Almost any page of de Man's work, but especially the beginnings and endings of essays, contains rejections of well-established received ideas about
literary
study.
Paul-de-Man-Material-Events
" Trans.
Peggy Kamuf.
In Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism, ed.
Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan.
Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.
127-64.
------. Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1998 [1996].
The Encyclopedia Americana. Vol. 26. Danbury, Conn. : Grolier, 1999.
Fiore, Edith. Encounters: A Psychologist Reveals Case Studies of Abductions by
Extraterrestrials. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.
------. The Unquiet Dead. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Vol. 21. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1961 [1930].
Gottlieb, Sidney, ed. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997. Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits. New York: Facts
on File, 1992.
A History of Technology. Ed. Trevor I. Williams. Vol. 7, The Twentieth Century
c. 1900 to c. 1950. Part II. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
Jung, Carl Gustav. "After the Catastrophe. " In Civilization in Transition, trans.
R. F. C. Hull. New York: Pantheon, 1964 [1945]. 194-217.
------. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Trans.
R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, 1978.
------. "Wotan. " In Civilization in Transition, trans. R. F. C. Hull. New York:
Pantheon, 1964 [1936]. 179-93.
Edward Kellog. "History of Sound Motion Pictures. " In A Technological History
of Motion Pictures and Television, ed. Raymond Fielding. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1967. 174-220.
Kittler, Friedrich. Grammophon Film Typewriter. Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose,
1986.
Kubis, Pat, and Mark Macy. Conversations beyond the Light: With Departed
Friends and Colleagues by Electronic Means. Boulder, Colo. : Griffin Publishing
in conjunction with Continuing Life Research, 1995.
Lacan, Jacques. "The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power. "
In E? crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London:
W. W. Norton, 1977). 226-80.
------. Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954. Book 1, The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester. New York and London:
W. W. Norton, 1988 [1975].
Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as
Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. " In E? crits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1977. 1-7.
------. "Presence of the Analyst. " In Essential Papers on Transference, ed.
Aaron H. Esman. New York and London: New York University Press, 1990. 480-91.
------. Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment. Ed. Joan Copjec. Trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990 [1973].
Leigh, Janet (with Christorper Nickens). Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller. New York: Harmony Books, 1995.
Leites, Nathan. "Transference Interpretations Only? " In Essential Papers on Transference, ed. Aaron H. Esman. New York and London: New York University Press, 1990. 434-54.
Loewald, Hans W. "The Transference Neurosis: Comments on the Concept and the Phenomenon. " In Essential Papers on Transference, ed. Aaron H. Esman. New York and London: New York University Press, 1990. 423-33.
Lubar, Steven. Infoculture. The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.
Mandel, Henry A. Banners of Light. New York: Vantage Press, 1973. "Our Next Program Comes to You from the Other World. " In Out of This
World: The Illustrated Library of the Bizarre and Extraordinary. New York:
Columbia House, 1976. 69-74.
Raudive, Konstantin. Breakthrough: Electronic Communication with the Dead
May Be Possible. New York: Zebra Books, 1971.
Rogo, D. Scott. An Experience of Phantoms. New York: Taplinger Publishing
Company, 1974.
Stemman, Roy. The Supernatural: Spirits and Spirit Worlds. London: Aldus Books,
1975.
Winter, Frank H. "Camera Rockets and Space Photography Concepts before
World War II. " In History of Rocketry and Astronautics. AAS History Series, vol. 8, AAS, San Diego (1989): 73-102.
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III. Re-Marking "de Man"
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Paul de Man as Allergen
J. Hillis Miller
WHY READING DE MAN MAKES YOU SNEEZE
It is easy to see why the institution of literary study in the United States, or, in a different way, in Europe, including journalistic reviewing in both regions, is antipathetical to de Man and needs to suppress him in order to get on with its business. De Man's work is a violent allergen that provokes fits of coughing, sneezing, and burning eyes, perhaps even worse symptoms, unless it can be neutralized or expelled. "Aller- gen": a substance that causes an allergy. The word allergy, oddly enough, comes from the German Allergie, meaning "altered reaction," a Teu- tonic formation from the Greek allo, other, plus ergon, work. The "gen" in allergen means generating or causing. De Man's work as al- lergen is something alien, other, that works to bring about a reaction of resistance to that otherness. The best antihistamine might be to forget his essays altogether and get on with the reproduction of some form or other of aesthetic ideology. The trouble is that once you have read de Man seriously it is difficult to do that without a vague uneasy feeling that you are laying traps for yourself and others, or, to put it more sim- ply, as de Man himself put it in the first paragraphs of "The Resistance to Theory," promulgating something false, perhaps dangerously false.
In a remark near the beginning of the "Kant and Schiller" essay, which, it should be remembered, is the transcription of an oral perfor- mance, Paul de Man observes that though his Cornell audience has been "so kind at the beginning and so hospitable and so benevolent," nevertheless, in this case as in others in his experience, "it doesn't take you too long before you feel that you're getting under people's skin, and that there is a certain reaction which is bound to occur, certain
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questions that are bound to be asked, which is the interesting moment, when certain issues are bound to come up. "1 My figure of de Man as allergen is a slight transposition of this figure. An allergen causes an al- lergic reaction. It gets under your skin or into your nose, and "there is a certain reaction which is bound to occur. " You sneeze or break out in a rash. The figure is only a figure. It compares what happens to some people in reading de Man to what happens in a certain material reac- tion to a foreign substance by a living organic body. The figure is not innocent, however. In comparing something seemingly "abstract," in- tentional, linguistic, or "spiritual," reading, to something material, au- tomatic, autonomic, and involuntary, something "bound to happen," that is, an allergic reaction, the question of the relation of language to "materiality" is raised. Does any substantial connection justify the fig- ure? This is one of the central questions in de Man's conception of a "material event. " How can a linguistic act, such as the formulations reached by Kant's philosophic rigor, intervene in the "material" world and bring about what de Man calls "the materiality of actual history"? 2 How can writing or reading be a material event? How can speech be an act? As I shall show, de Man's transformation of the usual meaning of "materiality" (the transformation is itself a speech act) goes by way of a new conception of the relation of language to that reconceived materiality.
