Ideology, rhetoric, aesthetics : for De Man

237 Pages·2013·1.6 MB·English

by  Warminski

The Frontiers of Theory
The Frontiers of Theory Ideology,
Series Editor: Martin McQuillan, Kingston University
This series brings together internationally respected figures to comment on and
re-describe the state of theory in the twenty-first century.
Rhetoric ,
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“The publication of this book is a historical event. Paul de Man (and Warminski) mean by the o
term ‘event’ something that happens, something that changes history. This book does that l Aesthetics
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with unparalleled intelligence, learning, and insight. It develops and deploys to wonderful
effect a specifically Warminskian way of doing rhetorical readings.” g
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J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine
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“An unavoidable book: it meets the challenge of reading Paul de Man unflinchingly and,
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more importantly, without compromising de Man’s practice of rhetorical reading and writing.
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Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics stands alone in offering a rigorous explication, extension,
For De Man
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and counter-signing of de Man’s own signature – and signature intervention – within
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literary studies.”
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Kevin Newmark, Boston College c
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Explicates and extends Paul de Man’s late project of a critique of A
Andrzej Warminski
aesthetic ideology e
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After a reading of de Man’s work in all its rigor – and taking in the aesthetic theory of Kant, t
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Schiller and Hegel – the book goes on to uncover a “material moment” in Hegel’s
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Phenomenology of Spirit that lives on in Marx and in the Marxist tradition. The book also
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elucidates de Man’s critical reading of Heidegger on the example of Hölderlin, a moment i
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essential for de Man’s shift to the question of rhetoric and then to the question of ideology.
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It ends with a reading of Derrida’s “last” text on de Man and its uncanny self-inscription in
Rousseau’s episode of the stolen ribbon.
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This book is a major contribution to the undaerstanding of a crucial but much misunderstood r
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(and much repressed) moment – and figure – in the recent history of “theory”. It wagers that
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the kind of reading it represents is needed on the contemporary critical scene, and that M
rather than harkening back to a past over and done with, it may open up or point to a
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different future. n
Andrzej Warminski is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He has
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published Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory with Edinburgh
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University Press (2013). He is also the author of Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, d
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Heidegger and the editor of Paul de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology. z
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Cover image: The Temple of Juno in Agrigento, 1828–1830, s
Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). k
ISBN 978–0–7486–8126–6 i
Cover design: Michael Chatfield
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Spine 19mm.
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Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics
The Frontiers of Theory
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Ideology, Rhetoric,
Aesthetics
For De Man
Andrzej Warminski
For Katia and Adrian
© Andrzej Warminski, 2013
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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Contents
Series Editor’s Preface vi
Author’s Preface viii
Acknowledgements xii
List of Abbreviations xiv
PART I Aesthetic Ideology
1. Allegories of Reference: An Introduction to Aesthetic
Ideology 3
2. “As the Poets Do It”: On the Material Sublime 38
3. Returns of the Sublime: Positing and Performative in Kant,
Fichte, and Schiller 65
4. Lightstruck: “Hegel on the Sublime” 79
PART II Hegel/Marx
5. Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life 99
6. Man and Self- Consciousness: Kojève, Romantic Ironist 127
7. Next Steps: Lukács, Jameson, Post-D ialectics 137
PART III Heidegger/Derrida
8. Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin 159
9. Discontinuous Shifts: History Reading History 173
10. Machinal Effects: Derrida With and Without de Man 185
Appendix 1: A Question of an Other Order: Deflections of the
Straight Man 203
Appendix 2: Response to Frances Ferguson 215
Index 220
Series Editor’s Preface
Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends
and after-l ife. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no
longer resistant to Theory but a significant consensus has been estab-
lished and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream
of the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and
new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leaves
so- called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures
of auto- critique need to consider: what is the nature of this mainstream
Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other
disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and
what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken
place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of a
more-t han- critical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, which
thinks thought’s own limits?
