88680604 paul de man the resistance to theory

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The Resistance to Theory


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The Resistanceto TheoryPaul de ManForewordbyWladGodzich

Theory and History ofLiterature, Volume33

University of Minnesota PressMinneapolisLondon


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Copyright 1986by theUniversityofMinnesota.All rightsreserved. Nopartofthis publicationmay be reproduced, storedin aretrieval system,ortransmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,-mechanical, photo-copying, recording,orotherwise, withouttheprior written permissionof thepublisher.

Sixth pr inting,2002Published by theUniversityo fMinnesota Press111Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis,MN55401-2520Printed in theUnited StatesofAmericaonacid-free paper

Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication ataDeMan, Paul.

Theresistanceto therory.(Theory andhistoryofliterature ; v. 33)Bibliography: p .Includesindex.1.Criticism-Addresses, essays, lectures.

2.Literature-Philosophy-Addresses, essays, lectures.I. Title. II.Series.PN85.F374 1986 801'.95 85-28820ISBN 0-8166-1293-5ISBN0-8166-1294-3(pbk.)The followingworksarereproduced with permissionof theoriginating pub-lisher: "The Resistance toTheory," Yale French Studies 63 (1982); "TheReturntoPhilology," TimesLiterarySupplement ,Dec.10,1982;"HypogramandInscription,"Diacritics 11(1981),theJohns Hopkins University Press;"DialogueandDialogism,"PoeticsToday 4:1(1983)thePorter InstituteforPoetics andSemiotics, Te lAvivUniversity; "Bibliographyo fTextsby Paulde Man," Yale FrenchStudies69(1985.)"A ninterviewwithPauldeMan," commissioned by RAI(The ItalianNa-tionalBroadcasting System), broadcast June 1, 1983, isreprinted with per-missionof the author 1983 from Maurizio Ferraris and Stefano Rosso(eds.), Deconstruzione tra f i losofia e letteratura, special issue of NuovaCorrente ,vol. XXXI (1984)n.93-94, p p .303-13."Reading andHistory" first appeared as the introduction to Hans RobertJauss's Toward a nAesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: UniversityofMin-nesota Press, 1982). "Conclusions: Walter Benjamin's'Taskof theTransla-tor' w as given as the last in aseries of sixMessenger Lectures atCornellUniversityonMarch4,1983; thequestion-and-answer session followedthelecture.

The UniversityofMinnesotais anequal-opportunityeducatorandemployer.


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Contents

Foreword: The Tiger on the Paper Mat Wl ad Godzich ixThe Resistance toTheory 3The Return to Philology 21Hypogram and Inscription 27Reading and History 54"Conclusions":W alter Be njam in's "The Taskof theTranslator" 73Dialogue and Dialogism 106An Interview with Paul de Man Stefano Rosso 115Bibliography of Texts by Paul de Man T o m K e e n a n 122Index 131


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Theory and History of LiteratureEditedby WladGodzich and Jochen Schulte-SasseVolume 1. TzvetanTodorovIntrod uction toPo et icsV olum e 2. Hans Robert JaussTowardan Aesthetic o f Recept ionVolume3. Hans Robert JaussAesthetic Experience and Li terary He rmene uticsVolume4. Peter BurgerTheory o f theAvant-GardeVolume5. VladimirProppTheory and Historyof FolkloreVolume6. EditedbyJonathanArac,WladGodzich,and Wallace M artinThe Yale CriticsReconstructioninAme ricaVolume7. PauldeManBlindnessa ndInsight:Essays in theRhetoricofCo ntemporary Criticism2nded.,rev.Volume8 . MikhailBakhtinProblemso fDostoevsky 'sPo et icsVolume9. Erich AuerbachScene s from theDram a o f European LiteratureVolume10. Jean-FranoisLyotardThe Po stmo de rn Cond ition: A Report on Know ledgeVolume11. EditedbyJohn Fekete TheStructura l Allegory:Reco nstructive E ncounters with the New French T houghtV olum e 12. Ross Chambers Storyand Situation: Narrative Se duction andthe P o w e ro f FictionVolume13. Tzvetan Todorov M ikhail Ba khtin: The Dialo gical P rincipleVolume 14. GeorgesBatailleVisionsofExcess: Selected Writings,1927-1939Volume15. Peter SzondiO nTextual Und erstanding and Other EssaysVolume16. Jacques AttaliNo iseVolume17. Michelde CerteauH eterologies


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Volume 18. ThomasG.Pavel The Poe t ics ofPlot:The Caseof EnglishRenaissance Drama

Volume 19. JayCaplanFram ed Narrat ives: Dide rot 's Genea logyof the Beho lder

Volume20. Jean-Fran


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ForewordTheTigeron the PaperMatWlad Godzich

iAfter thep ublicationof Al legor ies of R e a d i ngin1979,Paulde Man foundhim selfconstantly besieged by requests for articles, introductions, conference papers,and other forms of scholarly communication. Whereas some scholars live in atragicmode, thedisjunction between w hat they consider theirproperintellectualpursuitsand the demands made upon them by their profession, Paul de Man hadcome to think of this disjunction as the relation between the contingency of thehistorical and the necessity of coherent thought, with the former imposing asalutary heterogeneity upon the latter's inevitable drift toward single-mindedtotalization. Though he remained steadfast in his concerns, as anyone who hasread his work from the earliest essays to the very last ones will readily ac-knowledge, he framed them according to thedemands of the moment inw hichthey were ultimately written, and he drew a certain pleasure from the ironiesthat attended their publication.The very number of calls made upon de Man in these years and his abilityto write a great many major pieces in rapid succession eventually led him, inlate 1981 and early 1982, to formulate a general plan for publishing in bookform the essays that he had been writing and that he planned to write in the nearfuture. The present book was conceived as a unit of this general plan.W hile he w as prop erly suspicious of m ost forms of articulation, and p articu-larlyof those that claim ed the ability toperiodize,de M an did notfail to recognizetheir heuristic value, especially when it came to such mundane matters as pub-lication. During the discussions that led to the formulation of the plan of publi-cation, he put forw ard the following organization of his w ritings. Hisfirst essays


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(soonto be available in this series) constitute the p rop erlycritica lface of his activ-ity. In themhe considered authors asclassicalas Montaigne and asmodern asBorges andwondered a boutthe present possibilities ofp oetry or of thehistoricalsense in America. The very practice of such criticism led him to question itsvalidity, an interrogation soon exacerbated by the fact that he had entered theacademic profession at a time when the New Criticism was extending itshegemonyovertheteachingofliteratureinAm erican universities.Hethu s beganto concern himself more with matters of methodology and to write about theworks of other critics rather than those of poets or novelists. The results of thisphaseof hisworkare to be found in therevised editionofBl indness a nd Insight.It is in the essays gathered in that volume that Paulde Manarticulateda stancethat was properly theoret ica l , and while he was not alone to do so then, hisadoption of such a stance proved to be very influential in American academiccircles.He did not entirely welcome this influence for anumber of reasons, not theleast of which had to do with his own misgivings with respect to the theoreticalinstance soenthusiastically embracedinsome quartersanddenounced w ith equaleagerness andp assion inothers. In thecourse of these theoretical essaysde Manhad come todelimit a problematic thatw as fundamentaltoh im ,butw hich untilthen had been mediated through categories of consciousness and temporalityinheritedfrom theHegelian substratumofp henomenology: th ema t terof read ing.Reading,as de M anbegantoconceiveof it, is farmore radical thananytheoreticalenterprise can admit. As we shall see later, reading disrupts the continuitybetween the theoretical and the phenomenal andth us forcesarecognitionof theincompatibility oflanguageand intuition. Since thelatter constitutes the found-ational basis of cognition upon which perception, consciousness, experience,and the logic and the understanding, not to mention the aesthetics that areattendant to them, are constructed, there results a wholesale shakeout in theorganization and conceptualization of knowledge, from which language, con-ceived as adouble system of tropes andp ersuasion, thatis as arhetoricalentity,emerges as the unavoidable dimensionality of all cognition. This was the viewfirst adum brated in "The Rhetoric ofTemporality" and developed inA l legor iesof Read ing. There followed anumberof essays, now collected in T he Rhetoricof Romant ic ism, inw hich im plicationsofthis conceptionofreading were exp loredovera historically circumscribed corpus.