Almost any page of de Man's work, but especially the beginnings and endings of essays, contains rejections of well-established received ideas about literary study. These rejections can best be characterized as ironically and joyfully insolent or even contemptuous, as well as dis- mayingly rigorous and plausible. 3 Salient examples are the first two pages of "The Resistance to Theory" and the last three pages of "Shelley Disfigured. "4 De Man's essays have the structure he identifies in "The Concept of Irony" as "the traditional opposition between eiron and alazon, as they appear in Greek or Hellenic comedy, the smart guy and the dumb guy" (AI 165). De Man is of course the eiron, the smart guy, and all the previous experts on whatever topic or text he is discussing are the alazons, the dumb guys. 5 The received ideas he attacks, often fundamental assumptions of our profession, are charac- teristically called aberrant, deluded, or simply false. The reader can only hope or assume that "This does not, cannot, mean me! Surely I would not make such stupid mistakes. " De Man forestalls that defen- sive move, however, when he asserts, for example, in the "Kant and Schiller" essay in Aesthetic Ideology, that everyone, including himself,
however ironically, in a collective "we," is still bewitched by aesthetic ideology:
Before you either contest this [what he has been saying about Schiller's distortion of Kant], or before you not contest but agree with it and hold it against Schiller, or think that it is something we are now far beyond and that we would never in our enlightened days do--you would never make this naive confusion between the practical and the pragmatic on the one hand and the philosophical Kantian enterprise on the other-- before you decide that, don't decide too soon that you are beyond Schiller in any sense. I don't think any of us can lay this claim. Whatever writing we do, whatever way we have of talking about art, whatever way we have of teaching, whatever justification we give ourselves for teaching, whatever the standards are and the values by means of which we teach, they are more than ever and profoundly Schillerian. They come from Schiller, and not from Kant. (AI 142)
De Man goes on to make a warning that certainly applies to what has happened in his own case, in spite of the fact that he was protected by being a Sterling Professor at Yale, which is about as much security as you can get:
And if you ever try to do something in the other direction [in the direc- tion of Kant, that is, rather than Schiller] and you touch on it you'll see what will happen to you. Better be very sure, wherever you are, that your tenure is very well established, and that the institution for which you work has a very well-established reputation. Then you can take some risks without really taking many risks" (AI 142).
I have said that de Man's work is threatening to "us all" because al- most any page contains cheerfully taunting rejections, explicit or im- plicit, of "our" most basic ideological assumptions, the ones "we" most need to get on with our work, the ones the university most needs to get on with its work. His counterintuitive concept (it is not really a concept) of materiality is an example of this.
DE MAN'S MATERIALISM
The "'s" in this subhead is a double genitive, both objective and sub- jective. It names both de Man's theory of materiality and the way his own writings may show materiality at work or may be examples of materiality at work. De Man's materiality is one of the most difficult and obscure parts of his work.
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De Man's use of the terms materiality and materialism poses several special problems, resistances to comprehension. First, one or the other word is most often introduced only briefly and elliptically. If the reader does not keep a sharp eye out for it, it appears in a given essay for an instant, for the blink of an eye, like a meteor, and then vanishes. Moreover, in these passages de Man seems to be saying exceedingly strange things, such as the assertion that materiality is not "phenome- nal. " Second, unlike "performative" and "irony" (terms not on every- one's lips and concepts that clearly need some explaining), we tend to think we already know what materiality is. It is the property possessed by these hard objects right in front of me now, impassive, impassible, resistant, not dependent on my perception for their continued exis- tence, like that stone Samuel Johnson kicked to refute Berkeley's ideal- ism: "I refute him thus [kicking the stone]. " Third, the term material- ism is extremely difficult to extricate from its associations with modern empirical science or with vulgar understandings of Marxism. Is not Marxism to be defined as "dialectical materialism"? De Man is sup- posed to be in one way or another a linguistic formalist, someone who believed, as all so-called deconstructionists are supposed to believe, that it is "all language," though the reader might remember that de Man began his higher education as a science, mathematics, and engi- neering student at the E? cole Polytechnique of the University of Brussels (1936). His professional interest in language came later. Nevertheless, for de Man to call himself a materialist, or for us to call him one, seems as absurd and counterintuitive as for de Man to call Kant and Hegel materialists or to find crucial materialist moments in their work, since everybody knows (without necessarily having read them) that they are "idealists. " Equally absurd would be to think one might find any kin- ship between de Man's thinking and Marxism, though the truth is that a deep kinship exists between de Man's work and Marx's thought in The German Ideology, as Andrzej Warminski has been demonstrating in his seminars. To show this it is necessary actually to go back and read Marx, as well as de Man, no easy tasks.
The term materiality or its cognates appears at crucial moments in de Man's work as early as a citation from Proust in "Reading (Proust)" in Allegories of Reading. What Proust calls the "symbols," in Giotto's Allegory of the Virtues and Vices at the Arena in Padua, meaning rep- resentations like the Charity that looks like a kitchen maid, are "some- thing real, actually experienced or materially handled. "6 That this pas- sage was important to de Man is indicated by the way he cites it again
at a crucial moment on the symbol in Hegel just at the end of one of his late essays, "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics. " This time de Man translates the phrases himself somewhat differently from the Moncrieff translation, and he cites the French original: "the symbol represented as real, as actually inflicted or materially handled [. . . (le symbole repre? sente? ) comme re? el, comme effectivement subi ou mate? riellement manie? ]" (AI 103). The terms material, materiality, and the like then appear with increasing frequency in de Man's later work. It is as though de Man had discovered in such words a way to "call" more ac- curately something he wanted performatively to name, perhaps even to invoke, that is, to "call forth": "The only word that comes to mind is that of a material vision . . . " ("Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," in AI 82). What Michael Riffatere misses or evades in Hugo's "E? crit sur la vitre d'une fene^tre flamande" is just what the title indi- cates or names, namely, what de Man calls "the materiality of an in- scription" (RT 51). A climactic passage in Shelley's The Triumph of Life is said to stress "the literal and material aspects of language" (RR 113). "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric" ends, in a phrase I have already cited, with an appeal to "the materiality of actual history" (RR 262). A cascade of such terms punctuates the essays in Aesthetic Ideology, not only in "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" and in "Kant's Materialism," where "a materialism that Kant's posterity has not yet begun to face up to" (AI 89) is the focus of the argument, but also in "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics," where we read that "The idea, in other words, makes its sensory appearance, in Hegel, as the material inscription of names" and also in the way Hegel's "theory of the sign manifests itself materially" (AI 102, 103), and in "Kant and Schiller," where we read of the irreversible progression "from states of cognition, to something which is no longer a cognition but which is to some extent an occurrence, which has the materiality of something that actually happens, that actually occurs" and of "the materiality of the inscribed signifier in Kant" (AI 132, 134).
The reader will have seen that the term materiality and its cognates occur in three related, ultimately more or less identical, registers in de Man: the materiality of history, the materiality of inscription, and the materiality of what the eye sees prior to perception and cognition. In all three of these registers, as I shall try to show, materiality is associat- ed with notions of performative power and with what seems materiali- ty's opposite, formalism. In all three modes of materialism, the ultimate paradox, allergenic idea, or unintelligibility is the claim or insinuation
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that materiality is not phenomenal, not open to the senses. Just what in the world could that mean?
