Legacies of Paul de Man (review)

Two decades after his death, Paul de Man remains one of the most controversial figures of ‘high theory.’ Symptomatically abjected from today’s theory canon, and displaced by a late Derrida who is more easily assimilated by a ‘socially responsible’ criticism, de Man is arguably the spectre who drives both the survival of theory as culture’s Other and the evasions that mobilize the sheltering of this otherness within a post-Heideggerian thought that often loses the uncanniness of deManian deconstruction. Marc Redfield’s collection Legacies of Paul de Man thus provides a timely occasion for reflecting on de Man’s survival as well as on the cathexes and transferences underlying the critique and institutionalization of deconstruction.

It is impossible to deal with more than a couple of the essays here. Including work by Ian Balfour, Andrzej Warminski, Cynthia Chase, Rei Terada, Arkady Plotnitsky, Sara Guyer, and Jan Mieszkowski, the collection’s centrepiece is Redfield’s essay on John Guillory’s discussion of de Man in Cultural Capital. Guillory had argued that the charisma of deManian ‘rigor’ created a techno-bureaucratic transference among his Yale disciples that produced an oppressive critical hegemony which exposed itself as the last gasp of a conservative canon defending itself against demographic change through ‘theory.’ It is not entirely correct to say that Guillory’s critique had little impact ‘in deconstructive circles,’ for the essay was the symptom of a ‘cultural turn’ that has not been without effect on deconstruction itself. Nevertheless Redfield rightly argues that Guillory’s ‘cutting-edge’ attack on the canon is profoundly conventional, and that he speaks with an ‘institutional voice’ that makes him vulnerable to the critique he levels against de Man. Indeed Guillory’s ad hominem reduction of de Man’s work to his Yale seminar, used as a metonym for ‘Theory’ itself, is a signal instance of the trope of personification analyzed by de Man. Yet as Redfield concedes, deManian ‘rigor’ did facilitate ‘many of the transferential and ideological effects’ Guillory describes. Those effects are the subject of Guyer’s exemplary essay, which focuses on the uneasiness of de Man’s prefaces to his and his students’ work on Romanticism, so as to argue unexpectedly that the victim of this rigour, the corpse sought for by Neil Hertz in ‘Lurid Figures,’ is de Man himself. It is de Man who endures a ‘violence disguised by loyalty and discipleship,’ which prematurely closes off a certain negative capability in his work: an ability to be in doubts and uncertainties, particularly in his relation to Romanticism and history.

Guyer’s essay provides a paradigm for the work of others who have begun to rethink de Man’s legacy in terms of a return and retreat of the origin rather than a defence of his ‘method.’ For Romanticists, William Godwin’s study of Milton’s nephews can serve as an introduction to this problem of legacy. Godwin traces Milton’s influence through his two nephews: Edward Philips, who followed classically in his uncle’s footsteps, and John, who took the spirit of Milton’s work in more rhizomatic directions. Both kinds of legacy are represented in this volume. Thus the pieces by Chase, Warminski, and Mieszkowski are well executed and rightly insist that de Man’s was not an iterable method but a form of reading designed to produce anxiety. But in following the form as well as content of de Man’s analyses (from a certain period only), the essays themselves exhibit a ‘paralysis’ to which, Guyer suggests, de Man was sensitive. On the other hand, the ‘wider ripples’ of de Man’s influence that Guillory neglects can be seen in the work of Tom Cohen in film studies or Lee Edelman in queer studies. Given its origins in two sessions on de Man at the North American Society for Romanticism, the present volume is limited in its ability to present the full range of work cross-fertilized by de Man. But Plotnitsky’s essay on de Man as a ‘non-classical...