. “Rousseau” would thus be the allegorical

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name of reference, of the referential reading moment, or of the referential function itself. But, then again, what do we know about reference and the referential function apart from texts like Rousseau’s, generated by a suspension of reference in utterances like “Marion” whose meaning and reference is nevertheless immediately determined, leaving us with something to read, a text? One would do better to say that what we call “reference” and the “referential function” is an allegorical name for Rousseau – or de Man, or Derrida, or even Leiris in his essay “De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie.” To end, I don’t say conclude, let me quote the first sentence of “Excuses (Confessions)” again, but this time in its entirety: “Political and autobiographical texts have in common that they share a referential reading-­moment explicitly built in within the spectrum of their significations, no matter how deluded this moment may be in its mode as well as in its thematic content: the deadly ‘horn of the bull’ referred to by Michel Leiris in a text that is indeed as political as it is autobiographical” (AR 278). De Man has a footnote to this sentence that identifies Leiris’s text and its publication in 1946. He adds one sentence: “The essay dates from 1945, immediately after the war” (AR 278).10

Notes  1. In “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2),” Derrida writes that justice is “both without reference and applicable, thus with a reference: without and with reference” (TR 125, 101). All references marked as TR followed by page numbers are to the English and French of Jacques Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2),” in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), and “Le ruban de machine à écrire (Limited Ink II),” in Papier Machine (Paris: Galilée, 2001). This is a revised version of the text originally published in Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski (eds), Material Events, Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).   2. All references marked as M followed by page numbers are to the English and the French editions of Jacques Derrida, Mémoires, for Paul de Man, revised edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), and Mémoires, pour Paul de Man (Paris: Galilée, 1988).  3. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 158; De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), p. 227.   4. All references marked as C followed by page numbers are to the English and the French editions of Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1953), and Les Confessions in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959).   5. “Excuses (Confessions)” was first published under the title “The Purloined

­202    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics Ribbon” in Samuel Weber and Henry Sussman (eds), Glyph 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).  6. Sigmund Freud, “Negation,” in General Psychological Theory (New York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 213. In German: Sigmund Freud, “Die Verneinung,” in Psychologie des Unbewußten Studienausgabe Band III (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982), p. 373.   7. Page numbers refer to Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), and Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974).   8. On the “super-­performative,” see the postscript to my “‘As the Poets Do It’: On the Material Sublime,” Chapter 2 above.  9. See de Man’s comment on his use of the word “deconstruction” in the Preface to Allegories of Reading: “Most of this book was written before ‘deconstruction’ became a bone of contention, and the term is used here in a technical rather than a polemical sense – which does not imply that it therefore becomes neutral or ideologically innocent. But I saw no reason to delete it. No other word states so economically the impossibility to evaluate positively or negatively the inescapable evaluation it implies . . . I consciously came across ‘deconstruction’ for the first time in the writings of Jacques Derrida, which means that it is associated with a power of inventive rigor to which I lay no claim but which I certainly do not wish to erase” (AR x). 10. Michel Leiris, L’Âge d’homme, précédé de De la littérature considérée comme une tauromachie (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). By the “horn of the bull” Leiris means the actual risk of death run by the torero. He poses (and answers) the question: is there an equivalent of the “horn of the bull” for a writer writing a work?

Appendix 1: A Question of an Other Order: Deflections of the Straight Man

Carol Jacobs’s admirably subtle and difficult reading dislocates our claustrophobic auditor-­ reader and leaves him in desperate straits.1 In the face of such a text – Jacobs’s, Kleist’s, and Kant’s – words like “admirable,” “subtle,” and “difficult” only betray a refusal to read and hence miss the mark entirely. The only way to leave a mark on this text is to read it. And yet the demand for a reading of the text only increases the discomposed auditor-­reader’s anxiety and places him in an even more embarrassing predicament. Not only is the auditor-­reader already inscribed in Jacobs’s text (just as the historian and the critic are inscribed in Kleist’s text) but his thrusts are parried and his feints met only by an impassive (and ironic) motionlessness: whether we run to the past or to the future “in the hope of escaping the text through another sort of Geschichte and another sort of Kritik,” we find them “already included and ironized within the text.” Whatever our critical stance, it is always somehow the same story. Indeed, we are in a position similar to that of the fencer in the third story of Kleist’s “Über das Marionettentheater.” After having soundly defeated Mr von G’s son, the fencer (Mr C, the narrator’s interlocutor) is led to the wood-­shed to meet his master: a bear standing on his hind legs and leaning against the post to which he is tied. His right paw lifted and ready to strike – his fencing stance – the bear looks into the fencer’s eye. Whatever the fencer does, it is the same story: the bear parries his thrusts and is not at all moved by feints. “Now I was almost in the position of the young Mr von G. The earnestness of the bear succeeded in robbing me of my composure, thrusts and feints were exchanged, sweat dripped from me: in vain! Not just that the bear parried all my thrusts like the best fencer in the world: he was not at all taken in by feints (something no fencer in the world could imitate after him): eye to eye, as though he could read my soul in it, he stood, paw raised ready to strike, and when my thrusts were not meant seriously, he did not move.”

