The Frontiers of Theory

Ideology,
Rhetoric,
Aesthetics
For De Man
Andrzej Warminski

Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

The Frontiers of Theory

Series Editor: Martin McQuillan
Available Titles
Reading and Responsibility:
Deconstructions 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

Hlne Cixous

Death-Drive: Freudian Hauntings in

Literature and Art
Robert Rowland Smith

Insister of Jacques Derrida

Hlne Cixous

Veering: A Theory of Literature

Nicholas Royle

Volleys of Humanity: Essays

19722009
Hlne Cixous

Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For De

Man
Andrzej Warminski

Poetry in Painting: Writings on

Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics
Hlne Cixous, ed. Marta Segarra and
Joana Mas

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
Hlne Cixouss Semi-Fictions: At the
Borders of Theory
Mairad 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
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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 Editors Prefacevi

Authors 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: Kojve, Romantic Ironist
7. Next Steps: Lukcs, Jameson, Post-Dialectics

99
127
137

PART III Heidegger/Derrida

8. Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hlderlin
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 Editors 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 thoughts 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 Editors Prefacevii

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

Authors 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 Mans 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 (Lukcs, Jameson) on the one hand and in
Heideggers hermeneutics (and its radicalization by Derrida) on the
other. The books subtitle For De Man could be read somewhat
like Althussers Pour Marx.
Paul de Mans 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 Mans 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).

Authors Prefaceix

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 Kants and Hegels 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
Althussers essays of the 1960s and 1970s. He also provides us with a
way to pose anew the (German Romantic) question about philosophys
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 Mans 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 Mans 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 Mans essays on
Kant and Hegel. Chapter 2 is a very close reading of de Mans main
essay on Kants 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
Mans argument, the chapter also needs to perform its own commentary
on Kants 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 Kants unresolvable problematic of the sublime by resorting to

xIdeology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

what is in fact the beautiful thus turning themselves into aesthetic
ideologists. Chapter 4 is a commentary on what is perhaps de Mans
most difficult essay (Hegel on the Sublime) and it seeks to explain
precisely how it is that de Man draws political implications out of
Hegels sublime. Although the chapter is mostly an active paraphrase
of de Mans argument due, again, to its sheer difficulty it may
contain one bit of actual reading at the end in its response to Marc
Redfields claim that de Man makes a mistake and tries to have Hegels
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 Hegels 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 Hegels 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 Hegels argument lives on
in Kojves famous interpretation of the dialectic of life and desire in
the Phenomenology. In remediating what Hegels text in fact does not
mediate, Kojve winds up to be more Hegelian than Hegel. Chapter
7 demonstrates how the material moment in Hegel recurs in Lukcss
very attempt to say what the class consciousness of the proletariat
amounts to and how both Lukcs 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 8s critical reading of Heideggers interpretation of Hlderlins
hymn Der Ister (i.e., the river Danube). It turns out that Heideggers
ontologization of Hlderlin cannot account for what is truly, materially, historical in Hlderlin. Chapter 9 is a reading of two of de Mans
1967 Gauss lectures one on Heideggers interpretation of Hlderlin as
an apocalyptic poet and one on Wordsworth and Geoffrey Hartmans
also rather apocalyptic interpretation of his poetry which argues
that de Man is pushed toward rhetoric and rhetorical terms by his
reading of Heideggers failure to think the temporality of poetic form
in Hlderlin. In de Mans Wordsworth lecture we can almost see the
turn to rhetoric take place in the texts two layers the original lecture
of 1967 and some interpolated passages from 1971. Paradoxically but
in fact consistently enough, de Mans alleged turn (from history and) to
rhetoric is legible as, in fact, always already a turn to history. Chapter
10 attempts to disentangle Derridas perversely argumentative account

Authors Prefacexi

of de Mans reading of Rousseau (in Excuses) from what de Mans

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
Rousseaus text. While Derridas 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 Mans wartime writings. The book includes two appendices from, as it were, the archive of
deconstructive reading: one is a response to Carol Jacobss 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 Mans 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. 132; 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. 331; Chapter 3 in MLN 116:5 (December 2001), pp.
96478; Chapter 4 in The Political Archive of Paul de Man: Property,
Sovereignty, and the Theotropic, ed. Martin McQuillan (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 11830; Chapter 5 in Yale
French Studies 88 (1995), pp. 11841; Chapter 6 in Parallax 4:4
(1998), pp. 5764; Chapter 8 in Yale French Studies 77 (1990), pp.
193209; Chapter 9 in Romantic Circles/Romantic Praxis (May 2005);
Chapter 10 in MLN 124:5 (December 2009), pp. 1,07290. Appendix
1 appeared in Diacritics 9:4 (December 1979), pp. 708; Appendix 2 in
Diacritics 17:4 (Winter 1987), pp. 468. 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 Ngele, 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 Millers persistently cheerful and
unaccountable encouragement and Tom Cohens well-aimed nudges
neither this book nor Material Inscriptions would have seen the light
of day. The same is especially true for Martin McQuillans understated

Acknowledgementsxiii

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
Jis 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)

Part I:
Aesthetic Ideology

Chapter 1

Allegories of Reference:
An Introduction to Aesthetic Ideology

La fonction refrentielle est un pige, mais invitable1

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 Mans 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 Mans 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

4Ideology, 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 Jausss 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
Baudelaires (and Benjamins) allegory material or materialistic and
cuts it off sharply from symbolic and aesthetic syntheses (RT 68),
that renders the song of the sphinx in Baudelaires 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 Kleists
Marionettentheater and Baudelaires Correspondances the essays
and lectures collected in Aesthetic Ideology in particular the essays
on Kants Critique of Judgment and Hegels Aesthetics examine the

Allegories of Reference5

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 Kants and
Hegels 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
Kants 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 Kants 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 practically6
in other words, if morality is not to turn into a ghost.7 And Hegels
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
thoughts 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 Mans work on Kant and Hegel shows, however, is that
rather than being able to develop an adequate aesthetics i.e.,

6Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

adequate for the role prescribed it by their respective systems both
Kants Third Critique and Hegels 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. Kants 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 Kants
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 Mans reading of Kant on the
sublime (a development in fact characteristic of the texts in this volume
and of de Mans 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).
Hegels 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 (Gedchtnis),
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 Reference7

the mind to occur as the sensory appearance of the Idea Hegels

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 Hegels 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 Mans 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 Mans 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

8Ideology, 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 Schillers (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.) Schillers 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, Schillers utter lack of
philosophical interest in Kants 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 Kants and Hegels critical projects i.e., material
inscription, a radical materialism and Schillers ideologizing aesthetization because they reach to the heart of de Mans 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 Reference9

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 Kants (or Hegels)
materialism. This is in fact how de Mans 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
Mans 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 Mans 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 (Eagletons
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,

10Ideology, 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 Mans account of ideology and deposits it well beyond Eagletons
(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 Mans 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 Mans 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 Mans
project from that of a mere critique of aesthetic ideology.
De Mans account of the doubleness or duplicity of Kants and
Hegels 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 Mans 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 Mans texts make abundantly clear, what
we are left with after the reading of Kants or Hegels 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 Mans 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
Kants 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 Reference11

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 Mans gloomy insistence on the opposite)
would necessarily be tantamount to an acceptance (vs de Mans 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 Mans 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 thoughts
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.

12Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

Kants 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 Kants 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 Ideologys 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 Hlderlins the
true (das Wahre), it is what happens, what takes place, an event like

Allegories of Reference13

the text of Kants sublime, for instance, or, we might add, like the text
of de Mans readings of Kant and Hegel.

Reference and Rhetoric

That the materiality of actual history15 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 Mans 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

14Ideology, 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 marriage17
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
Mans favorite terms for it, and produce ideological aberrations. In
any event, if we want to understand the role of rhetoric and tropes in
de Mans 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 Mans definition of ideology the confusion of reference with
phenomenalism but also in the double impossibility that runs like a
leitmotif through all of de Mans 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 Mans 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 Reference15

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 Mans 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 Mans 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

16Ideology, 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), semiologys 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 semiologys (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 factors 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 languages referential function
and to reveal the mechanics of an ideologys 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 Reference17

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 Mans 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 Mans 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) Barthess 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
1713). 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

18Ideology, 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 Mans summary (1972) of Barthess 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 discourses
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. Barthess 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 Mans characterization
of Barthess 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 Reference19

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 Mans 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 2689). But even though the logic of grammar
generates texts only in the absence of referential meaning (AR 269),
the very application or determination of grammars 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 Mans 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
texts 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

20Ideology, 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 Reference21

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, Pascals Allegory of Persuasion

The characterization of de Mans 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 Mans previous work. Our
attempt to explain, or at least to account for, the relation of reference and rhetoric in de Mans 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

22Ideology, 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 Rhetoric20 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 discourses 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 Reference23
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 Mans 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 Pascals De lesprit gomtrique 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 methods 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

24Ideology, 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 Mans account of Kants 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 Hegels 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 discourses being able to model itself
on the discourse of mathematics is the first half of the second essay:
Pascals 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 texts 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.
Pascals 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 allegorys being
that which we can only call. That these predictable problems are,
one, allegorys referential status and, two, a recurrent ambivalence
in [allegorys] aesthetic valorization very precisely deposits the essays
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 Reference25

(AI 55). That the rigorous epistemologys 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 epistemologys own discourse, indeed with the referential (and
thus rhetorical) status of its own language of definition and proof. The
rigorous epistemology in question is Pascals in the first part of a text
entitled Rflexions sur la gomtrie en gnral; De lesprit gomtrique
et de lart de persuader, translated as The Mind of the Geometrician
in de Mans English version. De lesprit gomtrique begins its exposition in clear and classical terms: with the distinction between nominal
and real definitions, dfinitions de nom and dfinitions 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 dsignation) to other terms internal to the
system. What could be clearer? Real definitions (dfinitions 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

26Ideology, 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
Pascals 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 dogmatists 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 pense vers le mme
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. Pascals 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 pense, 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 Reference27

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 Mans 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 Pascals 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 Mans account of it) with its refusal of dogmatic

28Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

solutions like those of Arnauld and Nicole in La Logique de Port-
Royal25 that is responsible for Pascals texts occurring, its taking place
as a historical, material event. Its excess of rigor means rather that
the referential/rhetorical status of Pascals 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 Pascals 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 Pascals refutation of the Chevalier de Mr, who would
put into question the principle of double infinity (infinite smallness and
infinite bigness) that subtends Pascals cosmos and grounds the necessary and reciprocal link among the intraworldly dimensions of motion,
number, space, and time. What Mr does, in brief, is to use the
principle of the homogeneity between space and number, which is also
the ground of Pascals 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). Pascals 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. Pascals
demonstration works well enough, but it does so because it reintroduces
the ambivalence of definitional language, in which the nominally

Allegories of Reference29

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 (tendue), species (genre), and definition function as real, and not
as nominal, definitions (AI 589). This ambivalence returns and with
incalculable effects in Pascals 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 Mans 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 Mans 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 Mans 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

30Ideology, 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 zeros difference from, or, better, heterogeneity in relation to, the one may help us to account for the genuine difficulty of de
Mans 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, Pascals 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 Mans 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 Reference31

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 Pascals 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 Pascals 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 Mans
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 Mans 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

32Ideology, 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)
Pascals text that cannot but be reproduced (once again) in de Mans
account of it. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that de Mans 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 Reference33

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 Mans 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 zeros 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 Schlegels deliberately unintelligible formulation, the parabasis is permanent. If what
we are actually saying in de Mans sentence is not intelligible just
as unintelligible as Schlegels 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 sentences 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

34Ideology, 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 Mans notebook for the last class he gave in a seminar on
Thorie rhtorique au 18me et 20me sicle (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 Schlegels Misreading of Kant and Fichte. See my note #4.
3. The phrase critical-linguistic analysis is de Mans 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. Pascals Allegory of Persuasion *
3. Diderots Battle of the Faculties o

Allegories of Reference35

4. Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant *

5. Sign and Symbol in Hegels Aesthetics *
6. Hegel on the Sublime *
7. Aestheticism: Schiller and Friedrich Schlegels 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 Mans 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 Mans 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: Wordsworths 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 Mans abjection, see Tom Cohen, Diary of a Deconstructor
Manqu: Reflections on post Post-Mortem de Man, Minnesota Review
41/42 (March 1995), pp. 15774.
10. Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London: Verso, 1991), p. 200.
11. Ibid. pp. 2001.
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 Mans 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. 12786.

36Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

15. The phrase is from de Mans 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 Mans
Historical Materialism), in Material Inscriptions.
21. Cf. the opening of de Mans 1982 seminar Aesthetic Theory from Kant to
Hegel:

This course is part of a cycle on aesthetic theory around Hegel.
Precursor courses include: Hegels Aesthetics and Hegel and English
Romanticism.
 Were 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 its 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 Im giving the course) if theres a tension between the

Allegories of Reference37
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 Mans 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. Kleists ber 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
Benjamins The Task of the Translator now included in The Resistance
to Theory. On the unity of the Messenger lectures, see Kevin Newmarks
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 Marins La Critique du discours (Paris: Minuit, 1975) on the
relation between Pascals epistemology and that of the Logique. De Man
clearly profited a great deal from his reading of Marins Chapter 8 and
went further.
26. This is a phrase that occurs in the context of Derridas definition of the
undecidable. See Jacques Derrida, La double sance, in La Dissmination
(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 Schlegels 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 Kants 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 Mans 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 (blo ...
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 Kants 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 Mans 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 It39

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 Kants
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 Heideggers 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 Mallarms Coup de Ds,
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 Mans 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
Wordsworths, 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. Kants 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 Kants 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 Kants 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

40Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

the sense sublime in the famous passage of Wordsworths 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 [Wordsworths] 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 Kants
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 Kants, for lack of a better word,
material vision.
I recapitulate de Mans 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 dont have to know
all that much about the special status of Wordsworth in de Mans
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 Kants 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 It41

or at least Kants (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 Mans 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 Baudelaires 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 Mans
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 Mans account of Kants 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 Kants 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

42Ideology, 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 2601). This
is certainly borne out by de Mans 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 It43

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 Mans 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 Mans
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 Kants sublime and to
read the poets and their purportedly material vision in the context of de
Mans 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

44Ideology, 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 Mans 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 poems transcendentalizing tropes and end up in the stutter,
the pitinement of aimless enumeration (RR 254). In other words, de

As the Poets Do It45

Mans 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 Mans 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 Kants 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 Baudelaires 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

46Ideology, 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. (Kants example of Savarys account of ones
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 (Kants German in fact says
versetzen here), and substitution of the almost too large that is not yet
the too large in Kants 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 Mans 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 It47

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 Mans 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

48Ideology, 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 Mans 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 Vermgen, welches groen Hindernissen berlegen 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 It49

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 Mans
and, indeed, Kants 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 Mans presentation is not exactly, not quite, the same as Kants. Indeed, there is
something like a logic of the sublime or, better, a sublime program,
pro-gramma at work in de Mans 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 Mans 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 Kants 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 Mans getting to it only after he has discussed them as
well as denken and thus reordering Kants 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-motions
difficult apprehensions and renders his reading of the mathematical
sublime intelligible in linguistic terms. That is, de Mans 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

50Ideology, 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 Mans 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 Kants 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 Mans 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 It51

reading is not at all a reduction of Kants 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

52Ideology, 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 Mans 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 Mans 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, Kants evocations of the heavens as a vault that encompasses everything (alles befat) 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 passages proliferating tropology does not stop there. As more than one commentator has
also pointed out, the sky as a bow-or arch-shaped vault (Gewlbe,
from wlben) 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 It53

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
Mans three linguistic models of Kants 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
Mans 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 Kants pre-
critical (1764) Observations on the Feeling of the
Beautiful and the Sublime13 we get some direction from de Mans
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 Kants 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

54Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

does it say, il faut parvenir voir locan seulement, comme le font les
potes, selon le spectacle quil donne loeil, soit, lorsquil est contempl
au repos tel un clair miroir deau qui nest limit que par le ciel et,
lorsquil est agit, soit comme un abme menacant de tout engloutir,
quil nous est quand mme 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, isnt this what
the passage means, and arent 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 isnt one in the Kant. In the Kant, what we must do is to be able to

As the Poets Do It55

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 Kants 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. (Ive tried out the
German: Man mu blo, wie die Dichter es tun, mssen; Man mu
mssen; 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 Mans 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 Mans 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

56Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

de Mans 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 Marxs 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
Mans 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 Mans readings after reading tout court what always
happens and is thus predictable and inevitable (like deaths 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 Mans 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 It57

too much, for de Mans 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
Mans 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 Mans 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 Mans 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) cant 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 Mans 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

58Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

from the cognitive (AR 299300). Or, for another example, one could
adduce de Mans 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) cant 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 Mans
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 texts 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 Mans 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 Mans 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 Kants 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 It59

The same is true of Excuses (Confessions) and its complicated

reading of Rousseau. The fact that Rousseaus 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 2812)
does not disrupt the texts 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 Rousseaus 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 28990). 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 Rverie), at which two

60Ideology, 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 Mans 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 Mans 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 Excuses18 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 It61

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 Kants 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 Rousseaus 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 Rousseaus 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
Rousseaus autobiographer doomed to mindlessly, mechanically, repeating Marion over and over again, and Kants 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 mu mssen, mu mssen, mu mssen ...20
So: thats 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 Kants Third
Critique that de Man reads in the second half of his Phenomenality and
Materiality in Kant. In Werner Pluhars 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

62Ideology, 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 Mans brief but packed reading of Saussures ana-(and para-and
hypo-)grams in Hypogram and Inscription (RT 368).
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 [bloe Anschauung], for the other both intuition
and concept (AI 81).
4. This is no doubt an overdetermined misquotation. See de Mans many
texts on (faces in) Wordsworth now in The Rhetoric of Romanticism and
Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. See also my Facing Language:
Wordsworths First Poetic Spirits, Diacritics 17:4 (Winter 1987), pp.
1831, reprinted in Kenneth R. Johnston, Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson,
and Herbert Marks (eds), Romantic Revolutions (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990), pp. 2649. 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
2235). De Mans 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 Hlderlin in the same volume and Wordsworth and Hlderlin in
The Rhetoric of Romanticism.

As the Poets Do It63

6. For de Man on Schillerizing and re-Kantizing, see Kant and Schiller
in Aesthetic Ideology.
7. Although the reading of Kants mathematical sublime in terms of such
a subreptitious substitution i.e., calling sublime what is in fact only
colossal is Derridas (in Le colossal, La Vrit en peinture [Paris:
Flammarion, 1978], pp. 13668), de Mans own reading is very close to
Derridas here. That de Man had read Derridas Le colossal is clear in the
earlier Kants Materialism, also in Aesthetic Ideology.
8. On de Mans reading of Pascals 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: Hlderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. liiilxi.
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 Mans understanding of the stakes of Kants Analytic
of the Sublime and Lyotards. Indeed, however different their terms,
de Mans and Lyotards readings coincide in many respects. See Jean-
Franois 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 Vrit 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 Kants Materialism in
Aesthetic Ideology (AI 1245). It is worth noting that de Mans joke in
Kants Materialism about Kants 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. Bernards and Alexis Philonenkos translations are: Critique of
Judgment (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), pp. 11011; Critique de la
facult de juger (Paris: Vrin, 1984), p. 107.
15. Paul de Man, Shelley Disfigured (RR 122).
16. See Stefano Rossos interview with de Man (RT 121).
17. See my Allegories of Reference (above) and Ending Up/Taking Back
(with Two Postscripts on Paul de Mans Historical Materialism), in
Material Inscriptions.
18. Cf. Excuses: we are restating the disjunction of the performative from

64Ideology, 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 299300). Its 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 Rverie, he again singles out this same episode as a paradigmatic event, the core of his autobiographical narrative (AR 2789).
20. See the end of As the Poets Do It: On the Material Sublime above.
21. In working on Lukcss History and Class Consciousness, I was pleased to
find that in Lukcs 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: Lukcs, Jameson, Post-Dialectics in the present volume. (That de
Mans late work on the philosophical category of the aesthetic is at least
somewhat informed by his 1960s reading of Lukcss 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. 414.)

