De Man, That Dangerous Supplement Ziatan Filipovic A dissertation submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY English and Comparative Literature Goldsmiths, University of London London,2009 Copyright © Zlatan Filipovic, 2009. 3 Abstract To ask whether Paul de Man still matters is perhaps to have already answered the question. De Man's work, as 1. Hillis Miller writes in a telling irony, "is a violent allergen that provokes fits of coughing, sneezing, and burning eyes, perhaps even worse symptoms, unless it can be neutralized or expelled." There is something inherently resistant in de Man then that goes beyond his wartime journalism. Dust having settled, one must have good reasons today to whip it up and risk another reactive fit. Yet it is precisely this resistance in de Man that will pivot the movement ofthis thesis, as it sneezes and coughs along the way. Relayed through the allergen of terms like deconstruction, unreadability, rhetoric, it will come to remark a trace of something inappropriable, inhuman in texts, which persistently stalks our attempts to be rid of it. It articulates a crisis in the empire of cognition and a disruption of epistemo-aesthetic ideologies that inform our thinking of the political. The thesis plots a narrative that interrogates the relation between the rhetorical, the inhuman and the political, which in de Man comes to activate a new exigency of reading, constantly overtasking received epistemic regimes that integrate dissention to open a passage for the new ones to emerge. What is consistently traced is the measured emptying out of ontology and psychologism from language and its opening to unmasterable linguistic agencies. This general freeing of latency in structural closures that de Man's reading always teases out not only unsettles their epistemic reliability but also calls for a permanent assault on the authoritative grounding of their legitimacy. What shocks in de Man's work, provoking systemic fits, is a kind of permanent revolution to which his writing is committed. 4 Contents PREFACE 6 INTRODUCTION: DISFIGURING DE MAN 13 DE MAN, THAT DANGEROUS SUPPLEMENT 43 OF THE ORIGINAL POLEMIC: PHILOSOPHY'S FLOWERS 63 TOWARDS A TEMPORAL POETICS: RISS DES GRUNDES 91 HEGELIAN WITHOUT RESERVE 96 ON THE SECOND SLOPE: BLANCHOT AND DE MAN 119 THE WIDOWED WORD: MALLARME AND DE MAN 141 READING CON: RHETORIC, ALLEGORY AND THE MACHINE 178 ALLEGORY'S CONTRESENS: "To BRUSH HISTORY AGAINST THE GRAIN" 190 THE MACHINE 230 POLITICS DE TROP 255 SPACE ENGINEERS 264 HUMAN RELAPSES, INHUMAN EVENTS 279 BIBLIOGRAPHY 308 PRIMARY SOURCES: 308 SECONDARY SOURCES: 313 5 Profound aversion to reposing once and for all in anyone total view of the world. Fascination of the opposing point of view: refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic. -- Nietzsche, The Will to Power 6 Preface Because reading is always reading otherwise, no two repetitions of the book are the same. Preface, writes Gayatri Spivak, comes to "commemorate that difference in identity by inserting itself between two readings - in our case, my reading (given of course that my language and I are shifting and unstable), my rereading, my rearranging of the text - and your reading.") The preface, then, would be the site of a certain unreadability of the "book," a placeholder for its scattered repetitions and its disinscription by reading. Indeed, "[t]he preface, by daring to repeat the book and reconstitute it in another register, merely enacts what is already the case: the book's repetitions are always other than the book. There is, in fact, no 'book' other than these ever-different repetitions: the 'book' in other words, is always already a 'text,' constituted by the play of identity and difference" (xii). Writing prefatory remarks to the text is subject to the same general law of reading. It does not bind the "book" but perforates it yet again. Itself a text, preface would have to be pre-prefaced in tum by the general laws of its own expository reading. There can be no end to prefacing. And, indeed, the text prefaced is nothing other but a preface to another text that comes to displace it in misreading. It is a question of a certain resistance of reading that syncopates the "book" by shedding it in textual displacements. One never knows whether one writes a preface to the book or a book to the preface. I Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Translator's Preface." Preface to Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins UP, 1997), p. xii. 7 Prefacing is an "essential," yet "ludicrous operation," Jacques Derrida writes. Not "only because such an operation would confine itself to discursive effects of an intention-to-mean, but because, in pointing out a single thematic nucleus or a single guiding thesis, it would cancel out the textual displacement that is at work 'here. ",2 That is at work everywhere where there is reading, and, in