­204    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics If we tell this story, it is not (only) in order to escape Jacobs’s reading of “Unwahrscheinliche Wahrhaftigkeiten” by going outside to another story, another text, another reading. Rather than allowing us to escape the text by our going before or after to its past or future, this story would bring us closer to the mark, for it allows us to go, as it were, beneath the text. First of all, Jacobs’s text is clearly marked by the story of the bear insofar as the reading is organized by the pairs thrust/feint, straight line/ deflection, and is to this extent a reading not only of “Unwahrscheinliche Wahrhaftigkeiten” but also of “Über das Marionettentheater.” But the story of the bear is of supplementary interest to the extent that it is precisely a story of reading: that is, it provides one not at all reassuring model for the confrontation between text – the bear – and reader – the fencer. In this model reading is, to make a long story short, telling the difference between literal – the thrust – and figurative – the feint – senses. But this model is disconcerting for the reader because what the story tells is a story of the reader read: whether he reads the text literally or figuratively, that reading is always included in and accounted for by the text. The text discomposes us by reading us better than we can read the text; neither our thrusts nor our feints can hit the mark: all stratagems are deflected. And yet the story of the reading bear does not leave us completely helpless, for there is always the response of the straightforward interpreter, the absolute literalist, the straight man. What we have forgotten about this story, says the straight man, is that it is ridiculous. Why feint at all? Why not just give the bear so many straight thrusts that he will not know whether he is coming or going?2 Now this (non-­)response may do for the bear, but it becomes a ­question of another order when it becomes a question of reading. For what the reading of the straight man would entail is first finding and then taking literally what in the text can only be called “figures for the literal.” In Kleist’s texts examples of such figures for the literal would be the thrust (as opposed to the feint) in the story of the bear and the straight line in all its manifestations – the straight path of a bullet, the straight course of a boat, the link between cause and effect, linear narrative, continuous and unbroken story and history, and so on – in “Unwahrscheinliche Wahrhaftigkeiten.” As Jacobs’s reading has shown, the three stories that make up the latter “anecdote” are stories of the deflection of all these straight lines. And yet in order for these deflections to take place, as it were – and we shall soon have to ask whether a deflection can take place, whether it is an event – the fiction, the feint, the feigning (all from the Latin fingere) of the straight line has to be drawn; the literal meaning and the literalist reading of the straight man have to be set up in order that they may be knocked down. The straight line may turn out to have been

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a curve all along, the thrust a feint, the truth of fiction a fiction of truth, the straight man a straw man, and so on – nevertheless, all these figures for the literal, insofar as no reading can do without them, necessarily leave that reading open to the thrust of the straight man who will take these figures literally. In other words, a deflecting reading always deflects in two senses: it deflects – transitive: to cause to swerve or turn aside; and deflects – intransitive: to swerve or turn aside. In order to cause a text to swerve or turn aside the reading always needs to swerve or turn aside itself. And it swerves or turns aside itself in order to avoid the thrust of the straight man. To read this (intransitive) deflection – i.e., what the reading wants to avoid in swerving or turning aside itself – would be to ask with the insistence of the literalist: how straight is the straight man? To what extent is the straight man a straw man? But in order that we may ask these questions we must first identify the straight man. In Jacobs’s text, at least one of those who plays this role can be identified by name and text: Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, in particular the section on the Second Analogy (i.e., the principle of causality). As Jacobs has written, while “Kant’s text insists on the rule that links cause with effect,” the “common concern” of Kleist’s three stories is “with a deflection and a lapse in the understanding that mark[s] an unexpected discontinuity between cause and effect.” Indeed, “if the law of causality fails to operate in the events of each anecdote, that breakdown has its crucial point, as we have just seen, in the language of its telling.” Although there is a necessity that orders the succession of stories, “it is not that of causality.” In short, Kleist’s text is a rewriting of certain moments of Kant’s First Critique, and although it may not hit its mark directly, “let us just say that it throws it temporarily off-­course.” This last metaphor of Jacobs (and Kleist) is particularly appropriate since Kant’s famous example for an event that we experience as a necessary succession of perceptions whose necessity is o ­ bjective insofar as it is determined by the object we perceive is that of a boat moving downstream. Whereas in the case of our perceiving, say, a house the order of our perceptions is subjective in that we can look at the house from roof to foundation or from foundation to roof, in the case of our perceiving a boat moving downstream we cannot see the boat at point B downriver before we see it at point A upriver. In any case, before we ask whether Kleist’s text does indeed succeed in throwing Kant’s boat off-­ course – whether Kleist’s barge deflects Kant’s boat (Schiff) – we should recall that a great deal is at stake in this setting up of Kant as the straight man, for when the principle of causality (i.e., Kant’s Second Analogy) is at stake, then, to quote Jacobs again, “objectivity, experience, the possibility of representation and the primary function of the understanding

­206    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics are at stake.” The stakes in this game of boat and barge, straight line and deflection, one necessity and another, are very high and the participants would be playing for keeps. The fact that Jacobs’s text is quite explicitly aware that in this game Kant has been set up for the deflection of Kleist’s text does not lower the stakes for the straight man since the very possibility of his identity as the literalist, as he who takes literally all figures for the literal, is in the pot (or in the boat or on the barge?). Like “Kant” and “Kleist,” the straight man plays for keeps, so he goes, as it were, beneath the text once again to Jacobs’s footnote and reads: “It is not a question here, however, of reading Kant in any radical sense, but rather setting him up as a fictional point of stability and limit for the lightening of Kleist’s stylus” (italics of the straight man). Kant is explicitly set up and identified here as the figure – “a fictional” – for the literal – “point of stability and limit” – so that when we take this fiction, this figure, literally it is by no means to be taken as a correction of Jacobs. We are only discharging our duties as the straight man who is indeed not interested in “reading Kant in any radical sense.” Rather than correcting the course of Jacobs’s reading, what we want to do is measure the deflection of that reading by asking: 1) to what extent can Kant be set up as even a fictional point of stability, as even an “illusion of construct”?; and 2) what is the (other) necessity that makes the setting up of these fictional points of stability, these illusions of construct, necessary? It is a question of another deflection: a deflection, as always, of deflection. A response to the first question – to what extent can Kant be set up as a straight straw man in order that he may be knocked over? – requires that we first reconstruct (in abbreviated form, of course) the argument of the Second Analogy. The fact that this section of the First Critique contains, as Norman Kemp Smith puts it and as most commentators agree, “one of the most important and fundamental arguments of the entire Critique,”3 and that, further, there is no agreement among commentators as to even what the argument is,4 should make us wary, but it does not succeed in deflecting the course of the straight man. In order to proceed more quickly to our task we organize our summary of Kant’s argument by reading three crucial terms: event (ein Geschehen, das, was geschieht, as distinguished [at least provisionally] from Begebenheit),5 cause, and analogy. Now an event, a happening, occurs only when in the sequence of perceptions the succeeding state B can be apprehended only as following upon the preceding state A. The boat moving downstream is an example. “The order in which the perceptions succeed one another in apprehension is in this instance determined (bestimmt)” (CPR 221). This determined order is what specifies, makes necessary, “at what point I must begin in order to connect the manifold empirically.” “In