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 Annherung 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 378, 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 Fichtes Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre toward the end
of his discussion of the third Grundsatz. Indeed, one could say with
some justice that Fichtes 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

66Ideology, 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 Schnen) 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
imaginations 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 natures 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 Sublime67

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 Zweckmssigkeit unseres Gemts), in
the use of our imagination, for the minds 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 1934, 128).2
But why should this matter? Why should Fichtes 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 (bloer 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 Kants 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 cant 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

68Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

the mathematical sublime, this tropological system produces impossible
tropes of the infinite that cannot be accounted for in the terms of this
systems 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 Kants 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-grnden) 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 Sublime69

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
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 Mans reading of the Kantian sublimes helps us to appreciate the
considerable import of Fichtes 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 Fichtes 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 367, 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 Fichtes 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 Gods infinite I am or sublime Let
there be light and the law-givers Thou shalt or Thou shalt not.
But unlike Gods I am and Let there be light, the human law-givers
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

70Ideology, 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
Rousseaus Social Contract. So: what Im 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 Is 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 Fichtes
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 Schillers
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 Sublime71

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 Schnheit sein) (Letters 102310). 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
1023). 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 945). That
the concept of reciprocal action (Wechselwirkung) and the mutual
self-limitation it entails comes from Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre of 1794
would be clear enough, even without Schillers 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 Fichtes Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, Leipzig, 1794
(Letters 845). 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 blo
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

72Ideology, 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 945). Like the ideal
of beauty in Fichtes 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 Kants mathematical sublime. Like the power of number,
which can progress to infinity, imaginations 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 vollstndige
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 923). 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 Sublime73

together gets thrown together (symbol is from sun-ballein,

to throw together) in Schiller. What doesnt 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 Schillers 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 [Grssen-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
... (Gbe es aber Flle, wo ... so htte 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 Schillers 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 (Flle) 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. Schillers juxtaposition in this sentence of positing
(Vorausgesetzt) and of cases (Flle) Vorausgesetzt, da Flle 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 (Flle 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)

74Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

that are given but rather cases Gbe es aber Flle ..., 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 Schillers 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
Schillers 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 1889). 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 Schillers wording is the phrase the possibility of
sublimest [my emphasis] humanity (die Mglichkeit 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 Sublime75

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
Schillers 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 Schillers 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 ... (Gbe es aber Flle ... so htte er ...) and
the (pre-)positing of that experience It having been presupposed that
cases of this sort could actually occur in experience ... (Vorausgesetzt,
da Flle dieser Art in der Erfahrung vorkommen knnen ...). 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 Schillers proof rests on shaky ground

76Ideology, 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
Schillers text instead repeats the aporetic (rhetorical) structure of Kants
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, Hegels.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
Kants 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 unabhngig) 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 Mans essay and on Kants 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, 78).
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 Sublime77

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 Philonenkos 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 relev avec
raison que nous tions en prsence dune pure contradiction, principe de
lantithtique de la raison pure spculative, mais on na pas prt attention
la structure philosophique de la phrase qui tablit le troisime principe.
Le moi divisible (A) est oppos au non moi divisible (B) dans le Moi (C) par
un Je (D). Que les termes A et B soient opposs dans le Moi (A & B in C)
cela est concevable si un sujet (D) les oppose. Or ce sujet ne peut tre que
le philosophe et le Ich par lequel dbute la phrase signifie le rle actif du
philosophe dans la srie idelle. Le terme C, le moi en lequel se dveloppe
lopposition ne signifie nullement lidalisme, mais simplement le fait que
tout rel pour tre reconnu doit tre pos dans la conscience et reconnu en
mme temps par celle-ci comme indpendant delle. Alexis Philonenko,
LOeuvre 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 Austins terms, and be felicitous within an already
established juridico-political system comes from Jacques Derridas 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. 9191,045. This text was
republished as a book in French: Force de loi (Paris: Galile, 1994). On
the difference between positing super-performatives and performatives
in the narrow sense in de Mans 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 16384).
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 Schillers empiricization of Kant and his misunderstanding of the
Kantian sublime, I am much indebted to Paul de Mans lecture Kant and
Schiller in Aesthetic Ideology.

78Ideology, 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 823).
14. One could say that in the Letters Schillers 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 Hegels Aesthetics like Kants Third Critique
also disarticulates the category of the aesthetic, see de Mans two essays
on Hegel in Aesthetic Ideology: Sign and Symbol in Hegels 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/. Its from a
moment in Roman Jakobsons 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 Jakobsons claim, but
French, as Mallarm already noted, is rather perverse since in jour and
nuit the distribution of grave and acute vowels is inverted. Jakobsons
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. Jakobsons 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 Jakobsons, and his synesthesia, rather than being founded on a

80Ideology, 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 Mans sense in The Resistance to Theory, i.e., one based
on a non-phenomenal linguistics like Saussures). 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 Jakobsons 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
Kants 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
Jakobsons symbolism and Schillers symbol take us directly to
the problematic of sign and symbol in Hegels Aesthetics as read by de
Man not only in the essay of that title (Sign and Symbol in Hegels
Aesthetics) but also in its follow-up Hegel on the Sublime. Indeed,
Hegel on the Sublime amounts to an application of the first essays
findings to Hegels Aesthetics since, despite the essays 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 Encyclopedias 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

Lightstruck: Hegel on the Sublime81

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 Hegels 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 Mans most explicitly
political text. Perhaps it is no accident that it may also be de Mans most
difficult text. There are at least three reasons for this difficulty. It stems
in large part from de Mans attempt to present a certain conflictual
doubleness or even duplicity in Hegels 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
Mans reading must surely be the apparently simple fact that de Man
cannot perform his reading of Hegel without doing violence to Hegels
text, making Hegel say what his text plainly does not say. In the eyes of
some, this mistake if thats what it is is such that it would render
de Mans reading a non-reading or a mere performance of reading
without any cognitive validity. Let me try to recount and unpack de
Mans extremely condensed reading of the Hegelian sublime, unravel
the intricate strands of its implications, and then try to account for de
Mans apparent mistake.
De Mans 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

82Ideology, 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 Hegels
system is far from self-evident. Since Hegels 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 (Gedchtnis). 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 1089). If
nothing even remotely similar seems to be stated in the public theses or
arguments of Hegels 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 Hegels chapter
on The Symbolism of the Sublime.
Although it is still a merely formal consideration, the very placing of
the sublime in Hegels Aesthetics is telling. We find the sublime, writes
Hegel, primarily in the Hebraic state of mind and in the sacred texts
ofthe Jews (XIII 480). The association of the sublime with the poetry

Lightstruck: Hegel on the Sublime83

of the Old Testament may be a commonplace, but Hegels 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 Mans 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 Hegels chapter confirms this formal affirmation and develops some of its implications and
consequences. And, if this is Hegels sublime, then it differs considerably
from the post-Longinian sublime of his predecessors. De Man borrows
from Meyer Abramss 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 Hertzs 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). Hegels 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
thesignified toward which it is directed. It is the phenomenalization of

84Ideology, 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 degr zro of symbolicity, one could say. In marking an open
break with the linguistic model of the symbol, Hegels 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
Hegels 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 Lockes understanding, Kants
Vernunft, or Hegels Spirit) is the monotheistic principle of philosophy
as the single field of unified knowledge (AI 111). This is a first difficult
moment in de Mans reading, but in order to understand what follows
it is essential to get it right. It is difficult in part because Hegels 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
Hegels system, de Mans assertion is borne out. Art in Hegels 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

Lightstruck: Hegel on the Sublime85

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 Mans including the I at the end of his list is helpful, for it
indicates that what happens here in the monotheistic moment ofthe
Aesthetics is the same thing as what happens in the self-positing of
theI in de Mans 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 Mans 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 Mans 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. Hegels 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

86Ideology, 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 Hegels narrative
resembles that of dialectical sublation or upheaval (Aufhebung) only on
a first level of understanding (AI 111).
In Hegels 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
Mans steps here closely, for they lead directly to the political in Hegel.
At first sight, Hegels 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.
Hegels 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

Lightstruck: Hegel on the Sublime87

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 Gods 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 Hegels 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 Luthers Licht
ist dein Kleid, das du anhast; du breitest den Himmel wie einen Teppich

88Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

[Psalm 104, ll. 23]). 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 ones 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 11314). De Mans 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
thespirit (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 Mans 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 Mans reading of Hegels 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
ct 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.

Lightstruck: Hegel on the Sublime89

Particularly significant for de Mans 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 Hegels 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

90Ideology, 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 Mans summary statement is important to
remember both for the stakes of Hegels system and for appreciating
what follows in the last sentences of Hegels 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 absolutes 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 Hegels sublime and de Mans reading of it. For
Hegels sublime does not end with the heterogeneity of art and of the

Lightstruck: Hegel on the Sublime91

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 mans 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 Gods 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

92Ideology, 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 Hegels 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 Hegels
sublime is prosaic compared to Longinus (AI 118). As an essentially
prosaic discourse, Hegels 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 Mans 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. Its 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 Hegels 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 Mans 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

Lightstruck: Hegel on the Sublime93

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 Mans 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 11314). In
Mistake in Paul de Man, Marc Redfield points out that Hegels 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
Mans 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, Redfields critique of de Man would
have serious consequences: namely, de Mans reading of Hegel would
be based upon a violence done to Hegels 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 Mans reading is not the empty performance of a reading. It
is based not on a gratuitous violence done to Hegels 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 Redfields 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 (usserung), 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

94Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

existent shall be) the existent is immediately and actually posited in mute
obedience (das Daseiende wirklich in stummen Gehorsam unmittelbar
gesetzt ist) (Redfields 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
Gods 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 Mans 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 Hegels 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 Mans page reference
in the sentence that seems to do violence to Hegels text But since this

Lightstruck: Hegel on the Sublime95

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 Gods 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 Hegels sublime a Longinian and
a Hegelian sublime within the Hegelian sublime is also to be read
already within Longinus (and in Neil Hertzs recuperative interpretation
of Longinus) in the transition from the natural sources of the sublime
(Chapters 8 through 15) e.g., Mosess quotation of Gods 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., Demostheness
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 Mans 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 Mans 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 Mans 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 Redfields 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 Hegels 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. 10910). 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

96Ideology, 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. 878. The original
version of Jakobsons 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.

Part II:
Hegel/Marx

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.
Verhltnis fr die Philosophen = Idee. Sie kennen blo das Verhltnis des
Menschen zu sich selbst, und darum werden alle wirklichen Verhltnisse
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: Its not consciousness that determines life, writes Marx in a well-
known sentence of The German Ideology, but rather life determines
consciousness (Nicht das Bewutsein bestimmt das Leben, sondern das
Leben bestimmt das Bewutsein).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 Marxs 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 mans 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

100Ideology, 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 Marxs 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 Feuerbachs 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 Marxs
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

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life101

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, consciousnesss 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 Marxs 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,
Marxs 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

102Ideology, 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 bewute
Ausdruck) or the direct efflux (der direkte Ausflu) 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 (berzugehen) 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 Life103

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 thats 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 clich 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 Hegels text whatever it is that made it happen. Or, in other words,

104Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

what is it that could be said to be alive, living, in Hegels text? Whatever
it is, this life of Hegels 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 Hegels 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 ones 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 sections 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 Life105

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 cant 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 Millers 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 Selbstbewutsein die Reflexion aus dem Sein der
sinnlichen und wahrgenommenen Welt und wesentlich Rckkehr aus
dem Anderssein). It [self-consciousness] is as self-consciousness movement (Es ist als Selbstbewutsein Bewegung). But and this but

106Ideology, 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,

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life107

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 istoo 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. Whats 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, clichd received idea of idealism.
The burden of the passage is not at all a matter of self-consciousnesss

108Ideology, 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 idealisms 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 Kojve 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 Hegels text. What in fact happens is weirder,

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life109

odder, more overdetermined, hence something that produces a Hegel

other than the successfully Hegelian Hegel of Kojve 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, Hegels 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 Hegels 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 andits
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

110Ideology, 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 Auflsung dieser bestehenden Unterschiede;
und die Auflsung 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 lifes 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 dont 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, nmlich auf das
Bewutsein, fr 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

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life111

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 lifes 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. Lifes 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 spirits appearing the
possibility of a phenomeno-logic of spirits 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

112Ideology, 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 lifes 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 lifes 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 lifes 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 (lifes 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
Hegels 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,

