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T H E O R Y
mation o f aesthetic categories.” So, for example, the convergence o f sound
and meaning in literature is an effect that language can achieve “but which
bears no substantial relationship, by analogy or by ontologically grounded
imitation, to anything beyond that particular effect. It is a rhetorical rather
than an aesthetic function o f language, an identifiable trope (paronomasis)
that operates on the level o f the signifier and contains no responsible pro
nouncement on the nature o f the world— despite its powerful potential to
create the opposite illusion” {RT, lo). Literary theory, in its attention to
the functioning o f language, thus “raises the unavoidable question whether
aesthetic values can be compatible with the linguistic structures that make
up the entities from which these values are derived” {RT, 25). Literature
itself raises this question in various ways, offering evidence o f the autono
mous potential o f language, o f the uncontrollable figurai basis o f forms,
which cannot therefore serve as the basis o f reliable cognition, or in some
texts, allegorically exposing the violence that lies hidden behind the aes
thetic and makes aesthetic education possible.
De Man’s essay “Kant and Schiller” concludes with a quotation from
a novel by Joseph Goebbels, which casts the leader as an artist working cre
atively on his material:
The statesman is an artist too. The people are for him what stone is for the sculp
tor. Leader and masses {Führer and Masse) are as little of a problem to each other
as color is to a painter. Politics are the plastic arts of the state as painting is the
plastic art of color. Therefore politics without the people or against the people are
nonsense. To transform a mass into a people and a people into a state— that has
always been the deepest sense of a genuine political task.^^
De Man’s argument is that this aestheticization o f politics, which seeks
the fusion o f form and idea, is “a grievous misreading o f Schiller’s aesthet
ic state” but that Schiller’s conception is itself a similar misreading, which
must be undone by an analysis that takes us back to Kant. Kant had “dis
articulated the project o f the aesthetic which he had undertaken and which
he found, by the rigor o f his own discourse to break down under the power
o f his own critical epistemological d is c o u r s e .T o expose this disarticula-
35. Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagesbuchblattern,
quoted by de Man in “Kant and Schiller,” in Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed.
Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 154-55.
36. De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 134.
tion is to expose the illicit imposition o f unity through the aesthetic. De
Man seeks to demonstrate how the most insightful literary and philosophi
cal texts o f the tradition expose the unwarranted violence required to fuse
form and idea, cognition and performance.
“The critique o f the aesthetic ends up, in Kant,” de Man writes,
“in a formal materialism that runs counter to all values and characteris
tics associated with aesthetic experience, including the aesthetic categories
o f the beautiful and the sublime.
That formal materialism o f the let
ter, which he also calls the prosaic materiality o f inscription, is the letter
considered nonteleologically— that is, not as sign but as blank or mark of
whose significance one cannot be assured. This “indeterminately significa
tive mark”^* or prosaic materiality o f the letter is a puzzling concept, what
de Man calls on the one hand “all we get” yet on the other hand impossible
to experience as such, except as what is transformed when we confer sense
and meaning— through the violent positings of the aesthetic and of un
derstanding, for in stance.T hough recent essays on de Man have helped
to explicate his critique o f aesthetic ideology, the nature o f this materialist
theory o f language, with its emphasis on what resists meaning and theory,
while proving endlessly seductive to theory, remains difficult to grasp."*®
De Man’s writing grants great authority to texts— a power o f illumi
nation that is a power o f disruption— but little authority to meaning. This
highly original combination o f respect for texts and suspicion o f meaning
will give his writing a continuing power, though its effects are not easily
calculable. His essays commit themselves to major literary and philosophi
cal works for their relentless undoing o f the meanings that usually pass for
their value. His analyses, with their deployment o f a set o f key terms that
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