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the perception of an event there is always a rule that makes the order in which the perceptions (in the apprehension of this appearance) follow upon one another a necessary order” (CPR 221). If we understand this order of perceptions in an event as a necessary order, then something is indeed presupposed in the preceding state A – i.e., the state in which the event was not (yet) – upon which the determined state B invariably follows, that is, in accordance with a rule. And it follows that this series is 1) irreversible and 2) inevitable whenever the state which precedes A is posited. But there are some things which do not follow, and we can make those clearer by staying with the example of the boat moving downstream: namely, it does not follow that the boat’s being at a point upstream – i.e., the preceding state (A) – is the “something” that is presupposed and upon which the boat’s being at a point downstream – i.e., the determined state (B) – necessarily follows. All that follows is that there is “something” in the preceding state that determines the succeeding state to follow necessarily, that is, according to a rule. We may never be able to determine what this something is, but we presuppose it, and, according to Kant, we have to presuppose it in order to experience an event and, ultimately, anything. We have already arrived (prematurely)6 at the concept of “cause” so we may as well include it in this context of what does not follow upon the rule that links cause with effect. Again, and in other words, it does not follow upon this rule that the cause of, for example, the boat’s being at a point downstream is its having been at a point upstream, for then according to the two consequences of irreversibility and inevitability we should 1) never see the boat at a point downstream before we see it at a point upstream and 2) never see the boat at a point upstream without its being at a point downstream necessarily following. To disprove such a rule of cause and effect, all one would have to do is make the (somewhat facetious) critique of Schopenhauer: if you want to see the boat moving upstream from point B to point A all you need is enough hands strong enough to pull it.7 This critique, of course, misses Kant’s point entirely, for the cause of our seeing the boat downriver is not its having been upriver, but rather something we presuppose in the preceding state A that determines the succeeding state B to follow necessarily, that is, according to a rule. And one of the things that makes up the preceding state A in this case is precisely the boat’s moving downstream. The possibility of its moving upstream by no means touches the principle of causality, for then all we need do is say that our example is the case of a boat moving upstream. In any case, lest we get carried away by this multiplication of examples, let us make our point and then consider whether the events of Kleist’s stories can deflect it.

­208    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics The principle of causality is an analogy and at that a philosophical analogy. Kant’s famous distinction between a mathematical analogy and a philosophical analogy runs as follows: “In philosophy analogies signify something very different from what they represent in mathematics. In the latter they are formulas which express the equality of two quantitative relations, and are always constitutive; so that if three members of the proportion are given, the fourth is likewise given, that is, can be constructed. But in philosophy the analogy is not the equality of two quantitative but of two qualitative relations; and from three given members we can obtain a priori knowledge only of the relation to a fourth, not of the fourth member itself. The relation yields, however, a rule for seeking the fourth member in experience, and a mark (Merkmal) whereby it can be detected (aufzufinden)” (CPR 211). In other words, as a philosophical analogy, the principle of causality, i.e., the Second Analogy of experience, provides us with a rule that is no less certain than the rule provided by mathematical analogy – “both have certainty a priori” (CPR 211) – but it is a regulative and not a constitutive principle. This means that the principle of causality does indeed give us a rule for seeking and a mark whereby to find the cause of an event in experience, but it does not mean that it can guarantee the truth of any single objective judgment about a sequence of occurrences. All it can guarantee is the judgment’s objectivity. Indeed, we may never be able to say with certainty what the cause of an event like the boat’s moving downstream is; all we can say (and according to Kant have to presuppose in order for objective perceptual judgments, objective meaning, etc., to be possible) is “that the condition under which an event invariably and necessarily follows is to be found (anzutreffen ist) in what precedes the event” (CPR 226).8 What this means for the event in Kleist’s three stories is that, no matter how incalculable they may be, they cannot put in question, cannot deflect, the principle of causality precisely to the extent that they are events: “A bullet hole that enters a man’s chest and exits from his back does not wound him, an enormous block of stone falls towards the river below without hitting a passing barge, a blast of apocalyptic proportions carries a soldier to the other side of the river without a trace of violence” – the sequence in all of these events is indeed incalculable, but Kant’s Second Analogy does not need to be calculable in order to operate. Indeed, the very incalculability of empirical events could be used in support of Kant’s proof – that is, in support of his argument that mere induction from empirical events can never arrive at a concept of cause that is not contingent: “Now the concept, if thus found, would be merely empirical, and the rule which it supplies, that everything which happens has a cause, would be as contingent as the experience upon

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which it is based. Since the universality and necessity of the rule would not be grounded a priori, but only on induction, they would be merely fictitious (nur angedichtet) and without genuinely universal validity” (CPR 223). We could say that the mere force of (empirical) events cannot throw Kant’s boat off-­course, for that course is transcendentally guaranteed. But that “the law of causality fails to operate in the events of each anecdote” (italics of the straight man) is, of course, not really the main thrust of Jacobs’s text. It is rather “in the language of [the] . . . telling” that the breakdown has its crucial point, and at this point the straight man has real reason to worry, for such a breakdown introduces the possibility (indeed necessity) of a crisis whose deflections are not merely incalculable but undecidable. Kant’s proof of the principle of causality is, as it were, something of an event, and in order to make the proof he has to tell the story of that event. That story is anything but straightforward, and hence the language of its telling – the rhetoric of its operations and the operations of its rhetoric – is of interest to even the straightest of straight men. We may already wonder about the transitions of Kant’s story when we note that his procedure is to define an event, read that definition of event into experience by giving an example, and then read that event along with a necessary order of perceptions according to a rule out of the experience. And we worry not just because the extent to which Kant’s definition of an event already contains the concept of causality within it is also the extent to which his transcendental proof is open to the charge of its arriving at a conclusion that is not synthetic but analytic.9 Rather it is the authority and the necessity of precisely the transitions of his story – the carrying-­over from definition to example and back to rule without anything having been lost or gained (except to literalists like Schopenhauer) in the course of the trip – that makes us worry, for, after all, this story is to prove the possibility of such objective transition, such carrying-­over. A good example of the sense in which Kant’s boat may be said to have (always already) deflected itself from its proper course is the passage, quoted by Jacobs, that declares the primary function of the understanding: “Understanding is required for all experience and for its possibility. Its primary contribution [consists] . . . in making the representation of an object possible at all. This it does by carrying the time-­order over into appearances and their existence” (CPR 225–6). The full import of this operation of carrying-­over performed by the understanding is not conveyed until we understand that it is an event: that is, rather than the innocuous “This it does . . .,” what the German text says is “Dieses geschiehet nun dadurch, dass er die Zeitordnung auf die Erscheinungen und deren Dasein überträgt (This