De Man realized that the conception of reading that he haduncovered in hisown theoretical essays had to overcome two major obstacles: the first is posedby the theoretical enterprise itself, while the second has to do with thehistoryof philosophical thought since the eighteenth century. He thus formulated twoprojects to deal with these problems, neither of which was finished at the timeof his death in December 1983, though both were very far advanced toward


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FOREWORD D x icompletion. Thesecond,to bepublished shortlyinthisseries,cameto beentitledThe Aes the t ic Ideo logy , and it contains essays that focus on how the radicalnature of Kant's conception of aesthetic judgmentwhich app roximates deMan's ow n notion of theradicalness of reading was given amore reassuringpath in Schiller's interpretation and in its subsequent fate in the philosophicaltradition. Aesthetic judgment came to be replaced oroverlaid by an ideologicalconstruct of values, now commonly taken to be the aesthetic, even though, deM an insists, the underlying judgment will not support such an overlay but willactively w ork to dismantle it. O nly an activity such as reading can come in touchwith this process andexperience the resistanceof the material to the ideologicaloverlay. The shape of the volume isap p arent, though Paulde Man did not liveto write two essays that would have been of considerable interest: one on Kier-kegaard as seen by Adorno, and the other on Marx 's The G e r m a n I d e o l o g y .This collection ofessays thus rep resents, am ong other things,deM an's interven-tion in the current debates onmodernity and postmodernity.The essays gathered in thepresent volume were meanttoreexamine theworkof other theorists, in a manner somewhat analogous to that found in Bl indnessa nd Insight, in order to determine what about the theoretical enterprise itselfblinds it to the radicalness of reading and in order to disengage the principle ofthis blindness, whichde Man came toconceiveof as a"resistance"for reasonsI shall attempt to explore later. This volume too isunfinished. F rom the outsetit was meant to include three essays of which tw o appear here in preparatoryform and one not at all: essays on Bakhtin and on Benjam in, for which the papersincluded here were early versions still to be revised, and an essay onKennethBurke, which Paul de Man wanted very much towrite fo r quite some time andwhichheconsidered the"social"counterpartto themore"formalist" essayonRiffaterre includedhere,tho ugh equ ally m eant to arrive at a notion of inscriptionthatwould wreak havoc with the attempt to deal with history and the social onlythrough itsrepresentational forms.This brief ou tline gives a sense of the direction that Paul de M anfelthis w orkwas taking when he was struck downby illness. He labored hard to bring it tocompletion, taking advantageofevery mom ent ofremission, though quite awarethat the taskhe hadembarked up on would always rem ainincomplete.The textshe has left behind invite us to pursue his reflexion, challenging us to read themin the radical way he had begun to formulate.Again,theaccountIgive hereis notm eantto becanonicalnordoesitrep resentmore thanap unctual attemp ttorationalize thepublicationinbook formofessayswritten for thebewildering arrayofoccasions that m obilize p resent-day scholar-ship. From a more thematic perspective,one could formulatedifferent articula-tionsof the de Manoeuvre, with pivotal roles goingtoessays suchas"Heideg-ger's Exegeses of Holderlin," "The Rhetoric of Temporality," and "Shelley


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x ii QFOREWORDDisfigured."But the articulation thatIdescribegoverns thep ublication ofPaulde Man's essays and, as such, it is likely to play a role in the mode of theirreading,even if it is to be no m ore but no less than a certainformofresistance.

IIAll the essays in this volume engage the question of theory as it has come todominateour literary scene, and since theory isprimarily aconcern of academ-ically situated scholars, the essays also touch upon questions of pedagogy andinstitutional determination, although de Man did not feel that the latter was asimp ortant in the North Am erican contex t as in the Eu ropean one(cf.his interviewin this volume, which was broadcast in part on the cultural service of RAIInternational, in which heusefully distinguishes betw een his attitude and that ofDerrida in this respect). The title of the volume is borrowed from one of theessays which originally bore quite a different title, but whose retitling bringstogether all the questions of theory, pedagogy, and institutionalization that areamong the principal themes of this volume, along with the figure of resistancewhich is attached to themhere.

The essay "The Resistance to Theory" was originally entitled "LiteraryTheory: A im s andMethods.''It was comm issioned by the Com m ittee on R esearchActivities of the Modern Language Association for its volume Introduction toScholarship inM o d e r n L a n gu a ge s a nd Literatures where it was tofigure as thesectionon literary theory. Paulde Manfound itdifficult tow ritethepedagogicalpiece thatw asexp ectedof him andw rote instead anessay inw hichheattemptedtodetermine the nature of the resistance that theory poses to its own definition.The essay he subm itted encountered aresistance of another kind: it wasjudgedinappropriatefor thevolum ethe MLA wasp roducingand analtogether differentessay was then commissioned from Paul Hernadi. De Man did not quarrel withthis judgment;he simply retitled the essay fo r oral delivery at Amherst Collegein the spring of 1981 and determined soon thereafter that it should provide thetitle of thecollection on theory that he was then contemplating.The sequence of events in this little brouhaha ought to make clear that theterm "resistance" refers only secondarily, and almost ironically, to the institu-tional forms of resistance to theory as they were experienced in the seventiesand eighties in the United States. Althoughde Man did anticipate some formofsuch resistance to his essay, as the introductory paragraphs makeclear,he usedthe term in the essay itself with a very different view in mind. As is almostalways the case with his coinages, the figures he puts into motion in his textshave a technical meaning which it is useful torecall.The term resistance names a property of matter recognized since antiquity:its perceptibility to touch andinertialopp osition to m uscular exertion. F or Aris-totle, taphysika arecharacterized by theresistance theyopposeto us and they


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FOREWORD D xiiithus become objects of our cognition: it is by virtue of this resistance that weknow them to be outside of ourselves and not illusions fostered upon us by ourunreliable sensory apparatus. Resistance is a property of the referent, we wouldsay today, which allows this referent to become the object of knowledge of thesubject thatw eare. W ithout thisresistance, w ew ould neverbeable toascertainwhether the phenomenalor the sensible is really "out there"and thus whetherwe have any knowledge of suchan "out there."To the extent that theory hascognitivep retensions, resistance is very imp ortant to it as a p recondition for thetheory's cognitive reach intothe phenomenal. This is a venerable problem notonly of literary theory but of language philosop hy, as the following passage inthe essay seems to indicate in its recondite way:

If a cat iscalled a tiger it can easily be dismissed as a paper tiger; thequestion remains however why one was so scared of the cat in the firstp lace. T he same tactic w orks in reverse: calling the cat a mouse and thenderiding it for itspretenseto bemighty.Rather thanbeingdrawn into thispolemical whirlpool, it mightbe better to try to callthe cat a cat and todocument, however briefly, the contemporary version of the resistance totheory in this country, (infra, p. 5)

Passages such as this one are not at all rare in deMan'swritings. One may thinkfor example , of the justly famous play on Archie Bunker/arche debunker in"SemiologyandRhetoric."As in that passage, weseemtohaveaninstanceofp ostmod ern w riting here w ith its borrow ings of current p olitical slogans("papertiger"), p op ular culture (M ighty M ouse of S aturday m orning television cartoonfare), paronomasia("deriding"),etc.And its cognitive dim ension is to befoundin what Riffaterre would call the conversion of a matrix: instead of "to call aspade aspade"wehave "to calla cat acat," anapp arentreaffirmation of thefeline codeof thep assage,but sincethe meaningof "to call aspadeaspade"is thatof the primacy of denomination overdecorum, or in somewhat differentterms, ofdenotation over connotation, wehaveaversionof afam ousconundrumof language philosophyand of thephilosophyofm ind: ''thecat is on themat.''In other words, thep roblem isthatof thecognitive dimension oflanguage:howit apprehends the real. And in the playon the size of the cat and on itspu tativefearsomeness, de Man further alludes to his own discussion, and toDerrida's,of the famous passage on the "giant" in Rousseau in which the relation offigural language todenotation isexplored. All ofw hichare certified theoreticalproblems, indeed topoi of recent theory.It may be useful at this junctureto recall what theory is. Presently w e tendto use thetermtom eanasystemofconcepts that aim stogiveaglobal exp lanationto an area of knowledge, and we oppose it to praxisby virtueof the fact thatitisaformof speculativeknow ledge.The term obviously has taken on this m eaningafter Kant, though it appears in most of the western languages earlier, by way


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x iv D FOREWORDof Latin translations from the Greek (with a rather interesting swerve throughArabic thatweneednot concern ourselves withhere).Etymologically, the termcomes from the Greek verbtheorem,to look at, to contemp late, to survey. Andin Greek, it does no t enter into an opposition with praxis an oppositioncon-structed in Idealist philosophy and eventually used to combat the latter b utrather withaesthesis, something that Ruskin recalls in his Modern Pa in ters :

The impressions of beauty . . . are neither sensualnor intellectual butmoral,and for thefaculty receiving them . . .no termcan be moreaccurate. . . thanthatemp loyedbythe Greeks,"theoretic"whichIp rayp ermission to use and to call the operation o f thefacultyitself ''Theoria.''(II, iii, par.1, and then again in paragraph 8:) The mere animalconsciousness of the pleasantness I call Aesthesis, but the exulting,reverent, and grateful perception of it I call Theoria.