The phrase "materiality of history" seems the easiest to understand and accept as commonsensical. Of course history is material. It means what really happened, especially as a result of human intervention (though we speak, for example, of the history of the mollusks, or of geo- logical history). History is wars, battles, the building of the pyramids, the invention of the steam engine, migrations of peoples, legislative de- cisions, diplomatic negotiations, the clearing of forests, global warm- ing, that sort of thing. De Man's materiality of history, however, is not quite like that. For him the materiality of history, properly speaking, is the result of acts of power that are punctual and momentary, since they are atemporal, noncognitive and noncognizable performative utter- ances. History is caused by language or other signs that make some- thing materially happen, and such happenings do not happen all that often. The most radical, and allergenic, counterintuitive, scandalous formulation of this is in "Kant and Schiller. " There de Man asserts that Kant's Critique of Judgment was an irreversible historical event brought about by the shift from cognitive to efficaciously performa- tive discourse in Kant's own words, whereas Schiller's ideological mis- reading of Kant and its long progeny in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were nonevents, certainly not irreversible material events. In "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" de Man speaks of the crucial shift to a "formal materialism" in Kant's Critique of Judgment as "a shift from trope to performance" that is "a deep, perhaps fatal, break or discontinuity" (AI 83, 89, 79). This is the place, as he puts it in "Kant and Schiller," at which Kant "found himself by the rigor of his own discourse [the project of aesthetics as articulation of pure reason and practical reason or ethics] to break down under the power of his own critical epistemological discourse" (AI 134). This was an event, strictly speaking an irreversible historical event, "to some extent an oc- currence, which has the materiality of something that actually hap- pens, that actually occurs. And there, the thought of material occur- rence, something that occurs materially, that leaves a trace on the world, that does something to the world as such--that notion of oc- currence is not opposed in any sense to the notion of writing" (AI 132). Since the event of Kant's materialism is punctual and instanta- neous, it is in a curious sense not within time, though it has a perma- nent and irreversible effect on what we usually (mistakenly) think of as the temporality of history:
history is not thought of as a progression or a regression, but is thought of as an event, as an occurrence. There is history from the moment that words such as 'power' and 'battle' and so on emerge on the scene. At that moment things happen, there is occurrence, there is event. History is therefore not a temporal notion, it has nothing to do with temporality [there's allergenic assertion for you! ], but it is the emergence of a lan- guage of power out of a language of cognition. (AI 133)
I do not think de Man meant that the words power and battle are in themselves always historical events in the sense de Man is defining such events, but that he means the uses of such words in effective per- formative utterances are historical events. As opposed to the moment of Kant's self-undoing materialism in the third Critique, Schiller's recu- peration of Kant within aesthetic ideology and its long progeny, the procedures of which are identified in the main body of "Kant and Schiller," did not happen, were not historical events:
One could say, for example, that in the reception of Kant, in the way Kant has been read, since the third Critique--and that was an occur- rence, something happened there, something occurred [de Man's stut- tering iterations here mime the punctualities of historical events; the reader will remember that this is the transcript of an oral presentation that was not written down as such]--that in the whole reception of Kant from then until now, nothing has happened, only regression, noth- ing has happened at all. Which is another way of saying there is no his- tory . . . that reception is not historical. . . . The event, the occurrence, is resisted by reinscribing it in the cognition of tropes, and that is itself a tropological, cognitive, and not a historical move. (AI 134)7
These sternly recalcitrant statements may be more understandable and perhaps even more acceptable if we remember that Althusser, and de Man in his own way, following Marx, define ideology as having no history, as being outside history, as having no purchase on his- tory, since ideology is precisely an illusory misunderstanding of the "real conditions of existence," as Althusser put it in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,"8 or, as de Man puts this in "The Resis- tance to Theory": "What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism" (RT 11). 9 The reception of Kant by Schiller and his followers, including you and me as inheritors of aesthetic ideology, is ideological, therefore not historical.
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We are (I am) now in a position to answer the puzzling assertions de Man makes in "The Concept of Irony. " "Irony," he says, "also very clearly has a performative function. Irony consoles and it promises and it excuses" (AI 165). What could de Man mean by saying that irony is performatively efficacious, that it promises, consoles, or excuses? If we take seriously de Man's claim later in the essay that irony is a perma- nent parabasis that radically suspends meaning by the incursion of chaos, madness, and stupidity (Friedrich Schlegel's terms) into lan- guage, then it would seem radically counterintuitive to say that irony has a successful performative function. A statement at the end of the essay is equally baffling: "Irony and history seem to be curiously linked to one another" (AI 184). If irony is permanent parabasis it would seem to have little to do with history, but to be rather the withdrawal from effective historical action. The analogy between the noncognitive aspect of irony and the noncognitive aspect of performative utterances gives the clue. Irony is perhaps the most radical example of the rupture between cognitive and performative discourses. Insofar as an utterance is performative, it is unknowable. Irony suspends cognition. It is just because irony is error, madness, and stupidity that it can be performa- tively felicitous. Promises, excuses, consolations can be performed by irony, or can be especially done by ironic utterance, just because irony is the radical suspension of cognition. Another way to put this is to say that even the most solemn performative utterances are contaminated by being possibly ironic. Jacques Derrida includes irony along with lit- erature among the parasitical presences that are possibly incorporated within any performative as a result of its intrinsic iterability.
What I have just said will also indicate the surprising and "curious" connection of irony with history. Since the materiality of history as event is generated by acts of linguistic power, that is, performative speech acts, though by no means necessarily intentional ones, irony as a form of such power or as an ingredient of any such act of power, against all our instinctive assumptions, can be said not only to prom- ise, console, and excuse, but also to generate the events that make up the materiality of history. Just as, for Derrida, the possibility of felici- tous speech acts depends on the possibility that they may be "litera- ture," so for de Man the efficacy of performative utterances, including those that generate history, depends on the possibility that they may be ironical. They may be. You cannot tell for sure.