­210    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics happens through this, that it carries over the time-­order into the appearances and their existence).” What has happened in the carrying-­over of the translation (Übertragung) is precisely that the “happening” has been lost. In other words, the carrying-­over that makes the representation of an object possible at all, that makes an event (i.e., an objective succession of perceptions) possible at all, is itself an event. And the guarantee of the objectivity of this event’s order is the guarantee of metaphor (carrying-­over, Übertragung): in short, this is the metaphor that would guarantee metaphor. This would indeed not be much of a guarantee for the straight course of Kant’s boat, laden as it is, as it were, with a cargo of objective meaning (objektive Bedeutung) it is supposed to carry over from point A to point B. (“The boat is never far off when one plies figures of rhetoric,” says Derrida.10) For how can we ever be master of this carrying-­over of metaphor – this metaphor of carrying-­over, this metaphor of metaphor – except by the carrying-­over of still another metaphor whose claim to carrying over in a necessary order is no better (or worse) than the first (or last) metaphor? But let us not belabor the point. These deflections are liable to carry us away from the task at hand: Kleist’s reading of Kant. Rather than any radical reading of Kant, all I would do here is suggest the sense in which Jacobs’s proposal of a Kleist-­crisis for Kant is a metaphor for Kant’s Kant-­crisis. How this crisis is carried over by Kleist scholarship to the point where it becomes Kleist’s Kant-­crisis is the story of another metaphor and another deflection: as always, it is a metaphor and a deflection of reading. What is known as Kleist’s Kantkrise is quite literally a crisis of reading: Kleist reads Kant and can read no more. As stated in the two main documents of Kleist’s Kant-­crisis, the effect of his getting to know “the recent so-­called Kantian philosophy” (II, 634)11 is that he has not been able to touch a book again (habe ich nicht wieder ein Buch angerührt). An inner disgust, revulsion (ein innerlicher Ekel), keeps him from working, everything called knowledge revolts him (aber mich ekelt vor allem, was Wissen heisst), and, again, since this time books revolt him (seitdem ekelt mich vor den Büchern). Before we read what Kleist considers to be the cause of this deep, convulsing effect (eine tiefe erschütternde Wirkung) (II, 633), let us remark the metaphors of this crisis, for they have a bearing on the reading of “Unwahrscheinliche Wahrhaftigkeiten.” They are metaphors of thrust and deflection and, above all, hitting the mark. The thought bothering Kleist has shaken him deeply and painfully, and he asks Wilhelmine not to smile if it does not affect her the same way: “Ah, Wilhelmine, if the point of this thought does not strike your heart don’t smile about another who feels wounded by it in his most sacred innerness” (II, 634). But the most repeated

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metaphor is that of Ziel – goal, aim, target. Kleist has been rendered aimless (ohne Ziel) and he repeats the following formulation four times (twice in the letter to Wilhelmine and twice in the letter to Ulrike von Kleist): “my only, my highest goal, aim, target, is sunk” (mein einziges, mein höchstes Ziel ist gesunken). Rather than Kleist’s throwing Kant’s boat off-­course, what we have here is Kant’s (the straight man’s?) hitting his mark directly, causing a crisis, and deflecting the course of Kleist’s life. And it is indeed the course of Kleist’s life that is deflected, for Kant or rather Kleist’s reading of Kant sinks the goal, aim, target Kleist had set up for his life: the history, the story, of his soul (die Geschichte meiner Seele) has been disrupted and deflected. What is Kleist’s goal and how has his reading of Kant sunk it? Kleist’s highest goal, aim, target is Bildung (education, formation) and what that means for him is the amassing of truth: “Education (Bildung) seemed to me the only goal (Ziel) worth striving for, truth (Wahrheit) the only riches worth possessing.” And the reason his goal is sunk is not only that he is now convinced “that here below no truth is to be found,” but that the relation between objective and subjective knowledge, truth and verisimilitude, Wahrheit and Wahrscheinlichkeit, is undecidable: “If all men had green glasses instead of eyes, then they would have to judge (urteilen) that the objects (Gegenstände) which they sighted through them were green – and they would never be able to decide (und nie würden sie entscheiden können) whether the eye shows them things as they are or whether the eye does not add something to them that does not belong to them but to the eye. Thus it is with the understanding (Verstand). We cannot decide whether that which we call truth truly is truth or whether it only so appears to us (Wir können nicht entscheiden, ob das, was wir Wahrheit nennen, wahrhaft Wahrheit ist, oder ob es uns nur so scheint)” (II, 634). In short, the crisis of reading (Kant) is a crisis of undecidability. If we rehearse the particulars of this crisis, it is not in order “to repeat the tedious banalities of Kleist’s Kant crisis” – indeed, we would say that, thanks to Jacobs’s reading, that crisis is no longer banal – but rather to bring out the full implications of the crisis. And we leave aside the question of “how well” Kleist understands Kant – we would say that he reads him very well – or the extent to which Kleist sets up Kant as a “fictional point of instability” in order, say, to go to Paris with his sister Ulrike and break off his engagement to Wilhelmine von Zenge.12 No, all I would do here is point out that the crisis of ­undecidability – the undecidable crisis – is also what “Unwahrscheinliche Wahrhaftigkeiten” is about: indeed, one could say that the anecdote is a “proof” of the “principle of undecidability” which makes a decision between truth (Wahrheit), verisimilitude (Wahrscheinlichkeit), and their

