SOURCE: Cole, Steven E. “The Dead-end of Deconstruction: Paul de Man and the Fate of Poetic Language.” Criticism 30, no. 1 (winter 1988): 91-112.

[In the following essay, Cole focuses on the critical theory of de Man, suggesting that his deconstruction of meaning in literature leads not to liberation from tradition, but to a logical dead end.]

1.

Perhaps no contemporary theorist is more difficult to analyze than Paul de Man, although the difficulties are not precisely what his admirers have supposed. In the flood of commentary which has appeared since his death (and this is true even of Jacques Derrida's remarkable Memoires¹), one finds less analysis than a kind of mimetic homage in which the acolyte gestures mysteriously at texts whose profundity is insured by their resistance to comprehension. Thus, in a memorial volume of essays, we are told that de Man “will also teach us, once again, in his own voice, how to read in new and unexpected ways, how to contend with the impossibility of reading,”² and warned that the attempt to find a value system in de Man's deconstruction must confront “a mystery about which no moral imperative to leap from textuality to subjectivity or history can tell us more than de Man's stubborn labyrinths of rigor, resistance, and profoundly meaningful unreliability.”³ In such proclamations (and they are virtual commonplaces of de Man commentary) de Man's work stands as sacred writ, immune to the searching historical and sceptical suspicion which it embodies.

What explains this extraordinary protectiveness towards de Man's work? In large part, it seems to stem from an uneasiness about the actual content of what de Man has to say, a largely unspoken awareness that for all its logical brilliance and subtlety, de Man's writing is profoundly unsettling and depressing. Certainly this would explain the nervous, almost embarrassed, generosity of the memorial tributes which have been published: the recurrent theme is an apology for the experience of loss occasioned by de Man's death, yet seemingly made impossible by his work.⁴ Yet it would be wrong to seize upon such an apparent discrepancy between work and world as evidence that de Man has in some way been refuted. For as we shall see, the significance of de Man's work is not its denial of the ontology of experience; it is rather its insistence that such an ontology, while inescapable, must also remain intractably inexplicable, and more important, that such inexplicability exposes the emptiness of political or social praxis.

Unfortunately, there is a continuing reluctance to take de Man at face value—a refusal to accept that positions which deny absolutely the possibility of either affirmable meaning or value really mean what they say. The reason for this seems obvious—for some time de Man's work has been seen as central to a more general project that would argue that the indeterminacy of linguistic meaning is subversive of politically or psychologically objectionable structures whose power inheres in their pretension to determinism.⁵ But there is a terminological difficulty here: “subversion” is a notoriously slippery term, particularly in the absence of any shared agreement about that which is being subverted. Thus, while Paul Bové argues that “the deconstructive reversal of the New Critical project … authorizes the redeployment of critical energies into a new alignment of forces which preserves the integrity of the institution while providing original and praeter-naturally subtle insight into both the operations of textuality and the primordiality of writing,”⁶ de Man himself wryly accepts what he calls the “supreme insult” that his work is “just more New Criticism. I can live with that very easily, because I think that only what is, in a sense, classically didactic, can be really and effectively subversive” (RT [The Resistance to Theory] 117). The dilemma here is fundamental to any effort at situating de Man's work: the attempt at locating a realm of thematic significance, whether this be ethical, political, or historical, seems frustrated by de Man's own anticipation of, and dismissal of, that attempt. Small wonder that Wallace Martin argues that it is simply wrong to believe that in de Man “the theory being advanced is some form of idealism, scepticism, or negative theology.”⁷ This is wrong, according to Martin, because “de Man is aware of this danger, is increasingly vigilant in attempting to avoid it, and presumably resigned in advance to being misunderstood, since his theory is designed to explain why such misunderstandings are inevitable” (p. xxxii).

What is missing here is, of course, any sense of what de Man's “vigilance” is designed to protect: the critical orthodoxy which has made de Man's work seem immune from the supposed banalities of ethical or political criticism is remarkably silent about what a de Manian response to those criticisms might be. As we can see in Bové and Martin, the standard response to criticisms of de Man is to claim that de Man has a subversive relationship to some tradition which the critic is struggling to defend, the implication being that subversiveness is in and of itself a sufficient end for criticism. There is, however, an enormous difficulty with this position, which, following Whitehead, we might characterize as a fallacy of misplaced concreteness. If there is indeed a relationship between criticism and the politically objectionable, then that relationship can only be addressed by showing how criticism might help to subvert political institutions which are, presumably, external to criticism itself: the reification of subversion as an intrinsic good mistakenly transforms the dialectic of oppression and liberation from a characteristic possessed by real social institutions into a structural framework governing the analysis of any intellectual position. The point is a simple one: no argument can be seen as either oppressive or subversive without a specification of its real political consequences. And it is here that the claim that de Man's work is somehow “subversive” becomes extraordinarily curious. For while the rhetoric of subversion may tempt one to believe that the overcoming of any dominant tradition is necessarily politically liberating, in de Man's “subverting” of New Criticism, precisely the opposite conclusion is reached.