Ruskinarticulates the op p osition betw eenae s thes isandtheoriaaround the m atter-of-factnessof thefirstand thejubilatorycharacterof thesecond w ithout inquiringinto theprovenance of this jubilation.The latter is indeed well attested. It comesfrom thefactthat the act of lookingat, ofsurvey ing, designatedby theorem does notdesignateap rivate act carriedout by a cogitating philosopher but a very public one with important socialconsequences. The Greeks designated certain individuals, chosen on the basisof their probity and their general standing in the polity, to act as legates oncertainformal occasions inother city statesor inmattersofconsiderable p oliticalimportance. These individuals bore the title oftheoros,and collectively consti-tuteda theoria . (It m ay beuseful to bear in m ind that the w ord is always a p luralcollective.) They were summoned on special occasions to attestthe occurrenceofsom e event, to witness its hap p enstance, and to then verbally certify its havingtaken p lace. (W e m ay recall here the role of w itnesses to the ex ecution of deathsentences in the American judicial system.) In other words, their function w asone ofsee-and-tell. To be sure, other individuals in the city could see andtell,bu t their telling was no more than a cla im that they had seen something, and itneeded some authority to adjud icate the validity ofsucha claim . The city neededa more official and more ascertainable form ofknow ledge if it was not to loseitself in endless claims andcounterclaims.The theoria provided sucha bedrockof certainty: what it certified as having seen could become the object of publicdiscourse. The individual citizen, indeed even women, slaves, and children,were capable of aesthesis, that is perception, but these perceptions had no socialstanding. They were not sanctioned and thus could not form the basis ofdelib-eration, judgment, and action in the polity. Onlythe theoretically attested eventcould be treated as afact. The institution al natu re of this certification ought notto escape us, as well as its social inscription. Indeed, it may be of more thantheoretical interest, in our current senseof the term, to wonderhow thissocial


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dim ension of the certification ofevents,of the granting to som ething the discursivestandingof"real,"cam eto beocculted,though that wouldtakeus too farafieldfrom our immediate concerns.

The structure of the functioning of the Greek theoria is as follows then:betweentheeventand itsentry into pu blicdiscourse,thereis am ediating instanceinvested w ith undeniable authorityby thepolity.Thisauthorityeffects thepassagefrom the seen to the told, it puts into socially acceptable and reliable languagewhatitap p rehends. This authority,thetheoria,has to uselanguage itself thou gh,and its language is not yet covered by the guarantees it brings to the polity. Infact, it must construct that guarantee within itself, although the theoria is alonesocially recognized ascapable of wielding suchlanguage.The structure ofsucha language must be of a nature to permit the following, admittedly awkwardparaphrase: "W e who now address you here, were there thenand we witnessedthere then what we are about to tell you here now in order that you here and wehere may all talk here now and in the future about how what happened therethen affects us here." In other words, such a language must be deicticallyarticulated, something that did not escape Hegel as he embarked on his owntheoretical project in The P h e n o m e n o l o g y o f Mind with a consideration of the"this."And it is thep roblem aticin thebackgroundof"thecat is on themat"discussion, the fam ous p aper tiger of the philosop hy of language and m ind. Oneunderstands more readily w hy jubilation attended to the theoretical among theGreeks:theyhadsolvedthep roblemuntilphilosophers came alongandattemp tedto ground everything in sense p erception, inaesthesis,w ith a theorizing of theirown, appropriated from thepolls in ways as yet little understood, as the solemediation.

IllDeixis is the linguistic mechanism that permits the articulation of all of thesedistinctions between the here and the there, the now and the then, the we andtheyou.Itestablishestheex istenceof an"outthere"thatisnotan"over here,"and thus it is fundamental to the theoretical enterprise. It gives it its authority."The cat is on themat"p roblem is a problem of deixis: the sentence is trueonly insofar as the utterer refers to a givencat,that is the ca t is a cat that hasbeen referred to or otherwise brought to the attention of the addressee. For allpractical purposes, the sentence mustbe taken to mean something like: "thiscat that you and I are aware of is now on this mat that you and I are awareof.''Of course noneof us speaks in this way ,justas the theoriadid not speak in theway that I indicatedearlier, but the proper functioning of the discourse that wewield presupposes that sort of structural capacity to specify deixis. The historyof languages is instructivein this regard: it is well known that thep resent-dayarticles of Romance languagesare descendantsof Latin demonstratives, and the


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medieval forms of these articles still had strong demonstrative capabilities andhave to be translated as such. Many utterances can be evaluated in terms of theirclaims to truthfulness only when this deictic dimension is brought into consid-eration. Neitherthe logical nor the grammatical structureo f a sentence sufficesfor these purposes; they m ay only provide assurances of well-formedness butthey are helpless to determ ine w hether the sentence is true w ith respect to a certainstate of affairs.Theories of language have been aware of this problem for a long time, andit is indeed the Stoics who came to give this problem the name ofdeixis. Modernlinguistics has refined it, and the present canonical form of the problem is onearticulated in rapid succession byEmile Benveniste andRoman Jakobson, w homade explicit the role played by the act of uttering in the functioning ofdeixis.Ben veniste in his"FormalA p p aratus of Enu nciation" (Prob lemes d el inguistiquegenerate, Paris, 1966) identifiesthe specificity of the deictics withthe fact thatthey refer to the instance of discourse: they have no objective referents outsideofthediscourse; they actually make reference towhathas noreferentsince theirmeaning isdeterminable only by means of the instance of discourse that theyoccur in. Benveniste then activates the Saussurean opposition of langue andparole toconclude that deicticsare the verbal mechanism that permits languagetobecome discourse, that istheyeffect thepassage from thevirtualityo f langueto the actuality ofparole.Jakobson's analysisof deictics, whichhe calls "shif-ters," is quite similar though it originates in, and indeed closely espouses,Peircian notions on the subject.What is interesting about this theory of deixis is that it appears to run counterto what seemed to be the very core of the problem. On the one hand, theindicational capability of deixis, its ability to indicate a here and now, had beentaken as the very bedrock of referentiality. This is where language encounteredthe resis tance of what it talked about, and thus it had cognitive value; it ap-prehended the world. On the other hand, once the mechanism at work in deixiswas investigated and described, it turns out that deictics do not refer to anythingtangible, to anything that has any resistance, as is clear from the very instabilityof the terms themselves (I becomes you when you address me, and here turnsinto there, etc.). Deictics refer to the instance of discourse, Benveniste tells us,and this is a dismal finding for those who placed their hope in the referentialcapacity of language for it is clear that deictics were the great hope of referen-tiality. But it wouldbe too quick to conclude that, as aresult, deictics lock usinto language.Deictics dorefer; they refer to the fact that language has takenplaceand thatit is something that takes place, that is even something that offers resistance.Benveniste's reliance upon the Saussurean terminology and its Aristotelian over-tones ought not to blind us to the fact that deictics are the means by whichlanguage makes itself into something that takesplace a nd something that ca n


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be referred to , and it is from this inaugural act of reference that all other formsof reference will flow. It is, in theterminology thatdeM anuses, the resistanceof language to language that grounds all other forms of resistance. To language,all of thereal is fungiblebut itself, and the resistance that language opposes toitselfw hichm ay take the formoftroping establishes the realityof languageto language, which then constructs all other formsof reference upon this funda-mentalmodel. In termsof theopposition that Heidegger hasreconstructed fromantiquity,the taking p lace of language (enun ciation in Benveniste's terminology)is itsontological dimension, whereas thetyp eofreference that takes place w ithinthespace openedup by theinauguralact oflanguage'staking p laceis theontic.The ontic comes to deploy itself in the space that theontological has openedup for it. This inaugural act of opening up a space de Man formulates asinscription, and one can readily see that the very dep loym ent of the ontic requiresthe effacement of the ontological, hence adialectic, in the Kantian and not theHegelian sense, of inscription and effacement, which in this book on theorycomes toreplace the earlierdialectic of blindness and insight characteristic ofcriticism.

The problematics ofinscription,worked out in the essay onRiffaterre in thisvolume, rejoins an older preoccupation ofPaulde Man, namely history. It maybeuseful inthis regard tocompare brieflyh isitinerarywiththatofHegel,againstwhich muchof this thinking takesplace, anaga inst thathas to betaken tomeanboth in opposition to and in the sense of resting against.

In his P h e n o m e n o l o g y o f Spirit,Hegel too analyzed deixis through the act ofindication as he embarked upon his examination of the relationship of sensecertainty to cognition. He came to the conclusion that to show something, thatis to apprehend its this-ness, necessitates a recognition of the fact that sensecertainty is a dialecticalprocessofnegation and mediation. This process affectsnatural consciousness Hegel's operative notion in this text w hich p uts itselfforward as the unmediated and the immediate, but is shown in the analysis ofshowingnot to be agivenbut aGe schichte, thatis ahistory. This typ eofhistorybelongs to the ontic, since it is the result of mediation and is in the realm ofrepresentation. Paul de Man came early to understand that this articulation ofhistory depended upon the central position of consciousness, and his own earlypreoccupation with this category, which has led some to believe that he wassomehow affiliated withthe Genevaschool,w as an attemp t to dislodge con scious-ness from the central position it occupied in the Hegelian edifice. When de Mancame into contact with the thought of Heidegger, almost contrapuntally in theFrench environment in which he lived then since it was Hegel that the Frenchwere discovering then asthey were finally beginning to translate him, he recog-nized a preoccupation similar to his own, and in the distinction of the ontic andthe ontological, the possibility of distinguishing a history that is caught up inrepresentation and one that is not. And while such a possibility w aspresent in


