Blindness and Insight Essays i Paul de Man

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.“Lyric and Modernity” was delivered at the English Institute during the September 1969 session on the lyric chaired by Professor Reuben A.Brower.Permission to reprint from the various periodicals is gratefully acknowledged.I have myself translated into English the four essays originally written in French as well as the quotations from various French and German authors.Material for second edition, revisedThe original French versions of “Les exégègeses de Hölderlin par Martin Heidegger” and “Impasse de la critique formaliste” were published in Critique (Paris).The translations are by Wlad Godzich.For permission to publish them in English the publisher is grateful to the editor of Critique, Jean Piel.Permission to reprint “The Rhetoric of Temporality” comes from the Johns Hopkins University Press; the essay originally appeared in Charles Singleton, editor, Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969).Thanks are due to Thomas R.Hart, editor of Comparative Literature, for permission to reprint the review of Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence.Thanks are also due Ralph Cohen, editor of New Literary History, for permission to reprint “Literature and Language: A Commentary.” The first edition of Blindness and Insight was published by Oxford University Press, New York.IntroductionCaution! Reader at Work!Wlad GodzichSome time ago, Michael Riffaterre proposed that the verbal existence of objects is best apprehended through the notion of “descriptive system”: rather than merely having names, objects are, linguistically speaking, the nexus between a number of nouns, epithets, motifs, narrative plots and situations, images, metaphors, oppositions, etc., all of which can be summoned into print or consciousness directly or through each other's mediation.1The notion is a rich one and deserving of widespread application: for example, there is little doubt that a descriptive system comes into play as soon as Paul de Man's name appears.His pre-eminence in the field of literary theory is generally acknowledged, and his lectures at professional meetings and conferences attract large audiences of scholars and students.He is found to be lucid, trenchant (“surgical” is much favored), uncompromisingly rigorous, austere, yet somehow affable, kind even.Although he deals with the leading critics and theoreticians of our day, his style is remarkably unpolemical.One listens to him as one witnesses a performance: one has the feeling beforehand that one knows what de Man will do, yet one still is awed by the elegance, precision, and economy of his performance; one has a reluctant but solid conviction that one could not duplicate it.De Man is thought to be highly original, yet, in a sense, he does exactly what we expect him to do.Therein lies the sense of our awe, but also of a certain malaise.If we are willing to concede that a certain degree of physical endowment enhanced by years of training does produce an exceptional athlete or star performer, we are most reluctant to extend such a concession to the realm of thought.Here feats must, indeed, be duplicated by others before they gain assent (philosophers of science call it, verifiability) and cannot remain the prerogative of their inventor, lest charlatanism be suspected.Such is the critical temper of our times that lately a version of this charge has been leveled at Paul de Man: his is the criticism of performance; he is arbitrary; he is not the slayer of the New Criticism but its last faithful remnant, not a radical iconoclast but a pillar of the establishment.Questions are raised: What is the status of a discourse that questions the status of all discourses? Does de Man escape his blindness? If so, by virtue of what dispensation? If not, where is it located and why is it not fatal? Where does the authority of his discourse come from? Is there more to it than a rhetoric of mastery?In their contradiction, all of these assertions and questions do constitute a descriptive system, and it is one that presupposes that Paul de Man has been read.And here we run into a problem—not that de Man's books and articles have not been read, but rather because to claim to have read de Man presupposes that we know how to read.Yet if there is anything that de Man's work has been asserting with a quiet but insistent resolve, it is that we do not know what reading is.Thus, before making any determination on the accuracy of part or the whole of the de Manian descriptive system, we must learn to read, and learn to read the question of reading in de Man.It is with this object in view that the editors of this series have decided to reissue the text of Paul de Man's first collection of essays, Blindness and Insight, augmented with essays from his early years, newly translated from the French, as well as the article that Jonathan Culler once described as “the most photocopied essay in literary criticism”—“The Rhetoric of Temporality.”IOnce upon a time, we all thought we knew how to read, and then came de Man.… Even with its bathos alleviated by the fairytale motif and the Boileau citation, such a statement remains misleading, for it is far from certain that we, as literary scholars, knew how to read.The institutionalization of literary studies in European and American universities in the nineteenth century took place under the aegis of philology and literary history, ignoring, for the most part, the tradition of classical poetics and rhetoric.The first sought to establish texts, to make them as reliable as possible, so that the second could weave them into a satisfactory narrative of emergent national cultural achievement.It is not clear that texts were read, or, if they were, how.2 To the trained scholarly gaze, they were made to yield a certain documentary information about the state of language, their authorship, their sources, the influences they had been subject to,3 and their place in a historical sequence or in some generic taxonomy.But alongside this function of information, they had nothing further to offer.It could in fact be suggested that, for the great age of literary history (roughly 1830–1939), literature had no cognitive value.The literary scholar in his or her capacity as historian certainly no longer felt authorized, let alone able, to state the truth, perhaps because truth no longer wore the same cloak or rose from the same old well; it was much easier to write glosses upon the texts of those who, in a naiveté becoming their olden times, had dared to utter it.There arose then with respect to literature and other fields of inquiry, notably philosophy and history, a generic distinction between primary and secondary texts previously restricted to the relation of sacred text and commentary, the impact of which is still very much with us [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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