Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 7) by Paul de Man (PDF)

Description

Focuses upon the gap between a critic’s view of a particular mark and his own literary method using the critical writings of Binswanger, Lukacs, Blanchot, Paulet, and Derrida

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Ingenious

⭐This book is a good introduction to Paul de Man’s writing. I’m not unbiased, since he was one of my instructors at Yale in the 70s. I am aware of the controversy surrounding him because of his personal life and collaboration with the Nazis in occupied Belgium, but that is extraneous to this book.The strength of the book is its accessibility. De Man was reaching out to a more general audience than in the works published later in his life and posthumously by his many admirers and students. That having been said, it lacks some of the impact and depth of his other writings. Still, for someone looking to find out what all the fuss is about Deconstruction, this is the place to start.

⭐Brilliant!

⭐In this book, Paul de Man examines major European literary theorists of the twentieth century like Blanchot, Poulet, Lukacs, etc. and shows through his incisive insights, how each theorist while trying to explain the origin of the ‘work’ or of literature remained blind to what lies outside the purview of his thoeretical system, because the very logic of theorization always excludes something. Of particular interest is his critique of readings of Rousseau. Accordingly, some of the theorists he discusses are mainly Rousseau scholars.

⭐When Paul de Man released BLINDNESS AND INSIGHT in 1971, it was his first foray in America to deal with literary criticism. For a first attempt, it was a smashing success; the easily impressed graduate students at Yale saw it as a classic of the then burgeoning field of deconstruction. The book contained essays on a variety of 20th century writers and a few of previous eras. Jacques Derrida had previously deconstructed Rousseau and in this book’s seminal essay, de Man discusses how Rousseau deconstructs himself. To the awe-struck first generation of neophyte deconstructionists, de Man codified the rules set by Derrida: despite the surface clarity and brilliance of the New Critics, their essays were built on linguistic houses of mushy sand, emphasizing that the hoped for insight of the authors was no more than unwitting blindness. The more that these authors strove for clarity, the more that they succumbed to the self-imposed traps of the underlying and insidious contradictions brought out by reversing the polar binaries of a misused Saussurean logic.Future editions included essays that now are seen as the heart and soul of the de Manian imperative. One of these essays was “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” With the publication of “The Rhetoric of Temporality” in 1969, Paul de Man was well on the way to becoming one of America’s foremost deconstructionists. He was not quite “there” yet since he still saw himself as a transitional figure between the linguistic stodginess of structuralism and his own deeply submerged desire to “smooth over” his Nazi past by using the incredibly elaborate prose style of French literary discourse. De Man divides his essay into two parts: (I) Allegory and Symbol and (II) Irony. The common link between them is that he “demystifies” both to show how temporality interacts with tropes like allegory, symbol, and irony to produce a deferred meaning. It is this focus on temporality that marks de Man as a deconstructionist-in-training. The term “deconstruction” had not yet then entered discourse as the newest and most potent of buzz words, but whenever de Man uses “demystification,” he means roughly the same thing. In the first part of the essay, de Man’s general thrust was to challenge the generally accepted notion that symbol was privileged over allegory. Just as Jacques Derrida in his “Sign, Structure, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” notes that an “event” had taken place to mark the end of one stage of literary discourse only to begin another so does de Man write that a change had taken “place in the latter half of the eighteenth century when the word “symbol” tends to supplant other denominations for figural language, including that of “allegory.”” De Man elaborates using the concepts of Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of signs to which he adds his own that he would soon enough term a “transcendental signified” or a “metaphysics of presence:” “The world is then no longer seen as a configuration of entities that designate a plurality of distinct and isolated meanings, but as a configuration of symbols ultimately leading to a total, single, and universal meaning.” De Man clearly derides the purported ability of a symbol to point to a “total, single, and universal meaning.” Allegory, in contrast, has the more modest and achievable goal to refer to “one specific meaning.” De Man laments the lack of vision shown by recent French and English writers who urge allegory to be “considered an anachronism and dismissed as non-poetic.” De Man mentions Coleridge as one who “appears to be an unqualified assertion of the superiority of the symbol over allegory. He mentions Coleridge as a poet who used symbols as “the product of the organic growth of form; in the world of the symbol, life and form are identical.” From this, de Man postulates that symbolic-based poetry does not allow the sort of ontological fragmentation that was so near and dear to the heart of Paul de Man. Though de Man had not yet totally absorbed either the deconstructionist tenets of Jacques Derrida or his convoluted and philosophically-grounded vocabulary, he nevertheless used quasi-deconstructive terms like “mystification” and “translucence” ubiquitously: “Starting out from the assumed superiority of the symbol in terms of organic substantiality, we end up with a description of figural language as translucence.” The “temporality” of the title appears when de Man introduces what will in a few years become the foundation of deconstructionist thought–deferral of meaning. He quotes a few lines from “The Prelude” by Wordsworth which contain the temporal paradox that “The immeasurable height / Of woods decaying, never to be decayed / The stationary blast of waterfalls.” De Man sees deictic connection “for the self to borrow…the temporal stability that it lacks from nature and to devise strategies by means of which nature is brought down to a human level while still escaping from the ‘unimaginable touch of time.'” De Man further adds that “the prevalence of allegory always corresponds to the unveiling of an authentically temporal destiny.” This “destiny” permits a subject to subsume himself and to “seek refuge against the impact of time in a natural world to which, in truth, it bears no resemblance.” More dramatically, de Man notes much the same with regard to endless deferral: “The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition….of a previous sign with which it can never coincide.” De Man concludes this first part by emphasizing the role that allegory plays in temporalization: “Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference.” In the second part of the essay, “Irony,” de Man notes that “an awareness of the persistence of allegorical modes goes hand in hand with a theoretical concern for irony.” However, not all writers of the 18th and 19th centuries would agree–Rousseau and Wordsworth rarely used irony. Still, for most writers there is an “implicit and rather enigmatic link between allegory and irony.” Yet this link does not get close enough so that allegory and irony emerge as independent subjects for reflection. Indeed, though there is a link, this link is “rarely used as a means to reach a sharper definition.” The basic definition of irony as “saying one thing but meaning another” points to another shared linkage: “in both cases, the relationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous.” De Man concludes, then, that “the sign points to something that differs from its literal meaning.” This difference weakens the coherence of figural language in general in that both allegory and irony suffer from “discriminatory precision.” Due to this lack of precision, de Man determines to focus a “more general and theoretical interpretation,” which is the basis for this essay. Complicating matters for de Man is the ongoing relation between irony and the novel: “an intentional theory of irony should deal with the relation between irony and the novel.” Here, as elsewhere in this essay, de Man uses “demystification” as a precursor for what would soon enough be the linguistic coin of the realm–deconstruction. De Man notes that the mystification of irony is a long-established “fact of history” which must be accounted “before actual theorization can start.” Since many writers historically have deliberately infused their texts with an overriding sense or irony, it becomes impossible to overlook the obvious that irony has become inextricably melded within the very center of a text. It seems clear to de Man that “we cannot escape the need for a definition toward which this essay is oriented.” When writers use (or overuse) irony to the extent that irony becomes absolute, then this heightened sense of irony becomes akin to a consciousness of madness, which paradoxically enough permits the author to portray this consciousness of madness as the end of all consciousness, thus allowing that author to maintain a consciousness of a non-consciousness, “a reflection on madness from the inside of madness itself.” When this occurs, irony then becomes imbued with a duality of structure: “the ironist invents a form of himself that is “mad” but that does not know its own madness.” He can then ponder his madness in a way that to him seems eminently objective. In order for the ironist to write thus convincingly, he must prevent the “all too readily mystified reader from confusing fact with fiction and from forgetting the essential negativity of the fiction.” The ironist prevents this from happening by using what de Man would later find indispensable as a deconstructionist (or “de-mystifier”)–the deferral of meaning into an open loop of temporalization. Irony then morphs into the “prefiguration of a future recovery, fiction into the promise of a future happiness that, for the time being, exists only ideally.” Towards the end of the essay, de Man discusses irony in a manner that in his future writings would become a staple of deconstructive thought–the endless deferral of meaning that prevents one from reaching a “transcendental signified” or “metaphysics of presence.” “Our description seems to have reached a provisional conclusion. The act of irony, as we now understand it, reveals the existence of a temporality that is definitely not organic, in that it relates to its source only in terms of distance and difference and allows for no end, for no totality. Irony divides the flow of temporal existence into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic…It remains endlessly caught in the impossibility of making this knowledge applicable to the empirical world.” For de Man, allegory and irony are interlocked in a temporal bear-hug that recreates the de-mystification of an organic world “postulated in a symbolic mode of analogical correspondences or in a mimetic mode of representation.”The misuse of Saussure in BLINDNESS AND INSIGHT well illustrates the garbled vision of Paul de Man.

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