As we shall see, de Man never dissents from the New Critical belief that a coherent description of value requires the specification of a realm of experience ontologically autonomous from empirical determination: in this very abstract sense, value might be seen as subversive of empirical institutions. But what de Man's developing analysis of the ontology of autonomy insists is that experience itself is ultimately a delusion. The inexorable necessity of language as that which both defines the conditions and possibility of experience, and which equally makes the terms governing experience ontologically meaningless, leads de Man to a belief that the very relational structures (structures embodying the relations of individuals to each other, and to their material conditions) which determine political existence are necessary delusions, at best an inescapable burden. Far from providing the basis for a radical critique of existing social institutions, de Man's final insistence on linguistic indeterminacy cedes to existing institutions an inevitability from which there is no escape. The conclusion which de Man unflinchingly accepts (although this is largely ignored by his defenders) is that, if meaning is indeed indeterminate, then the positive arguments required by the project of political amelioration are as condemned to error as any other discourse. By seeing the derivation of de Man's insistence that all meaning is a delusion from his earlier, New Critical, hope that poetic language offers the possibility of existential and ontological reconciliation (and nothing in de Man's position allows the bracketing of political meaning as somehow exempt from this claim), we can begin to understand the enormous problems involved in claiming, as deconstruction wants to, that indeterminate usages of language are politically liberating.⁸ My argument will thus be that de Man's project is finally (although unintentionally) therapeutic: by exposing the aporias which mark the ideology of linguistic autonomy which is the unacknowledged premise of most contemporary literary theory, de Man's work demonstrates the necessity of a radical rethinking of both the origins and the aims of literary studies.

2.

In trying to situate de Man's early work, it is important to keep in mind an essential premise of all the New Critics: statements about values are different fundamentally from statements about facts—different both in the way that they are expressed, and in the way that they are justified.⁹ New Criticism further argued that the difference between facts and values requires that values themselves be conceived in three related ways: first, they are immune from the determinations of the empirical world; second, they emerge from a private realm of experience; and third, their expression requires a non-referential use of language.¹⁰ At no point in his work does Paul de Man ever question either the distinction between facts and values, or the conception of value upon which New Criticism relies; indeed he assumes throughout his work that the New Critical description of value is the necessary presumption for any claim that value statements can articulate successfully the powers which are customarily claimed for them. Rather, his work is designed to show the impossibility of construing a realm of value which is empirically undetermined, privately produced, and linguistically articulated. He does this, however, not to propose a more adequate formulation of shared value, but rather to deny its possibility.

We can see the beginnings of this position in an early essay on the New Critics, where de Man argues that the formalist method is governed by an ontological contradiction: it presumes an adequacy of language to experience (his example of this is I. A. Richards) which must ignore the constitutive role which language plays with regard to experience. From this perspective he argues that “the problem of criticism is no longer to discover to what experience the form refers, but how it can constitute a world, a totality of beings without which there would be no experience.”¹¹ But it would be a mistake to assume that the emphasis must accordingly be on the social construction of the world, for de Man argues that “the problem of separation inheres in Being, which means that social forms of separation derive from ontological and metaphysical attitudes” (BI [Blindness and Insight] 2 240). De Man's critique of New Criticism is thus from the beginning less a challenge of its premises, than an insistence that those premises must be explored more finely. His quarrel with Richards is not against the general claim that there exists a uniquely poetic realm of language, but rather against the conclusion from that claim that poetic language can be seen to exhibit “an adequation of the object itself with the language that names it” (BI2 244). Further, in his very formulation of the issue of representation as the relationship of linguistic construction to Being we can see de Man's acceptance of the New Critical belief that the unity of experience is the telos of literary analysis, the value which literary analysis is to disclose. Thus he argues that “the foremost characteristic of contemporary criticism is the tendency to expect a reconciliation from poetry; to see in it a possibility of filling the gap that cleaves Being” (BI2 245). What is mistaken about this criticism is not the aim, but its confidence about the ease with which that aim might be achieved: de Man criticizes Jean Pierre Richards's phenomenological optimism for its deluded belief that consciousness can reveal ontological substance, but he characterizes the project of reconciliation as the “supreme wager” to which is opposed only “the sorrowful time of patience, i.e., history” (BI2 243). As we shall see, de Man's subsequent work is a nuanced exploration of the reasons for the loss of this wager, and the consequent necessity of submitting to the aimless movement of history.

In a later essay, apparently written in the mid-1960's, de Man examines more closely the relationship of intentionality to formalist analysis. He argues once more that New Criticism was mistaken in believing that literary analysis might reveal an adequation between representation and Being, focusing now on the intentionality of the representation, and drawing a contrast to the status of natural objects: “The intentional object requires a reference to a specific act as constitutive of its mode of being.”¹² What is interesting here is that de Man seems to accept the possibility that some usages of language can refer transparently to a natural world. He distinguishes between entities such as a stone “the full meaning of which can be said to be equal to the totality of their sensory appearances,” and a chair: “the most rigorous description of the perceptions of the object ‘chair’ would remain meaningless if one does not organize them in function of the potential act that defines the object” (BI 23-24). This distinction seems to bracket intentionality as relevant only to a class of perceptions whose origin is not natural, but in drawing this distinction de Man assumes a class of natural entities whose perception, and finally whose meaning, is relatively unproblematic. Further, the claims which de Man now wants to make about the nature of poetry require this distinction: he is able to single out a class of intentional objects which raise unique ontological dilemmas only if he is able to contrast that class with a realm of objects possessing a fundamentally different ontology. (The ontological dilemma of intentional objects is defined by their difference from natural objects.)