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life113

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
Hegels 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 Hegels 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 Phnomenologie des Geistes would be the confessions of a seer
of ghosts, the speaking of the appearances of ghosts.
The idealizing nature of Hegels 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
day21 although lets 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 Bewutsein, 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,

114Ideology, 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 Marxs 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 Hegels 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 Life115

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 Hegels 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
lifes 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, nmlich auf das Bewutsein, fr 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 consciousnesss 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 lifes own for

116Ideology, 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, consciousnesss, 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 Millers 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 Hegels
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
lifes 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 texts sentence the moment when spirit, rather than appearing

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life117

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, nmlich auf das Bewutsein). Its in this
namely (nmlich) 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 Hegels text, but the shadow consciousness that would phenomenalize itself and appear as the essential (determinately negative) other of
life, lifes 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 lifes 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 natrliche Vorstellung, da ... 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

118Ideology, 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-consciousnesss 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 Marxs 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 texts remaindering (my translation of Derridas
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,

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life119

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 Hegels
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 Hegels text in its difference from
itself. Thats what makes him Marx and not a Young Hegelian his
countersigning of Hegels 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 Marxs 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. Marxs
text, like Hegels, is also living on in a species of after-life;30 it too is
still to come in the future, from the future. Thats what makes it Marx.
And its 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 Derridas Positions, which forty
years ago (in answer to questions about Derridas 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 Marxs,
Engelss, or Lenins 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 Althussers
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

120Ideology, 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 Hegels 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 Hegels 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 Marxs 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
didnt 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 Frhschriften,
ed. Siegfried Landshut (Stuttgart: Alfred Krner, 1971), p. 411.
2. The German Ideology, p. 37; Die Frhschriften, p. 349.
3. The German Ideology, p. 41; Die Frhschriften, pp. 3534.
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. 87128.
5. The German Ideology, p. 36; Die Frhschriften, p. 348.
6. The German Ideology, pp. 434; Die Frhschriften, pp. 3567.
7. The German Ideology, p. 45; Die Frhschriften, 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 Life121

trope, see my Ending Up/Taking Back (with Two Postscripts on Paul
de Mans 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 Hegels
ideology of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, see below.
Althussers 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, Marxs 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 Phenomenologys place within Hegels system
most uncanny but also threatens to destabilize that systems coherence
see Otto Pggeler, Zur Deutung der Phnomenologie des Geistes, in
Hegels Idee einer Phnomenologie des Geistes (Freiburg and Munich: Karl
Alber, 1973), and my Parentheses: Hegel by Heidegger, in Readings in
Interpretation: Hlderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987).
12. One example would be Richard Norman in his otherwise very helpful and
extremely clear Hegels 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 ones
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

122Ideology, 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, Phnomenologie
des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952),
p. 74: Es kommt dadurch in seine Bewegung ein Moment des Ansich-
oder Frunsseins, welches nicht fr das Bewutsein, das in der Erfahrung
selbst begriffen ist, sich darstellt; der Inhalt aber dessen, was uns entsteht,
ist fr es, und wir begreifen nur das Formelle desselben oder sein reines
Entstehen; fr es ist dies Entstandene nur als Gegenstand, fr uns zugleich
als Bewegung und Werden.
14. See Alexandre Kojve, Introduction 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
ONeill (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 Millers 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; Phnomenologie des Geistes, pp. 1378.
17. Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 109 (my translation); Phnomenologie des
Geistes, p. 138.
18. The commentators who do not just skip over lifes 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 Phnomenologie
des Geistes (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974), p. 176: Wieso verweist das Leben
auf die frsichseiende, sich wissende Einheit? Der bergang ist nicht ein
solcher der Bewutseinserfahrung, sondern ein solcher fr uns. Selbst der

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life123

Phnomenologe scheint hier aufgefordert, die Sache logisch zu nehmen, d.h.
von der blo ansichseienden substantiellen Einheit als Mglichkeit (Leben)
zur frsichseienden Einheit berzugehen, die das Selbstbewutsein 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 Hegels 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, consciousnesss self-negation, i.e.,
self-consciousness. But the positing of this formal self-consciousness has
to be verified in turn when consciousnesss 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
Hegels 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, Hegels Phenomenological Method,
The Review of Metaphysics 23 (1970), pp. 61541.
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 Mans 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 Mans 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 dmontrer, 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 Hegels 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 412). 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 Mans 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

124Ideology, 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. 323: Pour que lhomme la fin se rvle lui-mme il devrait
mourir, mail il lui faudrait le faire en vivant en se regardant cesser dtre.
En dautres termes, la mort elle-mme devrait devenir conscience (de soi),
au moment mme o elle anantit ltre conscient. Cest en un sens ce qui a
lieu (qui est du moins sur le point davoir lieu, ou qui a lieu dune manire
fugitive, insaisissable), au moyen dun subterfuge. Dans le sacrifice, le
sacrifiant sidentifie lanimal frapp de mort. Ainsi meurt-il en se voyant
mourir, et mme en quelque sorte, par sa propre volont, de coeur avec
larme du sacrifice. Mais cest une comdie!
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 ones 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. 17199.
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. liiilxi, and
the reading of Aristotles 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 Kojve. The ironies attendant upon
this interpretation are many: in being more Hegelian than Hegel and succeeding where Hegel failed, Kojve winds up being closer to Hegel
than Hegel is to Marx. Ironically (but consistently and predictably)
enough, Kojves 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, Kojve
ends up with an utter abstract materialism (not unlike Feuerbachs) that
immediately turns over into an equally abstract idealism. End of man,

Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life125

end of history. (The moral being: real materialists dont mediate.) But a
long, careful exposition of Kojve would be necessary to demonstrate this;
I try to make a beginning in the next chapter. In the end, Kojve may be
the ultimate romantic ironist; and a comparison with the end of Kleists
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. Hegels 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 natrliches Leben beschrnkt ist, vermag durch
sich selbst nicht ber sein unmittelbares Dasein hinauszugehen; aber es
wird durch ein anderes darber hinausgetrieben, und dies Hinausgerissen
werden ist sein Tod. Das Bewutsein aber ist fr sich selbst sein Begriff,
dadurch unmittelbar das Hinausgehen ber das Beschrnkte und, da ihm
dies Beschrnkte angehrt, ber sich selbst ... Das Bewutsein leidet also
diese Gewalt, sich die beschrnkte Befriedigung zu verderben, von ihm
selbst (Phnomenologie, 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. 245: 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.

126Ideology, 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. 624, pp. 778.
32. For Derridas definition of deconstruction as what happens, see the
1984 interview Deconstruction in America: An Interview with Jacques
Derrida, Critical Exchange 17 (Winter 1985), 133.

Chapter 6

Man and Self-Consciousness:

Kojve, Romantic Ironist

The anthropologization of Hegels 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 Kojve both in his celebrated courses on the
Phenomenology in the 1930s and in the book (Introduction la
lecture de Hegel) that comes out of these courses. And yet, by the same
token, there is no denying the obvious power of Kojves 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 dont get me wrong here! The power and the influence are such
that they are not to be explained away by the clichs of intellectual
history (about influence of one thinkers 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, Kojve ...2).
Indeed, it is not too much to say that, with Kojve, i.e., with Kojves
reading of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit or, to be still more specific,
with Kojves reading of the Self-consciousness chapter of Hegels
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 lhomme, and at the same time should be able to furnish
postwar French thought with its best conceptual resources?3 To begin

128Ideology, 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 Kojves book: Man
is Self-consciousness (Lhomme est Conscience de soi).4 The anthropologization of Hegel could not be clearer in the sentences immediate
identification of man and self-consciousness. And one does not
have to read much further to see that Kojve takes Hegels 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 Hegels project in the Phenomenology of Spirit
as that of a phenomenological anthropology. Now this immediate
anthropologization of Hegels 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 anthropologys 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 Hegels 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 Hegels 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
anthropologys 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 Hegels 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-Consciousness129

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.
Thats what an anthropologization of phenomenology and the attempt
to read Hegels project as a phenomenological anthropology would
amount to an utter misunderstanding of the properly philosophical
project and its stakes.
Of course, Kojve 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 Hegels 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, Kojves 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,

130Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

he cannot be a merely desiring creature capable of a Sentiment of self
(Selbstgefhl) this the animal can also do but must rise to Self-
consciousness (Selbstbewutsein). And, according to Kojve, 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 Kojve 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 Hegels 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 Kojve emphasizes, another
desire and an other desire). Thanks to the negation of negation operated by a desire of desire, Kojve 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-Consciousness131

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 ones 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 Kojve would be) may want here,
Hegels 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 Hegels 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 Hegels 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 thats 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

132Ideology, 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
Hegels 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 Hegels 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

Man and Self-Consciousness133

(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 Kojves 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:
Kojve 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. Whats 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
theillusion that we are indeed seeing anything at all.8 And, in fact, the
spectacular predicament in which Kojve 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,
Kojve 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, Kojve 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, Kojve
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, Kojve also
phenomenologizes, as it were, life and desire. He also makes life and
desire disappear in their specificity by turning them into mere moments

134Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

in the speculative-dialectical history of knowing and self-knowing. In
other words, if on the one hand Kojve 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 Kojves payoff, what he ends up with, corroborates the double bind and, as always, spectacularly at that. For,
in the end or rather ends Kojve 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, Kojve 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, Kojve
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 Kojve 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

Man and Self-Consciousness135

predictable, and pre-dictated by Hegel, that desire, even as desire of

desire, would get Kojve 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 thats 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 Kojves 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
Kojves 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 Hegels text.
Kojves 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 Kleists or Schlegels than Hegels.
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. 2256. See also the detailed discussion of the seminar in
Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojve (Paris: Grasset, 1990).
2. See Stanley Rosen, Kojves Paris: A Memoir, Parallax 4 (February
1997), pp. 112.
3. Jacques Derrida, The Ends of Man, in Margins, trans. Alan Bass

136Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 117. French in Marges
(Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 139.
4. Alexandre Kojve, Introduction 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 Hegels Phenomenology of
Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p.49.
German in G. W. F. Hegel, Phnomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes
Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), p. 66.
6. Phnomenologie des Geistes, p. 135.
7. The above is a paraphrase of the opening paragraphs of the section Die
Wahrheit der Gewiheit seiner selbst (The Truth of Self-certainty) in
Hegels Self-consciousness chapter of the Phnomenologie, 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 Kojves
Introduction la lecture de Hegel, pp. 4347.
11. The conception of irony here differs from the historicized (and, indeed,
psychologized) irony of Michael S. Roth in his chapter on Kojve in The
Ironists Cage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 14852.
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 Kojves reading of
Self-consciousness in Hegels 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. 2940.

