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T H E O R Y
in short, structuralism and its legacy, which we have called, in optimistic
American fashion, “poststructuralism.” Even the New Criticism, which
certainly might be said to be interested in the production o f meaning prior
to its establishment, is seen by de Man as ultimately a form o f resistance to
theory, because o f the social and ethical and aesthetic principles that it val
ues above the text’s resistance to its supposed meaning.*® Barbara Johnson,
looking at the terms in which Walter Jackson Bate and others set up an op
position between deconstructive reading and humanistic reading, remarks
that it looks as though, whereas deconstruction is said to “go too far,” hu
manism is, by contrast, supposed to stop reading when the text stops say
ing what it is supposed to say.“ Historical and aesthetic assumptions about
what works o f a particular period or value may say and what would be in
appropriate or anachronistic would be examples o f a resistance to theory
as a resistance to reading. Theory is contrasted with approaches that take
meaning not as a problem but as something given, to be classified or eval
uated, by placing works in historical schemes or discussing the ethical or
political value o f a work’s meaning, for example.
Theory is identified with a focus on the problem o f language and
thus with reading attentive to the linguistic and rhetorical structures o f a
text. Even within approaches based on language, such as the structuralist
attempt to work toward a “grammar” o f narrative, or in reader-response
theories, which link meaning to the process o f reading, de Man finds that,
however admirable these approaches may be, they are ultimately engaged
in a resistance to reading that is a resistance to theory. Structuralist and se-
miological attempts to work out a grammar o f narrative or generally to ex
tend grammatical models beyond the sentence implicitly presume that the
ID.
See de Man, The Resistance to Theory, 6-7. New Criticism’s rejection of
paraphrase, as in “the heresy of paraphrase,” would seem to mark an interest in
the production of meaning prior to its establishment, and in “The Return to Phi
lology” de Man praises the radical character of New Critical reading, as practiced
in Reuben Brower’s course at Harvard, in which de Man taught {RT, 23-24). But
the New Criticism’s aesthetic principle of the poem as organic whole and its com
mitment to the ethical value of the literary encounter prevent it from instantiating
reading not based on nonlinguistic considerations. See also RT, 17.
I t .
Barbara Johnson, “Teaching Deconstructively,” in
Writing and Reading
Differently, ed. G. Douglas Atkins and Michael Johnson (Lawrence; University
Press of Kansas, 1985), 140.
meaning o f texts is predictable or explicable in terms o f linguistic struc
tures or literary and linguistic conventions and thus elide the necessity of
reading, which is above all a coming to terms with rhetorical structures
where meaning cannot be determined by systematic considerations (de
ciding, for instance, whether something in a text is ironic or not is a prob
lem o f reading that cannot be resolved by grammatical models). “The re
sistance to theory is a resistance to the rhetorical or tropological dimension
of language,” which comes into play even in structuralist and semiological
approaches that explicitly embrace rhetoric {RT, 17). And reader-oriented
approaches de Man sees as a strenuous avoidance o f reading, whether by
postulating interpretive communities or historical circumstances o f recep
tion to explain or predict interpretive conclusions: “The resistance to the
ory, which as we saw, is a resistance to reading, appears in its most rigorous
and theoretically elaborated form among the theoreticians o f reading who
dominate the contemporary theoretical scene” {RT, 17-18).
In this logic o f small differences, where the resistance to theory seems
to become most prominent and most interesting in those discourses that
are reputed most theoretical, de Man takes a surprising step: instead o f iso
lating as true theory and true reading a deconstructive theory and prac
tice o f rhetorical reading— attentive to the obstacles to meaning, to the
unmasterable play o f the referential functioning o f language in texts— he
notes that these practices, too, ultimately involve an avoidance o f reading.
Though they identify structures and functions that do not lead to a knowl
edge of an entity, are “consistently defective models o f language’s impossi
bility to be a model language” that would function without indeterminacy
or self-undermining, and “are theory and non-theory at the same time, the
universal theory o f the impossibility o f theory,” still as theory, as teachable
and subject to systematization, “rhetorical readings, like the other kinds,
still avoid and resist the reading they advocate. Nothing can overcome the
resistance to theory since theory is itself this resistance” {RT, 19). A certain
resistance to reading and to theory is not just a lapse or a failure o f theory
but is inherent in the theoretical enterprise, even as he has narrowly de
fined it.
How are we to understand this? In what sense can theory itself be a
resistance to theory? A brief detour through Freud might help. Laplanche
and Pontalis’s Dictionary o f Psychoanalysis reports that in psychoanalysis
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