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Hegel'sthought,it wasunderthe swayof thedialectic w hich effectively robbedit of its radicality.In Heidegger, however, the distinction between Historic and Geschichte,

whichmap sthe tw odifferent conceptionsof thehistorical dim ension , lends itselfsom ewhat easily tocertain formsofrecup eration, best ex em p lifiedby thesuccessofH eideggerian ideas in theologicalcircles.The historical dim ension that p residesover the constitution of the apparent and is itself not of the apparent, to speakthe languageof idealist philosophy, can far too rapidlybeconceived as aformof transcendentalism thateffectively removes history from human view.The p roblematic status of prax is in contemp orary thoug ht derives in great p artfrom this situation. Conceived of in relation to theory, praxis is subject to thelatter, and when the latter runs into problems, praxis appears arbitrary or willful.Indeed willfulness, whether constructed immediatelyassuchor conceived alongthe lines ofdesire, has figured prominently in recent thought as a way out ofthis predicament. Paul de Man seems to have adopted another strategy, one thatled him to recognize that the mapping of the opposition/dependency of theoryand prax is , left aesthetics free standing. In a first movement, he restores theancient relation between aes thes is and theoria and problematizes their relation,and mostof ushave followed with considerable interest whathe hasdone there.But we ought not lose sight of the fact that de Man's remapping has liberatedpraxis from the hold that theory has had over it. It is incum bent upon us nowto deal w ith p rax is, though it becomes rapidly clear that our old w ays of dealingwith it, beholden as they were to the supremacy of theory and the autonomyofaesthes is , w ill not do. P raxis thu s stands as a rather m ysterious entity p resently,the figure of the agency (Handlung) that we thought we had lost when wsecularized butthatnowreturns w ithoutthegodheadthatadornedit, as the figureofhistory.The death of Paul de Man is thus a great loss as he was beginning to moveinto thisphaseof his thinking, whichwasgoingtobecomeapp arentin theessayson Burke, Kierkegaard, andMarx . But there isenough for us to r e a dhere,andfor quite a while.

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TheResistance toTheory

This essay was not originally intended to address the question of teaching directly,although it wassupposedtohaveadidacticand aneducational function whichit failed toachieve. It waswrittenat therequestof theCommittee onResearchActivities of the Modern Language Association as a contribution to a collectivevolume entitled Introduction toScholarship in M o d e r n Languages a ndLitera-tures.I was asked to write the section on literary theory. Such essays are expectedto follow a clearly determined program: they are supposed to provide the readerwith aselect butcomprehensive list of themain trends andpublications in thefield, to synthesize and classify the main problematic areas and to lay out acritical and programmatic projection of the solutions which can be expected inthe foreseeable future. All this with a keen awareness that, ten years later,someone willbeaskedtorepeatthe same exercise.I found it difficult to live up, inminimal good faith, to therequirements ofthis program and could only try to explain, asconcisely aspossible, why themain theoretical interest of literary theory consists in the impossibility of itsdefinition. The Committee rightly judged that this was aninauspicious way toachieve the pedagogical objectives of the volume and commissioned anotherarticle. I thought their decision altogether justified, as well as interesting in itsimplications for the teaching of literature.

I tell this for two reasons. First, to explain the traces in the article of theoriginal assignment which account for the awkwardnessof trying to be moreretrospective and more general than one can legitimately hope to be. But, second,becausethe predicamentalso revealsaquestionofgeneral interest:thatof the


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relationship between the scholarship (the key word in the title of the MLAvolume), the theory, and the teaching of literature.Overfacile opinionnotwithstanding, teaching is not primarilyanintersubjec-tive relationship betweenpeoplebut a cognitive process in which self and otherare only tangentially and contiguously involved. The only teaching worthy ofthe name is scholarly, not personal; analogies between teaching and variousaspects of show business or guidance counseling are moreoften than not excusesfor having abdicated the task. Scholarship has, in principle, to be eminentlyteachable. In the case of literature, such scholarship involves atleast twocom-plementary areas: historical and philological facts as the preparatory conditionforunderstanding, and methods of reading or interpretation. The latter is admit-tedly an open discipline, which can, how ever, hope to evolve by rational m eans,desp ite internalcrises,controversies andp olemics. As acontrolled reflectiononthe formation of method, theory rightly proves to be entirely compatible withteaching, and one can think of num erous imp ortant theoreticians who are or werealso prominent scholars. A question arises only if a tension develops betweenmethods of understanding and the knowledge which those methods allow oneto reach. If there is indeed something about literature, as such, which allows fora discrepancy between truthandm ethod, between Wahrhei t andM e tho d e , thenscholarship and theory are no longer necessarily compatible; as a first casualtyof this complication, the notion of "literature as such" as well as the cleardistinction between history and interp retation can no longer be taken for granted.For a m ethod that cannot be m ade to suit the"truth"of its object can only teachdelusion. Various developments, notonly in the contemporary scene but in thelong and complicated history of literary and linguistic instruction, revealsymp toms that suggest that such adifficulty is an inherent focus of the discourseabout literature.Theseuncertaintiesarem anifestin thehostility directedattheoryinthenameofethicalandaestheticvalues, aswellas in therecuperative attem p tsof theoreticians to reassert their own subservience to these values. The mosteffective of these attacks will denounce theory as an obstacle to scholarship and ,consequently, toteaching. It isw orth ex am ining w hether, andwhy, this is thecase. For ifthis isindeed so, then it isbetter to fail inteaching w hat shouldnotbe taught thanto succeed in teaching whatis not true.

A general statement about literary theory should not, in theory, start frompragmatic considerations. It should address such questions as the definition ofliterature (what is literature?) and discuss the distinction between literary andnon-literary uses oflanguage, aswell as between literary andnon-verbal formsofart. It should thenp roceed to the descriptive taxonomy of the various aspectsand species of the literary genus and to the normative rules that are bound tofollow from such a classification. Or, if one rejects a scholastic for aphenomenological model, one should attempt ap henom enology of the literary


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RESISTANCE TOTHEORY D 5activity as writing, reading orboth, or of the literary work as theproduct, thecorrelate of such an activity. Whatever the approach taken (andseveral othertheoretically justifiable starting-pointscan beimagined)it iscertain that consid-erable difficulties will arise atonce, difficulties that cut so deep that even themost elementary taskofscholarship, thedelimitation of thecorpusand the e ta tpresent of the question, is bound to end in confusion, not necessarily becausethe bibliography is so large but because it is impossible to fix its borderlines.Such predictable difficulties havenotprevented many writerson literature fromproceeding along theoretical rather than pragmatic lines, oftenwith considerablesuccess. It can beshown however that,in allcases,this success dependson thepowerof asystem (philosophical, religiousorideological) thatmaywell remainimplicit but that determines an apriori conception of what is "literary" bystarting out from the premises of thesystem rather than from theliterary thingi t se l fif such a "thing" indeed exists. This last qualification is of course areal question whichin fact accounts for thepredictability of thedifficulties justalluded to: if theconditionofexistenceof anentityisitself particularlycritical,thenthetheoryofthis entityisboundtofallback intothepragmatic.T he difficultand inconclusive history of literary theory indicates that this is indeed the casefor literature in aneven more manifest manner thanforother verbalized occur-rences suchasjokes,forexample,orevendreams. Theattempttotreat literaturetheoretically may as well resign itself to the fact that it has to start out fromempirical considerations.

Pragmatically speaking, then, w e know that there has been, over the lastfifteen to twenty years, astrong interest insomething called literary theory andthat,in theUnitedStates,this interesthas attimes coincided withtheimportationandreception of foreign, mostlybut notalways continental, influences. W e alsoknow that this waveof interest now seems to be receding as some satiation ordisappointment sets in after the initial enthusiasm. Such an ebb and flow isnatural enough, but it remains interesting, in this case, because it makes thedepth of the resistance to literary theory so manifest. It is a recurrent strategyofanyanxietytodefusewhatitconsiders threateningbymagnificationorminimi-zation, by attributing to itclaims topower ofwhich it isbound to fall short. Ifa cat is called a tiger it can easily bedismissed as a paper tiger; thequestionremains howeverwhy one was soscared of the cat in the first place. The sametactic worksinreverse: callingthe cat amouseandthen deridingit for itspretenseto be mighty. Rather than being drawn into this polemical whirlpool, itmightbe better to try to call the cat a cat and to document, however briefly, thecontemporary versionof the resistance to theory in thiscountry.Thepredominant trends inNorth American literary criticism, beforethenine-teen sixties, were certainly not averse to theory, if by theory one understandsthe rooting of literary exegesis and of critical evaluation in a system of someconceptualgenerality.Eventhemost intuitive, empirical andtheoreticallylow-


