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Part 1
De Man on Benjamin
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Introduction
Claire Colebrook
Anecdotes aren’t very de Manian, but I will begin with one anyway. (De Man focused on texts as objects torn from anything like ‘life’, praxis, humanity, ecology or unity. Texts, like ‘life’ and unlike anecdotes, tend to destroy relations and connectedness, tend to annihilate what have come to be known as ‘aha’ moments. That said, de Man’s textual objects were never sacred and self-enclosed works but possessed a destructive power that could – if read – allow for a radical disturbance of the present).
My anecdote is this: I began writing on de Man while living in Manhattan. I was surrounded by educated, well-read, thoughtful, highly literate but not necessarily academic types. When I mentioned that I was writing on de Man they all either knew about de Man almost solely via the ‘de Man affair’ or had de Man introduced to them there and then (by me) through an account of the de Man affair. It seemed that if I were to explain who de Man was then the first significant detail would be his notoriety. I would like that not to be case. I would like a world in which other aspects of de Man’s existence were more significant, but that world does not exist, both because of the scandal that came to mark de Man’s work but more because of de Man’s unreadability, which made any canonization of his work outside scandal and journalism almost impossible. To use the term unreadable here is not to signal a particular difficulty or obscurantism of de Man’s work. On the contrary, de Man often said the most important things quite directly, including his statement – explored by Miller in this volume – that one should not take the impossibility of reading too lightly. That is a clear enough statement, and yet de Man was often read as though he took the impossibility of reading very lightly indeed – so much so that he supposedly said anything at all about the texts he was reading. De Man also, in his talk on Benjamin (transcribed in this volume), was very clear that one could neither return all texts to some original intention, nor read a text without some orientation to what the text really says. Yet despite the clarity of some of his most important claims he was both deemed to be unreadable (in the sense of being willfully misleading) or, worse, he was simply not read. What he was saying about reading would have required the sort of thinking and intellectual labour that many seemed simply unwilling to undertake. As a result de Man emerged from the 1980s as a ‘black box’: many critics held very strong opinions of the effect of de Man’s work, and where one ought to go in order to overcome the damage he had caused, even if what de Man actually wrote was not examined with the sort of rigor de Man expended on the texts he analysed, nor with the sort of scholarly standards that many accused de Man of destroying.
The aim of this volume is to create what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1994, 76) referred to as a conceptual persona, which is quite different from, though not unrelated to, biography. (A biography includes all possible concrete facts that one might list about an individual, but a conceptual persona is that same biography as narrated in the understanding of a concept: how could we understand ‘the unconscious’ without a certain story about Freud?).
At present de Man is a figure in a conceptual landscape. If we want to know what deconstruction as a concept is then we also encounter the persona of Jacques Derrida (and to a lesser extent, de Man). Derrida has a biography, including his birth-date, his Algerian origin, and so on. But his persona is crucial for the concept: just as we think of Descartes as the philosopher who came and doubted, and need to do so if we want to understand the concept of the cogito, so we need to have some notion of Derrida the French philosopher who harangued literature departments in order to understand ‘deconstruction.’ Part of the concept of ‘deconstruction’ today includes the figure or persona of de Man on the horizon: deconstruction can now be deemed to be ethically responsible and properly philosophical because of a certain story. Deconstruction once threatened to be playful, literary and irresponsible but avoided this fate by creating a relation between an ethical Derrida and scandalous de Man (O’Rourke 1997).
If a thinker creates concepts then he or she does so also by co-creating a dramatic figure; in de Man’s case this persona – as so many of the denunciations and apologies suggest – is tied to a melee regarding responsibility. De Man’s created concepts – of irony, allegory, materiality, history and modernity – were all written in such a way as to shift the terrain or plane upon which discussion took place. Concepts not only require assumed personae, they also occur in complex connections and establish a plane of problems: we cannot think about irony without thinking about texts, reading, meaning and (after de Man) temporality. De Man used these concepts in ways that rendered the traditional terrain of literary criticism – or the interpretation of texts for the sake of meaning– null and void. Irony would not signal an original intent that has been concealed or deferred, but a capacity of a text to be detached from any grounding sense. De Man used concepts that were once tied to projects of meaning and interpretation (concepts such as ‘history’) to signal a certain machine-like or inert and dead quality of textual objects. In doing so he created a new ‘plane’ of responsibility where a text could be interrogated not in order to disclose its original animating intent, but to examine its force or the ways in which it operated outside anything like our usual understanding of human communication. So there would be two ways (at least) of approaching de Man: one would be to restore his quite alienating and inhuman work back into what we usually understand as responsible human history. Responsibility would refer to who owns or who can answer to a text’s force, and history would refer to the narratives through which we make sense of, and contain, a text’s operations. Another mode – one which is pursued in this volume – is to take de Man’s dislocation of literary concepts seriously, and this in two senses.
