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261 e l e v e n Bewildering: Paul de Man, Poetry, Politics As you know, Paul was irony itself and, among all the vivid thoughts he leaves with us and leaves alive in us, there is as well an enigmatic reflection on irony and even, in the words of Schlegel which he had occasion to cite, an “irony of irony.” — j a c q u e s d e r r i d a , Mémoires for Paul de Man It is no easy task to determine the proper place of the “political” within the writings of Paul de Man. The difficulties inherent in the question stem not so much from the absence of references to history and politics in his writing—on the contrary; it is a rare text by de Man that does not mention law, politics, economics, social unrest, war, or revolution. The problem arises instead from the way such references can become intelligible only in the context of analyses that are themselves not in the first place either historical or political. What one does not find in de Man’s archive—at least not among works composed after World War Two—is a consideration of the political that would not first have to address complications that are specifically textual, and that have to do with literary concerns on the one hand and philosophical concerns on the other; or in somewhat more restricted terminology, that have to do with rhetoric and epistemology. “One should . . . not forget,” de Man warns characteristically about proceeding too quickly from literary-critical analysis to critique of ideology, “that we are dealing with textual models, not with the historical and political systems that are their correlate.”1 As a “correlate” of the textual models from which it necessarily derives, whatever is properly 262 The Irony of Tomorrow political is therefore not accessible to thought in any direct or immediate fashion. Rather, genuinely historical, political, and ideological questions— and it would be worth asking whether and to what extent de Man conceives of the possibility of separating any one of these from its necessary intertwining with the others—can be effectively and legitimately addressed only on the far side of a critical-linguistic analysis of concepts. And these concepts will always be conditioned by textual features that are both rhetorical and epistemological in nature. A case in point is provided by the opening of the essay “Hegel on the Sublime ,” in which de Man economically spells out both the imperative of treating literary, philosophical, and political issues together and the unwarranted tendency to introduce into the mix principles of exclusion that would somehow isolate the literary from either contaminating, or being contaminated by, the all-important coordination between the other two. The conclusion de Man draws here, and which he inscribes within a “tradition” of thinkers stretching from Kant to Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Benjamin, Althusser, and Derrida , is that the trajectory that joins intellectual discourse to political action must inevitably pass by way of the aesthetic category in which the confrontation with literature is impossible to avoid. Therefore, and despite the nearmechanical regularity of such reductive gestures, no valorization of aesthetic experience at the expense of either epistemological or political considerations, nor any dismissal of the category of the aesthetic as an autonomous and thus self-reflexive totality having no impact on the others, could ever succeed in achieving its stated aims. A given philosophical thinker, de Man observes laconically , “is politically effective because of, and not in spite of his concentration on literary texts.”2 If you want to think productively about genuine political activity, that is, if you want to bring thought together with action, he seems to be saying, you should go read some more fiction! Can such a suggestion be taken seriously? This is the kind of baffling statement that is upsetting for our most familiar understanding of both literature and politics. Upsetting enough, de Man argues, that rather than face up to its challenge, we will resort to numberless strategies in order to dismiss it outright, ignore it politely, or domesticate it into the kind of reassuring schemas that pretend to restore us to a sense of philosophical and ideological equilibrium. As luck would have it, one means of escape from this dilemma is obligingly offered by a remark de Man himself makes in connection with the very argument which, in “Hegel on the Sublime,” alerts us to the danger of falling prey...

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