Needless to say, at this stage of the analysis de Man's position is indistinguishable from I. A. Richards's; where in the earlier essay he had seemed to differ from Richards in denying any possible adequacy of representation to the objects being represented, he now, like Richards, would seem to grant representational adequacy to descriptions of natural objects. There is, however, a genuine difference between the two positions. De Man's critique of Richards stems from a disagreement about the range of objects which de Man would describe as intentional, and which Richards would describe as having affective components. While Richards is willing to accept with tranquility the existence of natural objects whose being will never be reconciled with consciousness, de Man assumes throughout his work that the fundamental dilemma of existence is precisely such reconciliation. Thus, in a passage which we examined above, he insists that even social separation is ontological in origin, and this belief is perhaps the source of what seems a shocking early judgment: “the central moment of Ulysses, the carefully prepared encounter between Bloom and Steven Dedalus … indicates, surely, the total impossibility of any contact, of any human communication, even in the most disinterested love.”¹³ Far from rejecting New Critical assumptions about poetic unity, de Man changes (and in some way raises) the stakes of what would count as reconciliation, and in doing so heightens also the thematic consequences, the value, of such reconciliation.

Indeed, what is at stake in both the essays on the New Criticism is precisely a thematic question about what sort of knowledge, what sense of value, is offered by the conception of literary language which de Man finally wants to advance. De Man argues that, far from his understanding of intentionality comprising a threat to the New Critical project, it is instead its completion: “the intentionality of the act [of the work of literature], far from threatening the unity of the poetic entity, more definitely establishes this unity” (BI 25). While descriptions of natural objects (insofar as they are descriptions) defy unity because they necessitate a distinction between the describer and the described, an act which is intentional “reflects back upon itself and remains circumscribed within the range of its own intent” (BI 26). For this reason, such an act is both unified and “constitutes a perfectly closed and autonomous structure” (BI 26). Thus, it would be a mistake to argue that the unity of a poem can have an organic model, since “the structural power of the poetic imagination is not founded on an analogy with nature, but … is intentional” (BI 28). In this sense de Man does seem to disagree with New Criticism. But the rejection of the metaphor of organicity is designed not to reject New Criticism, but rather to prepare the ground for a sweeping endorsement of its most fundamental premise:

True understanding always implies a certain degree of totality; without it, no contact could be established with a free knowledge that it can never reach, but of which it can be more or less lucidly aware. The fact that poetic language, unlike ordinary language, possesses what we call “form” indicates that it has reached this point. In interpreting poetic language, and especially in revealing its “form,” the critic is therefore dealing with a privileged language: a language engaged in its highest intent and tending toward the fullest possible self-understanding. The critical interpretation is oriented toward a consciousness which is itself engaged in an act of total interpretation. The relationship between author and critic does not designate a difference in the type of activity involved, since no fundamental discontinuity exists between two acts that both aim at full understanding; the difference is primarily temporal in kind. Poetry is the foreknowledge of criticism. Far from changing or distorting it, criticism merely discloses poetry for what it is.

(BI 32)

Thus, the value of poetic language, (the value which the critic reveals in his analysis of poetry), is that it exhibits a reconciliation, a totalization, of consciousness and the (intentional) objects of its experience. Further, and perhaps more important, as we have seen, de Man wants to stake the possibility of ameliorating social separation precisely on the possibility of such totalization; the failure of the project he describes would leave us condemned to “the sorrowful time of patience” where “any contact” or “human communication” would indeed be impossible. And de Man himself, at the close of his essay, seems certain the project will fail: he praises Benjamin's definition of allegory “as a void ‘that signifies precisely the non-being of what it represents’” and argues that “the temporal labyrinth of interpretation” leads to the “negative totalization” which “constitutes the real depth of literary insight” (BI 35). What is perhaps too obvious to need mentioning is that this failure (which is for de Man in fact a triumph) demands an initial acceptance of the ontological premise that “the problem of separation inheres in Being”—given this, the conclusions, both about language and about totalization, follow inevitably, but in the absence of the premise, the conclusions are incoherent.

3.

The discussion so far has been intended to block one easy approach to de Man's obvious reliance on New Critical assumptions about poetic unity in his early criticism. This approach would argue that de Man is relying only on a technique of exegesis, and not on the thematic defense of that technique, and would thus make de Man an early instance of the general naturalization of New Critical technique in American theory. But such an approach would not only be overly easy, it would be wrong. For as we have seen, de Man's early dissent from New Criticism is not a denial of the ontological imperative of reconciliation, but rather an insistence that the terms of the reconciliation need to be rethought. In particular, de Man's apparent acceptance, by the late 1950's, that an argument about reconciliation requires a distinction between referential and non-referential language, leads to an insistence that the representational status of non-referential language must be explored much more carefully if conclusions about reconciliation are to be sustained.¹⁴

This is clearest in his seminal essays of the 1960's, “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image” and “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” where de Man interrogates more finely than he had earlier the claim that poetic language should be read as a reconciliation of tensions, arguing that this reconciliation can be conceived either as the delusory unity posited by symbolic constructions, or a wiser and more authentic allegorical acceptance of the negative relationship between consciousness and nature. In the latter instance, the reconciliation produced by poetic language is an acknowledgment of its own fictionality, an acceptance of its failure to endow nature with human meaning. But this wisdom, as de Man calls it, is importantly an act of value, an insight into the (negative) truth of existential Being, and it is his continued reliance in these essays on tacit assumptions about how poetic language can be seen to produce value and meaning that separates this work from the deconstructive essays of the 1970's.

