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Reviews 223 This laborious gathering together of the various streams of influences and actions, poUtical deeds and cultural artifacts that constitute both the Haymarket drama and its wake cannot but help make these synchronous developments of radicalism resonate aU the more strongly today when it is needed the most. JAY MURPHY Readingsin Interpretation, Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger, by Andrzej Warminski. MinneapoUs: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. pp. 233. $29.50 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). Andrzej Warminski's Readings in Intepretation collects essays written over the last ten years on the problem of reading. Title and topic already suggest Warminski's indebtedness to the work of Paul de Man. In the wake of the recent discovery of articles written by the young de Man for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper in the early forties, this opening statement on an author's scholarly heritage foregrounds and invites quick judgments — whether of a defamatory kind, or from a defensive, apologetic point of view — for it is unfortunately in these two categories that many participants in this debate have situated their comments. At the very least, then, this statement seems to require an explanation of sorts. This is not the place to engage in any detailed discussion of de Man or "deconstruction." The context and struaure of those discussions, though, which tend to reinforce the increasing resentment towards "deconstruaion," make it necessary to say the foUowing: these essays are in no need of being proteaed or defended against those frequent accusations of nihilism, ahistoricity, apolitical or even fascist views, because our reading and writing, of this book, of politics, of history, is precisely what these essays are about. To begin to understand the urgent insistence of Warminski and others on texts and reading, one should begin by — reading. Warminski's book, for example. These canny and fascinating texts present neither applications of a particular method nor essays in the theory of Uterary criticism. Instead, oppositions such as that between exegetical practice and its theoretical reflection are Warminski's primary concern. The book problematizes such disjunctions and analyzes their function in reading. Theessay's subjea matter already testifies to the fact that forms and conditions of "relation" are given priority over that which is put into relation: Uke few others, Hölderlin, Hegel and Heidegger stand in the closest possible proximity to one another. Facing this historical and philosophical configuration , Warminski presents the complex intertextuaUty of their interaction neither teleologically nor hierarchically. Rather, he insists upon the continuation and complication of this "history" through our reading of those texts. The historical dialogue among Hölderlin, Hegel and Heidegger is not just the given framework of Warmniski's inquiry into the readerly "we," but equally its medium. The works of Hölderlin, Hegel, and Heidegger and their insistence on questioning conventional distinaions baween philosophy and poetry, analysis and narrative, represent perhaps the greatest possible chaUenge for any attempt to read Western metaphysics. The attempt to think its possible closure or transgression is not original with Warminski (nor de Man or even Derrida), but is rather among the projects of Hegel, Hölderlin and Heidegger themselves, a fart that accounts in turn for their reappearance as demanding authorities in the works of Derrida, de Man, Warminski and others. Warminski never concedes differences between Uterature and thought: rather his text operates between them, and between the texts and their reading. The speculative "in" of these Readings in Intepretaion marks an intermediate space: between Uterature and philosophy and between reading and inteprrtation, a space which is anything but the calm and calming middle ground baween extremes. Reading is a radical and extreme movement, newly constituted and displaced in each particular reading. "Before" differences and oppositions, this "baween" is not stable and must remain without a site. According to Warminski, his readings are distinguished (from those of Jean-Luc Nancy or PhiUppe Lacoue-Labarthe, for example ) by his overriding interest in the tropologica! dimension of language. The siteless "be- 224 the minnesota review tween" thus has its clearest figuration in a trope: within the symmetrical inversion of the chiasmus, Warminski reads an asymmetrical third element, which disarticulates the future even as it makes it possible. In more general terms, Warminski's...

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