Paul de Man

The following essay will look at the issue of neologisms and the ‘chains of
Equivalences’ as well as ways of attaining jouissance in James Joyce’s book “Ulysses”.

The vast amount of neologisms, syllogisms, allusions, which are utilized throughout this book raise a rather substantial issue, in that the meaning/comprehensibility of the text is constantly at odds apropos the execution - act of writing. The autonomous potential – literariness – of Ulysses’ language possesses a considerable freedom from referential restraint, while at the same time it makes it epistemologically highly volatile and fragile. Suffice to say that a single signifier is capable of launching intricate phenomenological repercussions, which ought to overcast the sentiment (i.e., considerations of truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness, good and bad etc.)  Moreover, the ‘word’ itself becomes merely a vicissitude/interchangeable with other signifiers. In other words, the Signifier word-sic and its grammatical omnipotence – literality - is perpetually trivialized and belittled by the contingency and arbitrariness of the mise-en-scene.

Since the mid-1970s in American academia, a series of articles and books in Sinology (comparative literature) appeared with the attention to rhetoric, contending that the Western sense of allegory/metaphor is absent in Chinese poetics and literature. According to them, the Chinese concept of “allegory/metaphor” has little to do with creation or invention, and is known for its lack of disjunction, which is founded on the monistic worldview that assumes a pre-established unity between the subject and object. Such a representation for Chinese poetics, as this essay argues, constitutes at best a part, or rather, a line of thought in Chinese poetry, which interestingly recalls the symbolist aesthetics challenged by Paul de Man since the late 60s. Tracing the changing observations in major comparative works on Chinese poetics since Qian Zhongshu, the essay considers problems in comparative poetics, the relationship between philosophy-religion-worldview and literature, and understanding of the Self and the Other.

This paper focuses upon Adorno's critique of musical temporality-as found in his musical criticism and as implied by his philosophy as a whole. I shall contend that the two do not necessarily coincide. Adorno presents temporality in a different light in each, and rather than labor over Adorno's 'disparate and diverging comments on temporality in an attempt to prove their inner consistency, I dwell on their irreconcilability. This is made a particularly plausible approach by Adorno's own methods, which I characterize as being driven by the principle of antinomy. It is not for nothing that Adorno refuses to issue coherent, succinct theses, and we misunderstand his rationale by passing over or attempting to explain away the apparent inconsistencies and paradoxes in his writing. It does not need my intervention for the contradictory element in Adorno's writing to be made fully apparent. Current reception of Adorno neatly polarizes into those devotees who

The question of ethics posits, at its core, an idea of the other. But what is this other? What is it made of? What is the meaning of its power over the human subject? The paper looks at the idea of otherness as its appears in Levinas and Paul de Man – two thinkers who share a fascination with radical exteriority but could not disagree more on its meaning – and its implication on the question of freedom. With Walter Benjamin in supporting role.

Soren Kierkegaard Lucinda-kritikájának elemzéséből kiindulva azt vizsgálom meg, hogy miben különbözött Schlegel és Kierkegaard iróniával kapcsolatos trópus-használata, milyen metaforák mentén határolódott el a dán filozófus német elődjétől. A hegeli bírálati pontok számbavételével igyekszem árnyalni a Paul de Man-féle interpretációt is. Kierkegaard és Schlegel összehasonlítása során külön hangsúlyt fektetek az éghajlat, a meztelenség, és a restség alakzataira, illetve azok revelációval és szubverzióval kapcsolatos szerepére.