Thus, in “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” de Man challenges the attempt to construe poetic language as having an origination analogous to nature: “the natural object, safe in its immediate beginning, seems to have no beginning and no end,” while “entities engendered by consciousness”—such as a poem—have “a beginning [which] implies a negation of permanence, the discontinuity of a death” (RR [The Rhetoric of Romanticism] 4). Further, while “in everyday use words are exchanged and put to a variety of tasks,” and thus “are not supposed to originate anew,” (“they are used as established signs to confirm that something is recognized as being the same as before”), “in poetic language words are not used as signs, not even as names, but in order to name” (RR 3). Having defined a realm of poetic language which is distinct both from the natural world and from normal uses of language, de Man concludes that poetic language offers “a possibility for consciousness to exist entirely by and for itself, independently of all relationship with the outside world, without being moved by an intent aimed at a part of this world,” and he argues that this “leaves the poetry of today under a steady threat of extinction, although, on the other hand, it remains the depository of hopes that no other activity of the mind seems able to offer” (RR 16-17). Similarly, in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” de Man argues that both allegory and irony involved a demystification of the attempt by symbolic poetic language to establish what he terms a “pseudo dialectic between subject and object” (BI2 206): “Both modes are fully demystified when they remain within the realm of their respective language but are totally vulnerable to renewed blindness as soon as they leave it for the empirical world. Both are determined by an authentic experience of temporality which, seen from the point of view of the self engaged in the world, is a negative one” (BI2 207).

In both these essays de Man assumes the possibility that poetic language, precisely because its rhetoric disrupts external referentiality, can adequately represent the negative relationship of consciousness to externality. Further, it is the representational adequacy of poetic language which allows de Man to conclude that his analyses reveal a “depository of hopes” of “an authentic experience of temporality”—de Man is able to discover in poetry a reconciliation of consciousness to its own delusions about the external world precisely because consciousness is not deluded about the adequacy of poetic language to represent that reconciliation. But while de Man is squarely within the New Critical tradition in assuming that the representational adequacy of poetic language is fixed by its difference from referential language (poetic language can represent consciousness because its meanings are determined by consciousness rather than the external objects which determine referential meaning), his assumption that reconciliation must itself involve a demystified severing of the relationship of consciousness to an external world (as opposed to the New Critical dream of reconciliation as the adequation of consciousness and externality) contains a proleptic anticipation of his later argument that poetic language is itself an external entity with no relationship to consciousness. For by pushing the ontological dualism which he inherited as much from New Criticism as from phenomenology to its logical conclusion that the terms of the duality have no genuine interaction, de Man insures that any analysis aimed at a recuperation of meaning is doomed to failure.

De Man's shift in emphasis from the relationship of consciousness to poetic language, to the impossibility of representation in poetic language itself, indicates clearly his refusal to settle for conclusions unwarranted by the terms of his analysis. Just as the definition of poetic language as non-referential blocked any claim that poetic language offered a reconciliation of consciousness and external experience, so now the developing critique of representation itself leads to an increasing recognition that the very arguments used to deny a reference to externality in poetic language apply equally to the claim that poetic language refers to consciousness. In retrospect, the argument seems fairly obvious. If predication involves an unwarranted imposition of non-natural qualities onto natural objects, then only an analysis of consciousness which was able to show that consciousness is itself non-natural could insure that predicates attached to the experience of consciousness were not as unwarranted as those attached to nature. But the unresolvable dilemma is that the attempt at offering the necessary analysis of consciousness involves a usage of language which it had been the aim of the analysis to defend. By using as part of its analysis the very terms which it had been designed to analyze, the defense of consciousness as non-natural (and thus as representable) finds itself caught in a vicious circle which finally requires the abandonment of consciousness itself. The naming of consciousness is as delusory as the naming of nature.

This insistence on the interpretive aporia which results from a distinction between literal and figural meaning provides the unifying focus of the essays collected in Allegories of Reading. In discussing Julie, de Man argues that “any reading always involves a choice between signification and symbolization, and this choice can be made only if one postulates the possibility of distinguishing the literal from the figural.”¹⁵ But this choice is contaminated by the necessity of relying, in making the distinction, on the very realms which a naive reading would have assumed are already distinct: the literal defines the figural, and the figural defines the literal. As de Man argues, “the situation implies that figural discourse is always understood in contradistinction to a form of discourse that would not be figural” (AR [Allegories of Reading] 201). In an analysis of Nietzsche, de Man is clear about the consequences of this dilemma for any attempt at delimiting a realm of language which might adequately represent the self: “the idea of individuation, of the human subject as a privileged viewpoint, is a mere metaphor by means of which man protects himself from his insignificance by forcing his own interpretation of the world upon the entire universe. … The attributes of centrality and of selfhood are being exchanged in the medium of the language. Making the language that denies the self into a center rescues the self linguistically at the same time that it asserts its insignificance, its emptiness as a mere figure of speech. It can only persist as self if it is displaced into the text that denies it” (AR 11-12). The paradox to which de Man points is that the nature of figural language denies the very hope which its initial identification as an autonomous realm has been designed to secure.