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6n RESISTANCETOTHEORYkey writers on literature made use of a minimal set of concepts (tone, organicform, allusion, tradition, historical situation, etc.)of atleast some general imp ort.In several other cases,the interest in theory was pu blicly asserted and p racticed.A broadly shared methodology, more or less overtly proclaimed, links togethersuchinfluential tex t booksof the era as Understanding Poetry(Brooks andWar-ren), Theory of Literature(W ellek andWarren)and The Fie ldsof Light(ReubenBrower) or such theoretically oriented works as The Mirror and the La m p ,Language as Gestureand The Verbal Icon.Yet, with the possible exception of Kenneth Burke and, in some respects,Northrop Frye,none of these authors wou ld have considered themselves theoreti-cians in the post-1960 sense of the term, nor did their work provoke asstrongreactions, p ositive ornegative,asthatof latertheoreticians.Therew erepolemics,no doubt,anddifferencesinap p roach that coveraw ide spectrumofdivergencies,yet thefundam ental curriculumofliterary studiesaswellas the talentandtrain-ing expected for them were not being seriously challenged. New Criticalapproaches experienced no difficulty fitting into the academic establishmentswithouttheir practitioners havingtobetray their literarysensibilitiesin anyway;several of its represenatives pursued successful parallel careers as poets ornovelists next to their academic functions. Nor did they experience difficultieswith regard to a national tradition which, though certainly less tyrannical thanitsEurop ean counterparts,isnevertheless farfrom powerless.Thep erfect embod-iment of the New Criticism remains, in manyrespects, the personality and theideology of T. S. Eliot, a combination of original talent, traditional learning,verbal wit and moral earnestness, anA nglo-Am erican blendof intellectual gen-tilitynot sorepressedas not to afford tantalizing glimpses ofdarker psychicandpoliticaldepths, butw ithout breakingthesurfaceof anam bivalent decorum thathas its own complacencies and seductions. The normative principles of such aliterary ambiance are cultural and ideological rather than theoretical, orientedtowards the integrity of a social and historical self rather than towards theimp ersonal consistency that theory requires. Cu lture allows for, indeed advocates,a degree of cosmopolitanism, and the literary spirit of the American Academyof the fifties was anythingbut provincial. It had no difficulty appreciating andassimilating outstanding productsof a kindred spirit that originated inEurope:Curtius, Auerbach,Croce, Spitzer, Alonso,Valery and also, w ith the excep tionofsome of his works, J. P. S artre. The inclusion of Sartre in this list is im p ortan t,for it indicates that the dominant cultural code we are trying to evoke cannotsimply be assimilated to a political polarity of the left and the right, of theacademic and non-academic, ofGreenwich Village and Gambier, Ohio. Politi-cally oriented andpredominantly non-academic journals, of whichthePa rtisanReview of the fifties remainsthe best example, did not (after due allowance ismadefor allp roperreservationsanddistinctions) standin anygenu ine opp ositionto the New Critical approaches. The broad, though negative, consensus thatbrings these extremely diverse trends and individuals together is their shared


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RESISTANCE TOTHEORY a 7

resistancetotheory. This diagnosisisborneout by theargumentsand complicitiesthat have since come to light in a more articulate opposition to the commonopponent.Theinterestof these considerations wouldbe atmost anecdotal (the historicalimpact of twentieth-century literary discussion being so slight) if it were not for

the theoretical implicationsof the resistance totheory.The local manifestationsof this resistance are themselves systematic enough to warrantone's interest.W hat is it that is being threatened by the app roaches to literature that developedduring the sixties and that now, under a variety of designations, make up theill-defined and somewhat chaotic field of literary theory? These approaches

cannot be simply equated with any particular method or country. Structuralismwasnot the only trend to dom inate thestage,not even inFrance,and structuralismaswellassemiology areinseparablefrom priortendenciesin the Slavic domain.In Germany, the main impulses have come from other directions, from theFrankfurt schoolandm ore orthodoxMarxists,frompost-Husserlianphenomenol-ogy and post-Heideggerian hermeneutics, with only minor inroads made bystructural analysis. All these trends have had their share of influence in theUnited States, in more or less productive combinations with nationally rootedconcerns. Only a nationally or personally competitive view of history wouldwishto hierarchize such hard-to-label movements.Thep ossibility ofdoing liter-ary theory, which is by no means to be taken for granted, has itself become aconsciously reflected-upon question and those w ho haveprogressed furthest inthis questionare them ost controversial but also the best sources ofinformation.This certainly includes several of the names loosely connected with structuralism,broadly enough defined to include Saussure, Jakobson andBarthes as well asGreimas and Althusser, that is to say, so broadly defined as to be no longer ofuse as a m eaningful historical term.

Literary theory can be said to come into being when the approach to literarytexts is no longer based onnon-linguistic, that is to sayhistorical andaesthetic,considerations or, to put itsomew hat less crudely, w hentheobjectofdiscussionis no longer the meaning or the value but the modalities of production and ofreception ofmeaning and ofvalue p rior totheir establishment the implicationbeing that this establishment is problematic enough to require an autonomousdisciplineofcritical investigationtoconsideritsp ossibilityand itsstatus. Literaryhistory, even when considered at the furthest remove from the platitudes ofpositivistic historicism, is still the history of an understanding of which thep ossibility is taken for granted. The qu estion of the relationship between aestheticsand meaning is more complex, since aesthetics apparently has to do with thee f f e c t of meaning rather than with its content per se. But aesthetics is in fact,ever since its development just before and with Kant, a phenomenalism of aprocess ofmeaning andunderstanding, and it may be naive inthat it postulates(as its name indicates) a p henomenology of art and of literature which m ay w ell


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8 Q RESISTANCE TO THEORY

be what is at issue. Aesthetics ispartof a universal system of philosophy ratherthan a specific theory. In the nineteenth-century philosophical tradition,Nietzsche's challenge of the system erectedby Kant, Hegel and their successorsis a version of the general question of philosophy. Nietzsche's critique ofmetaphysics includes, or starts out from, the aesthetic, and the same could beargued for Heidegger. The invocation of prestigious philosophical namesdoesnot intimate that the present-day development of literary theory is a by-productof larger philosophical speculations. In some rarecases, a direct link may existbetweenp hilosophy and literarytheory.M ore frequently, how ever, contem p oraryliterary theory is a relatively autonomous version of questions thatalso surface,in a different context, in philosophy, though not necessarily in aclearer andmore rigorous form. Philosophy, in England as well as on the Continent, is lessfreed from traditional patterns than it sometimes pretends to believe and theprominent, though never dominant,placeof aesthetics am ong the m ain com po-nents of the system is a constitutive part of this system. It is therefore notsurprising that contemporary literary theory came into being from outsidephilosophy and sometimes in conscious rebellion against the weight of its trad-ition. Literary theory may now well have become a legitimate concern ofphilosophy but it cannot be assimilated to it, either factually ortheoretically. Itcontains a necessarily pragmatic moment that certainly weakens it as theory butthat adds a subversive element of unp redictability and makes it something of awild card in the serious game of the theoretical disciplines.The advent of theory, the break that is now so often being deplored and thatsets it aside from literary history and from literary criticism, occurs with theintroduction of linguistic terminology in the metalanguage about literature. Bylinguistic terminology is meant a terminology that designates reference prior todesignatingthe referent and takes into accou nt, in the consideration of the world,the referential function of language or, to be somewhat more specific, thatconsiders reference as a function oflanguageand notnecessarily as anintuition.Intuition implies perception, consciousness, experience, and leads at once intothe world of logic and of understanding with all its correlatives, among whichaesthetics occupies aprom inent p lace.Theassum p tion that therecan be ascienceof language which is not necessarily a logic leads to the development of aterminology which is not necessarily aesthetic. Contemporary literary theorycomes into its own in such events as theapplication of Saussurian linguistics toliterary texts.

The affinity between structural linguistics and literary texts is not as obviousas, with the hindsight of history, it now may seem. Peirce, Saussure, Sapir andBloomfield were not originally concerned with literature at all but with thescientificfoundationsoflinguistics.B ut theinterestofp hilologists suchasRomanJakobson or literary critics such as Roland Barthes in semiology reveals thenatural attraction of literature to a theory of linguistic signs. By considering


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RESISTANCE TOTHEORY Q9

language as a system of signs and ofsignification rather than as an establishedpattern of meanings, one displaces or even suspends the traditional barriersbetween literary and presumably non-literary uses of language and liberates thecorpus from the secular weight of textualcanonization. The results of the en-counter between semiology and literature went considerably further than thoseof many other theoretical models p hilological, psychological or classicallyepistemological w hich w riters on literature in quest of such models had triedoutbefore. The responsiveness of literary texts tosemioticanalysis is visible inthat, whereas other approaches were unabletoreach beyond observations thatcould be pa raphrased or translated in terms of comm on know ledge, theseanalysesrevealed p atterns that could only be described in terms of their ow n, specificallylinguistic, aspects. The linguistics of semiology and of literature ap p arently havesomething in common that only their shared perspective can detect and thatpertains distinctively to them. The definitionof this something, often referredto as literariness, has become the object of literary theory.Literariness, however, is often misunderstood in a way that has provokedmuch of the confusion which dominates today's polemics. It is frequently as-sumed, fo r instance, that literariness is another word for, or another mode of,aesthetic response. The use, in conjunction with literariness, of such terms asstyle and stylistics, form or even "poetry" (as in "the poetry of grammar"),all of which carry strong aesthetic connotations, helps to foster this confusion,even among those w ho first put the term in circulation. Roland Barthes, forexample , in an essay properly and revealingly dedicated to Roman Jakobson,speaks eloquently of the writer'squest for a perfect coincidence of the phonicproperties of awordwithits signifying function. "W e would also wishtoinsiston the Cratylismof the name (andof the sign)inProust. . . .Proustseestherelationship between signifier and signified as motivated, the one copying theother and representing in its material form the signifiedessenceof the thing (andnot the thing itself). . . . This realism (in the scholastic sense of the word),which conceives of names as the 'copy' of the ideas, has taken, in Proust, aradical form. But one may well ask whether it is not more or less consciouslypresent in all writing and whether it is possible to be a writer without some sortof belief in the natural relationship between names and essences. The poeticfunction, in the widest sense of theword, would thusbe definedby aCratylianaw areness of the sign, and the writer w ould be the conveyor of this secular m ythwhich wants language to imitate the idea and which, contrary to the teachingsof linguistic science, thinks of signs as motivated signs."1 To the extent thatCratylism assumes a convergence of the phenomenal aspects of language, assound, withits signifyingfunction asreferent, it is an aesthetically oriented con-ception; one could, infact,w ithoutdistortion,consideraesthetictheory,includingits m ost system atic form ulation inHegel,as the comp lete un folding of the m odelof which the Cratylian conception of language is aversion.Hegel's somewhat


