Introduction

It is with great pleasure that I introduce Mosaic 52.4, a general issue of special significance that features the work of Andrzej Warminski, Andrew Barnaby, Rebecca Haubrich, Adina Balint and Patrick Imbert, Andrew Kim, Jeffrey R. Wilson, Eric Bronson, Matthew Teorey, and Jen Hui Bon Hoa. In this context I would further like to highlight Andrew Barnaby's essay on Freud, Hamlet, and self-authorship; Rebecca Haubrich's work on Kafka, Celan, and Derrida in Babel; and lastly, Jen Hui Bon Hoa's work on Rancière and Derrida's Dissemination. Finally, I am thrilled to single out Andrzej Warminski's essay on the use and misuse of rhetoric in the work of Roman Jakobson and Gerard Gennette.

Mosaic is very lucky to publish Andrzej Warminski's "Resistances to Rhetoric: Jakobson and Gennette." I will not summarize Warminski's argument on the resistances to rhetoric in Jakobson and Gennette, two literary theorists whom he describes as explicitly putting rhetoric to work in their theoretical projects. What I will do is provide a few pragmatic points for reading his work that I have gleaned over the years. First of all, this is classic Warminski. We are moved very quickly and ably through extremely difficult theoretical terrain by virtue of the medieval trivium. Vis-à-vis Paul de Man, there is a dose of interpretative policing, new light is shed on particularly critical passages we have all no doubt glossed, and de Man's work and his insights are expanded upon and pushed through close reading, demonstrative example, the isolation of chiasms, and Warminski's unique brand of humour. Further, textual argumentation is shot-through with pedagogical demonstration derived from the classroom—in this case the summary steps of reading Jakobson are taken directly from teaching notes. Finally, catachresis puts in an appearance, the emergence of philosophical aesthetics is brought into the mix, and Warminski shows that the passage from grammar to meaning and world is always fraught, troubled by rhetoric, and ultimately inaccessible to reading.

Beyond this, Warminski's essay will read like first-generation Deconstruction, and as always upon reading such texts, we are reminded just how necessary it is to revisit these insights today. In reading Warminski on any subject, one cannot help but feel one's own projects wither, for the intense scrutiny he places on his subjects always bleeds into one's own work. This is primarily the case because Warminski works upstream from literary theory as we know and use it, consistently bracketing the work we do via rhetoric. It is in this sense that I always emerge from reading his texts as something of an aesthete, but with each reading I also become less and less a soldier of aesthetic ideology.

No doubt this is a puzzling way to describe the effects of reading Warminski's texts, but I think it helps introduce his critical work. Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (1987), Warminski's first book, long served as a bedside breviary of mine and a model of how to compose and structure the perfect book—he would shrink from this thought. Nevertheless, there is no better description of reading theory to be found than his "Prefatory Postscript," which reduces the problem down to three easy steps. With the book's subtle formalization of the problem of interpretation as distinct from reading, a formalization achieved by nesting the latter at the heart of the former, Warminski offers a road map for determining where resistance begins as a function of the aesthetic. In turn, the alliteration of the book's subtitle, "Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger," points to the ends of reading, and how quickly reading bottoms out in a form of ironic textual resistance. It is as if the demonic laughter of catachresis—Warminski's favourite trope that is an "abuse of trope" and which lies at the limits of tropology—sounds out from behind metonymy as syntactical proximity to reveal a final threshold to be crossed (liv). Warminski's subsequent books, Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For De Man (2013) and Material Inscriptions: Reading in Practice and Theory (2013), flesh out and expand upon this project.

In any case...