Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies

Comparative Literature and the Ideology of Metaphor, East and West

Comparative Literature and the Ideology of Metaphor, East and West Karl S.Y. Kao Traditional confidence in the ability of conceptual thinking to control the working of rhetorical figures started to receive serious challenges in the nineteenth century. Nietzsche pointed out that thinking is always and inseparably tied to the rhetorical devices that are part and parcel of language itself. Not only does the philosophical discourse lack epistemological superiority over other kinds of discourse, it is self-deluding for us to think that any kind of discourse could be exempted from rhetorical penetration and contamination. Set forth mainly in the well-known essay that describes “truth” as a used-up, wornout metaphor, Nietzsche’s criticism of the truth-claim of philosophical discourse as illusory has to do with his mistrust of metaphysics. Reality and truth are not accessible without mediation, while interpretations and “anthropomorphisms ” have their roots not in some transcendental source but the drive to appropriate and conquer, the “will to power” (42–47). Deconstructive criticism follows up on this by inquiring into the problematics of rhetoric and figural discourse, making inquiries in this respect a fundamental aspect of its project. Both Derrida and de Man have examined the question in detail and exposed how thinking is bound to rhetorical devices, how figures are connected with metaphysics and ideology. To briefly recapitulate , in Derrida’s view, the Western tradition since the time of Plato has been confused by the thinking that there are fixed truths and non-linguistic facts “out there,” that through the tools of reason, argumentation, and evidence, philosophy and science could capture or uncover these truths. This thinking follows from a belief in the “metaphysics of presence” which, however, could never be reached or realized through language. All discourses, philosophical 97 or scientific, are in reality but varieties of “writing,” systems of signs, which are characterized by différance and the free play of signs. The logocentric purpose , the pursuit of “transcendental signified,” arrests this play by suppressing the difference in the sign and freezing the differing process. This is also the moment when, in Derrida’s words within Of Grammatology (1976), “a metaphoric mediation has insinuated itself into the relationship [between the signifier and the signified] and has simulated immediacy” (15). What is called “literal truth” is but a willful interruption of the free play of language and the restriction of the sense of the sign as determinate. As David Novitz puts it in his 1985 article “Metaphor, Derrida, and Davidson,” “When once we freeze this play, when once we speak determinately, we are . . . speaking metaphorically ” (105). In a logocentric system, where language is used in such a “determinate ” way, speaking will appear to have definite meanings. Philosophers have dreamt for language to be purified of its contamination by figures and rectified of the aberration, but it is only through a “double effacement” of the metaphor that this illusion is sustained. Exploring the question of “metaphor in the text of philosophy,” Derrida shows in “White Mythology ” that philosophy is a “process of metaphorization which gets carried away in and of itself” (211); it is not so much that metaphor is in the text of philosophy but theses texts are in metaphor. In reading a text, says Derrida in Of Grammatology that “it is not . . . a matter of inverting the literal meaning and the figurative meaning but of determining the ‘literal’ meaning of writing as metaphoricity itself” (15). The choice of a metaphor inevitably entails the positing of a perspective or frame, a positioning of the discourse in its “will to power.” In this view, dominant values and ideologies of a given time are supported by the ruling metaphors, as Foucault’s conception of discursive formation would also argue. Philosophy, then, is a kind of writing that cannot help being contaminated by metaphoricity ; concepts only become such by a process of metaphorization of language. But this process is often hidden from epistemological scrutiny, as metaphoricity has also often been rendered transparent and invisible. Deconstructive reading of philosophical texts exposes how privileged terms in Western culture, in their striving for a metaphysics of presence, are held in place by the force of dominant metaphors rather than undisputable logic. Exposure of the hidden metaphor and the metaphoricity of the text in general also disrupts the logic of rational argument, resulting in the instability and undecidability of the meaning of a text. As Derrida urges in Dissemination, “Metaphoricity is the...