The Ethics of Reading: Kant, De Man, Eliot, Trollope, James and Benjamin [1 ed.] 0231063350, 9780231063357

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11 Previously Published Wellek Library Lectures Harold Bloom

The Breaking of the Vessels

Perry Anderson

In the Tracks of Historical Materialism

Frank Kermode

Forms of Attention

Jacques Derrida

Memoires for Paul de Man

J. Hillis Miller ",

The Ethics of Reading KANT,

de

MAN,

ELIOT, TROLLOPE, AM J ES,

and

BENAM J IN

The Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine

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Columbia University Press

New York

1987

Columbia University � Guildford, Surrey Copyright. © 1987 Columbia University Press All rights reserved New York

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Printed in the United States of America

Libaraty or' Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miller, 1. Hillis (Joseph Hillis), 1928The ethics of reading. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Deconstruction. 2. Literature and Morals. I. Title.

PN98.R38M55 1986 ISBN 0-231-06334-2

This book is Smyth-sewn. Book design by

J. S. Roberts

801'.95

PlY98 -

1138 ;tfb-S

I'�/ 86-11708

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For fIarold Bloom

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READING UNREADABILITY: de MAN

the text right," respecting it in that sense, not a matter involving moral obligation. Even less would Paul de Man's particular "theory" of reading seem likely to have an ethical dimension. Epistemological categories, categories of tcuth and falsehood, enlightenment and delusion, insigh,t and blindness, seem to control the admirable rigor of his essays. The category of ethics or, as he says, "ethicity," does, however, somewhat surprisingly, appear at crucial moments in de Man's-essays, for example in "my" passage. The category of ethicity is one version of that insistence on a necessary referential, I pragmatic function of language which distinguishes de Man's work from certain forms of structuralism or semiotics. It also gives the lie to those who claim "deconstruction" asserts the "fr�e play" of language in the void, abstracted from all practical, social, or political effect. Of de Man one can say what he himself says of Rousseau: "his radical critique of referential meaning never implied that the referential function of language could in any way be avoided, brack­ eted, or reduced to being just one contingent linguistic property among ot�rs, as is postulated, for example, in contemporary sem­ iology which, like all post-KantjsT formalisms, could not exist without this postulate" (AR, 207) \yhicity is for de Man associated with the categories of 4?olitics and histo]5y, though these three modes of what he calls �" are not the same. My goal here is to account for the presence of the word "ethics" in de Man's vocabulary, and to present thereby a salient example within con� temporary literary theory of an ethics of reading. "Ethicity," like other forms of reference to the extral­ inguistic by way of the linguistic, occurs for de Man not at the beginning, as a basis for language, and not at the end, as a final triumphant return to reality validating language, but in the midst of an intricate sequence, the sequentiality of which is of course only a fiction, a convenience for thinking as a narrative what in fact always occurs in the tangle of an "all at once" mixing tro­ pological, allegorical, referential, ethical, political, and historical dimensions. The passage I began by citing and p"ropose. in this chapter to try to "read" follows in Allegories of Reading on the

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READING UNREADABILITY: de MAN

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page after one of de Man's most succinct formulations of his paradigmatic model for the narrative pattern into which all texts fall: "The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration. As distinguished from primary deconstructive narratives centered on figures and ultimately always on metaphor, we can call {such narratives to the second (or the third) degree allegories" (AR, 205). This formulation is by -no means' immediately transparent in meaning. I have elsewhere attempted to read it in detail.3 What is most important here is the fact that the ethical moment, for de Man, occurs toward the end of this intricate sequence, as primary evidence of a text's inability to read itself, to benefit from its own wisdom. First comes the assertion of an unjustified and aberrant metaphor, then the "deconstruction" of that metaphor, the revelation of its aberrancy, then the . " allegory, " that is, the expression in a veiled form of the impossibility or reading that revelation of aber­ rancy. One form that repetition of the first error takes is the mode of referentiality that de Man calls "ethicity." The first feature of the ethical for de . Man, then, is that it is an aspect not of the first narrative of metaphorical denomination, nor of the second narrative of the deconstruction of that aberrant act of denomination, but of the "third" narrative of the failure to read which de Man calls "allegory." Says de Man: "Allegories are always ethical." The ethical, or what de Man calls. somewhat barbarously, "ethicity," is not a primary category, but a secondary or in fact tertiary one. "Ethicity" is necessary and it is not derivative from anything but the laws of language that are all-determining or all-engendering for .de Man, but the ethical does · not come first. It intervenes, necessarily intervenes, but it occurs at a "later stage" in a sequence which , begins with epistemological error, the error born of aberrant metaphorical naming. One must remember, however, that the sequential of "earlier" and "later" th t makes all texts, in de Man's use of the term, narratives' is the fictional temporalization of what in fact are simultaneous mguistic operations:

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READING UNREADABILITY: de MAN

aberrant metaphorical naming, the deconstruction of that act of nomination, the allegory of the unreadability of those "first" two linguistic acts, and so on. Of that allegory of the impossibility of reading '�ethicity" is a necess..ary dimension, since all' allegories are ethical. In this sense ethicity is as first as any oth�r lir1guistlc act. It is uncorlditionally necessary. But what does it mean to say that "allegories are always ethical"? It is-, clear , at the main target of de Man's attack here is ant's ethical theory To put this another way, the passage about ethics slmu aneous y rejects Kant and bends Kantian language to another purpose. In order to make an open spqce for his own ethical theory, de Man has simultaneously to reject the Kantian theory and appropriate its language to his own uses: "The ethical category is imperative (i.e., a category rather than a value) to the extent that it is linguistic and not subjective." In order to argue that ethicity is the product of a purely linguistic necessity de Man has to reject the notion that it has to do with subjectivity, or with freedom as a feature of selfhood, or with interpersonal relations, or with a categ6rical imperative coming from some transcendental source, whether from subjectivity in the fdrm of the transcendenta� imag­ ination or fromsome extrahuman transcendence., "Ethics," says de Man, "has nothing to do with the will (thwarted or fre�) of' a subject, nor a fortiori, with a relationship between, subjects." And: "The passage to an ethical tonality does not result from a tran­ scendental imperative." -Well, i f ethics has nothing to do with any of the things it has traditionally been thought to be concerned with, with what then does it have to qo? The answe s {hat ethical judgment and _'} command is a necessary feature' of human langua� We cannot help making judgments of right and wrong;'"'commanding others to � ;;.-' '