Forgotten Paths: Etymology and the Allegorical Mindset

Chapter 7 Redefining Difference: Allegorical Etymology in de Man, Derrida, and Vico

chapter 7 reDeFInIng DIFFerenCe allegorical etymology in de Man, Derrida, and Vico this survey on allegorical etymology could very well have ended with the Middle ages. If it is true, as ohly suggests, that allegorical etymologizing waned with the decline of Latin and has appeared only sporadically in the national languages ever since, it would have made more sense to focus on Isidore, give his work ampler coverage , and provide an in-depth analysis of his contribution to the medieval debate on language.1 nonetheless, this chapter is, I think, consistent with the premises of my research and complementary to its findings. When I set out to trace etymegoreia, I did so not only with an eye to its paradigmatic medieval embodiment but also with the conviction that different ways of reading, writing, and thinking in an etymologico-allegorical fashion survive to this day and above all that their scope need not be restricted to the “unscientific” milieu of poetry or the “trifles” of wordplay. It is for these reasons that, having talked about the change that allegorical etymology underwent with the demise of the roman Middle ages and the onset of the renaissance, I turn to compare texts that reach analogous, yet subtly divergent, conclusions on the meaning and function of etymegoreia: Paul de Man’s “the rhetoric of temporality ,” Jacques Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy,” and giambattista Vico’s The New Science of Giambattista Vico. I bring these distant voices into the same arena because I feel that they shape in remarkable ways—if obviously with unequal ascendancy—post-Cartesian ideas on etymol135 1. ohly, Geometria e Memoria, 264. ogy and allegory. Vico on one side, and Derrida and de Man on the other can be taken respectively as representatives of two main lines of allegorical etymologizing.2 For Vico, allegorical etymology retains a strong argumentative potency, borrowed from the renaissance jurist tradition. as I have argued elsewhere,3 Vichian etymologies are hermeneutic tools: they trace cognitive networks that map history also through the “spiritual” projections of desire. Derrida’s etymologizing has a similar heuristic vigor, but its light and shade values are reversed : it rests on a deconstructive celebration of allegory, sanctioned by Paul de Man, and relies on the self-effacing, vertiginous effect of unlimited wordplay. this chapter defies chronology to highlight Vico’s contribution to an understanding of allegorical etymology. I begin with a brief exposition of de Man’s pronouncements on allegory, relate them to Derrida ’s etymologies, and finally move back in time and compare these to the ideas of Vico. It is clear that, by engaging Derrida and de Man, I encroach upon territories that are under the insignia of poststructuralism . and in such territories, “allegory has been used to describe and to register the dislocations that constitute our modernity,” as Deborah Madsen puts it from her “post-essentialist” perspective.4 Let me say from the start that I welcome Madsen’s conclusion whereby “allegory articulates itself as both an agent and a record of cultural change,”5 as well as her suggestion that “allegory offers at least a paradigm for the way in which generic discourses seek to engage with cultural values, establishing relationships that are of the greatest significance for the way we live our lives.”6 I resist, however, her implicit claims that allegory (and hence for us allegorical etymology) rests only on discursive 2. I contrast Vico with Derrida and de Man only for the sake of analysis. such a stark opposition is just as arbitrary and arguable as my unproblematic coupling of de Man and Derrida on the same deconstructive side of the allegorico-etymological rivalry. 3. Davide Del Bello, “Forgotten Paths: the Making of Vico’s etymology,” Semiotica 113 (1997), 171–88. 4. Madsen, Rereading Allegory, 27. 5. Ibid., 133. 6. Ibid., 147.  REDEFINING DIFFERENCE play and that allegory as “other speaking” or “speaking of the other ” must be discarded as “essentialist” because it is not “sensitive to the shifting nature of temporality.”7 an “essentialist”/”nominalist” dichotomy of the kind Madsen sets up not only reasserts the very Western , logo-centric framework it professes to debunk but also masks a ideological tactics that recent criticism has, I think, rightfully exposed .8 In the pages that follow I am going to argue that etymegoreia can be thought of as an approach that is both referential and relational, “essentialist ” and phenomenological. allegory and Chronos in...