Chapter 7

Next Steps:
Lukcs, Jameson, Post-Dialectics

Lukcs
At the outset of Hegel on the Sublime, Paul de Man offers Lukcs
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 1057). And the company in which Lukcs
is included would be equally apt. Less obvious and more suggestive,
however, would be de Mans juxtaposition of Lukcs with one other
truly critical aesthetic thinker, namely Derrida.
Derridas and Lukcss 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 Mans project of a critique of the aesthetic ideology
that characterizes the reception of Kants and Hegels truly critical aesthetic thought. Compactly, if a bit tortuously, stated: according to de
Mans 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

138Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

a radical materiality and materialism that cannot be transformed into
the phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judgment. If the texts of Derrida
and Lukcs 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 Derridas 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 Derridas 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 Derridas 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 Lukcs 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 Lukcs 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 form2 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 clichs and the name-
calling, it would seem that Lukcss work presents obstacles to taking
him as a truly critical rather than a merely pre-critical or even dogmatic
thinker. For Lukcs 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 Lukcs calls
classical German philosophy) namely, the class consciousness of
the proletariat which, as the self-consciousness of the commodity form

Next Steps139

itself and therefore of capitalist society as such, would be the subject

(the subject-object), the we, of history itself Lukcs seems to have a
logical problem that Terry Eagleton characterizes as follows: There
is, however, a logical problem with Lukcss 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
Lukcss notion of reflection and his doctrine of realism Lukcs
seems to come up with an aesthetic that, in Eagletons 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 Lukcs, having
tracked the embarrassments of bourgeois society to their material roots
in a style quite at odds with that societys 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 Lukcss prematurely dismissed texts, we may find that
they tell a very different story a story that may make Lukcs also
into a historical materialist of a different stamp, a figure less familiar
than the Lukcs we so readily kick around. The critique of Lukcss
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 Lukcs learned (very well indeed) from
Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, where it is also the one, indispensable,
thing we have to understand in order to understand what knowing is. In

140Ideology, 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 Hegels 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

Next Steps141

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
knowings 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, Hegels 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 Lukcs in History and Class
Consciousness when he talks about Hegels 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 Lukcs 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, Lukcss critique of Engelss deplorable misunderstanding of Hegels in-itself and

142Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

for-us in an excursus whose place in Lukcss 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 Lukcss
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 Lukcss having run
the bourgeoisie/proletariat relation through the first two sections of
Hegels Phenomenology, with bourgeois thoughts contemplative
(too immediate) stance toward the objects of its knowledge corresponding globally to the stage of mere consciousness, and the proletarian
consciousnesss 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-
consciousnesss 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
Lukcs has in effect done here is to replace Hegels 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 Lukcs did, or all that
happened in Lukcs, then it would be difficult to see how his solution
to the antinomies of bourgeois thought was any different from Hegels.
If Hegels 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 (1467/329) then
Lukcss merely substituting the proletariat for Hegels Spirit, Absolute,
or Idea would be little more than the substitution of one conceptual
mythology (Begriffsmythologie) for another, to use Lukcss own apt
term for it. It would amount to a mythology of the proletariat, and it
is certainly true that a great deal in Lukcss tone at least sounds like
one. Such a mere reproduction of Hegels 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 Lukcs (to
paraphrase Lukcs on Engelss misunderstanding of Hegel8). Given
Lukcss very convincing demonstration of how classical philosophy
issues in impasses, dead ends, and aporias that leave it with the bleak

Next Steps143

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 Hegels solutions are in fact non-solutions, we should
perhaps not hurry to assume that Lukcs simply relapses into a reified,
contemplative, conceptual mythology without a clue.9
That something else is going on in, and as, Lukcs begins to become
legible if we simply, and very schematically, try out, test out, Lukcss
presentation of his argument (in Reification and the Consciousness of
the Proletariat) against Hegels. If in the last section of this long chapter
Lukcs 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 Lukcss own we, the we of the dialectical presentation of contemplative knowings self-dissolution due to its determined
internal contradictions. If we ask where this happens, where the we
of Lukcss 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 societys rationalization and commodification of
all existence). That is, the we of Lukcss 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 Lukcss 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
Hegels 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

144Ideology, 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 ber die brgerliche Gesellschaft hinaus) ... The continuation of that course which at least in method started to point the way
beyond these limits (ber 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 (1489/331). 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 Lukcss account begins to
emerge. For despite Lukcss 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 (145/3278), 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 ber) 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),

Next Steps145

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 Durchfhrung des nchsten Schrittes)
of the development (1978/385). 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] (Durchfhrung)
of the next step. Durchfhrung 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.
Lukcss 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 cant
close itself off, that cant 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 systems
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

146Ideology, 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 Lukcss 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 Lukcss epistemological solution. Needless to say, it
necessarily has a bearing on Lukcss aesthetic solution as well. In lieu
of an extended discussion, let me simply say that I was pleased to see
that Fredric Jamesons nuanced account (in his Marxism and Form) of
Lukcss 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 Lukcs indeed takes the next

step ... to the next step, and does the deed.

Jameson
That Jamesons analysis of postmodernism as the logic of late capitalism (a term he takes over from the title of Ernest Mandels book
Late Capitalism) can be taken as an extension of Lukcss 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 Lukcs comes in Jamesons 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. Jamesons 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

148Ideology, 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 Jamesons defense of the concept of totality and

his attempt to think or at least to map the totality of late capitalisms
cultural logic goes his redeployment of Lukcss 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 capitalisms 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
Lukcsian 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 4171812). 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 Lukcsian next step to a consciousness of the proletariat (one
that corresponds to our historical situation).
One specific way in which Jamesons 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

Next Steps149

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 latters 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 ones 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 3467)

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 its 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 Lukcss History and
Class Consciousness, Jameson goes over three such discourses feminist

150Ideology, 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 Jamesons 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. Jamesons epistemological solution here is certainly not

Next Steps151

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 Jamesons 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 Jamesons 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

152Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

late capitalisms cultural logic, and aside from Jamesons 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 Jamesons
efforts. Among others, I would single out the explanatory power of
Jamesons 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

Next Steps153

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 Jamesons
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 Jamesons 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 Jamesons analysis
to this ultimate horizon of meaning, but it is also responsible for the
general (and sometimes dismaying) shapelessness of Jamesons 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? Doesnt 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
Jamesons understanding of structural causality in The Political
Unconscious ultimately work in the same way.) This would be at least

154Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

one sense in which the production of class consciousness in Jamesons
analysis despite its explicit genealogy in Lukcs in fact differs from
that in Lukcs, 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 Lukcs 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 signs 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 Jamesons 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
Mans 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 Althussers
famous definition of ideology. On page 51 of Postmodernism,
Jameson quotes: the representation of the subjects Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence. Although the quotation
is already approximate, it does preserve the triplicity of Althussers
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

Next Steps155

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 Althussers definition of ideology. Jameson
not so, for he changes it on page 415 of Postmodernism to read: the
Imaginary representation of the subjects 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 Jamesons 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 Lukcs and Derrida in 1995 hence the unwieldy opening
where I chose to speak on Lukcs 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. Kolakowskis
critique in Main Currents, pp. 299300.
4. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Basil Blackwell,
1990), pp. 3245.
5. G. W. F. Hegel, Phnomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister
(Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), p. 140. English in Hegels 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 Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1971), pp. 1313. 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 Klassenbewutsein in Lukcss Werke
(Neuwied and Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand, 1968).

156Ideology, 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. Lukcs, History and Class Consciousness, pp. 132/311.
9. For Lukcss 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. 1889. Jameson is quoting J. L. Houdebine, Sur une
lecture de Lnine, in Thorie densemble (Paris: Seuil, 1968), pp. 2956.
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.
2756.
16. Quoted in Jameson, On Cultural Studies, pp. 2834.
17. Cf. Louis Althusser on the need to distinguish the suppletory theoretical
function (la fonction thorique suppltive) of particular concepts from the
concepts themselves in the case of Marxs works of the break, e.g., The
German Ideology, in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Vintage,
1970), p. 37.
18. See Jamesons essay on de Man in Postmodernism, pp. 21759, and
the beginnings of a critique in my Ending Up/Taking Back (with
Two Postscripts on Paul de Mans 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. Althussers autocritique in Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame
Lock (London: New Left Books, 1976).

Part III:
Heidegger/Derrida

Chapter 8

Monstrous History:
Heidegger Reading Hlderlin

Heideggers lectures on Hlderlins late hymns his third and last lecture
course on Hlderlin, 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 Hlderlins Der Ister by way of a long excursus
on the Greek determination of mans essence in Sophocless Antigone.
This excursus to Greece and hence Heideggers entire interpretation of
Hlderlin 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:
Vielfltig das Unheimliche, nichts doch
ber 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. Heideggers translation of the Greek words deinon and deinataton by unheimlich (uncanny, say) is already an answer to the riddle:
an account of mans 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 Heideggers answer to his determination of mans 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, Hlderlins own answer.
That is, Hlderlin translates the opening of the choral ode by rendering
the Greek word not as unheimlich but as ungeheuer:

160Ideology, 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 Hlderlins dialogue with Sophocles and yet
not using Hlderlins own translation of Sophocles: Since Hlderlin
himself translated the whole of Sophocles Antigone, it would seem
appropriate to listen to this choral ode in Hlderlins own translation.
Nevertheless, this translation (bersetzung) is comprehensible only on
the basis of the Hlderlinian translation (bertragung) 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 Hlderlins own
translation because he does not want to quote it out of context. But the
context of Hlderlins 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 Hlderlin out of context
indeed, some would say that his whole project of interpreting Hlderlin
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 Hlderlinian translation
in its entirety (nur aus dem Ganzen der Hlderlinschen bertragung)
as the switch from bersetzung to bertragung suggests. He means that
Hlderlins translation of the choral ode would be understandable only
on the basis of our already having understood Hlderlins interpretation
of the Greeks historical specificity and our (Hesperian) historical
specificity in their sameness and their difference. In other words, the
real reason for Heideggers not quoting Hlderlins translation here is
the nature, the essence, of translation itself. Translation, according to
Heideggers 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 Hlderlins 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

Monstrous History161

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 (7980).
(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 Hlderlin, to interpret the dialogue
of Hlderlin and the Greeks, does not (indeed, cannot) use Hlderlins
own translation but rather has to retranslate both Sophocless Greek
and Hlderlins German. For Hlderlins 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 mans essence, with his unheimlich (uncanny)
rather than Hlderlins ungeheuer, it is no arbitrary substitution but an
interpretation that would say the same thing as Hlderlin. 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 Hlderlin 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 Heideggers
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 hyperbologic3 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 Heideggers unheimlich preserves the internal difference
proper to ungeheuer, whether his retranslation translates the words 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

162Ideology, 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 Hlderlin. In other
words, Heideggers retranslation of the choral ode is thinking more
Hlderlinian than Hlderlin 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 Hlderlins 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 Hlderlinian than Hlderlin? Heidegger thinks mans
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 ones 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 ones own (Das Heimischwerden im
Eigenen) is the only concern [or care, Sorge] of the poetry of Hlderlin
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 ones own. That which is
ones own (das Eigene) is the native (das Vaterlndische) 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 ones 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)

Monstrous History163

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, mans uncanniness
(Unheimlichkeit) is grounded in his homelessness (Unheimischkeit) and
this homelessness in turn has its hidden ground in mans 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, da der
Mensch berhaupt im Sein heimisch ist) (11314). It is this reading of
Unheimlichkeit on the basis of Unheimischkeit and in turn on the basis
of mans 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, mans
Unheimlichkeit is grounded in his essential Unheimischsein (not being at
home) and Heimischwerden (coming to be at home), and Heidegger has
little trouble interpreting Hlderlins 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 bersetzen, denken wir in die Richtung des Nicht-
geheuren) (87). In short, Heidegger translates Hlderlins 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 Hlderlin
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
Rkwrts zu gehen und
Ich mein, er msse kommen
Von Osten.
Vieles wre
Zu sagen davon.