‘Theory’ is a name that traps by an aberrant nominal effect the trans-
formative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought in
an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent: as a
‘name’, a word and a concept, Theory arrests or misprisions such think-
ing. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or to abandon
Theory (on the contrary one must always insist on the it-i s- necessary of
Theory even if one has given up belief in theories of all kinds). Rather,
this series is concerned with the presentation of work which challenges
complacency and continues the transformative work of critical thinking.
It seeks to offer the very best of contemporary theoretical practice in
the humanities, work which continues to push ever further the frontiers
of what is accepted, including the name of Theory. In particular, it is
interested in that work which involves the necessary endeavour of cross-
ing disciplinary frontiers without dissolving the specificity of disciplines.
Published by Edinburgh University Press, in the city of Enlightenment,
this series promotes a certain closeness to that spirit: the continued
Series Editor’s Preface vii
exercise of critical thought as an attitude of inquiry which counters
modes of closed or conservative opinion. In this respect the series aims
to make thinking think at the frontiers of theory.
Martin McQuillan
Author’s Preface
This is a book about the work of Paul de Man on the critique of aes-
thetic ideology and the strange “materiality” – a “materiality without
materialism,” as Derrida has put it – that emerges from it. It consists
of three groups of essays – “I. Aesthetic Ideology,” “II. Hegel/Marx,”
“III. Heidegger/Derrida” – and it is “about” de Man in two senses.
Approximately half of the book – in particular, Chapters 1, 2, 4, 9, and
10 – consists of an explication and a reading of crucial articulations
in de Man’s project; and the other half would extend this project and
its implications by a reading of “material” moments in Hegel, Marx,
and the Marxian tradition (Lukács, Jameson) on the one hand and in
Heidegger’s hermeneutics (and its radicalization by Derrida) on the
other. The book’s subtitle – “For De Man” – could be read somewhat
like Althusser’s Pour Marx.
Paul de Man’s turn to questions of ideology and the political in his
late work was anything but an arbitrary choice or an accident of biogra-
phy. Rather it was a move that comes directly out of de Man’s particular
kind of rhetorical reading – i.e., one which goes through and past tropes
to demonstrate how tropological systems undo themselves and produce
a material remainder or residue, what de Man comes to call “material
inscription.”1 And since what gets undone in this self-u ndoing of tropo-
logical systems is the phenomenality – including what de Man calls “the
phenomenality of the linguistic sign” – that tropes on the one hand
make possible, one main casualty is the value of the aesthetic (and of
the aesthetic function of literature). This deconstruction of the aesthetic
is to be read in those texts that take the aesthetic not as a value but as a
philosophical category subject to critique: for example and above all, in
the philosophical aesthetics of Kant and of Hegel. That is, paradoxically
1 See my companion volume to this one: Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading
in Practice and Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
Author’s Preface ix
but consistently enough, the critique of aesthetic ideology is to be read
already in the founding texts of aesthetic theory, and it is only thanks
to a relapse and a regression – what de Man calls the “Schillerization of
Kant,” for example – in the reception of these texts that we can blunt
their critical thrust and continue to teach literature as an aesthetic func-
tion. “We are all Schillerians,” says de Man at a lecture occasion, “no
one is Kantian any more.”
In thus restoring the critical power of Kant’s and Hegel’s aesthetics, de
Man accomplishes several things. For one, he begins what is perhaps the
most serious and important rethinking of the question of ideology since
Althusser’s essays of the 1960s and 1970s. He also provides us with a
way to pose anew the (German Romantic) question about philosophy’s
“presentation” (Darstellung) in a discourse that would lay claim to
transparency on the basis of a taken for granted “phenomenalization
of the sign” – i.e., an aesthetic moment that, once read, turns out to be
anything but stable. Unfortunately, de Man was not able to complete his
project and left us something like an outline and some (at times cryptic)
hints and indications of paths to follow. The present volume attempts
to clarify this project while doing justice to its rigor and to extend it in
ways productive for critical thought. It comes with a certain modest
confidence – or at least a willingness to take a certain risk – that the kind
of reading represented in these essays and their attentiveness to the ques-
tion of language is needed on the contemporary critical scene, and that
rather than harkening back to a past over and done with, it may open
up or point to a different future.
Taking the place of an Introduction, Chapter 1 is a detailed exposi-
tion of de Man’s project in Aesthetic Ideology and how it relates to the
rhetorical readings in his Allegories of Reading. The chapter ends with
a reading of de Man’s Pascal essay (in particular his difficult account
of the zero) as an example of what it means to read “from the point of
view of the quadrivium” and as an anticipation of de Man’s essays on
Kant and Hegel. Chapter 2 is a very close reading of de Man’s main
essay on Kant’s sublime and the linguistic models (“tropological”
and “performative”) and peculiar “materiality” and “material vision”
(ascribed to “the poets”) that emerge from it. In order to explicate de
Man’s argument, the chapter also needs to perform its own commentary
on Kant’s difficult “Analytic of the Sublime.” Chapter 3 is a shorter
piece that follows up on the reading of Kant in Chapter 2 to demon-
strate that the aporetic structure of the Kantian sublime leaves traces
both in the thought of Fichte and in the aesthetic theory of Schiller. The
chapter shows how Fichte and, in particular, Schiller bring to resolu-
tion Kant’s unresolvable problematic of the sublime by resorting to