If speech acts generating history are, strangely enough, one form of materiality or are the place where language touches materiality, leaves
a mark on it, materially handles it, the materiality of what the eye sees appears more obvious but turns out to be more difficult to grasp. Of course, we say, what the eye sees is material. That received opinion or doxa turns out, however, once again not to be quite what de Man means. What he does mean is the central argument of the two essays on Kant, "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" and "Kant's Materialism. " For received opinion, what we take for granted, phe- nomenality and materiality are the same thing or are two aspects of the same thing. Because something is material it is phenomenal, open to the senses. For de Man, following Kant, phenomenality and materiali- ty are not conjoined but opposed. How can this be? De Man sees in Kant's theory of the dynamic sublime two radically contradictory no- tions. On the one hand, the sublime is the moment when the imagina- tion triumphs over fear and puts all the elements of the sublime scene together, articulates them in a grand aesthetic synthesis, as tropes ar- ticulate, or as the body's limbs are articulated: "The imagination over- comes suffering, becomes apathetic, and sheds the pain of natural shock. It reconciles pleasure with pain and in so doing it articulates, as mediator, the movement of the affects with the legal, codified, formal- ized, and stable order of reason" (AI 86). In so doing, the imagination of the sublime or the sublime itself accomplishes the goal of the third Critique, which was to find a "bridge" between the first and second Critiques, between pure reason and the practical reason of moral obli- gation and choice. On the other hand, Kant's analysis of the dynamic sublime contains a moment that radically disrupts, interrupts, and sus- pends this happy articulation. Kant reaches this moment through the very rigor of his critical thinking. He proposes that the paradigmatic example of the dynamic sublime is when the overarching vault of the sky and the outstretched mirror of the sea are seen just as the eye sees them, or as the poets see them, without thought for their meaning. Seeing them as meaningful would occur, for example, when we view the sea as a reservoir of edible fish, or the sky as a producer of life-giving rain. De Man quotes section 28 of Kant's The Critique of Judgment: "we must regard it [the starry heaven], just as we see it [wie man ihn sieht], as a distant, all-embracing vault [ein weites Gewo? lbe]. . . . To find the ocean nevertheless sublime we must regard it as poets do [wie die Dichter es tun], merely by what the eye reveals [was der Augeschein zeigt]" (AI 80). De Man goes on to argue that this way of seeing is radi- cally nonphenomenal. It does not involve the mind that in its activity of perception would make sense of what is seen. It just sees what it
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sees, in an activity of the eye operating by itself, enclosed in itself, wholly detached, disarticulated, from thinking and interpreting: "No mind is involved in the Kantian vision of ocean and heaven. . . . That is how things are to the eye, in the redundancy of their appearance to the eye and not to the mind, as in the redundant word Augenschein, . . . in which the eye, tautologically, is named twice, as eye itself and as what appears to the eye" (AI 82). De Man's name for this way of seeing is "material vision": "The only word that comes to mind is that of a material vision" (AI 82), which is another way of saying, in a paradig- matic performative speech act, "I call this 'material vision. '" The word material then appears in a cascade of phrases in the subsequent pages: "the vision is purely material"; "what we call the material aspect"; "a materialism that, in the tradition of the reception of the third Critique, is seldom or never perceived"; "If the architectonic then appears, very near the end of the analytics of the aesthetic, at the conclusion of the section on the sublime, as the material disarticulation not only of na- ture but of the body [traditional examples of the beautiful or the sub- lime], then this moment marks the undoing of the aesthetic as a valid category. The critical power of a transcendental philosophy undoes the very project of such a philosophy leaving us, certainly not with an ideology--for transcendental and ideological (metaphysical) principles are part of the same system--but with a materialism that Kant's pos- terity has not yet begun to face up to" (AI 83, 88, 89).
How could we "face up to" something that we can see but not face up to in the sense of clearly confronting it and making it intelligible to ourselves? The idea of a way of seeing that is performed by the eye alone, wholly dissociated from the mind, is, strictly speaking, unintelli- gible, since any sense we give to this Augenschein is an illicit, ideologi- cal imposition: "To the extent that any mind, that any judgment, inter- venes, it is in error" (AI 82). That is what I mean by saying that de Man's materiality is nonphenomenal, since phenomenality always in- volves, instantly, making sense or trying to make sense of what we see. This "material vision" would be pure seeing prior to any seeing as the sort of understanding that we name when we say, "I see it all now. " It would be a pre-seeing seeing, that is, something unthinkable, unknow- able, unintelligible, a tautological eye eyeing: "Realism postulates a phenomenalism of experience which is here being denied or ignored. Kant's looking at the world just as one sees it ('wie man ihn sieht') is an absolute, radical formalism that entertains no notion of reference or semiosis" (AI 128).
The idea of a materiality that would not be phenomenal does not make sense. Nevertheless, that is just what de Man affirms, most overtly and in so many words at the end of the essay on Riffaterre, "Hypogram and Inscription. " There he speaks of "the materiality (as distinct from the phenomenality) that is thus revealed [when we remember that Hugo's poem was supposed to have been written on a window pane], the unseen 'cristal' whose existence thus becomes a certain there and a certain then which can become a here and a now in the reading 'now' taking place" (RT 51). The paradox is that the window glass, figure here for the materiality of inscription, is not what the eye sees but what the eye sees through. In the Kant essays, as in "Hypogram and In- scription," the rigor of de Man's own critical thinking brings him re- peatedly, by different routes, across the border of the intelligible and into the realm of the allergenic, in this case the recognition of a materi- alism in Kant that has seldom or never been recognized in the whole distinguished tradition of Kant scholarship and so is anathema to it, just as de Man's reading of somewhat similar material moments in Hegel was anathema to the distinguished Hegel specialist Raymond Geuss. 10
The final version of materiality in de Man is the "prosaic materiali- ty of the letter" (AI 90). Just what does de Man mean by that? No one doubts that writing (and speaking too) have a material base, marks on paper or modulated waves in the air. This materiality is the benign base of the meaning, permanence, and transmissibility of language. No problem. De Man of course does not mean anything so in agreement with common sense and received opinion. When de Man calls Kant's sublime Augenschein of sky and sea a "material vision" he goes on to raise a further question that is not answered until the end of the essay: "how this materiality is then to be understood in linguistic terms is not, as yet, clearly intelligible" (AI 82). The answer is the materiality of the letter, but just what does that mean? The essay ends with an ex- planation that if not clearly intelligible, at least indicates why these "linguistic terms" must be unintelligible. The reader is given intelli- gence of unintelligibility, new news of the unknowable.
The prosaic materiality of the letter, linguistic "equivalent" of a ma- terialism of vision, has two main features. One is a disarticulation of language equaling the disarticulations of nature and the human body de Man has found in Kant's dynamic sublime: "To the dismemberment of the body corresponds a dismemberment of language, as meaning- producing tropes are replaced by the fragmentation of sentences and
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propositions into discrete words, or the fragmentation of words into syllables or finally letters" (AI 89). Strictly speaking, as linguists, not to speak of language philosophers like Wittgenstein, have shown, words do not have meaning by themselves. They have meaning only when they are used, incorporated into sentences. To detach them from their sentences and leave them hanging there in the air or on the page, surrounded by blank paper, is the first stage in a progressive disarticu- lation of meaning that goes then to syllables and finally to letters. It is extremely difficult to see words, syllables, or letters, for example on a printed page, in this way, just as it is extremely hard to see as the eye sees. One has to be a poet, as Kant says, to do it. The mind instantly in- terprets what the eye sees, "perceives it," and gives meaning to it, just as the mind projects meaning into those mute letters on the page. It is almost impossible to see letters as just the material marks they are. Even words in a language we do not know are seen as language and not as sheer materiality. We tend to see random marks on a rock as possibly writing in an unknown language.