164Ideology, 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 heien
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 ones own and that which is foreign always
speaks (Der Ister ist jener Strom, bei dem schon an der Quelle das
Fremde zu Gast und gegenwrtig ist, in dessen Strmen die Zwiesprache
des Eigenen und Fremden stndig 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 Heideggers interpretation of
going over and coming back by going over and coming back should
nevertheless indicate the law governing his interpretation of Hlderlin.
That law is the law of history itself according to which that which
is ones own is the most distant and the path to that which is most ones
own is the longest and most difficult (derzufolge das Eigene das Fernste
und der Weg zum Eigensten der lngste und schwerste ist) (179) and it
is grounded in an ontological interpretation of historical mans essence.
This is why it is futile to object to Heideggers interpretation on the basis
of any prematurely philological grounds: if Heidegger interprets

Monstrous History165

Hlderlin 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
Heideggers interpretation of Hlderlins 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 Hlderlin 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 Heideggers law of
history: that is, if in thinking the same as Hlderlin, Heidegger remembers to say it differently, to say it in its difference from itself in short,
remembers that Hlderlin 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 Hlderlins famous first letter to Bhlendorff (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 ones 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 ones own the most distant the path to that which is most ones 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,

166Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

what they are born to, is what Hlderlin 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 ones own,
says Hlderlin, has to be learned just as much as that which is foreign;
and because it is that which is ones 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 Hlderlin).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 letters scheme of das Eigene and das Fremde (that which is ones own
and that which is foreign) to interpret the Ister and the Greek determination of mans essence. In short, whereas Hlderlins scheme maintains an internal doubleness of that which is ones 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 Hlderlin, he says
simply Germany or the Germans) with that which is ones own, das
Eigene, and Greece with that which is foreign, das Fremde. In doing so,
Heidegger not only changes Hlderlins bipolar scheme of a relation (by
inversion) of bipolar terms into a simply bipolar scheme of us

Monstrous History167

(Hesperians,Germans) and the Greeks, that which is ones own and that
which is foreign, das Eigene and das Fremde, that is to say, of simple
terms and thereby reduces Hlderlins 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 Hlderlins scheme is what it does to
Hlderlins 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 Hlderlins terms and calls that
which for Hlderlin 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 Hlderlins 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 elses 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 elses culture: the Greek clarity of representation, Junonian sobriety). If it is legitimate to read Hlderlins
scheme in this way, then what happens in Heideggers 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

168Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

Hlderlin 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 Heideggers interpretation of Hlderlin and the Greeks in his consistent reduction to a
two-fold scheme Greece and Hesperia of what is well marked everywhere in Hlderlin 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 Nchsten 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. / Schn 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
Isters seeming to go backwards:
Der scheinet aber fast
Rkwrts zu gehen und
Ich mein, er msse kommen
Von Osten.

Monstrous History169
Vieles wre
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 msse 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 Hlderlins historical scheme cannot help but have implications for
Heideggers law of history in short-hand, again, that which is ones
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., Hlderlin 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 ones 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.

170Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

Again: its 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 Hlderlins determination of mans 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 Mans The Riddle of Hlderlin 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
Hlderlin. The first is an explanation of the attraction of Hlderlins
scheme for critics with a utopian or apocalyptic bent: Thus the transposition of Hlderlins 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 Heideggers
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

Monstrous History171

to be at home, and so on. De Mans that is, Hlderlins answer is

uncompromising: True wisdom begins in the knowledge of its own historical ineffectiveness. When Hlderlin 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 Hlderlins 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,
Hlderlins Hymne Der Ister (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,
1984). This is volume 53 of the Gesamtausgabe of Heideggers works.
3. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La csure du spculatif and Hlderlin et
les Grecs, in LImitation des modernes (Paris: Galile, 1986). English in
Lacoue-Labarthes 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 Benjamins
The Task of the Translator, now in Telling Time (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993).
7. Peter Szondi, berwindung des Klassizismus, in Hlderlin-Studien
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967). See my reading of Szondi in
Hlderlin in France, in Readings in Interpretation: Hlderlin, Hegel,
Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
8. Endpapers: Hlderlins Textual History, Hlderlin in France, and
Heidegger Reading Hlderlin, all in Readings in Interpretation.

172Ideology, 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: Hlderlins 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 Hlderlin, The New York Review of Books
15:9 (19 November 1970), pp. 4752. Now reprinted in de Mans Critical
Writings, 19531978, 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 Hlderlins
poetry (Wir haben noch kaum begonnen, die geheimnisvollen Bezge
zum Osten zu denken, die in Hlderlins Dichtung Wort geworden sind). In
Martin Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, Mit einem Brief ber
den Humanismus (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1947), p. 85. Something like an
Oriental, Egyptian, reading of Heidegger these words being read in
a Hlderlinian sense is Jacques Derrida on Heidegger on Trakl in his Paris
seminar of spring 1985 and in the essay Geschlecht 2: Heideggers Hand,
in John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987). French in Jacques Derrida, Psych, Inventions de
lautre (Paris: Galile, 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 Mans 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 Mans 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

174Ideology, 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 Mans 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 Mans own remarks about his alleged failure
too literally. It might be better to take a page from de Mans 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 Mans last essays. Ironically
(and undialectically) enough, the failed attempt at a historical definition of Romanticism turns into a certain success for de Mans thinking of history.
The mechanism and the necessity of de Mans 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 Heideggers interpretation
of Hlderlin (Patterns of Temporality in Hlderlins Wie wenn am
Feiertage) and the lecture on Wordsworth (and on Geoffrey Hartmans
interpretation of Wordsworth in his 1964 Wordsworths 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 lectures
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 Heideggers interpretation of
Hlderlins 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
Hlderlins text. In short, the turn to rhetoric occurs on account of the
lack in Heideggers terms and Heideggers failure to think the temporality of poetic form, as de Man puts it, when he comes to interpret
Hlderlins poetry. How so?
De Man begins his critical reading of Heidegger in a hopeful vein:
Heideggers ontological understanding of Hlderlins key concepts as

Discontinuous Shifts175

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 Mans 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 Mans 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 Mans 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

176Ideology, 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 578)

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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers interpretations of
Hlderlins 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 Hlderlins 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 Hlderlins poem. In his interpretation of Wie
wenn am Feiertage, Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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)

Discontinuous Shifts177

(RCC 65). In short, Hlderlin 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 Hlderlin as an
apocalyptic poet is wrong in general and, in the particular case of

Heideggers interpretation of Wie wenn am Feiertage, it is wrong

in specific ways for specific reasons. It is wrong in general because
Hlderlin, 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 Heideggers 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 Hlderlins poem in two
ways. First, Heidegger ignores and treats as unproblematic a certain
ambiguity of metaphorical reference (RCC, 62) in the poems
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
poems poetic form. And it gets unfolded in terms of the triadic tonal
pattern of Hlderlins theory of the alternation of tones (Wechsel der
Tne), 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 Hlderlin calls
ideal. Heidegger cannot read the alternating tones of Hlderlins
hymn because he ignores the poems Pindaric triadic structure and
simply cuts off the fragmentary lines that would have constituted the
strophes of the poems end that is, makes the poem whole by truncating it. So: by glossing over the ambiguity of metaphorical reference
in the poems opening simile and by ignoring the poems tonal structure
and truncating its ending, Heidegger completely disregards its poetic
form. And since its poetic form is the temporal structure of the poems
self-understanding, disregarding it means also disregarding the poems
temporal structure. Again, it is a case of Heidegger the thinker of
temporality not being Heideggerian enough! The consequences for

178Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

Heidegger are clear: in short, there is a flaw in Heideggers method, as
de Man puts it, that leads to a misinterpretation of Hlderlin as an
apocalyptic poet, when Hlderlins 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 Heideggers method of his having substituted
ontological for what could well be called formal dimensions of language are clear, the results for de Mans 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 Heideggers. The main difference
would be that whereas for Heidegger the poems 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 poems 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 poems 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 Hlderlins 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 Mans 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

Discontinuous Shifts179

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
Mans 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 Hlderlins
poetic form. Adornos parataxis is one possibility, which (parataxis)
is linked by Auerbach to what he calls a figural style. Hlderlins 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 Mans
ending needs to introduce these explicitly rhetorical terms parataxis,
caesura, figural style, and others because the discontinuous temporality his reading of Hlderlin has disclosed is one whose reversals can no
longer be accounted for in ontological terms. That de Mans reading
of Hlderlin has pushed Heideggers 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 Hlderlins poetry from an organic unity (like
that of Schellings 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 Mans reading of the
temporality of poetic form proper to Hlderlins poetic language has
disclosed a discontinuous temporality and structures of reversal and
substitution that cannot be accounted for in the terms of Heideggers
fundamental ontology or even in the rhetorical terms of Adorno and

180Ideology, 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 Mans veritably Hlderlinian reading of
Wordsworth. In fact, one could say that the double ending of Patterns
produces the two layers of Time and History. De Mans readings of
the Boy of Winander and the Duddon sonnet can be called Hlderlinian
because they consist of a certain application of Hlderlins 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
Heideggers 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 ones 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 ones 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 Mans formulations of how it is that this fiction can allow one to look back
upon, as it were, ones own death: The poem is, in a curious sense,
autobiographical, but it is the autobiography of someone who no longer

Discontinuous Shifts181

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 poems 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
envelopp, 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

182Ideology, 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
Mans 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 Hlderlin 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 Kants 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

Discontinuous Shifts183

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
Hlderlin and Wordsworth and their disclosure of reversals and substitutions whose discontinuity is not temporal but rhetorical. What this
also means is that de Mans 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 Mans discontinuous shift from history to history. If we are right to
callthis shift material and historical, then what would be the equivalent
of this moment in the order of language (AI 89)? In de Mans 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 [Wordsworths] 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
Mans history and our legacy.