­212    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics counterparts (Unwahrheit and Unwahrscheinlichkeit) impossible. After the second story of the officer, the nobleman says that the officer had chosen well the stories that were supposed to prove his proposition, his principle (Der Landedelmann meinte, dass er die Geschichten, die seinen Satz belegen sollten, gut zu wählen wüsste). What is this proposition, this principle, and how is it proved? As stated by the officer in his prefatory remarks, it is that verisimilitude is not always on the side of truth: “For as a first condition people demand of truth that it be verisimilitudinous; and yet verisimilitude, as experience teaches, is not always on the side of truth.” What this principle states is two unsettling possibilities: 1) that the two stated terms (Wahrheit and Wahrscheinlichkeit) people demand be on the same side need not necessarily be so; and 2) that two other “unstated” terms – but we can (and have to) determine them quite easily by analogy and with the help of the title – i.e., Unwahrheit and Unwahrscheinlichkeit, need not be on the same side either. In other words, the principle introduces the possibility of the breakdown of one bridge – between Wahrheit and Wahrscheinlichkeit and between Unwahrheit and Unwahrscheinlichkeit – and the construction of another – between Wahrheit and Unwahrscheinlichkeit and between Unwahrheit and Wahrscheinlichkeit. The trouble with this destruction and construction is that once the necessity of the first bridge has been broken, once truth can communicate either with verisimilitude or with unverisimilitude, once untruth can communicate either with unverisimilitude or with verisimilitude, we are no longer in a position to decide what lies on either side. We are certainly on a bridge – no matter how illusory that bridge may turn out to be – but the whence and whither of our crossing certainly remain undecidable. Jacobs’s text has documented the story of this breakdown and construction, and I need not repeat it. But what I would stress here is the difference between the bridge broken down and the bridge constructed: that is, the breakdown of the first bridge is the destruction of the bridge of analogy, of metaphor – truth is to verisimilitude as untruth is to unverisimilitude – and, in the aftermath, the substitution for the principle of analogy of another principle of substitution which can no longer be called a bridge but which is covered well by the term “chiasmus”: Wahrheit Wahrscheinlichkeit Wahrheit Wahrscheinlichkeit

5

3

Unwahrheit Unwahrscheinlichkeit Unwahrheit Unwahrscheinlichkeit

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Now this crossing-­over from the principle of analogy to the principle of chiasmic substitution is precisely the principle proved by the telling of the three stories. In other words, once the necessity of the bridge between truth and verisimilitude is broken down, the two terms (along with their “opposites”) are inscribed in a system of substitutions wherein not only is the constitution of the terms incalculable but the relation among the terms is undecidable. What should we call the “proof” of this principle? By setting up Kant as the straight man, we could say that the three stories of “Unwahrscheinliche Wahrhaftigkeiten” are a rematch between Kant and Kleist: whereas in the first encounter Kant hit his mark, sank Kleist’s goal, and deflected the course of Kleist’s life, in the second encounter Kleist makes a comeback and deflects the course of Kant’s boat. Kleist’s Kant-­crisis becomes Kant’s Kleist-­crisis. But, of course, this would be only one side of the story. With equal justice, we could say that the “proof” of the principle of undecidability, insofar as it not only repeats but also tries to transfer onto the auditor, the reader, the undecidability that caused Kleist’s goal to sink, is only another repetition of Kleist’s permanent Kant-­crisis. Kant’s Kleist-­crisis or Kleist’s Kant-­crisis – the chiasmus is precise and it is precisely as undecidable as the chiasmus of Wahrheit/Wahrscheinlichkeit, Unwahrheit/Unwahrscheinlichkeit. Like Jacobs’s fiction of truth and truth of fiction, it hits the mark. But lest we take these hits, these sinkings, this burning (or blowing up) of bridges literally – as though we could be, say, for chiasmus and against metaphor (which would mean as much as being, say, pro-­barge and anti-­boat) – we should remember that all these deflections of deflection are not possible without our drawing another straight line, constructing another bridge of metaphor, setting up another straight man or fiction of stability, literalizing another figure for the literal – in short, reading and writing another fiction of truth as though it could be the truth of fiction. Reading philosophy and literature as the deflection of deflection – no doubt this could carry us over to the intersection of literature and philosophy, so long, of course, as we do not take that intersection, that mutual cutting (inter-­, “mutually” + secare, “to cut”), too literally, for what could be the mark of a mutual cutting if not another deflection?

Notes   1. This essay was originally published as a “Response” to Carol Jacobs’s “The Style of Kleist” in Diacritics 9:4 (December 1979), pp. 70–8.   2. This reading of the straight man is that of Paul de Man in his Yale seminar on “Theory of Irony” (Spring 1976).

