114
C O N C E P T S
writes, “ [T]he structure o f the entity with which we are concerned (be it as
property, as national State, or any other pohtical institution) is most clearly
revealed when it is considered as the general form that subsumes all these
particular versions, namely as legal text” ; and after discussion o f the prob
lematical relation o f the generality o f law and its particular applications (a
point Rousseau stresses), he writes,
[W]e have moved closer and closer to the “definition” of text, the entity we are
trying to circumscribe. . . . The system of relationships that generates the text and
that functions independently of its referential meaning is its grammar. To the ex
tent that a text is grammatical, it is a logical code or machine. . . . But just as no
text is conceivable without grammar, no grammar is conceivable without the sus
pension of referential meaning. . . . [G]rammatical logic can function only if its
referential consequences are disregarded.^”
A law must be general, without reference to particular individuals
only to the empty chacun [each]. But, de Man continues, “no law is a law
unless it also applies to particular individuals.” And Rousseau writes that
the general will functions only because “there is no one who does not se
cretly appropriate the term each and think o f himself when he votes for
all [il n’y a personne qui ne s’approprie en secret ce mot chacun et qui ne
songe qu’à lui-même en votant pour tous]. Which proves that the equal
ity o f right and the notion o f justice that follows from it derive from the
preference that each man gives to himself and therefore from the nature o f
man.”^' Rousseau stresses that “the general will, to be truly such, should be
general in its object as well as in its essence, . . . and that it loses its natural
rectitude when it is directed toward any individual, determinate object,”
yet it is this mechanism o f secretly referring chacun to oneself that allows
the general will to function. “There can be no text without grammar,”
writes de Man; “the logic o f grammar generates texts only in the absence
o f referential meaning, but every text generates a referent that subverts the
grammatical principle to which it owed its constitution.”^^
It is this contradictory or duplicitous structure that relates text and
3 о. Paul de Man, Allegories o f Reading: Figurai Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,
Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 267, 268-69.
31. In the second version of Du contrat social Rousseau suppressed the “en
secret” in this passage. Otherwise, all the passages quoted are identical in the first
and second versions. Rousseau, Du contrat social, 306. Quoted in de Man, Allego
ries o f Reading, 269.
32. De Man, Allegories o f Reading, 269.
law: in the passage from The Social Contract it is the duplicitous produc
tion o f a referent (“en secret”) that bridges the gap between the elaboration
o f the law and its application. De Man then links the general model o f fig
urative language, where there is a gap between grammatical and referential
meaning, to Rousseau’s account o f the state:
In the description of the structure of political society, the “definition” of a text as
the contradictory interference of the grammatical with the figurai field emerges in
its most systematic form. . . . We call text any entity that can be considered from
such a double perspective: as a generative, open-ended non-referential system and
as a figurai system closed off by a transcendental signification that subverts the
grammatical code to which the text owes its existence.^^
An impossible object, joining perspectives whose compatibility is by no
means assured. De Man continues: “ [T]he tension between figurai and
grammatical language is duplicated in the differentiation between the State
as a defined entity {étai) and the State as a principle o f action {souverain),
or, in linguistic terms, between the constative and performative function
o f language. A text is defined by the necessity o f considering a statement,
at the same time, as performative and constative.
In de Man we thus find that the text has become the name for and
the model o f a pervasive structural relationship to which we have in recent
memory given many names, both in thinking about language (performa
tive/constative, langue/parole) and in thinking about the most basic mat
ters o f action, identity, and institutions (the relationship between structure
and event, for example). The concept o f text thus offers the possibility of
limctioning as the basis for wide-ranging interdisciplinary study. But it is
striking that de Man’s conception o f text is based not on aesthetic or lit
erary structures but on a legal structure requiring judgment and exercis
ing power through its referentiality. There is no organic and aesthetic to
talization, as with the New Critical conception o f the text. As in de Man’s
account o f the double rapport o f the individual to the state, the concept
o f text captures a ubiquitous and paradoxical structural relationship be
tween the generality o f law, grammar, system, and the particularity o f act
or event.
33. Ibid., 270.
34. Ibid.
35. For a powerful reading of de Man’s reading of Rousseau that takes up
this and other questions see Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” in Without Alibi, es
pecially 150—54.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