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10n RESISTANCE TOTHEORYcryptic referencetoPlato,in theAesthetics,mayw ellbe interpreted inthissense.Barthes andJakobson often seem to invite a purely aesthetic reading, yet thereis a part of their statement that moves in the opposite direction. For the con-vergence of sound and meaning celebrated by Barthes in Proust and, as GerardGenette has decisively shown, 2later dismantled by Proust him self as a seductivetemptation to m ystified m inds, is also considered here to be a m ere e f f e c t whichlanguagecan perfectly well achieve, but which bears no substantial relationship,by analogy or by ontologically grounded imitation, to anything beyond thatparticular effect. It is a rhetorical rather than an aesthetic function of language,an identifiable trope (paronomasis) that operates on thelevelof the signifier andcontains no responsible pronouncement on the natureof the world desp ite itspowerful potential to create the opposite illusion. The phenomenality of thesignifier, as sound, is unquestionably involved in the correspondence betweenthe name and the thing named, but the link, the relationship between word andthing, is not phenomenal but conventional.

This gives the language considerable freedom from referential restraint, butit makes it epistemologically highly suspect and volatile, since its use can nolonger be said to be determined by considerations of truth and falsehood, goodand evil, beauty and ugliness, or pleasure andp ain. Whenever this autonomousp otential o f language can be revealed by analysis, w e are dealing w ith literarinessand, in fact, with literature as the place where this negative knowledge aboutthe reliability of linguistic u tterance is made available. The ensu ing foregroundingof material, phenomenal aspects of the signifier creates a strong illusion ofaesthetic seduction at the very moment when the actual aesthetic function hasbeen, at the very least, suspended. It is inevitable that semiology or similarlyoriented methods be considered formalistic, in the sense of being aestheticallyrather than semantically valorized, but the inevitabilityof such an interpretationdoes not make it less aberrant. Literature involves the voiding, rather thantheaffirmation, of aesthetic categories. One of the consequences of this is that,whereas we have traditionally been accustomed to reading literature by analogywith the plastic arts andw ith music,we nowhave torecognize thenecessityofa non-perceptual, linguistic moment in painting and music, and learn to r e a dpictures rather than to imaginem eaning.

If literariness is not an aesthetic quality, it is also not primarily mimetic.Mimesis becomes one trope among others, language choosing to imitateanon-verbal entity justasp aronom asis ''imitates''asound w ithoutanyclaimtoidentity(or reflection on difference) between the verbal and non-verbal elements. Themost misleading representation of literariness, and also the most recurrent objec-tion to contemporary literary theory, considers it as pure verbalism, as a denialof the reality principle in the name of absolutefictions, and for reasons that aresaid to be ethically and politically shameful. The attack reflects the anxiety ofthe aggressors rather than the guilt of the accused. By allowing for the necessity


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RESISTANCE TO THEORY D 11

ofa non-phenom enal linguistics, onefrees the discourse on literature from naiveoppositions between fiction andreality, w hicha rethemselves anoffspring of anuncritically mimetic conceptionofart.In agenuine sem iology aswellas inotherlinguistically orientedtheories, the referential function of language is notbeingdenied far from it; what is in question is its authority as a model for naturalor phenomenal cognition. Literature is fiction not because it somehow refusesto acknowledge "reality," but because it is notapriori certain that languagefunctions according to principles which are those, or which are like those, ofthe phenomenal world. It is therefore not a priori certain that literature is areliable source of information about anything but its own language.Itwouldbeu nfortunate, forexam ple, toconfuse them aterialityof thesignifierwith the materiality of what it signifies. This may seem obvious enough on thelevel of light and sound, but it is less so with regard to the more generalphenomenality ofspace, time or especially of the self; no one in his right mindwill try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word "day," but it is verydifficult not to conceive the pattern of one's past and future existence as inaccordance w ith tem p oral and sp atial schem es that belong to fictional narrativesand not to the world. This does not mean that fictional narratives are not partof the world and of reality; their impact upon the world may well be all toostrong forcom fort. Whatwecall ideology isp recisely theconfusion oflinguisticwithnatural reality, ofreference with phenomenalism.Itfollow sth at, m ore thanany other mode of inquiry, including economics, the linguistics of literarinessis ap owerful and indispensabletoolin the unm asking of ideological aberrations,as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence. Those whoreproach literary theory for being oblivious to social and historical (that is tosayideological)realityarem erely statingtheirfearathavingtheirownideologicalmystifications exposedby thetooltheyaretryingtodiscredit. Theyare,inshort,verypoor readers of Marx 's G e r m a n I d e o l o gy .

In these all too summary evocations of arguments that have been much moreextensively and convincingly made by others, we begin toperceivesome of theansw ers to the initial question: w hat is it about literary theory that is so threateningthat it provokes such strong resistances and attacks? It upsets rooted ideologiesby revealing the mechanics of their workings; it goes against a powerfulp hilosophical tradition of w hich aesthetics is a prom inent p art; it up sets theestablished canon of literary works and blurs the borderlines between literaryand non-literary discourse. By implication, it may also reveal the links betweenideologies and philosophy. All this is ample enough reason for suspicion, butnot asatisfying answ er to the question. Fo r it m akes the tension between contem -porary literary theory and the tradition of literary studies appear as a merehistorical conflict between two modes of thought that happen to hold the stageat the same time. If the conflict is merely historical, in the literal sense, it is oflimited theoretical interest, a passing squall in the intellectual weather of the


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world. As amatter of fact, the arguments in favor of the legitimacy of literarytheoryare socomp elling thatitseems uselesstoconcern oneself withtheconflictat all. Certainly, none of the objections to theory, presented again and again,always misinformed or based on crude misunderstandings of such terms asmimesis, fiction, reality, ideology, reference and, for that matter, relevance, canbe saidto be of genuine rhetorical interest.It may well be, however, that the development of literary theory is itselfoverdeterminedby com p lications inherent in its very project and unsettling withregard to its status as a scientific discipline. Resistance may be a built-in con-stituent of its discourse, in a manner that would be inconceivable in the naturalsciences and unmentionable in the social sciences. It may well be, in otherwords,that the polemical op p osition, the systematic non-understanding and m is-representation, the unsubstantial but eternally recurrent objections, are the dis-placed symptomsof a resistance inherent in the theoretical enterprise itself. Toclaim that this would be sufficient reason not to envisage doing literary theorywould belikerejecting anatom y because it hasfailed to cure mortality. The realdebate of literary theory is not with its polemical opponents but rather with itsownmethodological assumptions and possibilities. Rather than asking why liter-arytheory is threatening, we should perhaps ask why it has suchdifficulty goingaboutits business and w hy it lapses so readily either into the langu age of self-jus-tification andself-defense orelse into the overcompensation of a programmati-cally euphoric utopianism. Such insecurity about its own project calls fo r self-analysis,if one is tounderstandthe frustrations that attend uponitspractitioners,even when they seem to dwell in serene methodological self-assurance. And ifthese difficulties are indeed an integral part of the problem, then they will haveto be, to some extent, a-historical in the temporal sense of the term. The wayin which they are encountered on the present local literary scene as a resistanceto the introduction of lingu istic term inology in aesthetic and historical discourseaboutliterature is only one p articular version of a question that canno t be reducedto a specific historical situation and called modern, post-modern, post-classicalor romantic (not even inHegel's sense of the term), although its compulsiveway of forcing itself uponus in the guiseof a systemof historical periodizationis certainly part of its problematic nature. Such difficulties can be read in thetext of literary theory at alltimes, at whatever historical moment one wishes toselect. One of the m ain achievem ents of the present theoretical trends is to haverestored some awareness of thisfact. Classical, m edieval and Renaissance literarytheory is now often being read in a way that knows enough about what it isdoingnot to wishto call itself "modern."W ereturn,then,to the original question in an attem p t to broaden the discussionenough to inscribe the polemics inside the question rather than having themdetermine it. Theresistance totheoryis aresistanceto the use oflanguage aboutlanguage. It is therefore aresistanceto language itselfor to the possibility that