Na obra de Rainer Maria Rilke e de Clarice Lispector, fica sempre a
impressão de que alguns gestos permanecem fora do lugar, como
se, à deriva de significados desconhecidos, eles fizessem parte de
uma linguagem que surge no instante em que tudo desaparece. Ao
longo deste livro, Alexandre Rodrigues da Costa oferece reflexões
sobre como esses gestos se formam, como as obras de autores,
aparentemente tão distantes e diferentes um do outro, podem
abordar, cada um a seu modo, a relação entre as artes visuais e a
literatura, entre aquele que olha e o mundo que se ergue diante
dele. Com este livro, o autor busca perceber de que maneira se dá o
olhar na obra de Rilke e de Clarice sobre as artes visuais. Para isso,
ele se detém em como esse olhar se forma a partir do contato do
sujeito com o mundo à sua volta. Daí a importância, para este estudo,
das análises de Paul de Man e de Merleau-Ponty, seja do ponto de
vista retórico ou fenomenológico, sobre o quiasma. Ao enfatizar as
relações que Rilke e Clarice fazem entre a literatura e as artes visuais,
o autor também se utiliza do quiasma para analisar como os dois
autores interpretam o abstrato e o figurativo, e, consequentemente,
contestam os limites impostos entre as artes. Alexandre Rodrigues
da Costa demonstra, assim, como Rilke e Clarice articulam em seus
textos reflexões que acabam nos levando para uma análise do próprio
olhar e, dessa maneira, tornam possível pensar as artes como forma
de comunhão entre o sujeito e o mundo, no momento em que ela
questiona si mesma e o espaço que ocupa no mundo.

In Memoires for Paul de Man Derrida articulates a new model of mourning as an ongoing conversation with the dead who are both within us and beyond us and continue to look at us with a look that is a call to responsibility and transformation. Derridean mourning significantly revises classic psychoanalytic accounts of mourning, reworking and combining conceptual apparatus from psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature: incorporation (Abraham and Torok), gedachtnis (Hegel), rhetoricity and aporia (de Man).

El texto que presentamos, Autobiografías visuales. Del archivo al índice, inició su andadura en el marco del programa de investigación Biography  desarrollado en el Getty Research Institute de Los Ángeles (California) en 2003.

En dicho programa se presentaba  la biografía (incluyendo la biografía del “yo” o autobiografía)  como  un género emergente no sólo en el ámbito literario, sino en el de la historiografía artística, un género que podía ofrecer nuevas aproximaciones, tanto teóricas como contextuales, al erosionado método biográfico implantado por Giorgio Vasari en 1550 y que respondía  a las siguientes preguntas ¿Cómo las convenciones biográficas han variado a lo largo del tiempo y a través de las culturas? ¿Cómo éstas han influido en la interpretación de los objetos? ¿Cómo algunas propiedades y características de los objetos  conforman la producción verbal  de una biografía de artista? ¿Cómo las interacciones con los objetos artísticos contribuyen a los procesos de formación de la identidad en la consideración de la biografía? ¿Cuáles son los “modos biográficos” dentro de las artes visuales?. Estas y otras cuestiones fueron  ampliamente debatidas por los más de treinta  participantes convocados al citado programa a lo largo del año académico 2002-2003, entre ellos Paul Barolsky, Peter Burke, Eric Fernie, Nikolaos Chatzinikolaou, Griselda Pollock, Rudolf Preimesberger, Paul Smith, Sally Stein, Elisabeth Sussman y Richard Wrigley.

Como apunta el biógrafo y escritor francés Claude Arnaud , desde la década de los años ochenta, las grandes corrientes del pensamiento, la antropología, el existencialismo, el psicoanálisis y el marxismo empezaron a ser víctimas de una contraofensiva “fulminante” que a partir de un cierto “retorno del yo” (y/o de la subjetividad)  habría propiciado indirectamente la vuelta de géneros desplazados en los lindes de la historia como la novela histórica, la biografía y la ficción.  Y ante un cierto desmoronamiento del optimismo del progreso histórico, de la idea de vanguardia y, en general, de la condición de  modernidad (reivindicar la modernidad resultaba casi imposible desde el momento en que todo proyecto global , estético o ideológico parecía amenazado de deriva), la biografía aportaba  una mirada dispersa, fragmentada, rebelde respecto al sistema y “curiosa” en relación a los hechos, sus gentes y sus orígenes. 

