Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation

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175 conclusion Romantic Hospitality to Come J i Guest as Allergen In an “improvised” lecture on “Kant and Schiller” delivered at Cornell University in March of 1983, Paul de Man reflects hesitantly on his invitation to speak and on the reception of his arrival:“You are so kind at the beginning and so hospitable and so benevolent that I have the feeling that…” (131). De Man pauses cautiously, manages to utter a few broken phrases, before continuing finally to say,“But it doesn’t take long before you get the feeling that you’re getting under people’s skin, and that there is a certain reaction which is bound to occur, certain questions that are bound to be asked, which is the interesting moment, where certain issues are bound to come up” (131–32). Fondly recalling the incident, J. Hillis Miller takes advantage of his old friend’s “oral performance”at Cornell, reconstructing the“scene”as a way to characterize de Man’s presence and his work “as allergen”—that is, as “something alien, other, that works to bring about a reaction of resistance to that otherness ”(“Allergen”183). Miller’s analogy of the guest as irritant is intriguing for many reasons, not least because it calls to mind The Last Man’s insistence on the complex connections between contagion and hospitality.As Miller writes, the “best antihistamine” to a de Manian irritation “might be to forget his essays altogether”(183).“The trouble,”warns Miller,“is that once you have read de Man seriously it is difficult to do that without a vague uneasy feeling that you are laying traps for yourself and others” (183). As guest lecturer, de Man inspires a feeling of dis-ease; his work is as infectious as it is irritating. J 05-conclusion 3/1/07 12:12 Page 175 And yet if his reception “provokes fits of coughing, sneezing, and burning eyes,”as Miller playfully contends (183), then de Man has an allergic reaction of his own, choking as he does on the suffocating formality of the guest lecture, on the language of placating one’s hosts. Troubled by the offence that his words promise to inspire, de Man is made to feel uneasy; he barely manages to speak—evidence of which can be found in the high number of ellipses that surround and interrupt this moment of awkwardness in William Jewett’s and Thomas Pepper’s transcription of the lecture for de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology. More interestingly, however, if an allergic reaction amounts to an aggressively hostile reflex to the source of an irritation, then we might say that de Man reacts inhospitably by foreclosing the conditions of his reception both before and after it has occurred. On the one hand, his talk on “Kant and Schiller”is the fifth in a series of “Messenger”lectures. He has already“had questions”from his audience, as he says, and has“felt some resistances”(131). Thus, he is reacting to these resistances after the fact. On the other hand, reflecting on the benevolence shown to him by Cornell, de Man claims to “know from experience”that this kind of reception is not altogether genuine, that an unreserved welcome has“not [been] the case”(131, emphasis added). Reacting to Cornell’s resistance, de Man now insists on having anticipated the reception in advance. “There’s always an interesting episode in a series of lectures like that,” he says (131, emphasis added). There are always “certain” reactions that are “bound” to occur, “certain” questions that are “bound” to be asked—this word “certain” curiously sliding in meaning from something that is“unnamed”to something that is“inevitable,”something that is bound to happen (131, emphasis added). De Man’s reaction to “the resistance to [his] theory” is to contain or accommodate his audience’s reaction by characterizing their “resistances” as “interesting” but predictable nonetheless. Refusing to see these resistances as anything more than ordinary, de Man is always already unfriendly to what he deems to be the unfriendliness of his hosts—thus, in a sense, resisting their resistance in a kind of pre-emptive strike. Predicting his reception,“knowing”it in advance, de Man inhospitably refuses to welcome the future, the a-venir, as Derrida would say. He refuses to greet the impending “discussion” that he knows will follow his talk (and which is included in Jewett’s and Pepper’s transcription of the lecture) with an “open” mind.1 The frictional contest between guests and...