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language contains factors or functions that cannot be reduced to intuition. Butwe seem to assume all too readily that, when we refer to something called"language,"we k now w hat it is we are talking ab out, although there is p robablyno word to be found in the language that is as overdetermined, self-evasive,disfigured and disfiguring as "language." Even if we choose to consider it ata saferem ovefromanytheoreticalmodel,in thep ragm atic historyof''language,''not as a concept, but as a didactic assignm ent that no hum an being can byp ass,we soon find ourselves confronted by theoretical enigmas. The most familiarand general of all linguistic models, the classical trivium, which considers thesciences of language as consisting of gram m ar,rhetoric,andlogic(or dialectics),is in fact a set of unresolved tensions powerful enough to have generated aninfinitely prolonged discourse ofendless frustration ofw hich contem p orary liter-ary theory, even at its most self-assured, is one more chapter. The difficultiesextend to the internal articulations between the constituent parts as well as thearticulation of the field oflanguagewith theknowledgeof the worldin general,the link between the trivium and thequadrivium, which covers the non-verbalsciences of number (arithmetic), of space (geometry), ofmotion (astronomy),and of time (music). In the history of philosophy, this link is traditionally, aswell as substantially, accomp lished by way oflogic, the area where the rigor ofthelinguistic discourse abou t itself m atchesupw iththerigorof themathematicaldiscourse about the world. Seventeenth-century epistemology, for instance, atthem om ent w hen the relationship betwen philosophy and m athematics is particu-larlyclose,holds up the language of what it calls geometry (mos geometricus),and whichin fact includes the homogeneous concatenation between space,tim eand number, as the sole model of coherence and economy. Reasoning m o r egeometr ico is said to be "almost the only mode of reasoning that isinfallible,because it is the only one to adhere to the true method, whereas all other onesare by natural necessity in a degree of confusion of which only geometricalmindscan beaware."3 This is a clear instanceof the interconnection betweena science of the phenomenal world and a science of language conceived asdefinitional logic, thepre-conditionfor acorrect ax iom atic-deductive, syntheticreasoning. The possibilityofthus circulatingfreelybetween logic andm athema-tics has its own complex and problematic history as well as its contemporaryequivalences with a different logic and a different mathematics. What mattersfor ou rp resent argumentisthat this articulationof the sciences oflanguage w iththemathematical sciences represents a particularly compelling version of a con-tinuity betweenatheoryof language, aslogic,and theknow ledge of thepheno-menal world tow hich mathematics givesaccess. In suchasystem , theplaceofaesthetics ispreordained and by no means alien, provided thepriority oflogic,in the model of thetrivium, is notbeing questioned. For even if one assumes,for the sakeof argumentandagainstagreat deal ofhistoricalevidence, thatthelinkbetw een logic and the natura l sciences issecure,this leavesopenthe question,


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14n RESISTANCE TO THEORYwithin the confines of the trivium itself, of the relationship between grammar,rhetoric andlogic.And this is the p oint at w hichliterariness,the use of languagethat foregrounds the rhetorical over the grammatical and the logical function,intervenes as adecisive butunsettling element which, in avariety ofm odes andaspects, disrupts the inner balance of the model and, consequently, its outwardextension to the nonverbal world as well.

Logic and grammar seem to have a natural enough affinity for each otherand, in the tradition of Cartesian linguistics, the grammarians of Port-Royalexperienced little difficulty at being logicians aswell. The same claim persiststoday invery different methods andterminologies that nevertheless m aintainthesameorientation tow ard the universality that logic shares w ithscience.Rep lyingto those who oppose the singularity of specific texts to the scientific generalityof the semiotic project, A. J. Greimas disputes the right to use the dignity of"grammar" todescribe a reading that wouldnot becom m itted touniversality.Those who have doubts about the semiotic method, he writes, "postulate thenecessity of constructingagramm ar for each particular text. But theessence (l epropre) of a grammar is its ability to account for a large number of texts, andthem etap horicaluse of theterm . . . failstohidethefact thatonehas,infact,givenup on thesemioticproject.''4Thereis nodoubt that wh atishere p rudentlycalled "a largenumber" implies thehopeat leastof afuture m odel that w ouldin fact be applicable to the generation of all texts. Again, it is not our presentpurpose to discuss the validity of this methodological optimism, but merely tooffer it as an instance of the persistent symbiosis between grammar and logic.It isclear that, fo r Greimas as for the entire tradition towhichhe belongs, thegrammatical and the logical functions of language are co-extensive. Grammaris anisotopeoflogic.It follows that, as long as it remains grounded in grammar, any theory oflanguage, including a literary one, does not threaten what we hold to be theunderlying principle of all cognitive and aesthetic linguistic systems. Grammarstands in the service of logic which, in turn, allows for the passage to theknowledge of the world. The studyofgram m ar, the first of the ar tesliberates,is thenecessary pre-condition for scientificand humanistic knowledge. Aslongasitleaves this p rincip le in tact, thereisnoth ing threatening abou t literary theory.The c ontinuity between theory and p henom enalism is asserted and preserved bythe system itself. Difficulties occur only when it is no longer possible to ignorethe epistem ological thrust of the rhetorical d im ension of discourse, that is, w henit is no longer p ossible to keep it in its place as a m ereadjunct, a mere ornam entwithin the semantic function.

Theuncertain relationship between gram m ar andrhetoric (asopp osed tothatbetween grammar and logic) is apparent, in the history of the trivium, in theuncertain status of figures of speech or tropes, a component of language thatstraddles thedisputed borderlines betweenthe twoareas. Tropesusedto bepart


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of the study of grammar but were also considered to be the semantic agent ofthe specific function (or effect) that rhetoric performs as persuasion as well asmeaning. Tropes, unlike grammar, pertain primordially to language. They aretext-producing functions thatare notnecessarily p atterned on anon-verbal entity,whereas grammar is by definition capable of extra-linguistic generalization. Thelatent tension between rhetoric and grammar precipitatesout in the problem ofreading, the process that necessarily partakes of both. It turns out that the resis-tance to theory is in fact a resistance to reading, a resistance that is perhaps atits mosteffective, in contemporary studies, in the methodologies that call them-selves theories ofreading butnevertheless avoidthe function they claim astheirobject.

What is meant when we assert that the study of literary texts is necessarilydep enden t on an act of reading, or when we claim that this act is being systemat-ically avoided? Certainly more than the tautology that one has to have read atleast some parts, however small, of a text (orread some part, however small,ofatex t about this text)inorderto beabletomakeastatem ent aboutit. Commonasit may be, criticismbyhearsay isonly rarely heldup asexem plary. To stressthe by no means self-evident necessity of reading implies at least two things.First of all, it implies that literature is not a transparent message in which it canbe taken for granted that the distinction between themessage and the meansofcommunication is clearly established. Second, and more p roblem atically, it im-plies thatthegrammatical decoding of a text leaves aresidueof indeterminationthathas to be, butcannotbe ,resolvedbygram m aticalm eans,however extensivelyconceived. The extension of grammar to include para-figural dimensions is infact the most remarkable and debatable strategy of contemporary semiology,especially in the studyofsyntagmaticand narrative structures. The codificationof contextual elements well beyond the syntactical limits of the sentence leadsto the systematic study ofm etaphrastic dimensions and has considerably refinedand exp anded the knowledge of tex tualcodes. It is equallyclear,however, thatthis extension is always strategically directed towards the replacement of rhetor-ical figures by grammatical codes. This tendency to replace a rhetorical by agrammatical terminology (to speak of hypotaxis, for instance, to designateanamorphic orm etonym ic tropes) is part of anexplicit program, ap rogram thatis entirely admirable in its intent since it tends towards the mastering and theclarification of m eaning. The rep lacement of a herm eneutic by a semioticmodel,of interpretation by decoding, would represent, inviewof thebaffling historicalinstability of textualmeanings(including, of course, thoseofcanonical texts),aconsiderable progress. Much of the hesitation associated with"reading"couldthusbe dispelled.

The argum ent can be m ade, h ow ever, that no gramm atical decoding, how everrefined, could claim to reach the determiningfigural dim ensions of a tex t.Thereare elements in all tex ts that are by no m eans ungram m atical, but whose semantic


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16 O RESISTANCE TO THEORY

function is not grammatically definable, neither in themselves nor in context.Do we have to interpret the genitive in the title of K eats' unfinished epic T heFal l of Hyperion as m eaning "Hyperion'sFall," the case story of the defeat ofanolderby anewer pow er, thevery recognizable storyfrom w hich K eats indeedstarted out but from whichhe increasingly strayed away, or as"Hyperion Fall-ing," themuch less specificbutmore disquieting evocationof anactual p rocessof falling, regardless of its beginning, its end or the identity of the entity towhom it befalls to be falling? This story is indeed told in the later fragmententitled T he Fa l l o f Hyper ion , but it is told about a character who resemblesApollo rather than Hyperion, the same Apollowho,in the first version (calledHyperion), should definitelybetrium p hantly standing rather thanfalling ifKeatshad not been com pelled to interrup t, for no app arent reason, the story of Ap ollo'striumph. Does the title tell us that Hyperion isfallen and that Apollo stands, ordoes it tell us that Hyp erion and Ap ollo (and Keats, w hom it is hard to distinguish,at times, from Apollo) are interchangeable in that all of them are necessarilyand constantly falling? Both readingsare grammatically correct, but it isimp os-sible todecide from thecontex t (the ensuing narrative) wh ich versionis therightone. The narrative context suits neither and both at the same time, and one istempted to suggest that thefact that Keats w as unable to com plete either versionmanifests the impossibility, for him as for us, of reading his own title. Onecould then read theword"Hyperion" in thetitle T heFa l l of Hyperion figurally,or, if one w ishes, intertextu ally, as referring not to the historical or m ythologicalcharacter but asreferring to the title ofKeats' own earlier text (Hyperion). Butare we then telling the story of the failure of the first text as the success of thesecond, theFall of Hyperion as theTriump hof TheFa l lof Hyperion? Manifestly,yes, but not quite, since the second text also fails to be concluded. Or are wetelling the story of why all texts, as texts, can always be said to be falling?Manifestlyyes,but notquite, either, since thestoryof thefallof thefirst versionastold in the second, applies to the first version onlyandcould not legitimatelybe read as meaning also the fall of The Fa l l o f Hyper ion . The undecidabilityinvolves the figural or literal status of the proper name Hyperion as well as ofthe verb falling, and is thus a matter of figuration and not of grammar . In"Hyperion's Fall," the word "fall" is plainly figural, the representation of afigural fall, and we, as readers, read this fall standingup . But in "HyperionFalling,"this is not so clearly thecase,for if Hy p erion can be Ap ollo and Ap ollocan be Keats, then he can also be us and his figural (or symbolic) fall becomeshis and our literal falling as well. The difference between the two readings isitself structured as a trope. And it matters a great deal how we read the title, asanexercise not only in sem antic s, but in w hat the tex t actually does to us. Facedwith the ineluctable necessity to come to adecision, no grammatical or logicalanalysis can help usout.Just as K eats had to break off his narrative, the readerhas to break off his understanding at the very moment when he is most directly