Paralelamente al impulso de la genealogía  como alternativa al discurso explicativo lineal y desencadenante, la biografía aparecía como el género historiográfico que mejor podía explicar el renovado interés por el pasado vinculado a las “micronarrativas” así como por una dimensión del individualismo que en cada personalidad mostraba “un universo en sí”  . De ahí la emergencia de un movimiento de curiosidad en relación a las “vidas” y a la idea misma de “vida” como reacción frente a unos años de inflacionismo teórico dominados por la crisis de la autoría. En definitiva, unos años dominados por una defensa a ultranza de la impersonalidad, bajo el paradigma del barthesiano concepto de “muerte del autor” (1968) y el nacimiento, a sus expensas, del lector, o bajo el replanteamiento del estatuto de autor expresado por Michel Foucault en el texto “¿Qué es  un autor?” (1969)  en el que pone en entredicho las convenciones usadas en favor  de la “función-autor” o del autor vinculado con una  “entidad discursiva”.

Donde había antes un concepto, parece imponerse ahora una biografía . Y siempre con la consideración de que la biografía no explica la vida, sino que corre paralela a ella, como en paralelo corren los raíles del tren.  Ante la necesidad de llevar a cabo un inventario de una época y  de los modos de pensar, escribir, recapitular las personalidades , las formas y los comportamientos de la misma,  la biografía aparece como una “respuesta instintiva”, un impulso ciego frente a los fundamentos del orden y de la razón unidos al yo. Como afirma Arnaud, individualismo y biografía comparten  elementos en común y sobre todo participan de una misma restauración de la inocencia, después de  decenios de cuestionamiento moderno del “yo”.  Y si el psicoanálisis constituyó una etapa en el retorno del “yo” , sin duda la biografía  aparece como el instrumento más adecuado para  responder a la crisis de la “intelligentsia”, de la teoría artística y los grandes relatos de la modernidad .

Resultan interesantes al respecto las reflexiones de Pierre Bourdieu en el texto “La ilusión biográfica” (1994)  en el que justifica la proliferación de “las historias de vida” (concepto que abarcaría un amplio espectro de manifestaciones discursivas, desde entrevistas hasta una autobiografía clásica) por la necesidad no tanto de profundizar en acontecimientos únicos y autosuficientes vinculados con el “sujeto” y con el “nombre propio” sino por la voluntad de contextualizar los acontecimientos biográficos en el campo social en el que se ubican: “esto supone afirmar que no se puede comprender una trayectoria a menos de haber construido  de antemano los estados sucesivos del campo en el que esta trayectoria se ha desarrollado”

