Legacies of Paul de Man (review)

This outstanding collection of eight, sharply crafted essays provides a timely overview of recent work on Paul de Man’s literary criticism, embracing four distinct aspects of the critic’s theoretical achievements and later influence. While the theme of reading emerges strongly in the first section of the book, we encounter this crucial de Manian concern in all of the essays that describe and develop the critic’s on-going legacy. The collection has been organized around four major issues, namely, the theory of reading, the problem of history, the role of institutions, and the relationship between materiality and aesthetics in de Man’s later work. Each set of essays explores a different aspect of de Man’s disputed legacy, but the cumulative implications of each section allow further questions to be raised in a fresh context, often in ways that quietly confront the critic’s many detractors. The sustained purpose of this collection, however, is not polemical but theoretical in the sense of providing an advanced discussion of reading as a complex activity that is both irreducible and intractable, however open it may be to interdisciplinary elaborations.

In the opening section, Cynthia Chase and Jan Mieszkowski are engaged in clarifying the depth and scope of the reading model as a rhetorical strategy that can be applied to different kinds of texts. Chase’s article suggests an unexpected kinship between Aristotle and Nietzsche, two apparent antagonists who ultimately approach one another when indicating the “unreadability” of literary tropes. Mieszkowski concentrates on how the careful reading of a short text by Heinrich von Kleist calls attention to our inability to account for the linguistic structures that are intended to explain what happens in a literary tale. Hence, the first two essays differently discuss how the reading model can be applied to texts that allow us to ask difficult questions about the purpose of criticism and nature of language itself.

The activity of reading is also important to de Man’s comments on history, which are often misunderstood and seldom explored in all of their literary complexity. Ian Balfour’s discussion of this issue begins with a useful attempt to contextualize de Man’s early criticism, which demonstrates that the problem of history was never far from his literary concerns. Comparison with the work of Benjamin and Adorno demonstrate how the meaning of the word “historical” is perhaps best revealed when comprehension becomes all but impossible. Andrzej Warminski’s emphasis on hermeneutical discontinuity is complementary to Balfour’s purposes, especially at a decisive moment in de Man’s reading of Romantic texts, which produce radical aporias and transform the significance of history into a rhetorical, rather than a specifically temporal, concern.

In addressing the pedagogical importance of de Man’s criticism, Sara Guyer discusses how the critic’s reluctance to offer comments on the work of his own students, when contributing to the 1979 journal issue of Studies in Romanticism, allows us to situate his break with historicism, just as it marks the limits of his belief in the value of academic discipleship. One of the high-points of the collection is no doubt Mark Redfield’s professional intervention in the third section of the book, where the editor offers a trenchant, but hardly unappreciative, critique of John Guillory’s attempt to repudiate de Man as the nemesis of a new aesthetic humanism. This penetrating essay not only clearly describes the impressive method and intention of Guillory’s major work, Cultural Capital, but it also examines the precise passages where Guillory seems to miss the subtlety of de Man’s literary criticism.

Finally, in an overtly theoretical exposition, Arkady Plotnitsky examines de Man’s departure from Kant in explaining how a “nonclassical” approach to the world would no longer be predicated in the goal of objective knowing; thus, it would be allegorical in the precise sense of favoring radical discontinuity over hermeneutical resolution. In a similar spirit, Rei Terada’s concluding essay returns to the problem of reading with which the...