First, what de Man took to be the literary was – quite literally – a text’s tendency to exist as something like a dead mark or trace, something that had left the author’s hand but would nevertheless survive and require reading, even if every reading would always have to project some imaginary sense that would never be the text itself. Second, this would then require something like literary history, but only if history could be understood not as the narrative that restores texts to contexts and authors with social biographies but as something like a non-chronological (or non-linear, non-clock) time – something that would always be outside the order and sense ‘we’ make of the world. It would be counter de Manian, then, to read words like ‘text’, ‘irony,’ ‘rhetoric’ or ‘aesthetic’ as though they referred to human practices of making meaning of the world. Yet the persona we have of de Man today, including the scandalous de Man of the ‘de Man affair’ goes something like this: de Man was a literary critic, and he therefore saw all events and history in terms of stories or texts, and therefore lacked all moral judgement and all sense of history.
The future, though, calls for another de Man, not only a different persona but a different approach to personae. At present – and this is an increasing tendency – concepts are domesticated by personal narratives. This is evidenced both at a ‘high’ theoretical level, where concepts such as deconstruction are accompanied by celebrity narratives. (There is more than one feature-length movie of Jacques Derrida, including one where he quotes Martin Heidegger saying that one should narrate a philosopher’s biography by saying that he ‘lived, wrote philosophy and died.’1 And there are also several pocket guides to famous philosophers.) And it is also a prevalent tendency in popular culture where broader inhuman threats and promises, such as terror and hope, are accompanied by personalities (Bin Laden or Obama). Another, inhuman, plane is possible whereby a text’s author is not akin to a celebrity narrative but something closer to an alien or monster, someone we cannot read, or whose time and desires are necessarily always blocked from us (despite projections). De Man read literary history as literary history: literary, because it consisted of nothing more than marks or traces (what he referred to as materiality), and history, because it had a temporality and future. The future would be historical, not because it would play out human expectation, nor because we might have an ethics of the future where we would save the earth for our children or our own memories. On the contrary, for de Man history was inhuman. Literary or rhetorical reading would, if you like, treat the past not as our own (as though within our narrative) but as though it arrived from a time without us. In this sense it is perhaps the monstrous de Man, the de Man who lacked all morality, responsibility and humanity, who needs to be read today. This would not be so we could look wisely upon the error of his ways and be more mindful of our humanity and ethics, but because he would confront us as a force from outside. De Man could not be, then, someone whom we could consign to the dust-bin of high theory because he was too literary (and unethical) nor someone who we might save, forgive or ameliorate because we too might have acted badly had we been in his position. Rather, we might read de Man as though his text arrived for us without persona, as though it came from an inhuman future.
Gilles Deleuze (2004, 167) argued that all philosophy and criticism had been accompanied by an ‘image of thought’; this is distinct from the specific persona (a doubting Descartes, a meditative Heidegger, a revolutionary Marx), but is more general: thinking presupposes someone who wants to know, understand, be understood, and be oriented to truth and wisdom. What, Deleuze asks, if we could imagine thought without an image? What if thinking could occur as though, let us imagine, humans did not exist, as though this world of ours with our future were not a self-evident value? This may seem insanely abstract but nothing could be more pertinent for the present. ‘We’ are, after all, living in a present that is at once intensely self-destructive (terrorism, climate change, resource depletion, economic pillage) and intensely self-loving (for our overwhelming question appears to be how ‘we’ might survive or adapt, as though ‘we’ need not question who ‘we’ are and our worth). This may then be the time to create this persona of de Man as anti-persona: the man who came and practiced literary criticism in highly literary terms, and yet who destroyed what ‘we’ felt literature (and especially literary ethics) to be.
So let us return to de Man as the figure or persona he is today, and back to the mode of the anecdote even if that is precisely the mode that a reading of de Man might annihilate. I began university study (not in an English department) in 1984 and I (like so many others) therefore heard of de Man first by way of journalism and commentary. If you google de Man today, ‘de Man affair’ is promptly suggested. What one learns in a nutshell is this: de Man can be accounted for either by saying that he was a value-destroying, apolitical, dehistoricising literary critic who was discovered to have written anti-Semitic journalism in Belgium during the war (thus proving that nihilistic textual criticism has very disturbing origins, affiliations and causes). Or one can reverse the explanatory sequence: it’s not that being a literary aesthete follows from being amoral and anti-Semitic, but if you have a certain formalist bent then you are more inclined to end up advocating disastrous causes such as Nazism. In the first case literary theory is a sign of moral penury; in the second it is a cause.
That is the de Man affair and problem in a nutshell, but like so many things it exceeds its nutshell. These concerns seem to be extrinsic to a close reading of de Man – and they are if they are composed as questions of biography – but there is also a way in which they strike at the heart of problems that de Man refigured. How is it that something like speaking historical life is captured in language? When we read a text how do we attribute sense, meaning, life or intentionality to what we are actually given? In the lecture on Benjamin, and particularly in the manuscript that is included in this volume, one can see the ways in which de Man posed this question through a series of oppositions – between poetic naming and translation, between experience or perception a...