The task of the main character of J.L. Borges' short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is not very difficult, indeed, Pierre Menard decides to re-write word by word Cervantes' Don Quixote. However, he presumes to accomplish this undertaking not merely by coping the novel, but rather by reproducing it as if the Don Quixote naturally arose through Menard's subjectivity and creativity. The French character does not intend to write an adaptation of Miguel Cervantes, a sort of “Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on La Cannebière or Don Quixote on Wall Street” (Borges, 48), since being a man of good taste he considers adaptations mere anachronisms. “He did not want to compose another Quixote - which is easy - but the Quixote itself . [...] [H]e did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide - word for word and line for line -.” (Borges, 48. Emphasis by Borges).
In order to achieve his goal Menard presupposes two possible alternatives: “[k]now Spanish well, recover the Catholic faith, fight against the Moors or the Turk, forget the history of
Europe between the years 1602 and 1918, be Miguel de Cervantes.” Or “go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.” (Borges, 48-49). Menard, obviously, opts for the latter. J.L. Borges describes the singular work of this fictional French literary critic and symbolist poet, as a sort of encomium, a critical review that attempts to re-establish what Borges calls the “subterranean” work of Menard. The form adopted by Borges is the first element that destabilizes the reader's mind, since Borges starts to play with the plausibility of the references that he uses for his paradoxical review; he merges fictitious characters with
prominent figures of literary and philosophic history as Paul Valéry, Bertrand Russel or Leibniz. The parodic intent of the story towards the literary critique is evident through out the
entire narration, e.g. the ironic reference to the “unforgettable vendredis” hosted by the unlikely Baroness de Bancourt.
The continuous shifting between narrative and literary critique, fictitious and veritable, plausible and contradictory, creates an infinite web of references that merges into Borges' labyrinthian writing, whereof Pierre Menard represents the first victim. The density and the strict bond between content and form inherent Borges' writing has allowed, over the years, the proliferation of numerous critical readings on Pierre Menard...,
that have attempted to give a plausible interpretation of this short story through different perspectives and disciplinary fields, such as literary criticism, history, philosophy or psychology. Borges' subtle narrative capacity of creating stories whereof is impossible to discern if an element is central or peripheral and to separate the content from the form, creates a sort of illogical dynamic of plausible and contradictory entities that allows the coexistence of diverging and, occasionally, oppositional theories. The embracing nature of Borge's Pierre Menard... is identifiable also in Walter Benjamin's short essay The Task of the Translator. Indeed, this theoretical text has begotten several rereadings, wherein numerous thinkers exposed their interpretations, that, as with Menard,
occasionally resulted as contrasting theories. Benjamin's and Borges' texts share the possibility of allowing the dynamic tension between contraries, in fact they both tend to ground their own existence on their multiplicity; paradoxically they feed on the tensions that derive from their interpretation. As Pierre Menard..., The Task of the Translator constantly creates a series of inter-textual and extra-textual references that render it ineffable in its entirety. Moreover, also in Benjamin's text the content and the form through which it has been expressed, appear absolutely inseverable so that the purpose pursued by the author could be accomplished. It succeeds in rendering possible the coexistence of contradictory element, for instance “the text is full of tropes, and it selects tropes which convey the illusion of totality. It seems to relapse into the tropological errors that it denounces.” (De Man, 30)
Hence, this communal embracing nature of both texts  onstitutes the root cause of their permanence or their “afterlife” as Benjamin calls it. Since they are texts which reflect on the aesthetic production of a work of art, on the nature of art itself, hence upon themselves as writing expressions, they envelop the reader/critic who is occasionally attracted and rejected by them. Therefore, I presume that they both own the features that Benjamin identifies in the original work, c'est-à-dire contain[ing] the law governing the translation: its translatability.” (70) Simultaneously, their originality is not
affected by the act of translation because “[j]ust as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original not so much from its life as from its afterlife.” (Benjamin, 71) Besides the conceptual contiguity of these works, I reckon that these two text could be
analysed next to each other for these particular and communal aesthetic features. Hence, by defining Pierre Menard as the translator of the Quixote, I will attempt to explain why
although his “subterranean” work slightly touches Cervantes' Don Quixote, he diverges form the Spanish novel to reach different meanings; “[j]ust as a tangent [that] touches a circle
lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity.” (Benjamin, 80). In the first section of this essay, I will briefly resume Benjamin's The Task of the Translator, while in the other two sections I will concentrate my analysis on Borges' text.

This project tells a history of allegory from late modernism into the present. It presents case studies of four sites of allegorical thought and practice in late twentieth-century American cultural production, with a focus on post-WWII art, theory, literature, and material culture: Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic writings in dialogue with the work of Color Field painter Morris Louis and his critics; the relationship between materiality and hermeneutics in Ken Kesey’s communal art project, Furthur; the literary theory of Paul de Man, where allegory becomes conflated with irony; and allegorical structure and performativity in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Understanding allegory as a structure of thought—a transmedial structure based on an urge for meaning-making inherent in the human mind that is modified and adapted in response to evolving historical contexts, circumstances, and pressures—it examines these sites of allegorical transformation to ask how allegory was mobilized, theorized, or used by historical actors working within the limits of their contextual conditions of possibility. In doing so, it asks how recent changes in allegorical form, structure, and function come to shape the mode’s contemporary appearance, arguing that allegory’s structure undergoes a progressive flattening of levels as its aesthetic transcendence is reimagined as aesthetic immanence.

Selva: A Journal of the History of Art, issue 2 (Fall 2020): "Reactionary Art Histories." Edited by Rachel Silveri and Trevor Stark. An investigation of right-wing art history and criticism in the 20th century, with an emphasis on the interwar period in Europe. One section of the issue consists of a dossier of translations and critical essays focused on the Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr, who joined the Nazi party in 1931. Further essays consider art historians, critics, and urbanists in France, Italy, and Brazil.

