19. Kevin Newmark’s brilliant, difficult essay, “Paul de Man’s History,” in
drzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
versity Press, 1984), 16.
gois, 1987), 83,147.
T H E O R Y
A critique o f the reception o f romanticism has been an activity o f “de
construction in America.” An aestheticizing and monumentalizing interpre
tation o f romanticism, institutionalized in the teaching o f Wordsworth in
American universities, has been challenged and in some measure dismantled
by the deconstructive readings produced by de Man and his students.^^
De Man insists that the question o f romanticism is not just one o f
characterizing a period or a style. Discussion o f romanticism is particu
larly difficult, he suggests, because it requires a coming to terms with a
past from which we are not yet separated, a past whose poets’ most intense
questioning involves precisely this interpretive relation to their past expe
rience— that is, the very structure on which our relation depends.^^ De
scriptions o f romanticism always miss the mark, for reasons that are struc
tural rather than due to failures o f intelligence. A further complication is
introduced by the fact that the genetic categories on which literary history
depends— the models o f birth, development, death— are most decisively
promoted but also exposed by the romantic works that they would be used
to discuss: “one may well wonder what kind o f historiography could do
justice to the phenomenon o f Romanticism, since Romanticism (itself a
period concept) would then be the movement that challenges the genetic
principle which necessarily underlies all historical narrative”— a certain re
sistance to theory.^'^ As a result, he writes, “the interpretation o f romanti
cism remains for us the most difficult and at the same time the most neces
sary o f tasks,” involving this double movement, o f identifying what resists
prior theorization and risking the resistance to reading that goes with the
theoretical description o f this structure.^^
Another version o f this structure o f theory as resistance to theory is
de Man’s account o f the relationship between blindness and insight. In the
22. The key role of this critique in de Man’s own changes— the turn to
ward a linguistic terminology above all— emerges clearly in the dual version of
his “Time and History in Wordsworth,” published for the first time by Cynthia
Chase and Andrzej Warminski in Diacritics 17, no. 4 (1987): 4-17.
23. De Man, The Rhetoric o f Romanticism, 49-50. See Cynthia Chase,
“Translating Romanticism: Literary Theory as the Criticism of Aesthetics in the
Work of Paul de Man,” Textual Practice, 4, no. 3 (winter 1990):
349
-
75
-
24. De Man,
Allegories o f Reading, 82.
25. De Man, The Rhetoric o f Romanticism, 50.
book o f this title he argues that critics “owe their best insights to assump
tions these insights disprove,” a fact that “shows blindness to be a necessary
correlative o f the rhetorical nature o f literary language.”^*^ A famous pas
sage describes the way the New Critics’ concentration on language (rather
than authors, for example) was made possible by their conception of the
work as organic form but led to insights into the role o f irony that under
mine the conception o f literary works as harmonious, organic wholes. For
them, as for other critics, an
insight could only be gained because the critics were in the grip of this peculiar
blindness: their language could grope toward a certain degree of insight only be
cause their method remained oblivious to the perception of this insight. The in
sight exists only for a reader in the privileged position o f being able to observe the
blindness as a phenomenon in its own right— the question of his own blindness
being one which he is by definition incompetent to ask— and so being able to dis
tinguish between statement and meaning. He has to undo the explicit results of
a vision that is able to move toward the light only because, being already blind, it
does not have to fear the power of this light. But the vision is unable to report cor
rectly what it has perceived in the course of its journey. To write critically about
critics thus becomes a way to reflect on the paradoxical effectiveness of a blinded
vision that has to be rectified by means of insights that it unwittingly provides.^^
This relation is structural, not psychological, for de Man. The blind
ness is not a product o f the distinctive individual histories o f c ri t ic s .A nd
although “blindness” seems to belong to a phenomenological vocabulary
o f consciousness, de Man construes it as an impersonal mechanism o f read-
26. De Man, Blindness and Insight, 141.
27. Ibid., 106.
28. De Man’s is a theory about the dependency of truth on error, not sim
ply about the pervasiveness of error. Thus, this is not de Man’s attempt, as some
have claimed, to make his own youthful blindness— his participation in a col
laborationist newspaper in Belgium after the German invasion, until he quit in
1942— into an ineluctable necessity— at least not unless one can show some bril
liant insight of his wartime journalism that was made possible by this blindness.
For discussion see Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan, eds., Re
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