The other feature of the materiality of the letter stressed by de Man makes that materiality more likely to be glimpsed, in the wink of the eye, before the mind starts "reading. " This is repetition of words and word parts that calls attention to the absurd and unmotivated echoes among them at the level of syllable and letter: puns, rhymes, allitera- tions, assonances, and so on, that is, precisely those linguistic features poets especially use, "the play of the letter and of the syllable, the way of saying . . . as opposed to what is being said" (AI 89). The "persua- siveness" of the passage in Kant about the recovery of the imagination's tranquillity through material vision depends, de Man says, "on the proximity between the German words for surprise and admiration, Verwunderung and Bewunderung" (AI 89). The reader, de Man contin- ues, is led to assent to the incompatibility or aporia between the imagi- nation's failure and its success by "a constant, and finally bewildering alternation of the two terms, Angemessen(heit) and Unangemessen(heit), to the point where one can no longer tell them apart" (AI 90). One ad- ditional example of this in de Man's essays is the cascade of words in "fall" that he finds in a passage by Kleist: Fall, Beifall, Su? ndenfall, Ru? ckfall, Einfall, Zuru? ckfall, Fa? lle: "As we know from another narra- tive text of Kleist ["On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts while Speaking"], the memorable tropes that have the most success (Beifall) occur as mere random improvisation (Einfall) at the moment when the author has completely relinquished control over his meaning and has
relapsed (Zuru? ckfall) into the extreme formalization, the mechanical predictability of grammatical declensions (Fa? lle)" (RR 290). By the time the reader gets to the end of this the root "fall" is fast becoming a mere surd, a sound emptied of meaning: "fall, fall, fall, fall. " The read- er will see that "formalism" of "formalization" names for de Man not the beautiful aesthetic formalization of the artwork, but a principle of mechanical senselessness in language that he associates with the arbi- trariness of grammar, of declensions, Fa? lle. De Man goes on to make a pun of his own. Since Falle also means trap in German, he can say that everyone falls into "the trap of an aesthetic education which inevitably confuses dismemberment of language by the power of the letter with the gracefulness of a dance.
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III. Re-Marking "de Man"
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Paul de Man as Allergen
J. Hillis Miller
WHY READING DE MAN MAKES YOU SNEEZE
It is easy to see why the institution of literary study in the United States, or, in a different way, in Europe, including journalistic reviewing in both regions, is antipathetical to de Man and needs to suppress him in order to get on with its business. De Man's work is a violent allergen that provokes fits of coughing, sneezing, and burning eyes, perhaps even worse symptoms, unless it can be neutralized or expelled. "Aller- gen": a substance that causes an allergy. The word allergy, oddly enough, comes from the German Allergie, meaning "altered reaction," a Teu- tonic formation from the Greek allo, other, plus ergon, work. The "gen" in allergen means generating or causing. De Man's work as al- lergen is something alien, other, that works to bring about a reaction of resistance to that otherness. The best antihistamine might be to forget his essays altogether and get on with the reproduction of some form or other of aesthetic ideology. The trouble is that once you have read de Man seriously it is difficult to do that without a vague uneasy feeling that you are laying traps for yourself and others, or, to put it more sim- ply, as de Man himself put it in the first paragraphs of "The Resistance to Theory," promulgating something false, perhaps dangerously false.
In a remark near the beginning of the "Kant and Schiller" essay, which, it should be remembered, is the transcription of an oral perfor- mance, Paul de Man observes that though his Cornell audience has been "so kind at the beginning and so hospitable and so benevolent," nevertheless, in this case as in others in his experience, "it doesn't take you too long before you feel that you're getting under people's skin, and that there is a certain reaction which is bound to occur, certain
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questions that are bound to be asked, which is the interesting moment, when certain issues are bound to come up. "1 My figure of de Man as allergen is a slight transposition of this figure. An allergen causes an al- lergic reaction. It gets under your skin or into your nose, and "there is a certain reaction which is bound to occur. " You sneeze or break out in a rash. The figure is only a figure. It compares what happens to some people in reading de Man to what happens in a certain material reac- tion to a foreign substance by a living organic body. The figure is not innocent, however. In comparing something seemingly "abstract," in- tentional, linguistic, or "spiritual," reading, to something material, au- tomatic, autonomic, and involuntary, something "bound to happen," that is, an allergic reaction, the question of the relation of language to "materiality" is raised. Does any substantial connection justify the fig- ure? This is one of the central questions in de Man's conception of a "material event. " How can a linguistic act, such as the formulations reached by Kant's philosophic rigor, intervene in the "material" world and bring about what de Man calls "the materiality of actual history"? 2 How can writing or reading be a material event? How can speech be an act? As I shall show, de Man's transformation of the usual meaning of "materiality" (the transformation is itself a speech act) goes by way of a new conception of the relation of language to that reconceived materiality.
Almost any page of de Man's work, but especially the beginnings and endings of essays, contains rejections of well-established received ideas about literary study. These rejections can best be characterized as ironically and joyfully insolent or even contemptuous, as well as dis- mayingly rigorous and plausible. 3 Salient examples are the first two pages of "The Resistance to Theory" and the last three pages of "Shelley Disfigured. "4 De Man's essays have the structure he identifies in "The Concept of Irony" as "the traditional opposition between eiron and alazon, as they appear in Greek or Hellenic comedy, the smart guy and the dumb guy" (AI 165). De Man is of course the eiron, the smart guy, and all the previous experts on whatever topic or text he is discussing are the alazons, the dumb guys. 5 The received ideas he attacks, often fundamental assumptions of our profession, are charac- teristically called aberrant, deluded, or simply false. The reader can only hope or assume that "This does not, cannot, mean me! Surely I would not make such stupid mistakes. " De Man forestalls that defen- sive move, however, when he asserts, for example, in the "Kant and Schiller" essay in Aesthetic Ideology, that everyone, including himself,
however ironically, in a collective "we," is still bewitched by aesthetic ideology:
Before you either contest this [what he has been saying about Schiller's distortion of Kant], or before you not contest but agree with it and hold it against Schiller, or think that it is something we are now far beyond and that we would never in our enlightened days do--you would never make this naive confusion between the practical and the pragmatic on the one hand and the philosophical Kantian enterprise on the other-- before you decide that, don't decide too soon that you are beyond Schiller in any sense. I don't think any of us can lay this claim. Whatever writing we do, whatever way we have of talking about art, whatever way we have of teaching, whatever justification we give ourselves for teaching, whatever the standards are and the values by means of which we teach, they are more than ever and profoundly Schillerian. They come from Schiller, and not from Kant. (AI 142)
De Man goes on to make a warning that certainly applies to what has happened in his own case, in spite of the fact that he was protected by being a Sterling Professor at Yale, which is about as much security as you can get:
And if you ever try to do something in the other direction [in the direc- tion of Kant, that is, rather than Schiller] and you touch on it you'll see what will happen to you. Better be very sure, wherever you are, that your tenure is very well established, and that the institution for which you work has a very well-established reputation. Then you can take some risks without really taking many risks" (AI 142).
I have said that de Man's work is threatening to "us all" because al- most any page contains cheerfully taunting rejections, explicit or im- plicit, of "our" most basic ideological assumptions, the ones "we" most need to get on with our work, the ones the university most needs to get on with its work. His counterintuitive concept (it is not really a concept) of materiality is an example of this.