O presente texto surge como uma tentativa de “leitura” do ensaio “A Resistência à Teoria”, de Paul de Man, almejando uma compreensão dos princípios subjacentes ao texto damaniano, iniciaremos por uma reflexão acerca da sua concepção de linguagem (e literariedade) em articulação com a “radicalidade da leitura” (a necessária tensão interna entre os constituintes: “gramática” e “retórica”), passando para a análise do(s) sentido(s) da resistência à teoria,  e, por último, a respectiva articulação da literatura com o conhecimento do mundo (“a arremetida epistemológica da dimensão retórica”).

El trabajo reconstruye el concepto de ironía del crítico de origen belga Paul De Man a los fines de mostrar algunos supuestos filosóficos que emplea para su conceptualización. Concentramos el análisis en su conferencia de 1977 que póstumamente fue publicada con el nombre “El concepto de ironía”. El objetivo es evidenciar los elementos y herramientas conceptuales que De Man emplea para abordar este concepto de origen romántico. Finalmente, empleamos algunos comentaristas de su obra para estimar las consecuencias y alcances de esta conferencia tan citada y comentada.

This article reevaluates Michael Fried’s antitheatrical aesthetics—expounded primarily in “Art and Objecthood” (1967) and Absorption and Theatricality (1980)—by constellating Fried’s work alongside Péter Szondi’s writings on modern drama and Paul de Man’s theories of allegory. This theoretical juxtaposition reveals, first, that the phenomenon Fried describes as “absorption” parallels a form of mimetic, bourgeois drama hegemonic in European theatre from the time of Diderot to Ibsen, and second, that Fried’s concept of “theatricality” corresponds significantly to the notion of 􏰀allegory􏰁 developed in de Man’s work. Fried’s writings thus advance a theory of modernity organized around the rise and fall of mimesis in performance, one in which mimetic drama comes programmatically to eclipse allegory and theatricality during the Enlightenment, only to then fall into crisis around the turn of the twentieth century with the rise of modernism, understood as a moment marked by the reemergence of allegory and theatricality in the arts. In this way, Fried’s views of theatricality overlap considerably with the origins of postdramatic theatre demonstrated influentially in theatre studies by Hans-Thies Lehmann, and these overlaps require our field to rethink now well-established positions on Fried and Lehmann alike. A new view of theatre history is required, one that accounts both for the emergence of supposedly postdramatic forms and for this general reappearance of theatricality and allegory in modern times.

In his paper “The Return to Philology,” Paul de Man insists that philology and theory should not be in conflict, but should, rather, mutually enhance one another. This claim that the turn to theory is also a return to philology is explored in the context of the structure of language. In the last twenty to twenty-five years, the return to philology has been a dominant part of the Anglo-Saxon discourse of “world literature,” which has turned away from theory. The return to philology is captured in a market-based adaptation of literature in terms of globalization, transnationalism, and translation. In his latest book The Birth and Death of Literary Theory (2019), Galin Tihanov recalls the legacy of classical literary theory and propounds the contemporary discourse of world literature as an unreflected continuation of this legacy as it was articulated in Viktor Shklovsky’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s approaches to literature beyond language. Turning this legacy on its head, this essay focuses, rather, on language in literature. In a short-circuiting way, Roman Jakobson’s linguistics and poetics and Erich Auerbach’s nonnational-based philology can be seen as surprisingly close to one another.

Analyse der La Grande Bellezza Sorrentinos,  im Hinblick auf die Merkmale des zeitgenössischen italienischen Kinos und im Zusammenhang mit dem Begriff der “Allegorie des Lesens” interpretiert wird. Dieser Begriff ist mit den dekonstrukturalistischen Theorien Paul de Mans zu verstehen, der “die Allegorie des Lesens” als eine Art von Erzählung bezeichnet, die die Widersprüche der Lektüre einschließt.