There is thus a decided shift in de Man's work in the 1970's from his earlier analysis of the phenomenology of being to an emphasis on the contradictions which emerge from an analysis of the realm of language—the figural—which had been earlier assumed to represent that being unmediatedly. But it would be a mistake to conclude that de Man's concerns have changed in any fundamental way, that he has moved from the attempt to find in a certain kind of language the confirmation of a phenomenological project to a focus on the nature of language itself. Rather, de Man's shifting view of language is necessitated by the very failure of the phenomenological project itself: the increasing attention to language in itself comes about not because of an arbitrary shift in commitment, but rather because of an increasing recognition of the impossibility of identifying a specialized realm of language which might secure for consciousness its dream of autonomy. Thus, de Man's insistence on the mutually contradictory realms of the rhetorical and the literal can be understood finally only by examining the phenomenological consequences of this insistence. De Man's position changes not because of a greater understanding of language in itself, but rather because he realizes that figural language cannot confirm the phenomenological project of an autonomous consciousness which he had assumed throughout his work is the telos of literary analysis. More important, because de Man never abandons his belief that figural language offers the best chance for representing an authentically autonomous consciousness, his realization that the hopes he had rested in figural language are delusory inevitably produces the phenomenological conclusions at which we will now look.

In the essay on The Triumph of Life which he contributed to Deconstruction and Criticism, de Man offers perhaps his most direct statement of the phenomenological consequences of the deconstructive analysis of language. There, he focuses on Shelley's attempt at finding in Rousseau a confirmation of the power of language to posit an ontologically adequate realm of temporal experience. De Man argues that the arbitrariness and intrusiveness of language makes such adequation impossible: “The positing power of language is both entirely arbitrary, in having a strength that cannot be reduced to necessity, and entirely inexorable, in that there is no alternative to it” (RR 116). Here de Man moves decisively beyond the phenomenological hope, best exemplified by Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche, that a recognition of the intrusive nature of human consciousness, a self-conscious overcoming of consciousness, might allow a reconciled acceptance of being-in-itself.¹⁶ Instead, de Man's argument is that our very awareness of nature, and finally of our own existence, is contaminated in an absolute way by the very language which makes possible that awareness. Our representations of experience are “punctured by acts that cannot be made a part of it” (RR 117). But this arbitrariness of language is both inescapable and inexorably understood. In representing, for example, the relationship of the stars and the sun, we are made aware both that the appearance of the sun is only retrospectively understood as part of a temporal sequence of events, as a part of “a dialectical relationship between day and night, or between two transcendental orders of being” (RR 117) and equally that the inevitability of such retrospection must blind us to a more ontologically frightening knowledge which we also cannot escape: “the sun does not appear in conjunction with or in reaction to the night and the stars, but of its own unrelated power” (RR 117). What de Man wants to show here is that language grips us in the power of a necessity of representation which is both inescapable, and yet which we know to be false: language serves here as a purely arbitrary intrusion between consciousness and world, and thus the realms of value and facticity, far from emerging unscathed from their putative origins, are in fact rendered meaningless through their mediation in language. The “unrelated power” which de Man here ascribes to the sun might seem to contradict this general assertion of indeterminacy, but de Man's argument would surely be that “power” is itself a trope produced by the representational inevitability of language, and as such is reducible neither to an empirical world which might anchor its status as a fact, nor to a consciousness which might proclaim its value. The knowledge which is produced by our analysis of language is purely negative: it is a knowledge of the impossibility of knowing.

The obvious question is how such knowledge is possible, and for de Man the answer is to be found in our attempts to come to terms with death, or more precisely, in our awareness of the inadequacy of our attempts to represent death. Thus, in analyzing Shelley's attempt at finding in the dead Rousseau a monument to life, de Man identifies a threat to representation which culminates in a crisis of reading: “to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat—that is to say, the endless prosopopoeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn” (RR 122). Our very awareness of death requires a recognition of the arbitrariness of representation, since the very terms by which we represent death are contaminated by their denial of death, by their construal of the dead as somehow alive. Further, de Man cautions explicitly against the Heideggerian hope (which had been his own hope in his earlier work) that this negative insight might somehow provide a sustaining knowledge: “No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words. What would be naive is to believe that this strategy, which is not our strategy as subjects, since we are its product rather than its agent, can be a source of value and has to be celebrated or denounced accordingly” (RR 122). Instead, for de Man the analysis of death culminates in pure nihilism: “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” (RR 122).¹⁷

The difficulty of knowing how to respond to a claim such as this is exhibited by an oddly defensive discussion of Jonathan Culler. According to Culler, de Man's concern with “truth and knowledge” here protect him (and by implication deconstruction) from the attack that deconstruction relies upon an easy denial of truth, and later Culler ridicules what he calls the “rumors” that deconstruction “eliminates meaning and referentiality.”¹⁸ But the clear thrust of de Man's argument is to eliminate meaning, and for reasons that are precise and coherent. Perhaps Culler was misled by de Man's own denial that his position is nihilistic (RR 122) for what Culler assumes is that a “commitment to the truth of the text when exhaustively read” (p. 280) protects deconstruction from the charge of a nihilistic denial of meaning. But de Man's position is more subtle, and more unnerving, than this. Having assumed from the beginning of his career that truth must itself be autonomous, and having accepted further that it is the self which must serve as the ground of the autonomy of truth, de Man's position culminates in a recognition that it is solely by virtue of its death that the autonomy of the self can be preserved. Further, the nihilistic denial of any relation is logically congruent with the insistence on autonomy as the necessary ground of truth: if death confirms the possibility of autonomy, and thus reveals truth, then its random denial of relation makes it impossible to sustain any description of meaning or truth which is predicated upon relation. Finally, because language is itself ontologically implicated in a plurality of determinations, in an endlessly proliferating web of relations, it must prove inadequate to the randomness and solitariness of death, and it is further such inadequacy which will expose the ultimate failure of language. It is only in death that de Man discovers both the ultimate fate, and the triumph, of autonomy, for it is only in death that we can be said to exist autonomously.

