Legacies of Paul de Man

Double-Take: Reading de Man and Derrida Writing on Tropes

Double-Take: Reading de Man and Derrida Writing on Tropes Cynthia Chase De Man’s late essay ‘‘Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,’’ delivered in a series of lectures at Cornell University in the spring of 1983,1 begins with an argument which proceeds as a reading of the first third of a sentence in ‘‘On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,’’ the words affirming that truth is a mobile army of tropes.2 It’s a sentence famous or notorious enough so that, as one might say, ‘‘it hardly needs translation.’’ Perhaps indeed it needs retranslation into a foreign tongue, or so one might be tempted to say given the disorienting usage of the word ‘‘translated ’’ in the opening paragraph of de Man’s essay. De Man quotes from Nietzsche in German and then alludes to his quotation as ‘‘translated’’ even though he hasn’t translated it from German to English but left it in the original: ‘‘‘Was ist also Wahrheit? Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern , Metonymien, Anthropomorphismen . . .’ Even when thus translated before it has been allowed to run one third of its course, Nietzsche’s sentence considerably complicates the assimilation of truth to trope which it proclaims.’’3 I want to call attention to a way in which ‘‘Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric’’ and two essays by Derrida frame what Nietzsche lists in his breakdown of ‘‘truth’’ into rhetorical terms, a ‘‘mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms’’ (Nietzsche 3:314). I’ll be moving back and forth between the de Man and Derrida 17 18 Cynthia Chase essays, drawing analogies, paying attention especially to a certain passage in ‘‘Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric’’ and a comparable passage in Derrida’s ‘‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.’’ In each essay there is an abrupt slowing down of the reading—or you could call it a drawn-out double-take. There is an odd moment in the preceding essay in Margins of Philosophy, ‘‘The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics’’—a stressed elision, which occurs in reference to a passage in ‘‘On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense.’’ Nietzsche’s essay serves up an argument analogous to certain familiar arguments of and about philosophical language, but ‘‘with,’’ Derrida writes, ‘‘an entirely other aim.’’4 ‘‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’’ can be read as elaborating on that elision. And the outcomes of Derrida’s reading of Aristotle on metaphor can find a language, I would argue, in Nietzsche’s essay’s odd list of tropes as it is read by de Man. In the text of Aristotle, as read in ‘‘White Mythology,’’ thinking about metaphor takes place as a thinking through metaphor. Statements of truth come in the form of metaphor and in reflections about metaphor. Reading Aristotle, Derrida will almost not find anything but what can be thought of by means of analogies, the metaphorical linkage, by analogy, of one idea with another. But the reading brings us to a knot amid those woventogether threads, and something in the texture of Derrida’s essay changes. What had ‘‘White Mythology’’ and ‘‘Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric’’ been saying? Each essay has asserted or demonstrated that the tie between truth and metaphor is so close as to be a coinciding. ‘‘Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric’’ sets out with a quotation from ‘‘On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense.’’ De Man has restated it blandly: ‘‘At this point, to say that truth is a trope is to say that truth is the possibility of stating a proposition . Truth is a trope, the trope truth is the possibility of stating a proposition .’’5 A metaphor says A says B. ‘‘White Mythology’’ has been reading Aristotle and showing that statements of truth come in the form of metaphor and in reflections about metaphor, and that in these inaugural texts what one finds are metaphors that are philosophemes, which can be stated, and also offered in example, like truth, light. In ‘‘The Supplement of Copula : Philosophy before Linguistics,’’ where Derrida is concerned particularly with Benveniste, Saussure, and again Nietzsche, ‘‘truth’’ is a ‘‘trope’’ means something a little different: the reversibility into each other of the two ostensibly opposing sides or phases of an argument or what Derrida calls a ‘‘philosophical scheme.’’6 Here is an instance: someone challenges 19 Double-Take the authority of philosophical discourse by pointing to...