DE MAN'S MATERIALISM
The "'s" in this subhead is a double genitive, both objective and sub- jective. It names both de Man's theory of materiality and the way his own writings may show materiality at work or may be examples of materiality at work. De Man's materiality is one of the most difficult and obscure parts of his work.
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De Man's use of the terms materiality and materialism poses several special problems, resistances to comprehension. First, one or the other word is most often introduced only briefly and elliptically. If the reader does not keep a sharp eye out for it, it appears in a given essay for an instant, for the blink of an eye, like a meteor, and then vanishes. Moreover, in these passages de Man seems to be saying exceedingly strange things, such as the assertion that materiality is not "phenome- nal. " Second, unlike "performative" and "irony" (terms not on every- one's lips and concepts that clearly need some explaining), we tend to think we already know what materiality is. It is the property possessed by these hard objects right in front of me now, impassive, impassible, resistant, not dependent on my perception for their continued exis- tence, like that stone Samuel Johnson kicked to refute Berkeley's ideal- ism: "I refute him thus [kicking the stone]. " Third, the term material- ism is extremely difficult to extricate from its associations with modern empirical science or with vulgar understandings of Marxism. Is not Marxism to be defined as "dialectical materialism"? De Man is sup- posed to be in one way or another a linguistic formalist, someone who believed, as all so-called deconstructionists are supposed to believe, that it is "all language," though the reader might remember that de Man began his higher education as a science, mathematics, and engi- neering student at the E? cole Polytechnique of the University of Brussels (1936). His professional interest in language came later. Nevertheless, for de Man to call himself a materialist, or for us to call him one, seems as absurd and counterintuitive as for de Man to call Kant and Hegel materialists or to find crucial materialist moments in their work, since everybody knows (without necessarily having read them) that they are "idealists. " Equally absurd would be to think one might find any kin- ship between de Man's thinking and Marxism, though the truth is that a deep kinship exists between de Man's work and Marx's thought in The German Ideology, as Andrzej Warminski has been demonstrating in his seminars. To show this it is necessary actually to go back and read Marx, as well as de Man, no easy tasks.
The term materiality or its cognates appears at crucial moments in de Man's work as early as a citation from Proust in "Reading (Proust)" in Allegories of Reading. What Proust calls the "symbols," in Giotto's Allegory of the Virtues and Vices at the Arena in Padua, meaning rep- resentations like the Charity that looks like a kitchen maid, are "some- thing real, actually experienced or materially handled. "6 That this pas- sage was important to de Man is indicated by the way he cites it again
at a crucial moment on the symbol in Hegel just at the end of one of his late essays, "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics. " This time de Man translates the phrases himself somewhat differently from the Moncrieff translation, and he cites the French original: "the symbol represented as real, as actually inflicted or materially handled [. . . (le symbole repre? sente? ) comme re? el, comme effectivement subi ou mate? riellement manie? ]" (AI 103). The terms material, materiality, and the like then appear with increasing frequency in de Man's later work. It is as though de Man had discovered in such words a way to "call" more ac- curately something he wanted performatively to name, perhaps even to invoke, that is, to "call forth": "The only word that comes to mind is that of a material vision . . . " ("Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," in AI 82). What Michael Riffatere misses or evades in Hugo's "E? crit sur la vitre d'une fene^tre flamande" is just what the title indi- cates or names, namely, what de Man calls "the materiality of an in- scription" (RT 51). A climactic passage in Shelley's The Triumph of Life is said to stress "the literal and material aspects of language" (RR 113). "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric" ends, in a phrase I have already cited, with an appeal to "the materiality of actual history" (RR 262). A cascade of such terms punctuates the essays in Aesthetic Ideology, not only in "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" and in "Kant's Materialism," where "a materialism that Kant's posterity has not yet begun to face up to" (AI 89) is the focus of the argument, but also in "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics," where we read that "The idea, in other words, makes its sensory appearance, in Hegel, as the material inscription of names" and also in the way Hegel's "theory of the sign manifests itself materially" (AI 102, 103), and in "Kant and Schiller," where we read of the irreversible progression "from states of cognition, to something which is no longer a cognition but which is to some extent an occurrence, which has the materiality of something that actually happens, that actually occurs" and of "the materiality of the inscribed signifier in Kant" (AI 132, 134).
The reader will have seen that the term materiality and its cognates occur in three related, ultimately more or less identical, registers in de Man: the materiality of history, the materiality of inscription, and the materiality of what the eye sees prior to perception and cognition. In all three of these registers, as I shall try to show, materiality is associat- ed with notions of performative power and with what seems materiali- ty's opposite, formalism. In all three modes of materialism, the ultimate paradox, allergenic idea, or unintelligibility is the claim or insinuation
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that materiality is not phenomenal, not open to the senses. Just what in the world could that mean?
The phrase "materiality of history" seems the easiest to understand and accept as commonsensical. Of course history is material. It means what really happened, especially as a result of human intervention (though we speak, for example, of the history of the mollusks, or of geo- logical history). History is wars, battles, the building of the pyramids, the invention of the steam engine, migrations of peoples, legislative de- cisions, diplomatic negotiations, the clearing of forests, global warm- ing, that sort of thing. De Man's materiality of history, however, is not quite like that. For him the materiality of history, properly speaking, is the result of acts of power that are punctual and momentary, since they are atemporal, noncognitive and noncognizable performative utter- ances. History is caused by language or other signs that make some- thing materially happen, and such happenings do not happen all that often. The most radical, and allergenic, counterintuitive, scandalous formulation of this is in "Kant and Schiller. " There de Man asserts that Kant's Critique of Judgment was an irreversible historical event brought about by the shift from cognitive to efficaciously performa- tive discourse in Kant's own words, whereas Schiller's ideological mis- reading of Kant and its long progeny in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were nonevents, certainly not irreversible material events. In "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" de Man speaks of the crucial shift to a "formal materialism" in Kant's Critique of Judgment as "a shift from trope to performance" that is "a deep, perhaps fatal, break or discontinuity" (AI 83, 89, 79). This is the place, as he puts it in "Kant and Schiller," at which Kant "found himself by the rigor of his own discourse [the project of aesthetics as articulation of pure reason and practical reason or ethics] to break down under the power of his own critical epistemological discourse" (AI 134). This was an event, strictly speaking an irreversible historical event, "to some extent an oc- currence, which has the materiality of something that actually hap- pens, that actually occurs. And there, the thought of material occur- rence, something that occurs materially, that leaves a trace on the world, that does something to the world as such--that notion of oc- currence is not opposed in any sense to the notion of writing" (AI 132). Since the event of Kant's materialism is punctual and instanta- neous, it is in a curious sense not within time, though it has a perma- nent and irreversible effect on what we usually (mistakenly) think of as the temporality of history:
history is not thought of as a progression or a regression, but is thought of as an event, as an occurrence. There is history from the moment that words such as 'power' and 'battle' and so on emerge on the scene. At that moment things happen, there is occurrence, there is event. History is therefore not a temporal notion, it has nothing to do with temporality [there's allergenic assertion for you! ], but it is the emergence of a lan- guage of power out of a language of cognition. (AI 133)
I do not think de Man meant that the words power and battle are in themselves always historical events in the sense de Man is defining such events, but that he means the uses of such words in effective per- formative utterances are historical events. As opposed to the moment of Kant's self-undoing materialism in the third Critique, Schiller's recu- peration of Kant within aesthetic ideology and its long progeny, the procedures of which are identified in the main body of "Kant and Schiller," did not happen, were not historical events:
One could say, for example, that in the reception of Kant, in the way Kant has been read, since the third Critique--and that was an occur- rence, something happened there, something occurred [de Man's stut- tering iterations here mime the punctualities of historical events; the reader will remember that this is the transcript of an oral presentation that was not written down as such]--that in the whole reception of Kant from then until now, nothing has happened, only regression, noth- ing has happened at all. Which is another way of saying there is no his- tory . . . that reception is not historical. . . . The event, the occurrence, is resisted by reinscribing it in the cognition of tropes, and that is itself a tropological, cognitive, and not a historical move. (AI 134)7
These sternly recalcitrant statements may be more understandable and perhaps even more acceptable if we remember that Althusser, and de Man in his own way, following Marx, define ideology as having no history, as being outside history, as having no purchase on his- tory, since ideology is precisely an illusory misunderstanding of the "real conditions of existence," as Althusser put it in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,"8 or, as de Man puts this in "The Resis- tance to Theory": "What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism" (RT 11). 9 The reception of Kant by Schiller and his followers, including you and me as inheritors of aesthetic ideology, is ideological, therefore not historical.