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RESISTANCE TO THEORY D 17engaged and summoned by the text. One could hardly expect to find solace inthis "fearful symmetry" between the author's and reader's plight since, at thispoint, the symmetry is no longer a formal but an actual trap, and the questionno longer "merely" theoretical.This undoing of theory, this disturbance of the stable cognitive field thatextendsfrom grammartologicto ageneral scienceof man and of thephenomenalworld, can in its turn be made into a theoretical project of rhetorical analysisthat w ill reveal theinadequacyofgram m atical modelsofnon-reading. Rhetoric,by its actively negative relationship to grammar and to logic, certainly undoesthe claims of the trivium (and by extension, of language) to be an epistemolog-ically stable construct.The resistance to theory is aresistance to the rhetoricalor tropological dimension of language, a dimension which is perhaps moreexplicitly in the foregroundinliterature (broadly conceived) thaninother verbalmanifestations or to be somewhat less vaguewhich can be revealed in anyverbal event when it is read textually. Since grammaraswellas figuration is anintegral part of reading, it follows that reading will be a negative process inwhichthe gramm atical cognition isundone,at alltimes,by its rhetorical displace-ment. The model of the triviumcontains within itself the pseudo-dialectic of itsow n undoing and itshistory tells the storyof this dialectic.This conclusion allows for a somewhat more systematic description of thecontemporary theoretical scene. This scene is dominated by an increased stresson reading as a theoretical problem or, as it is sometimes erroneously phrased,by an increased stress on the reception rather than on the produc tion oftexts. Itis inthis area thatthe mostfruitful exchanges have come about between writersand journals of various countries and that the most interesting dialogue hasdeveloped between literary theory and otherdisciplines, in the arts as well as inlinguistics, philosophy and the social sciences. A straightforwardreport on thepresent state of literary theory in the United States would have to stress theem p hasis on reading, a direction w hich is already p resent, m oreover, in the NewCritical traditionof thefortiesand thefifties. Them ethodsare nowmore technical,bu t the contem p orary interest in a poetics of literature is clearly linked, tradition-ally enough, to the problems of reading. And since the models that are beingused certainly are no longer simply intentionaland centered on an identifiableself, nor simply hermeneutic in the postulation of asingleoriginary, pre-figuralandabsolute text, itwould appear that this concentration on reading would leadto the rediscovery of the theoretical difficulties associated with rhetoric. This isindeed the case, to some ex tent; but not quite. Perhaps the m ost instructive aspectof contemporary theory is the refinementof the techniques by which the threatinherent in rhetorical analysis is being avoided at the very moment when theefficacy of these techniques has progressed so far that the rhetorical obstaclesto understanding can no longer be mistranslated in thematic and phenomenalcommonplaces. The resistance to theory which, as we saw, is a resistance to


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18 D RESISTANCE TO THEORYreading, appears in its most rigorous and theoretically elaborated form amongthe theoreticians of reading w ho dominate the contemporary theoretical scene.

It would be a relatively easy, though lengthy, process to show that this is sofor theoreticians of reading w ho, like Greimas or, on a more refined level,Riffaterre or, in a very different mode, H. R. Jauss or Wolfgang Iser a ll ofwhom have a definite, though sometimes occult, influenceon literary theory inthis countryare committed to the use ofgrammatical models or, in thecaseof Rezeptionsasthet ik, to traditional hermeneutic models that do not allow forthe problematization of the phenomenalism of reading and therefore rem ainuncritically confined within a theory of literature rooted in aesthetics. Such anargument wouldbe easy to make because, once a reader has become awareofthe rhetorical dimensions of a text, he will not be amiss in finding textualinstances thatareirreducible togramm ar or to historically determined meaning,provided only he is willing to acknowledge what he is bound to notice. Theproblem quickly becomes the more baffling one of having to account for theshared reluctancetoacknowledgetheobvious.B ut theargument wouldbelengthybecause it has to involve a textual analysis that cannot avoid being somewhatelaborate; one can succinctly suggest the grammatical indetermination of atitlesuch as The F a l l o f Hyper ion, but to confront such an undecidable enigma withthe critical reception and reading of Keats' text requires some space.The demonstration is less easy (though perhaps less ponderous) in the caseof the theoreticians of reading whose avoidance of rhetoric takes another turn.We have witnessed, in recent years, a strong interest in certain elements inlanguagewhosefunction is not only not dep endent on any form of p henom enalismbut on any form of cognition as well, and which thus excludes, orpostpones,the considerationoftropes,ideologies,etc.,from areading that w ouldbep rim ar-ily performative. In some cases, a link is reintroduced between performance,grammar , logic, andstable referential m eaning , and theresulting theories(as inthecaseofOhm ann)are no t inessence distinctfrom thoseofavowed gram m ariansor semioticians.But them ost astute practitionersof aspeech acttheoryofreadingavoid thisrelap se and rightly insist on the necessity to keep the actual p erformanceof speech acts, which is conventional rather than cognitive, separate from itscausesandeffects tokeep, intheirterminology,theillocutionaryforce separatefrom i t > p erlocutionaryfunction. Rhetoric, understoodaspersuasion, is forcefullybanished (like Coriolanus) from the performative moment and exiled in theaffective area of perlocution. Stanley Fish, in a masterful essay, convincinglymakes this point.5 What awakensone's suspicion about this conclusion is thatit relegates persuasion, which is indeed inseparable from rhetoric, to a purelyaffective and intentional realm andmakes no allowanceform odes ofp ersuasionwhich are no less rhetorical and no less at work in literary texts, but which areof the order of persuasion by p r o o f rather than persuasion by seduction. Thusto empty rhetoric of its epistemological impact is possible only because its


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RESISTANCE TOTHEORY D 19

tropological, figural functions are being bypassed. It is as if, to return for amomentto the m odel of thetrivium,rhetoric could be isolated from the generalitythat grammar andlogic have in common and considered as a mere correlativeof an illocutionarypower. The equationofrhetoric with psychology rather thanwith epistemology opens up dreary prospects of pragmatic banality, all thedrearier if compared to the brilliance of the performative analysis. Speech acttheories of reading in fact repeat, in am uch m ore effectiveway,the grammati-zation of the trivium at the expense ofrhetoric. For the characterization of theperformative as sheer convention reduces it in effect to a grammatical codeamongothers.The relationship betweentropeand performance is actually closerbut more disruptive than what is here being proposed. Nor is this relationshipprop erly capturedbyreferenceto asupp osedly"creative''aspectofp erformance,anotion with w hichFishrightly takes issue. The perform ative pow er of languagecan be called positional, whichdiffers considerably from conventional as wellas from "creatively" (or, in the technical sense, intentionally) constitutive.S peech act oriented theories of reading read only to the ex tent that they p reparethe way for the rhetorical reading they avoid.But the same is still true even if a"truly" rhetorical reading that would stayclear of anyundu e phenom enalizationor of anyu ndue gram m aticalorp erform a-tive codification of the text couldbe conceived som ething w hich is not neces-sarily impossible and for which the aims andmethodsof literary theory shouldcertainly strive. S uch a reading w ould indeed ap pear as the methodical undoingof the grammatical constructand,in its system atic disarticulationof the trivium,will be theoretically sound as well as effective. Technically correct rhetoricalreadings may be boring, monotonous, predictable and unpleasant, but they areirrefutable. They are also totalizing (andp otentially totalitarian) for since thestructures and functions they expose do not lead to theknowledge of an entity(such as language) but are an unreliable process of knowledge production thatprevents allentities, inclu ding linguistic entities, from coming into discourse assuch, they are indeed universals, consistently defective models of language'simpossibility to be a model language. They are, always in theory, the mostelastic theoretical and dialectical model to end all models and they can rightlyclaim to contain w ithin their ow n defective selves all the other defective m odelsof reading-avoidance, referential, semiological, gram m atical, performative,log-ical,or w hatever. They are theory and not theory at the sam e tim e, the universaltheory of the imp ossibility of theory. To the ex tent how ever that they are theory,that is to s

88680604 paul de man the resistance to theory

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