­214    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics   3. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), p. 363.  4. Beside Norman Kemp Smith’s, some helpful discussions of the Second Analogy are: A. C. Ewing, Kant’s Treatment of Causality (London: Kegan Paul, 1924); Gerd Buchdahl, “The Kantian ‘Dynamic of Reason’ with Special Reference to the Place of Causality in Kant’s System,” and W. A. Suchting, “Kant’s Second Analogy of Experience,” both in Lewis W. Beck (ed.), Kant Studies Today (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1969); and James Van Cleve, “Four Recent Interpretations of Kant’s Second Analogy,” Kant-­Studien 64 (1973), pp. 71–87. See also Walter Bröcker, Kant über Metaphysik und Erfahrung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970).  5. All references indicated by CPR followed by a page number are to Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965). For the German I have used Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966). Although Kant would seem to make this distinction between “event” (Begebenheit) and “happening” (ein Geschehen, das, was geschieht) in the paragraph where he defines “happening” (CPR 220–1), later he calls all “events” Begebenheit. This may mean that once the principle of causality has been proved as a condition of all experiences of a series of perceptions, there is no longer a real difference between our perceptions of, say, a house and a boat moving downstream.  6. This slippage – between event (i.e., the necessary order) and causality (i.e, caused order) – is nevertheless not accidental insofar as there is some “textual evidence” that Kant here also, as P. F. Strawson puts it in The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), “proceeds by a non sequitur of numbing grossness.” For an excellent response to Strawson, see Van Cleve, “Four Recent Interpretations,” pp. 81–2.  7. See Arthur Schopenhauer, Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Wolfgang von Löhneysen (Stuttgart and Frankfurt am Main: Cotta-­Insel, 1962), II, pp. 107–9.   8. This is a paraphrase of the excellent summary of the Second Analogy in Stephan Körner, Kant (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974), p. 87.   9. This is a charge made by A. O. Lovejoy, “On Kant’s Reply to Hume,” in M. S. Gram (ed.), Kant: Disputed Questions (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1976), pp. 284–308. 10. Jacques Derrida, “Le Parergon,” in La Vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), p. 63. 11. All page references to Kleist’s letters to Wilhelmine von Zenge and to Ulrike von Kleist (22 and 23 March 1801), given by volume and page number, are to Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Hanser, 1961). 12. One could as easily say that Kleist went to Paris with his sister Ulrike and broke off the engagement to Wilhelmine von Zenge in order to say that he had had a Kant-­crisis. Who can say? Interpreters of Kleist’s Kantkrise too often forget that the rhetoric of the letters to Wilhelmine and to Ulrike, in addition to saying what it says, also wants to persuade both fiancée and sister.

Appendix 2: Response to Frances Ferguson

The following critique is from a letter to Frances Ferguson, 21 December 1987:1 Although we are dealing here with complex and, call it, multi-­layered arguments – both de Man’s and yours – I think that the point at which your representation of de Man’s argument diverges from it can be determined. That point of divergence, I would say, is most clearly visible in your essay’s understanding of de Man’s reading of “Marion” as a question of “ambiguity,” “positional equivalence,” and “self-­ contradiction.” In general terms, as I see it, such an account of de Man’s argument diverges from it because it continues to understand what is at stake in the case of the utterance of the name “Marion” as within the transformational (tropological) system that the text has set up: i.e., the system of guilt, shame, confession, excuse, etc. (or, as de Man puts it: “the system of truth, virtue, and understanding (or of deceit, evil, and error) that gives meaning to the passage” [AR 289]). That is, for de Man, this utterance is not a matter of an ambiguity where “Marion” can mean either Marion or “nothing.” Rather it is a matter of an utter disjunction between, on the one hand, the entire system of meaning (which, like the number system, is a transformational, tropological system in which terms can be rendered equivalent or in which they can come into contradiction with one another) and “something” that comes from outside it, that is a “foreign element,” as de Man puts it, that makes us enter “an entirely different system in which such terms as desire, shame, guilt, exposure, and repression no longer have any place” (AR 289). Far from being positionally “equivalent” or in contradiction, the name “Marion” as read referentially and the name “Marion” as a “foreign element” or “anacoluthon” can never come up against one another on the same terrain and hence can never be understood as a question of ambiguous meaning. I think this is most legible in your essay’s use of the “morning star-­evening star” and the base 7/base 10 examples on p. 38.

­216    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics Granted that the number 7 can be represented as 10 in one base and as 7 in another. Granted that “the apparent homology between the number 7 and its representation as 7 to a base of 10 counts neither as an absolute justification of the ontological validity of this particular representation nor as a statement of the invalidity of the representation of the number as 10 to a base of 7.” And granted that “it provides a context that enables the divergent procedures of representation to converge.” This is indeed a case of “positional equivalence” or, as I would understand it, a case of one transformational (tropological) system – namely, the number system (whether base 7 or base 10) – in which 7 can be represented by 7 or by 10. The trouble is, however, that the name “Marion” as utter contingency, as foreign element, as anacoluthon, is not in a position of equivalence in relation to its meaning when read referentially. It is rather precisely outside of the entire context of representation – the “context that enables the divergent procedures of representation to converge.” De Man’s essay states this several times in several ways, for instance when it summarizes what “fiction” means: “Fiction has nothing to do with representation but is the absence of any link between utterance and a referent, regardless of whether this link be causal, encoded, or governed by any other conceivable relationship that could lend itself to systematization” (AR 292). In short, the disjunction is not between two meanings of the name “Marion” – the person Marion and “nothing” – but rather between “Marion” as belonging to the system of meaning (and all the ambiguities that can exist within that system) and “Marion” as radically outside that system – as “naked name,” say, as material inscription. Rather than being ambiguous, “Marion” is undecidable. Another way to formulate the divergence between de Man and your account of de Man would be by analogy to the terms of “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion.” That is, the name “Marion” read as a foreign element outside of the system of representation – i.e., outside of the tropological system of guilt, shame, confession, etc. – is indeed like “zero” rather than a “one.” For zero in de Man’s reading is heterogeneous to the number system – i.e., a tropological, transformational system – a “foreign element” that is necessary for the system’s self-­ constitution but that itself cannot be homogenized to that system. Unlike the one – which is simultaneously non-­number and homogenizable to number – the zero cannot be assimilated to the number system by any transformational numerical operation, including any numerical operation that works by negation. Zero is not “nothing” – it is not a negative quantity, it is not a negation. (Note the exclusion of zero in your own quotation from Bertrand Russell on p. 41!) In the same way, the disjunction between “Marion” as read referentially and “Marion”