Impossible Reading: Idolatry and Diversity in Literature argues that to welcome diversity necessitates resisting idolatry. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Impossible Reading begins with chapters exploring the Hebrew Bible's and the Apostle Paul's divergent understanding of idolatry. Exodus's polemic against idols emerges as friendly to diversity and as resonant with the event of spacing that Plato names khōra. However, Paul's denunciations of idolatry presage the diversity ideology contemporary institutions embrace to gain legitimacy and to dissipate struggles for justice. Additional chapters examine how the Hebrew Bible's and Paul's divergent notions of idolatry impact the treatment of diversity in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's play El Divino Narciso and in two novels: Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Alfredo Véa's gods go begging. The final chapter details the workings of diversity ideology in the debate over removing the Christian cross from Los Angeles County's official seal. Suggesting that the Decalogue's prohibition of idolatry may actually help believers and non¬believers alike to lessen the violence undertaken in the names of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Impossible Reading seeks to contest diversity ideology and to open new paths for the study of diversity in literature.

In the wake of Bertrand Russell’s contention that Lawrence’s ‘mystical philosophy of “blood”’ led ‘straight to Auschwitz’, academics have been dutifully unearthing evidence of latent, cryptic or proto-fascist ideas in his work. Several scholars have chased up Russell’s suspicion that Lawrence somehow ‘imbibed prematurely the ideas afterwards developed by Hitler and Mussolini’ from Frieda and her circle of German intellectuals, and much energy has been expended on drawing dubious parallels between völkisch ideologues, such as Oswald Spengler, Alfred Rosenberg and Houston Chamberlain, and the work of Lawrence. In this article, I problematize some of the thinking that has led to his work being characterized as fascist, for this often involves a logic of contamination, whereby if Hitler read Nietzsche and Lawrence read Nietzsche, Lawrence becomes tarred with the fascist brush. This logic of contamination, I argue, is not only present in the work of the scholars who have highlighted völkisch elements in his thinking, it is also present in the Frankfurt School, which conceived of fascism as a disease, whose ideological symptoms spread and reproduced like a virus, infecting the body politic. I reveal that the Frankfurt School was in fact ‘infected’ by one of the völkisch thinkers who allegedly influenced Lawrence, and which led, by the logic of contamination, to his work being represented as fascist.

But the course ‘literary criticism’, the reason why I am writing this piece, was unsatisfactory and the contents only kept us ‘outmoded’. We had Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Arnold’s ‘The Study of Poetry’, Wordsworth’s ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, Johnson’s ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ and Aristotle’s Poetics. I have heard that Shelley’s ‘A Defense of Poetry’, excerpts from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Dryden’s ‘An Essay of Dramatic Poesy’ and Sidney’s ‘An Apology for Poetry’ too were there in the syllabus, in the past years. But still, what is it really with our obsession for things no longer deemed ‘valid’? Training in classical thoughts is undoubtedly praiseworthy (and necessary too!), but if that happens without some knowledge of the contemporary, it will be difficult to stand on the same footing with the constantly improving world literatures and their critical literary manifestos.

Text, vycházející z konceptu dez-interpretace Paula de Mana, si klade otázku po smyslu interpretace literárních textů. Zabývá se především dvěma významnými studie, které reflektují toto téma: esejí Susan Sontagové "Proti interpretaci" a studií Jonathana Cullera "Za hranicemi interpretace". V závěrečné části je pak z "demanovské" perspektivy zvažována otázka možného smyslu interpretace odsouzené k tomu být dez-interpretací.

Everything Jack Lindsay wrote was about the past or saturated with historical consciousness. Plebeian experiences, rebellion, revolution, and progressive expectations predominate. It is therefore natural to think of him as a Marxist historian. He himself identified as one, and was a regular attender of the meetings of the Communist Party's Historians' Group, the members which made substantial contributions to British and to Marxist historiography.

Yet on closer examination, Lindsay turns out to have been an unusual sort of historian and an unusual sort of Marxist. A relatively small proportion of his prodigious output qualifies as straightforward 'history’. Instead, there is historical fiction, biography, cultural criticism, and documentation of customs and beliefs. Lindsay’s historical practice stemmed from positions that that largely predated his conversion to Communism. Marxism does not constitute the whole of Lindsay’s philosophy of history, but rather is the keystone of a still broader conception ( “my dialectic”) which owed much to poetry, mysticism and philosophical Idealism.