De Man's Kant and Goebbels' Schiller: The Ideology of Reception

In his posthumously published essays and lectures on aesthetic ideology, Paul de Man suggests that Schiller's aesthetics and specifically his account of the sublime represent a "naive," "childish" and regressive reworking of Kant (AI 134, 141). De Man holds Schiller responsible for distorting the entire subsequent reception of Kant and for producing an aesthetic ideology that falsely ascribes unity and stability to the concept of the aesthetic, invariably papering over tensions within both that concept and the texts in which aesthetics is treated. In this regard the name "Schiller" becomes for de Man a signifier of aesthetic ideology. In his indictment of Schiller as a progenitor of aesthetic ideology, and in his invocation of a Kantian materialism, de Man appears thereby to lay claim to the legacy of critical theory and in particular Benjaminian "historical materialism." Indeed he goes on to imply, with reference to Joseph Goebbels, that Schiller's celebration by National Socialist Germany may indicate a connection between 18th-century aesthetics and 20th-century genocide (AI 154-55).

In what follows I would like to connect the bookends of de Man's academic career, namely his Allegories of Reading (1979) and Aesthetic Ideology (posthumously published in 1996), by arguing that his account of Kant and Schiller operates allegorically in multiple respects. First and most straightforward, de Man portrays Kant's account of the sublime as an allegory, i.e., as presenting "dramatically and interpersonally something which was purely epistemological and which had nothing to do with the pragmata of the relationship between human beings" (AI 143). Second, de Man's critique of Schillerian ideology, with its emphasis on arrest and discontinuity, allegorizes what Walter Benjamin has described as the work of the historical materialist. That is, as I will explain in further detail, de Man disrupts what he characterizes as an unbroken Schillerian history of aesthetics by revivifying a punctual "event" of material inscription in Kant. Third and most significant, Schiller's recasting of Kant's sublime serves for de Man as an allegory of the ideological pitfalls of reception, insofar as Schillerian aesthetics papers over rifts at the heart of Kantian aesthetics. Fourth, I want to point to where de Man allegorizes the dangers he ascribes to reception in general. That is, de Man paints Schiller as the source of aesthetic ideology, and thereby paints himself as a critic of ideology, but the account of Schiller also succumbs to the ideological pitfall that de Man ascribes to reception.² In particular, de Man's claim for the continuity and homogeneity of Schiller's legacy flies in the face of an otherwise insistent interrogation of continuities and homogeneities, insofar as these are the hallmarks precisely of what he calls ideology. There is, in other words, something ideological, in de Man's own sense, about such claims for a thoroughly Schillerian idealist legacy that exercises a chokehold on all subsequent reception of Kant. Hence even as de Man emphasizes discontinuity, rupture and retrieval in a Benjaminian vein, he nonetheless appears to replicate the homogenizing, ideologizing gesture that he exposes.

Finally I will suggest that de Man makes his most clearly ideology-critical claim, namely in his connection of Schiller to Joseph Goebbels, in terms so ambiguous that it is unclear whether he is describing a merely analogical relationship between Schiller's aesthetic ideology and Goebbels' National Socialist ideology or, in contrast, ascribing to Schillerian aesthetics some responsibility for National Socialism (AI 154-55). Given this ambiguity in de Man's claim for the connection between Schiller and Goebbels—i.e., Is the connection one of analogy or direct responsibility?—it is fittingly ironic that the controversies around his wartime journalism revolve precisely around the connection, or lack thereof, between ideology in de Man's work and National Socialism. For as Catherine Gallagher has pointed out, the wartime journalism, including one article notorious for its anti-Semitism, can be read as confirming several conflicting views on de Man and the politics of deconstruction: that deconstruction renders obsolete any debates about values; that deconstruction undermines leftist goals; that de Man's silence about...