In an essay which he apparently wrote near the end of his own life, de Man returns to the issue (which he had first raised in his analysis of formalist criticism) of how history relates to literary language, setting the discussion in an eerily appropriate context of mourning. For what de Man never ceases to realize is that his analysis of the ultimate privacy of experience requires some acknowledgment of those aspects of experience which are not private. He contrasts a deluded form of mourning which desires a “consciousness of eternity and of temporal harmony” with more genuine mourning which can “allow for non-comprehension and enumerate non-anthropomorphic, non-elegiac, non-celebratory, non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is to say prosaic, or, better, historical modes of language power” (RR 262). What our experience of history should teach us, de Man seems to be saying, is a mournful refusal to impose on our experience those assertions of the self—the anthropomorphic and so on—which must involve a denial of relation which cannot be sustained. A clearer sense of the prosaic quality of history, its insistence on treating us as referentially related rather than lyrically autonomous (lyric autonomy is of course for de Man now itself exposed as relational), can be found in de Man's claim that Rousseau's hopes for political amelioration are less significant than his analysis of political identity itself:

What the Discourse on Inequality tells us, and what the classical interpretation of Rousseau has stubbornly refused to hear, is that the political destiny of man is structured like and derived from a linguistic model that exists independently of nature and independently of the subject: it coincides with the blind metaphorization called “passion,” and this metaphorization is not an intentional act. … If society and government derive from a tension between man and his language, then they are not natural (depending on a relationship among men), nor theological, since language is not conceived as a transcendental principle but as the possibility of contingent error. The political thus becomes a burden for man rather than an opportunity. …

(RR 156-57)

It is important to note here that this “burden” is the result not of contingent aspects of particular political institutions, but rather of “political destiny” itself. Further, although de Man refers to an ethical realm treating the “relationship among men” as distinct from the political, his understanding of the political itself refers not merely to the positive institutions by which the state maintains its power, but more generally to the complex relational structures which constitute any community. (Given the constraints which his own analysis of the illusion of relation would place upon him, it's difficult to imagine how de Man could describe an ethical realm which differs from his description of the political. Indeed, de Man states quite explicitly that his focus is “the considerable ambivalence that burdens a theoretical discourse dealing with man's relation to man” [RR 157].)

If we add to the present discussion de Man's earlier claim that from the perspective of death, relations are themselves delusions which must be abandoned, we are now in a position to see the ultimate conclusions to which de Man's position leads. Having identified language as the repository of the hope for experiential reconciliation, while insisting at the same time that the nature of language makes such hope a delusion, de Man is forced to conclude that those aspects of experience which are “structured like and derived from a linguistic model” (and death is the sole aspect of experience for which this cannot be said) must be accepted as a burden. Uncompromisingly committed to the principle of autonomy, de Man's position thus ends in a mournful acceptance of the burden of community, and an ascetic insistence that truth is to be found only in death.

4.

In books which have little else in common, Jonathan Culler and Eugene Goodheart have each argued that the signal quality of contemporary literary theory is its sceptical denial of the authority of rules, of the possibility of finding a determinate ground for our actions.¹⁹ Culler attacks Charles Altieri's Wittgensteinian attempt at showing that rules are embedded in the very actions which are their manifestation, arguing that while it is true that “we have experience of determining and grasping meanings,” it is mistaken “to treat this experience as if it were a ground for the philosophical refutation of scepticism” (p. 140). The reason such an argument is mistaken is because a “redescription will alter rules or place an utterance in a different language game,” and thus the attempt at seeing rules as immanent in practices cannot account for the proliferating and indeterminate nature of practices themselves (p. 140). The implication is that the sole possible response to scepticism is to establish determinate rules which cannot be challenged by the practices they describe. Goodheart accepts that this is the sceptical challenge, and tries to meet it by arguing that proliferating contingencies are themselves an aspect of determinate meaning: “Uncertainty or scepticism need not be the perspective from which we view all the seasons of our lives or the texts that occupy our lives. What is missing from the radically skeptical view of privilege is a historical sense of the conditions under which certain views emerge and are felt to have authority, including the skeptical view” (p. 178). While they disagree about the success of the sceptical critique, Culler and Goodheart are united in their belief that a successful challenge to scepticism involves a demonstration that scepticism is itself logically impossible.

This argument may seem initially to parallel the positions we have been examining. As we have seen, Paul de Man's work proceeds out of an assumption that the success of our criteria for explaining our shared construal of the external world (the success of the empiricist account of referential language) requires the articulation of equally successful criteria if we are to explain our shared construal of experience. But in trying to ground such criteria in the assumption that experience must be conceived as autonomous, he ends in the sceptical conclusion that criteria for construing experience must fail. He argues that the best that we can do is mournfully accept the prosaic determinations of our experience while insisting as well on the ultimate failure of those determinations, on the essential privacy of experience. It is this sceptical acceptance of the very criteria whose truth has been denied by the analysis of experience which is missing in both Goodheart's and Culler's description of scepticism. De Man refuses to deny that our experience of the world is importantly marked by assumptions about shared experience; rather his argument is that an examination of the best case which he believes can be made for why shared experience is possible (the argument that shared experience is possible because it emerges out of a realm of experiential autonomy which is the defining characteristic of being human) must fail to account for the essential privacy and non-relatedness of experience in itself.

