In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory
  • William D. Melaney
Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, Andzej Warminski, eds. Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. 368 pp.

This collection of essays is devoted to examining the theoretical significance of Paul de Man’s last posthumous book, Aesthetics Ideology (1996), which challenges canonical interpretations of Kant and the tradition that his work presumably initiates. The eleven essays that compose this collection present an interlocking set of claims concerning “materiality without materialism,” a term that Jacques Derrida has applied to what might have been the third phase of de Man’s career. While an order of phases cannot be rigidly determined, we might schematically refer to de Man’s early phenomenological phase, culminating in the publication of Blindness and Insight (1971), which was followed by the rhetorical, linguistically-oriented phase resulting in the publication of Allegories of Reading (1979). However, de Man’s crucial work on Romanticism not only falls within both phases but demonstrates that sustained attention to canonical writers was theoretically important for a critic whose work cannot be divided into discrete periods. [End Page 203]

Hence, instead of suggesting that this third phase is incidental to his work in criticism, Material Events makes a strong case for reading de Man as a contemporary theorist whose interest in materiality may have been crucial to his entire oeuvre. Just as his early work challenged notions of organic form that sustained the American New Critics and their counterparts in Romantic studies, de Man’s final attempt to confront the challenge of ideology can be interpreted as the resumption of an initial concern. However, as Andrzej Warminski so clearly demonstrates in his comments on de Man’s reading of Kant, phenomenology in these late essays has been reduced in a manner that breaks with the entire tradition of recuperative reading, and also allows us to reconceptualize the sublime as a material event that frustrates verbal understanding. Warminski also shows how de Man’s reading indicates the gap between cognition and performativity that haunts the construction of aesthetic theory itself. In another outstanding contribution, Arkady Plotnitsky makes use of quantum mechanics in order to draw analogies between the function of material marks in the technosciences and the occurrence of “linguistic materiality” in literary texts, and thus integrates reflections on nonclassical physics that illuminate de Man’s version of materiality as an allegorical discourse. Once again, de Man’s close reading of Kant offers the basis for distinguishing “formal materialism” from figural and organic interpretations of the Romantic legacy.

The application of de Man’s later work in cultural and literary studies yields insights that counter the seductive claims of aesthetic criticism. T. J. Clark’s essay on Cézanne, which can be read in conjunction with ten useful reproductions, examines the painter’s materialism in terms of the nonidentity of the marked trace, which interrupts the movement toward totalization that dominates the aesthetic response to post-impressionism. Ted Cohen’s discussion of film links de Man’s concept of aesthetic ideology to an evasion of materiality that typifies liberal humanism as an institutional practice. On the literary side, J. Hillis Miller and Barbara Johnson relate the opposition between phenomenalism and materiality to the role of mechanical repetition in literary discourse. Rather than argue that repetition is basically a lyrical phenomenon, they discuss how material residues limit our cognitive mastery of literary texts. From both standpoints, this very limitation is what disrupts the closure of remembrance that prevents materiality from surfacing as culturally significant.

In a final essay, Jacques Derrida responds to de Man’s discussion of Rousseau in Allegories of Reading, a critical work that explores the theft of Marion’s ribbon in linguistic terms. While the essays of Ernesto Laclau and Judith Butler are concerned with challenging political hegemony or complicating the relationship between body and discourse, Derrida’s contribution shows how writing generates an infinite regress and cannot be eliminated from an assessment of Rousseau’s literary use of performative language. Moreover, in discussing the theme of materiality that informs de Man’s analysis of Rousseau...

Share