particular, reading of Paul de Man. For reading, in de Man, is what always double backs on its own statement and disaffirms it in a permanent shedding of thematic closures. It initiates, one could say, an unrelieved pledge to the other to whom reading is owed. To preface thematic pivot points or a topological relief that would account for the curvatures of de Man's writing would be precisely an attempt to domesticate the alterity of his texts that testify to a challenge and a profound resource of a certain resistance that prevents all reading from reifying into positive, exploitative truths. Indeed, as Derrida writes, "if such a thing were justifiable, we would have to assert right now that one of the theses ... inscribed within dissemination is precisely the impossibility of reducing a text as such to its effects of meaning, content, thesis, or theme. Not the impossibility, perhaps ... but the resistance - we shall call it the restance [that is, some other, atopos, always left unappropriated] - of a sort of writing that can neither adapt nor adopt such a reduction" ("Outwork," 7-8). What the text will have shown is the impossibility of prefacing its eventfulness and uncertainty that is also a resource of reading. "Hence," Derrida continues, "this is not a preface, at least not ifby preface we mean a table, a code, an annotated summery of prominent signifieds, or an index of key words or of proper names" (8). This preface is then more of a 2 Jacques Derrida, "Outwork," in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: The Athlone Press, 1981), p. 7. 8 retractive rent present in every reading that in providing "key terms" also, and by the same token, opens itself to a fund of repressed energies and discontinued possibilities that belong to de Man's text and disrupt all possibilities of its totalisation, keeping the "book" unwritten along its margins. It proceeds with no finality in view and, indeed, in most general terms possible. What it sets forth is a trajectory of a certain reading resistance in de Man that will come to empty the referential fiat of language and mount an assault on cognitive orders, keeping open the possibility of disruption as the very eventfulness of reading and a chance for politics. There is something impossible, indeed inhuman, in reading, an exigency that with a force of compulsion overtasks all possibility. But what one essentially does here is a conferring of masks or faces (prosopon poien) on a writing that has none in order to make it readable, to make it speak. Prosopopeia, however, as de Man has shown, defaces to the exact extent that it restores. It recalls the substitutivity and exteriority of the face that accounts for the possibility of reading. One always makes the text say more or less than it does and risks being struck dumb on what matters. But this is the essential risk of reading. The introductory chapter will consider and address the critical reception of de Man's writing, its immediate implications for our reading of literature, and what appears to have caused a certain topological concern within deconstruction, its crisis. This crisis is motivated not only by specific institutional and disciplinary needs, a guardrail against the entire register of irresponsibility and political apathy de Man's writing seems to solicit, but by an underlying opposition between literature and philosophy and its systematic disarticulation in 9 de Man, as a certain pressure or exigency of reading to account for the irreducible rhetoricity of philosophical concepts. What is put in question towards the end, however, is the possibility of anything like a topological margin that would presuppose a rigorous demarcation of meaning of deconstruction. There is nothing to signal the epoch of its meaning. This opens to the next chapter where the possibility of deconstruction, that in de Man seems to have lost its initiative and its ethico-political exigency, is made to hinge precisely on a certain impossibility of its margins. There is, perhaps, deconstruction only there where it is not, cannot be owned, attested to in its presence, nor secured against the invaginations that constitute it. De Man, that dangerous supplement, a marginal presence, is shown to be an irreducible presence of a margin inside deconstruction. In terms of its philosophical topoi that would come to carve out the property of deconstruction from the travesty of its rhetorical and literary perversions, deconstruction only affirms the very possibility of incursion of the literary. If there are borders between literature and philosophy, deconstruction is the borderline constituting their difference. Neither proper nor improper, it constitutes, and essentially limits, the very possibility of property. De Man can no longer be consigned to the margins in terms of this opposition because deconstruction is both traced by and is a tracing of the margin constitutive of all concepts.