Notes
1. See de Mans 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 Mans Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant (AI 79). On de
Mans reading of Kants 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

184Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

goes from de Mans 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 Derridas Mmoires, 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 Mans 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 Potique
(1970) of de Mans The Rhetoric of Blindness: Derrida as Reader of
Rousseau.1 De Mans first letter is itself a reply to a letter that Derrida
wrote to de Man in responding to the critique of his (Derridas) reading
of Rousseau in Grammatologie. In the excerpt Derrida quotes, de Man
refuses to be put off by what he calls Derridas 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 Mallarm 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 Potique,
Derrida must have thanked de Man once again, he says, and he gets in
reply another letter from Zrich (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 Mans critique. We dont have access to Derridas letter its
not in the de Man archive at UCI but it clearly did more than just offer
renewed thanks for de Mans critique! I quote Derridas quoting de
Man at a bit more length:

186Ideology, 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 Hlderlin) ... 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 lorigine 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 didnt feel obliged to say in
this text, but I would talk about it in regard to the Dialogues and especially
in regard to mile, which seems to me one of the most demented texts there
is. (M 130, 1278)

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-tre 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 Rousseaus 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 Mans
and Derridas differing conceptions of a texts and a readings blindness or blind spot. For the de Man of Blindness and Insight, a critics
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 tche 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

Machinal Effects187

about it or, better, what he does with it. For after quoting these passages from de Mans 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 Mans 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 nen avons jamais reparl), 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 dont 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 nen avons jamais reparl), in truth, is what we have
never ceased writing about ever since, as if to prepare ourselves to speak
of it again one day ( 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 (Quil me soit permis de nen reparler
jamais) (C 89, 87).4 Of course, as we have learned from de Mans
Excuses (the last chapter of Allegories of Reading), Rousseau has to
speak about it again, and not only in the Fourth Rverie. In a certain
sense, he does nothing but speak about it again and again throughout
the Confessions (and the other autobiographical writings) insofar asthe
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, lets
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

188Ideology, 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 Derridas Typewriter Ribbon: Limited
Ink (2) (1998) which is largely about de Mans 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
Derridas 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 arent 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 Mans Aesthetic Ideology, think about
materiality, and write something, anything, propos of it. In his text
Derrida thematizes this assignment and has great fun playing with and
interrogating the phrase propos from the conferences description a
line that read propos of Paul de Mans Aesthetic Ideology while
spending nearly all of his one hundred plus pages on or around de Mans
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 Derridas
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 Mans reading of Rousseau. Derridas other texts on de
Mans work are nothing if not generous, and this would include not only
the three original lectures in Mmoires but also the additional text on
the wartime journalism (Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell:

Machinal Effects189

Paul de Mans War). Indeed, Derrida refrains from criticizing even

early texts like Heideggers Exegeses of Hlderlin (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 Derridas 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 Vercelliss household.
In quoting Rousseaus description of the little pink and silver ribbon,
de Man leaves out the words already old un petit ruban couleur
de rose et argent dj 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 Derridas reservations or hesitations about what de Man says or
doesnt say are more productive than others. For instance, Derrida takes
to task de Mans dismissal of any possibility of an Oedipal situation
in Rousseaus desire for possession of the ribbon and hence desire for
possession of Marion and zeroes in on de Mans symptomatic footnote:
The embarrassing story of Rousseaus 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? propos, is
not every footnote a little Oedipal? In pure 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

190Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

had made several months earlier and who had also recently converted to
Catholicism, like the Calvinist Jean-Jacques. (TR 91, 567)

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 glac dargent)
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: Rousseaus 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 glac dargent) 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 Rousseaus
lying about Marions having given him the ribbon.
But however productive Derridas 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 Mans reading, at the
very least as plausible extensions or corollaries of his argument. This is
especially true of what seems to be Derridas 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 Rousseaus text). De Mans 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
Rousseaus 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 Effects191
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 Rousseaus 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 dont believe even that what de Man names the
interest of Rousseaus 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

192Ideology, 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 11011, 812)

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 Derridas 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. Derridas 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 Derridas somewhat perverse refusal to allow de Man to set
up his argument. But how exactly de Mans 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 Rveries, as Derrida seems to think already the very first step of
de Mans 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 Rverie

Machinal Effects193

(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
Mans reading begins here: that is, in how the avowal and the excuse,
a cognitive and a performative use of language, are coupled together in
Rousseaus 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 Mans 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 Rousseaus 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 Rousseaus
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

194Ideology, 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 Rousseaus 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 Rousseaus 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 Freuds
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 Rousseaus
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 Mans 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

Machinal Effects195

interchangeable. The implications of de Mans 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 Mans 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 Mans analysis is both too Lacanian and
not Lacanian enough!) Although it is not as marked, de Mans 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 Mans 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 2867). 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

196Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

of Kants 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
Rousseaus 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 (mu) 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, 834).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 Mans reading, this system gets
disrupted, disarticulated, by the anacoluthonic lie, Rousseaus random
utterance of the name Marion as the first object on which to excuse
himself: Je mexcusai sur le premier objet qui soffrit (C 86, 88).
This sentence is phrased in such a way, says de Man, as to allow for
a complete disjunction between Rousseaus 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 mexcusai sur le
premier objet qui soffrit 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 28990).
And it is in the Fourth Rverie 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 Mans 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

Machinal Effects197

undoing of understanding is perhaps always easier to understand than

the understanding of understanding! It should be clear, however, thatthe
foreign element the random or anacoluthonic lie that takes on the
name fiction in the Fourth Rverie, 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 Mans
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 Mans essay Derrida
is more than just correct, for he is able to extend the reach of de Mans
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, Derridas 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,
couldnt 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 Mans reading

198Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

even though he does note that de Mans use of the word deconstruction is not exactly his own than with the setting up of the system
that gets deconstructed by Rousseaus random lie. As even a less than
completely attentive reading (or hearing) of Derridas text will have to
acknowledge, the cognitive dimension what Derrida (or de Man) gets
right or wrong is not what actually happens in Derridas text, in de
Mans 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 Mans crucial
paragraph on the excuse as ruse, on shame used as excuse, but it is only
to underline de Mans 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) Rousseaus 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 Mans 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 Derridas 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 Rousseaus action becomes radical and
irreducible and hence absolutely unforgivable. I bring this up here
or rather its what comes up, what had to come up because it is in
fact what Derridas 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

Machinal Effects199

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 745, 37). The
compromise is that in order to save time and energy, he had to reorient in the direction of this colloquium [ propos of de Mans 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 Mans 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 Mans 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 Mans impossible confession/excuse, means that
Derrida needs to take de Mans text as itself politico-autobiographical,
and he says so explicitly several times. Toward the end of Typewriter
Ribbon, he insists that de Mans 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 Mans
text is politico-
autobiographical (or autobiographico-
political,
as Derrida puts it on the last page of his text), if he is talking about

200Ideology, 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 quil pensait devoir nous confier) (TR 160, 146).
On the surface, this is something of a joke and a tit-for-tat response to
de Mans having said in the interview with Stefano Rosso: Whatever
happens in Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. He
doesnt need Rousseau, he doesnt 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
Mans 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 Mans 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
Derridas 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, Rousseaus theft.
That is, Derrida steals back what had been taken from him, from his
own text, in the first place. This would include de Mans appropriation
of the term deconstruction first of all, as well as dissemination,
and the critical wielding of Austins performative. Derrida marks these
appropriations, says little about them, and then goes on to extend their
theoretical scope, as though to correct de Mans use of them for local
or technical purposes.9 So: de Man may be wrong in Derridas eyes,
but he is also right about Derrida: whatever happens in Derrida, it
happens between him and his own text. Derrida doesnt need anyone;
he doesnt need Rousseau because he is Rousseau. That is, in stealing
back what was taken from him, Derrida repeats Rousseaus 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

Machinal Effects201

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 Rousseaus, 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
littrature considre comme une tauromachie. To end, I dont 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 Leiriss 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 crire (Limited Ink II), in Papier Machine (Paris: Galile, 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, Mmoires, for Paul de
Man, revised edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), and
Mmoires, pour Paul de Man (Paris: Galile, 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
compltes, vol. 1 (Paris: Bibliothque de la Pliade, 1959).
5. Excuses (Confessions) was first published under the title The Purloined

202Ideology, 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 Unbewuten 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 Mans 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, Lge dhomme, prcd de De la littrature considre
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 Jacobss admirably subtle and difficult reading dislocates our

claustrophobic auditor-
reader and leaves him in desperate straits.1
In the face of such a text Jacobss, Kleists, and Kants 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-readers anxiety and places him in an even
more embarrassing predicament. Not only is the auditor-reader already
inscribed in Jacobss text (just as the historian and the critic are inscribed
in Kleists 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 Kleists ber das Marionettentheater.
After having soundly defeated Mr von Gs son, the fencer (Mr C, the
narrators 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 fencers 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.

204Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

If we tell this story, it is not (only) in order to escape Jacobss 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, Jacobss 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 ber 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
Kleists 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 Jacobss 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

Appendix 1205

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 Jacobss 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 Kants text insists on
the rule that links cause with effect, the common concern of Kleists
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, Kleists text is a
rewriting of certain moments of Kants 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 Kants 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 Kleists text does indeed succeed in throwing Kants boat off-
course whether Kleists barge deflects Kants 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., Kants Second Analogy) is
at stake, then, to quote Jacobs again, objectivity, experience, the possibility of representation and the primary function of the understanding

206Ideology, 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 Jacobss text is quite explicitly
aware that in this game Kant has been set up for the deflection of Kleists
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 Jacobss 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 Kleists 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 Jacobss 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 Kants
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

Appendix 1207

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 boats being at a point
upstream i.e., the preceding state (A) is the something that is presupposed and upon which the boats 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 boats 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 Kants 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 boats 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 Kleists stories can deflect it.

208Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

The principle of causality is an analogy and at that a philosophical
analogy. Kants 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 judgments objectivity. Indeed, we may never be able to say with
certainty what the cause of an event like the boats 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 Kleists 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 mans 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 Kants 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 Kants 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

Appendix 1209

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 Kants 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 Jacobss 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. Kants 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 Kants
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 Kants 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 Kants 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 2256). 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 bertrgt (This

210Ideology, 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 (bertragung) 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 events order is the guarantee of metaphor
(carrying-over, bertragung): in short, this is the metaphor that would
guarantee metaphor. This would indeed not be much of a guarantee
for the straight course of Kants 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: Kleists reading of Kant. Rather than any radical reading of Kant,
all I would do here is suggest the sense in which Jacobss proposal of
a Kleist-crisis for Kant is a metaphor for Kants Kant-crisis. How this
crisis is carried over by Kleist scholarship to the point where it becomes
Kleists 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 Kleists Kantkrise is quite literally a crisis of
reading: Kleist reads Kant and can read no more. As stated in the two
main documents of Kleists 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
angerhrt). 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 Bchern). Before we read what
Kleist considers to be the cause of this deep, convulsing effect (eine tiefe
erschtternde 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 dont smile about another who feels wounded
by it in his most sacred innerness (II, 634). But the most repeated

Appendix 1211

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 hchstes Ziel ist gesunken). Rather than Kleists throwing Kants
boat off-course, what we have here is Kants (the straight mans?) hitting
his mark directly, causing a crisis, and deflecting the course of Kleists
life. And it is indeed the course of Kleists life that is deflected, for Kant
or rather Kleists 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 Kleists goal and
how has his reading of Kant sunk it?
Kleists 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 (Gegenstnde) which they sighted through
them were green and they would never be able to decide (und nie
wrden sie entscheiden knnen) 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 knnen 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 Kleists Kant crisis indeed,
we would say that, thanks to Jacobss 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

212Ideology, 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 whlen wsste). 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. Jacobss 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

Unwahrheit
Unwahrscheinlichkeit
Unwahrheit
Unwahrscheinlichkeit

Appendix 1213

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 Kleists
goal, and deflected the course of Kleists life, in the second encounter
Kleist makes a comeback and deflects the course of Kants boat. Kleists
Kant-crisis becomes Kants 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 Kleists goal to sink, is only another repetition of Kleists
permanent Kant-crisis. Kants Kleist-crisis or Kleists Kant-crisis the
chiasmus is precise and it is precisely as undecidable as the chiasmus
of Wahrheit/Wahrscheinlichkeit, Unwahrheit/Unwahrscheinlichkeit.
Like Jacobss 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 Jacobss The
Style of Kleist in Diacritics 9:4 (December 1979), pp. 708.
2. This reading of the straight man is that of Paul de Man in his Yale seminar
on Theory of Irony (Spring 1976).

214Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

3. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kants Critique of Pure Reason
(New York: Humanities Press, 1962), p. 363.
4. Beside Norman Kemp Smiths, some helpful discussions of the Second
Analogy are: A. C. Ewing, Kants Treatment of Causality (London: Kegan
Paul, 1924); Gerd Buchdahl, The Kantian Dynamic of Reason with
Special Reference to the Place of Causality in Kants System, and W. A.
Suchting, Kants 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 Kants Second Analogy,
Kant-Studien 64 (1973), pp. 7187. See also Walter Brcker, Kant ber
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. Martins 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 2201), 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. 812.
7. See Arthur Schopenhauer, ber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom
zureichenden Grunde, in Smtliche Werke, ed. Wolfgang von Lhneysen
(Stuttgart and Frankfurt am Main: Cotta-Insel, 1962), II, pp. 1079.
8. This is a paraphrase of the excellent summary of the Second Analogy in
Stephan Krner, Kant (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974), p. 87.
9. This is a charge made by A. O. Lovejoy, On Kants Reply to Hume, in
M. S. Gram (ed.), Kant: Disputed Questions (Chicago: Quadrangle Books,
1976), pp. 284308.
10. Jacques Derrida, Le Parergon, in La Vrit en peinture (Paris: Flammarion,
1978), p. 63.
11. All page references to Kleists 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, Smtliche 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 Kleists 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 fiance 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 Mans and yours I think that the point at which
your representation of de Mans argument diverges from it can be
determined. That point of divergence, I would say, is most clearly
visible in your essays understanding of de Mans 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 Mans
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 essays use of the
morning star-evening star and the base 7/base 10 examples on p. 38.

216Ideology, 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
Mans 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 Pascals
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 Mans reading is heterogeneous to the number system i.e., a tropological, transformational
system a foreign element that is necessary for the systems 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

Appendix 2217

as non-referential is not a difference between the utterances meaning

either something (the person Marion) or nothing but rather a difference between the utterances 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 sance.2) In any case, even
thus summarily stated, the divergence between de Mans reading and
your essays 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 Mans 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 Mans having treated
a contingent claim to meaningfulness as if it were an absolute claim.
Far from it, de Man has no quarrel with languages 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, Rousseaus own text, against its authors interests, prefers
being suspected of lie and slander rather than of innocently lacking
sense (AR 293). Anyway, to short-circuit the argument, de Mans point
would be that languages overwhelming capacity to produce and reproduce meaning to render meaningful even utterances that innocently

218Ideology, 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 systems 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 essays 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 languages intrinsic heterogeneity, the
materiality of the zero, of the name, of inscription of language is the
heterogeneity of linguistic representation. Languages 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. Were
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 essays statements about de Mans
overestimating and exaggerating the claims of meaning. My claim
is that far from asking for absolute meaning, de Man is quite ready to
acknowledge languages 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

Appendix 2219

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. 378 but that these insights are embedded in a general
argument that, in the face of Excuses (never mind Pascals Allegory
of Persuasion and Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant), simply
does not hold.

Notes
1. This response is to Frances Fergusons essay Historicism, Deconstruction,
and Wordsworth. It was first published along with Fergusons 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 Fergusons essay are to this
issue of Diacritics. A revised version of Fergusons 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. 21922.
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, 1378
allegory, 1921, 245, 334, 11618,
1545
Althusser, Louis, 11, 35n, 36n, 121n,
125n, 137, 153, 154, 156n17,
156n19, 156n20
anacoluthon, 1967, 216, 217
anagrams, 62n2
apostrophe, 889
Arnauld and Nicole, 28
Auerbach, Erich, 179
Auffret, Dominique, 135n1
Barthes, Roland, 16, 1718
Bataille, Georges, 113, 124n20, 135
Baudelaire, Charles, 415
Benjamin, Walter, 137, 155
Blanchot, Maurice, 170
blind spot, 186
Brcker, Walter, 214n4
Buchdahl, Gerd, 214n4
catachresis, 11314
chiasmus, 21213
class consciousness of the proletariat,
1426
Cohen, Tom, 35n9
cultural studies, 1514
De Man, Paul (essays by)
Allegory (Julie), 1819, 21, 154
An Interview with Paul de Man,
13, 56

Anthropomorphism and Trope in

the Lyric, 415
Excuses (Confessions), 5761,
64n19, 69, 187201, 21519
Genesis and Genealogy
(Nietzsche), 11314
Hegel on the Sublime, 16, 36n18,
8196, 1378
Hypogram and Inscription, 34, 7,
62n2, 133
Kant and Schiller, 8, 48, 601,
78n14, 1823
Kants Materialism, 63n13
Pascals Allegory of Persuasion,
21, 2434, 21617
Patterns of Temporality in
Hlderlins Wie wenn am
Feiertage, 17480
Phenomenality and Materiality in
Kant, 48, 1011, 12, 24, 3855,
58, 6770
Promises (Social Contract),
1920
Reading and History, 34, 7
Roland Barthes and the Limits of
Structuralism, 16, 1718, 20
Semiology and Rhetoric, 22,
36n19
Shelley Disfigured, 55
Sign and Symbol in Hegels
Aesthetics, 58, 10, 801, 82,
85
The Concept of Irony, 34n2,
37n27, 70
The Epistemology of Metaphor, 24

Index221
The Resistance to Theory, 910,
1418, 20, 214, 114, 123n19,
124n21
The Rhetoric of Blindness: Derrida
as Reader of Rousseau, 1857
The Riddle of Hlderlin, 1701
Time and History in Wordsworth,
1803
death, 1802
deconstruction, 7, 202n9
Derrida, Jacques, 32, 58, 63n7, 63n9,
77n8, 11920, 127, 135, 1378,
172, 182, 185201, 210, 217
desire
in Hegel, 1059, 12935
in Kojve, 12935
Dove, Kenley Royce, 123n18
Eagleton, Terry, 9, 10, 11, 137, 139,
142
Engels, Friedrich, 141, 156n8
Ewing, A. C., 214n4
Ferguson, Frances, 21519
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 100, 102
fiat lux, 69, 867, 936
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 6570,
77n7
forgiveness, 1989
Freud, Sigmund, 190
Gedchtnis, 82
geometric method, 258
German Ideology, The, 11, 12, 20, 56,
99103, 118, 120
Goebbels, Joseph, 8
grammar, 1920, 21
Hartman, Geoffrey, 174
Hegel, G.W.F., 58, 10, 12, 24, 8096,
13941
Heidegger, Martin, 39, 113, 15972,
17480, 195
Heinrichs, Johannes, 122n18
Hertz, Neil, 83, 86, 95
Hlderlin, Friedrich, 15972,
17480
Hunter, Ian, 152
Hyppolite, Jean, 109, 122

ideology, 810, 13, 1420, 117, 152,

1545
inscription, 32, 82
irony, 33, 60
irreversibility, 435
Jacobs, Carol, 171, 20314
Jakobson, Roman, 7980
Jameson, Fredric, 14655
Jauss, Hans Robert, 34
Kant, Immanuel, 48, 10, 24, 3861,
6576, 80, 81, 196, 20511, 213,
214n5
Kleist, Heinrich von, 135, 20313
Kojve, Alexandre, 109, 122, 124n25,
12735
Kolakowski, Leszek, 155
Krner, Stephan, 214n8
Lacan, Jacques, 195
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 161
Leiris, Michel, 201, 202n10
life, in Hegel, 10419, 131, 132
Longinus, 81, 83, 86, 89, 90, 91, 92,
95
love, 133
Lukcs, Georg, 64n21, 13755
Lyotard, Jean-Franois, 63n11
Mandel, Ernest, 147
Manheim, Ralph, 159
Marx, Karl, 56, 99103, 115,
11820
materiality, 3861
of inscription, 67, 42, 53, 55
metalepsis, 181
metaphor, 1813, 21213
metonymy, 1813
negation in Hegel, 85, 86, 89, 101,
1058, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117,
12934, 141
Newmark, Kevin, 37n24, 95
nominal definition, 256
Norman, Richard, 121n12
number, 489
one see zero

222Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

parabasis, 33, 37n27
parataxis, 75, 179
Pascal, Blaise, 2134, 46
performative, 48, 501, 5761, 6870,
756, 77n8
phenomenalization, 16, 834, 1456
Philonenko, Alexis, 77n7
Pggeler, Otto, 121n
positing power of language, 6870,
734, 77n8, 85, 88
primitive terms, 267
Redfield, Marc, 936
reference, 1321, 123n19, 2001
Riffaterre, Michael, 34
Rosen, Stanley, 135n2
Roth, Michael S., 135n1, 136n11
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5961, 64n19,
70, 185201, 21518
Russell, Bertrand, 216
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 15, 27, 39,
80
Schiller, Friedrich, 8, 43, 44, 65, 706,
78n14, 80
Schlegel, Friedrich, 33, 60, 70, 135
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 207, 209
self-consciousness, in Hegel, 10420,
12735
semiology, 16

shame in Rousseau, 1936

Smith, Norman Kemp, 214n4
Sophocles, 159
Stoekl, Allan, 136n11
Strauss, Leo, 134, 136n9
Strawson, P. F., 214n6
sublime, 24
in Hegel, 8096
in Kant, 3861, 6570, 723
in Schiller, 706
Suchting, W. A., 214n4
symbol, 723, 837, 89, 90
Szondi, Peter, 166
transcendental method, 701, 734,
77n11, 78n14
translation, 15963, 165
trivium, 214
tropological system, 1112, 457,
5761, 8990
undecidabililty, 37n26, 216, 217
unreadability, 1819
Van Cleve, James, 214n4
Wordsworth, William, 3942, 62n5,
1803
zero, 2934, 46, 21619