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We are (I am) now in a position to answer the puzzling assertions de Man makes in "The Concept of Irony. " "Irony," he says, "also very clearly has a performative function. Irony consoles and it promises and it excuses" (AI 165). What could de Man mean by saying that irony is performatively efficacious, that it promises, consoles, or excuses? If we take seriously de Man's claim later in the essay that irony is a perma- nent parabasis that radically suspends meaning by the incursion of chaos, madness, and stupidity (Friedrich Schlegel's terms) into lan- guage, then it would seem radically counterintuitive to say that irony has a successful performative function. A statement at the end of the essay is equally baffling: "Irony and history seem to be curiously linked to one another" (AI 184). If irony is permanent parabasis it would seem to have little to do with history, but to be rather the withdrawal from effective historical action. The analogy between the noncognitive aspect of irony and the noncognitive aspect of performative utterances gives the clue. Irony is perhaps the most radical example of the rupture between cognitive and performative discourses. Insofar as an utterance is performative, it is unknowable. Irony suspends cognition. It is just because irony is error, madness, and stupidity that it can be performa- tively felicitous. Promises, excuses, consolations can be performed by irony, or can be especially done by ironic utterance, just because irony is the radical suspension of cognition. Another way to put this is to say that even the most solemn performative utterances are contaminated by being possibly ironic. Jacques Derrida includes irony along with lit- erature among the parasitical presences that are possibly incorporated within any performative as a result of its intrinsic iterability.
What I have just said will also indicate the surprising and "curious" connection of irony with history. Since the materiality of history as event is generated by acts of linguistic power, that is, performative speech acts, though by no means necessarily intentional ones, irony as a form of such power or as an ingredient of any such act of power, against all our instinctive assumptions, can be said not only to prom- ise, console, and excuse, but also to generate the events that make up the materiality of history. Just as, for Derrida, the possibility of felici- tous speech acts depends on the possibility that they may be "litera- ture," so for de Man the efficacy of performative utterances, including those that generate history, depends on the possibility that they may be ironical. They may be. You cannot tell for sure.
If speech acts generating history are, strangely enough, one form of materiality or are the place where language touches materiality, leaves
a mark on it, materially handles it, the materiality of what the eye sees appears more obvious but turns out to be more difficult to grasp. Of course, we say, what the eye sees is material. That received opinion or doxa turns out, however, once again not to be quite what de Man means. What he does mean is the central argument of the two essays on Kant, "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" and "Kant's Materialism. " For received opinion, what we take for granted, phe- nomenality and materiality are the same thing or are two aspects of the same thing. Because something is material it is phenomenal, open to the senses. For de Man, following Kant, phenomenality and materiali- ty are not conjoined but opposed. How can this be? De Man sees in Kant's theory of the dynamic sublime two radically contradictory no- tions. On the one hand, the sublime is the moment when the imagina- tion triumphs over fear and puts all the elements of the sublime scene together, articulates them in a grand aesthetic synthesis, as tropes ar- ticulate, or as the body's limbs are articulated: "The imagination over- comes suffering, becomes apathetic, and sheds the pain of natural shock. It reconciles pleasure with pain and in so doing it articulates, as mediator, the movement of the affects with the legal, codified, formal- ized, and stable order of reason" (AI 86). In so doing, the imagination of the sublime or the sublime itself accomplishes the goal of the third Critique, which was to find a "bridge" between the first and second Critiques, between pure reason and the practical reason of moral obli- gation and choice. On the other hand, Kant's analysis of the dynamic sublime contains a moment that radically disrupts, interrupts, and sus- pends this happy articulation. Kant reaches this moment through the very rigor of his critical thinking. He proposes that the paradigmatic example of the dynamic sublime is when the overarching vault of the sky and the outstretched mirror of the sea are seen just as the eye sees them, or as the poets see them, without thought for their meaning. Seeing them as meaningful would occur, for example, when we view the sea as a reservoir of edible fish, or the sky as a producer of life-giving rain. De Man quotes section 28 of Kant's The Critique of Judgment: "we must regard it [the starry heaven], just as we see it [wie man ihn sieht], as a distant, all-embracing vault [ein weites Gewo? lbe]. . . . To find the ocean nevertheless sublime we must regard it as poets do [wie die Dichter es tun], merely by what the eye reveals [was der Augeschein zeigt]" (AI 80). De Man goes on to argue that this way of seeing is radi- cally nonphenomenal. It does not involve the mind that in its activity of perception would make sense of what is seen. It just sees what it
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sees, in an activity of the eye operating by itself, enclosed in itself, wholly detached, disarticulated, from thinking and interpreting: "No mind is involved in the Kantian vision of ocean and heaven. . . . That is how things are to the eye, in the redundancy of their appearance to the eye and not to the mind, as in the redundant word Augenschein, . . . in which the eye, tautologically, is named twice, as eye itself and as what appears to the eye" (AI 82). De Man's name for this way of seeing is "material vision": "The only word that comes to mind is that of a material vision" (AI 82), which is another way of saying, in a paradig- matic performative speech act, "I call this 'material vision. '" The word material then appears in a cascade of phrases in the subsequent pages: "the vision is purely material"; "what we call the material aspect"; "a materialism that, in the tradition of the reception of the third Critique, is seldom or never perceived"; "If the architectonic then appears, very near the end of the analytics of the aesthetic, at the conclusion of the section on the sublime, as the material disarticulation not only of na- ture but of the body [traditional examples of the beautiful or the sub- lime], then this moment marks the undoing of the aesthetic as a valid category. The critical power of a transcendental philosophy undoes the very project of such a philosophy leaving us, certainly not with an ideology--for transcendental and ideological (metaphysical) principles are part of the same system--but with a materialism that Kant's pos- terity has not yet begun to face up to" (AI 83, 88, 89).