The point here is that de Man's scepticism does not challenge the existence of what Wittgenstein called shared forms of life, but rather the adequacy of our attempts to explain why we participate in these forms. As Saul Kripke has argued, the most unsettling aspect of Wittgenstein's critique of the appeal to criteria as the ground of our knowledge is the perfectly plausible possibility that what we agree to account as shared knowledge has been arrived at through innumerably different and contradictory explanatory criteria.²⁰ While Kripke's focus is narrow—he wants to show that our agreement about the simplest mathematical operations masks the logical possibility that we have arrived at that agreement through radically different and incommensurable rules—his insistence that rules or criteria are themselves ultimately private (they cannot be derived from public practices) is precisely the claim that de Man wants to make about experience. Thus, when Kripke argues that agreement about as simple a mathematical function as 2+2=4 cannot account for the possibility that in arriving at the correct answer, you were relying upon a standard “plus function,” while I was relying upon a non-standard “quus function,” he is close to de Man's belief that the terms of the relation are themselves described by the relation. To use Kripke's terms, de Man's position is that analysis of as simple a relational statement as “I love you” would reveal the possibility that the two agents denoted by the statement are, in their very agreement about the meaning of the statement, engaged in logically contradictory activities—that one is “plusing” while the other is “quusing.” Kripke's point (and it is one that de Man would agree with) is that nothing about private experience (intention, say, or emotional attitudes) can either be deduced from the contexts or rules determining shared activities, or be used to help explain such activities.

In insisting that shared experience is an inescapable fact of human existence, and is equally at best irrelevant to, and at worst destructive of, the private contingencies of individual experience, de Man is curiously close to Hobbes's insistence that political union is the necessary public shield against man's private brutality. Like de Man, Hobbes sees in language the vehicle of a shared perception which is both the defining characteristic of human community, and the defense of such community against the capriciousness of private perception. Here, for example, is Hobbes's attempt to derive from the origin of language the foundation of human community: “But the most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of SPEECH, consisting of names or appellations, and their connexion; whereby men register their thoughts, recall them when they are past, and also declare them to one another for mutual utility and conversation.”²¹ But this apparent tranquility about the power of language to give a publicly shared order, an enduring relational coherence, to experience is challenged by Hobbes's later insistence that individual experience poses a continual threat to public order: “I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” (p. 161). Here we can see that the community which Hobbes finds confirmed in the relational possibilities of language gains its authority because of its negative relationship to individual experience: the private drive for power which determines individual experience is defeated by publicly shared institutions which perpetuate community at the expense of individual need. Like de Man, Hobbes sees political institutions as an inescapable, but necessary, burden.

What this linkage of de Man and Hobbes allows us to see is that the focus of a genuine sceptical critique is not on the logical failure of criteria, but rather on the representational failure of public institutions which those criteria are designed to explain. De Man's denial of public experience is thus a denial that the available models of such experience can be said to represent adequately the dimensions of private experience to which they are claimed to be related. We can contrast the resulting belief that public experience is a burden to be endured with Hegel's belief that public modes of ordering experience entail an obligation of adherence precisely because they embody the moral content of the individual.²² As Sabina Lovibond puts it, “such obligation emanates from an ‘ethical order with a stable content independently necessary and subsistent in exaltation above subjective opinion and caprice—an order whose ‘moments are the ethical powers which regulate the life of individuals.’”²³ This relationship of the individual to the ethical community gains its authority because the individual both perpetuates the community, and discovers himself within the community, by maintaining his obligation to active participation. What de Man wants to argue is that this relationship to community must inevitably fail because of the representational inadequacy of the available terms for self discovery.

In The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell argues that the consequence of what he calls the “sceptical recital” of the impossibility of having certainty about the experience of others is tragedy: “both skepticism and tragedy conclude with the condition of human separation, with a discovering that I am I; and the fact that the alternative to my acknowledgment of the other is not my ignorance of him but my avoidance of him, call it my denial of him.”²⁴ But while the traditional approach to tragedy focuses on the role which the failure of moral agency plays in producing separation, Cavell instead shifts the focus to how separation is produced by the failure of what should be structures of social inclusion: “suppose that there is a mode of tragedy in which what we witness is the subjection of the human being to states of violation, a perception that not merely human law but nature itself can be abrogated. The outcast is a figure of pity and horror; different from ourselves, and not different” (p. 419). What the sceptical critique insists is that the inclusionary failure of public structures is an abrogation of, a denial of, our construal of the human. It is thus simply too easy to claim either that scepticism is itself merely a denial of the authority of rules, or that an adequate response to scepticism is to show the impossibility of denying the very rules which are being denied. The sceptic is denying (tragically) the pull of objectivity, the claim of any externality on his existence, and he is doing so because he cannot see himself in any of the available external models. Further, in denying that such seeing is possible, the sceptical retreat into privacy robs us of our certainty that we are in turn being allowed to see, and it is here that Cavell understands tragedy as turning in on itself, as moving from the triumph of exclusion to the failure of inclusion.²⁵ One version of such a failure is produced by de Man's exposure of the aporias which mark the attempt to find in autonomous experience as stable an ontological foundation for human community as that which external reality is presumed to offer for empirical knowledge: beginning in the attempt to find in autonomous experience the reality of human existence, de Man's project ends in a denial that reality allows any confidence that the relational structures necessary for construing the human can be sustained. With regard to the tradition he is deconstructing, de Man is finally quite literally correct: in reality, there is no relation. The only response possible to his scepticism is to show that somewhere else, there is.²⁶

