현상성과 물질성: 폴 드만의 문자

Abstract

Materiality is one that appears with increasing frequency in de Man’s later works. It has differing registers, all elliptical but interrelated: “a material vision,” “the materiality of the letter,” “the materiality of an inscription,” and “the materiality of actual history, for example. De Man writes that it cannot be exactly understood in any linguistic terms; as pure anteriority, it eludes cognition and cannot be accessible through our physical senses. Its emergence in de Man’s writings, especially in later years, marks a remarkable shift in his critical-linguistic apparatus from tropological displacements to what conditions and limits any metaphoricity. Drawing on this enigmatic entity of materiality, he seems to be engaged in a critical process of revaluing the concepts of history and aesthetics, concepts that, he argues, have been received in accordance with the model of practicality, empirical appeals, identity politics, and all forms of metaphorical self-transparency. If so, the critical examination of de Man’s materiality is a prerequisite for understanding his unique ideas of history, ideology, linguistic practices, body, and aesthetics. Therefore, the first part of this paper is mainly dedicated to analyzing de Man’s notion of irony and allegory, two central rhetorical concepts that characterize his linguistic principles in his later years. The assumptions of these concepts, insists de Man, radically question the legitimacy of cognitive and metaphorical models as proper critical paradigms. After this, this paper moves to a critical examination of his view of history, ideology, and aesthetics, all of which are built upon his unique linguistic principles and are undeniably affiliated with what is implied or involved in his ideas of materiality. The central argument of this paper is that de Man’s term of materiality disarticulates any attempts at referential totality. Instead, it proposes the practice of de-metaphorization and dis-figuration, thereby bespeaking a protocol of deconstructive reading that resists all forms of appropriation.