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as non-­referential is not a difference between the utterance’s meaning either something (the person Marion) or “nothing” but rather a difference between the utterance’s either meaning (whether something or nothing) or standing utterly outside of the system of meaning, like a zero as inscription, marker, place-­holder, etc. Or, in short, one is ambiguous (i.e., as simultaneously number and non-­number); zero is truly undecidable. (Cf. Derrida on undecidability as “the irreducible excess of the syntactic over the semantic” in “La double séance.”2) In any case, even thus summarily stated, the divergence between de Man’s reading and your essay’s account of it is great enough to render your conclusions questionable. For one thing, it is not the case that de Man “overestimates the challenge that ambiguity puts to linguistic self-­identity” (39) or that “By treating a contingent claim to meaningfulness (a claim that a meaning holds for a limited field) as if it were an absolute claim (a claim that language can only be meaningful if it is undisplacable and unambiguous), de Man reduces the notion of position to a random assignment of relationship that could only be arrived at through an act of pointing, Marion=‘nothing.’” In de Man’s account, the system of representation, of meaning, as a transformational tropological system, functions very well indeed, in fact all too well, to produce meaning that can accommodate all kinds of ambiguity and displacement because it can always remediate contradictory meanings, if in no other way, then by negation (just as we can represent 7 as 7 or as 10 without any loss of meaning – though note that we need the zero as place-­holder to perform the operation . . .). The utterance “Marion” as foreign element or as anacoluthon, however, is heterogeneous to this meaning-­making system and is meaningless – i.e., it does not mean “nothing” but rather has no meaning (de Man: “In the spirit of the text, one should resist all temptation to give any significance whatever to the sound ‘Marion’” [AR 289]). And this meaninglessness is not due to de Man’s having treated a contingent claim to meaningfulness as if it were an absolute claim. Far from it, de Man has no quarrel with language’s ability to mean and to continue to produce meaning in the face of the greatest negations. Indeed, even and especially in the case of the utterance “Marion” the text makes clear that it is immediately reinscribed in the system of meaning and representation, it is “at once caught and enmeshed in a web of causes, significations, and substitutions” (AR 292). For, as de Man says, “Rousseau’s own text, against its author’s interests, prefers being suspected of lie and slander rather than of innocently lacking sense” (AR 293). Anyway, to short-­circuit the argument, de Man’s point would be that language’s overwhelming capacity to produce and reproduce meaning – to render meaningful even utterances that innocently

­218    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics lack sense by misreading them as referential – nevertheless depends on, is constituted by, “radical fictions” like that of the utterance “Marion.” And as a (material) condition of possibility of meaning, such a condition is always necessarily its condition of impossibility. (See here the passage on p. 293 right after the phrase “innocently lacking sense” to the end of the paragraph.) Like the (meaningful) number system’s dependence on zero, the system of meaning and representation depends on a radically heterogeneous materiality that at one and the same time makes meaning possible and impossible – that renders it truly undecidable. If this is at all the case, then your essay’s conclusion that for de Man “materiality represents the only possibility of an escape from the heterogeneity intrinsic to linguistic representation” (39) is far off the mark. Rather than any kind of “escape” from language’s “intrinsic” heterogeneity, the materiality – of the zero, of the name, of inscription – of language is the heterogeneity of linguistic representation. Language’s materiality makes meaning both possible and impossible. Just as the materiality of the zero – zero as inscription – both constitutes and de-­constitutes the number system. This is a “count-­down” all right – but not of name “towards pure number” (39) but rather of name to material inscription, a count-­ down to zero – which is anything but “pure number.”3 Such would be the critique – at least in sketchy, hasty, outline form. As far as general philosophical stakes go, I suppose it is something of a response to the familiar pragmatist complaints against de Man (and “deconstruction”) that he (and it) needs to absolutize the claims of language or of knowledge in order to knock down these claims. “We’re not asking for absolute knowledge or meaning,” runs the line, “it is you who want absolute knowledge, meaning, foundations, ontological stability, etc.” I see it reflected in your essay’s statements about de Man’s “overestimating” and “exaggerating” the claims of meaning. My claim is that far from asking for absolute meaning, de Man is quite ready to acknowledge language’s ability to create meaning, contingent meaning, in context, in use. It is not because language fails to arrive at absolutes (meaning, truth, knowledge, or whatever) that it becomes unreliable, but rather that even the contingent, partial, context-­bound, use-­bound, relative meaning, truth, and knowledge that it does come up with are (materially) conditioned by “elements” that will not be assimilated to that “context.” The social context (or the social text) is nothing but a texture woven of the same undecidabilities, the same errors, the same mistaken readings of utterly random utterances as referential, and hence cannot serve as an even temporary, pragmatic, partial point of recourse. In any case, I realize that in zeroing in on what I took to be the main area of divergence between de Man and your account of his reading, I

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have left out a great deal – and a great deal that I find excellent in the essay. Still, I felt that I had to do so in order to get my main objections across as economically as possible. Indeed, on the whole, I feel that your essay makes quite a number of correct and very astute insights into de Man – for instance, the remarks on human and “nonhuman” and the sublime on pp. 37–8 – but that these insights are embedded in a general argument that, in the face of “Excuses” (never mind “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion” and “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant”), simply does not hold.

Notes 1. This response is to Frances Ferguson’s essay “Historicism, Deconstruction, and Wordsworth.” It was first published along with Ferguson’s essay and her own response to my response in a special issue of Diacritics 17:4 (Winter 1987) entitled “Wordsworth and the Production of Poetry” and co-­edited by Cynthia Chase and me. All page references to Ferguson’s essay are to this issue of Diacritics. A revised version of Ferguson’s essay – which incorporates and extends her response to my response – is published in her Solitude and the Sublime (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 2. In Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 219–22. 3. See my account of de Man on the zero in the third part of “Allegories of Reference,” Chapter 1 above.

Index

Abrams, M. H., 83 Adorno, T. W., 137, 179 aesthetics and politics, 137–8 allegory, 19–21, 24–5, 33–4, 116–18, 154–5 Althusser, Louis, 11, 35n, 36n, 121n, 125n, 137, 153, 154, 156n17, 156n19, 156n20 anacoluthon, 196–7, 216, 217 anagrams, 62n2 apostrophe, 88–9 Arnauld and Nicole, 28 Auerbach, Erich, 179 Auffret, Dominique, 135n1 Barthes, Roland, 16, 17–18 Bataille, Georges, 113, 124n20, 135 Baudelaire, Charles, 41–5 Benjamin, Walter, 137, 155 Blanchot, Maurice, 170 blind spot, 186 Bröcker, Walter, 214n4 Buchdahl, Gerd, 214n4 catachresis, 113–14 chiasmus, 212–13 class consciousness of the proletariat, 142–6 Cohen, Tom, 35n9 cultural studies, 151–4 De Man, Paul (essays by) “Allegory (Julie)”, 18–19, 21, 154 “An Interview with Paul de Man”, 13, 56

“Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric”, 41–5 “Excuses (Confessions)”, 57–61, 64n19, 69, 187–201, 215–19 “Genesis and Genealogy (Nietzsche)”, 113–14 “Hegel on the Sublime”, 16, 36n18, 81–96, 137–8 “Hypogram and Inscription”, 3–4, 7, 62n2, 133 “Kant and Schiller”, 8, 48, 60–1, 78n14, 182–3 “Kant’s Materialism”, 63n13 “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion”, 21, 24–34, 216–17 “Patterns of Temporality in Hölderlin’s ‘Wie wenn am Feiertage’”, 174–80 “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant”, 4–8, 10–11, 12, 24, 38–55, 58, 67–70 “Promises (Social Contract)”, 19–20 “Reading and History”, 3–4, 7 “Roland Barthes and the Limits of Structuralism”, 16, 17–18, 20 “Semiology and Rhetoric”, 22, 36n19 “Shelley Disfigured”, 55 “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics”, 5–8, 10, 80–1, 82, 85 “The Concept of Irony”, 34n2, 37n27, 70 “The Epistemology of Metaphor”, 24

Index    ­221 “The Resistance to Theory”, 9–10, 14–18, 20, 21–4, 114, 123n19, 124n21 “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Derrida as Reader of Rousseau”, 185–7 “The Riddle of Hölderlin”, 170–1 “Time and History in Wordsworth”, 180–3 death, 180–2 deconstruction, 7, 202n9 Derrida, Jacques, 32, 58, 63n7, 63n9, 77n8, 119–20, 127, 135, 137–8, 172, 182, 185–201, 210, 217 desire in Hegel, 105–9, 129–35 in Kojève, 129–35 Dove, Kenley Royce, 123n18 Eagleton, Terry, 9, 10, 11, 137, 139, 142 Engels, Friedrich, 141, 156n8 Ewing, A. C., 214n4 Ferguson, Frances, 215–19 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 100, 102 fiat lux, 69, 86–7, 93–6 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 65–70, 77n7 forgiveness, 198–9 Freud, Sigmund, 190 Gedächtnis, 82 geometric method, 25–8 German Ideology, The, 11, 12, 20, 56, 99–103, 118, 120 Goebbels, Joseph, 8 grammar, 19–20, 21 Hartman, Geoffrey, 174 Hegel, G.W.F., 5–8, 10, 12, 24, 80–96, 139–41 Heidegger, Martin, 39, 113, 159–72, 174–80, 195 Heinrichs, Johannes, 122n18 Hertz, Neil, 83, 86, 95 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 159–72, 174–80 Hunter, Ian, 152 Hyppolite, Jean, 109, 122

ideology, 8–10, 13, 14–20, 117, 152, 154–5 inscription, 32, 82 irony, 33, 60 irreversibility, 43–5 Jacobs, Carol, 171, 203–14 Jakobson, Roman, 79–80 Jameson, Fredric, 146–55 Jauss, Hans Robert, 3–4 Kant, Immanuel, 4–8, 10, 24, 38–61, 65–76, 80, 81, 196, 205–11, 213, 214n5 Kleist, Heinrich von, 135, 203–13 Kojève, Alexandre, 109, 122, 124n25, 127–35 Kolakowski, Leszek, 155 Körner, Stephan, 214n8 Lacan, Jacques, 195 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 161 Leiris, Michel, 201, 202n10 life, in Hegel, 104–19, 131, 132 Longinus, 81, 83, 86, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95 love, 133 Lukács, Georg, 64n21, 137–55 Lyotard, Jean-François, 63n11 Mandel, Ernest, 147 Manheim, Ralph, 159 Marx, Karl, 56, 99–103, 115, 118–20 materiality, 38–61 of inscription, 6–7, 42, 53, 55 metalepsis, 181 metaphor, 181–3, 212–13 metonymy, 181–3 negation in Hegel, 85, 86, 89, 101, 105–8, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 129–34, 141 Newmark, Kevin, 37n24, 95 nominal definition, 25–6 Norman, Richard, 121n12 number, 48–9 one see zero

­222    Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics parabasis, 33, 37n27 parataxis, 75, 179 Pascal, Blaise, 21–34, 46 performative, 48, 50–1, 57–61, 68–70, 75–6, 77n8 phenomenalization, 16, 83–4, 145–6 Philonenko, Alexis, 77n7 Pöggeler, Otto, 121n positing power of language, 68–70, 73–4, 77n8, 85, 88 primitive terms, 26–7 Redfield, Marc, 93–6 reference, 13–21, 123n19, 200–1 Riffaterre, Michael, 3–4 Rosen, Stanley, 135n2 Roth, Michael S., 135n1, 136n11 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 59–61, 64n19, 70, 185–201, 215–18 Russell, Bertrand, 216 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 15, 27, 39, 80 Schiller, Friedrich, 8, 43, 44, 65, 70–6, 78n14, 80 Schlegel, Friedrich, 33, 60, 70, 135 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 207, 209 self-consciousness, in Hegel, 104–20, 127–35 semiology, 16

shame in Rousseau, 193–6 Smith, Norman Kemp, 214n4 Sophocles, 159 Stoekl, Allan, 136n11 Strauss, Leo, 134, 136n9 Strawson, P. F., 214n6 sublime, 24 in Hegel, 80–96 in Kant, 38–61, 65–70, 72–3 in Schiller, 70–6 Suchting, W. A., 214n4 symbol, 72–3, 83–7, 89, 90 Szondi, Peter, 166 transcendental method, 70–1, 73–4, 77n11, 78n14 translation, 159–63, 165 trivium, 21–4 tropological system, 11–12, 45–7, 57–61, 89–90 undecidabililty, 37n26, 216, 217 unreadability, 18–19 Van Cleve, James, 214n4 Wordsworth, William, 39–42, 62n5, 180–3 zero, 29–34, 46, 216–19