Notes

1. In a deliberate echo of de Man, Derrida asks, “Is it possible, when one is in memory of the other, in bereaved memory of a friend, is it desirable to think of and to pass beyond this hallucination, beyond a prosopopeia of prosopopeia?” (Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cadava [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986], p. 28).

2. Shoshana Felman, “Postal Survival, or the Question of the Navel,” Yale French Studies, 69 (1985), 50.

3. Barbara Johnson, “Rigorous Unreliability,” Yale French Studies, 69 (1985), 80.

4. See especially the tributes of J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and A. Bartlett Giamatti in “In Memoriam,” Yale French Studies, 69 (1985), 3-21.

5. The debate about the political implications of deconstruction is enormous, and largely amorphous. Within this debate, defenses of de Man have taken two forms: either it is asserted that critics of de Man simply do not understand what he is saying, or it is asserted that the implications of his thought are more subversive than has generally been recognized. For an example of the first defense see Daniel T. O'Hara, The Romance of Interpretation: Visionary Criticism from Pater to de Man (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 205-35. For examples of the second defense, see Dominick La Capra, History and Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 105-5 and Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 150-51. Wlad Godzich has combined the two approaches in his “Afterword” to Institution and Criticism, p. 155, and in his “Foreword: The Tiger on the Paper Mat,” in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. ix-xviii (hereafter cited as RT). While there have been numerous criticisms of de Man's politics, there has been little or no attempt at showing the derivation of his political positions from his assumptions about language. For example, Jonathan Arac in his recent book, Critical Genealogies: Historical Studies for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), criticizes de Man for ignoring “human relationships,” arguing that “these are the elements, no less than the figures, from which to construct a history of the contingencies that have put us in the odd place that we are” (p. 253). But Arac seems unwilling to criticize the premises about language and indeterminacy which have produced the conclusions from which he dissents. Other criticisms of de Man include Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), and Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1983). There is an excellent overview of the general dispute about poststructuralism and politics in Jonathan Arac's “Introduction” to Postmodernism and Politics, ed. Jonathan Arac (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. ix-xliii.

6. Paul Bové, “Variations on Authority,” in The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, ed. Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich, and Wallace Martin (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 16-17.

7. Wallace Martin, “Introduction,” in The Yale Critics, p. xxxii.

8. As Rudolf Gasché has argued, it is important to distinguish between deconstruction as a literary project and deconstruction as a philosophical project. In what follows, my focus is clearly the literary uses which have been made of deconstruction, although contra Gasché, I would want to argue that a similar political critique could be made of deconstruction in its purely philosophical modes. See Rudolf Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 255-70 and “Deconstruction as Criticism,” Glyph, 9 (1979) 177-215.

9. See John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941), pp. 281-91.

10. See Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1939), p. 175, and The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), p. 232.

11. Paul de Man, “The Dead-end of Formalist Criticism,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., ed. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 232 (hereafter cited as BI2).

12. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 24 (hereafter cited as BI).

13. Qtd. in Yale Critics, p. 106.

14. This position begins to be worked out in the essays on Yeats collected in Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1984) (hereafter cited as RR).

15. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Reading in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 201 (hereafter cited as AR).

16. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4 vols., The Will to Power as Art, vol. 1, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 34-53.

17. These passages have become something of a crux for commentary on de Man. The best available discussion is Jonathan Arac, “To Regress from the Rigor of Shelley: Figures of History in American Deconstructive Criticism,” boundary 2, 8(3) (Spring, 1980), 251-53.

18. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), p. 280.

19. See Culler, On Deconstruction, and Eugene Goodheart, The Skeptic Disposition in Contemporary Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984).

20. See Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982). A similar argument has been made by Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 40-41.

21. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 100.

22. See Charles Altieri. Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1981), pp. 308-31, for a powerful attempt at using Hegel's understanding of Geist to construct a model of literary value. It is indicative of the topsy-turvy politics of contemporary criticism that Altieri's heterodox position on literary meaning is frequently labeled elitist by poststructuralist orthodoxy. See, for example, Paul Bové's review of Act and Quality in Contemporary Literature, 24 (1983), 379-86.

23. Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 64.

24. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 383.

25. Cavell develops this idea in “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 238-66.

26. It is not my intent here to claim that Cavell's notion of “acknowledgement” provides an adequate alternative to de Man's scepticism. Indeed, the weakness of consensual theorists such as Cavell, Richard Rorty, and John Rawls is their refusal to consider the function of material institutions in producing the alienation from consent which they deplore. Rather, my argument is that the challenge which de Man's work presents is to provide a conceptually adequate description of acknowledgement which escapes the sentimentality of both traditional bourgeois humanism and its poststructuralist alternatives. I pursue this argument in an as yet unpublished paper, “A Defense of Naivete: Sentimentality and the Politics of Criticism.”