How could we "face up to" something that we can see but not face up to in the sense of clearly confronting it and making it intelligible to ourselves? The idea of a way of seeing that is performed by the eye alone, wholly dissociated from the mind, is, strictly speaking, unintelli- gible, since any sense we give to this Augenschein is an illicit, ideologi- cal imposition: "To the extent that any mind, that any judgment, inter- venes, it is in error" (AI 82). That is what I mean by saying that de Man's materiality is nonphenomenal, since phenomenality always in- volves, instantly, making sense or trying to make sense of what we see. This "material vision" would be pure seeing prior to any seeing as the sort of understanding that we name when we say, "I see it all now. " It would be a pre-seeing seeing, that is, something unthinkable, unknow- able, unintelligible, a tautological eye eyeing: "Realism postulates a phenomenalism of experience which is here being denied or ignored. Kant's looking at the world just as one sees it ('wie man ihn sieht') is an absolute, radical formalism that entertains no notion of reference or semiosis" (AI 128).
The idea of a materiality that would not be phenomenal does not make sense. Nevertheless, that is just what de Man affirms, most overtly and in so many words at the end of the essay on Riffaterre, "Hypogram and Inscription. " There he speaks of "the materiality (as distinct from the phenomenality) that is thus revealed [when we remember that Hugo's poem was supposed to have been written on a window pane], the unseen 'cristal' whose existence thus becomes a certain there and a certain then which can become a here and a now in the reading 'now' taking place" (RT 51). The paradox is that the window glass, figure here for the materiality of inscription, is not what the eye sees but what the eye sees through. In the Kant essays, as in "Hypogram and In- scription," the rigor of de Man's own critical thinking brings him re- peatedly, by different routes, across the border of the intelligible and into the realm of the allergenic, in this case the recognition of a materi- alism in Kant that has seldom or never been recognized in the whole distinguished tradition of Kant scholarship and so is anathema to it, just as de Man's reading of somewhat similar material moments in Hegel was anathema to the distinguished Hegel specialist Raymond Geuss. 10
The final version of materiality in de Man is the "prosaic materiali- ty of the letter" (AI 90). Just what does de Man mean by that? No one doubts that writing (and speaking too) have a material base, marks on paper or modulated waves in the air. This materiality is the benign base of the meaning, permanence, and transmissibility of language. No problem. De Man of course does not mean anything so in agreement with common sense and received opinion. When de Man calls Kant's sublime Augenschein of sky and sea a "material vision" he goes on to raise a further question that is not answered until the end of the essay: "how this materiality is then to be understood in linguistic terms is not, as yet, clearly intelligible" (AI 82). The answer is the materiality of the letter, but just what does that mean? The essay ends with an ex- planation that if not clearly intelligible, at least indicates why these "linguistic terms" must be unintelligible. The reader is given intelli- gence of unintelligibility, new news of the unknowable.
The prosaic materiality of the letter, linguistic "equivalent" of a ma- terialism of vision, has two main features. One is a disarticulation of language equaling the disarticulations of nature and the human body de Man has found in Kant's dynamic sublime: "To the dismemberment of the body corresponds a dismemberment of language, as meaning- producing tropes are replaced by the fragmentation of sentences and
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propositions into discrete words, or the fragmentation of words into syllables or finally letters" (AI 89). Strictly speaking, as linguists, not to speak of language philosophers like Wittgenstein, have shown, words do not have meaning by themselves. They have meaning only when they are used, incorporated into sentences. To detach them from their sentences and leave them hanging there in the air or on the page, surrounded by blank paper, is the first stage in a progressive disarticu- lation of meaning that goes then to syllables and finally to letters. It is extremely difficult to see words, syllables, or letters, for example on a printed page, in this way, just as it is extremely hard to see as the eye sees. One has to be a poet, as Kant says, to do it. The mind instantly in- terprets what the eye sees, "perceives it," and gives meaning to it, just as the mind projects meaning into those mute letters on the page. It is almost impossible to see letters as just the material marks they are. Even words in a language we do not know are seen as language and not as sheer materiality. We tend to see random marks on a rock as possibly writing in an unknown language.
The other feature of the materiality of the letter stressed by de Man makes that materiality more likely to be glimpsed, in the wink of the eye, before the mind starts "reading. " This is repetition of words and word parts that calls attention to the absurd and unmotivated echoes among them at the level of syllable and letter: puns, rhymes, allitera- tions, assonances, and so on, that is, precisely those linguistic features poets especially use, "the play of the letter and of the syllable, the way of saying . . . as opposed to what is being said" (AI 89). The "persua- siveness" of the passage in Kant about the recovery of the imagination's tranquillity through material vision depends, de Man says, "on the proximity between the German words for surprise and admiration, Verwunderung and Bewunderung" (AI 89). The reader, de Man contin- ues, is led to assent to the incompatibility or aporia between the imagi- nation's failure and its success by "a constant, and finally bewildering alternation of the two terms, Angemessen(heit) and Unangemessen(heit), to the point where one can no longer tell them apart" (AI 90). One ad- ditional example of this in de Man's essays is the cascade of words in "fall" that he finds in a passage by Kleist: Fall, Beifall, Su? ndenfall, Ru? ckfall, Einfall, Zuru? ckfall, Fa? lle: "As we know from another narra- tive text of Kleist ["On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts while Speaking"], the memorable tropes that have the most success (Beifall) occur as mere random improvisation (Einfall) at the moment when the author has completely relinquished control over his meaning and has
relapsed (Zuru? ckfall) into the extreme formalization, the mechanical predictability of grammatical declensions (Fa? lle)" (RR 290). By the time the reader gets to the end of this the root "fall" is fast becoming a mere surd, a sound emptied of meaning: "fall, fall, fall, fall. " The read- er will see that "formalism" of "formalization" names for de Man not the beautiful aesthetic formalization of the artwork, but a principle of mechanical senselessness in language that he associates with the arbi- trariness of grammar, of declensions, Fa? lle. De Man goes on to make a pun of his own. Since Falle also means trap in German, he can say that everyone falls into "the trap of an aesthetic education which inevitably confuses dismemberment of language by the power of the letter with the gracefulness of a dance.
