Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory

395 Pages·2001·0.97 MB·English

by  Tom Cohen

Material
Events
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Material
Events
P A U L D E M A N
A N D
T H E A F T E R L I F E
O F
T H E O R Y
Tom Cohen
Barbara Cohen
J. Hillis Miller
Andrzej Warminski
Editors
University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis — London
“How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?” first
appeared in abbreviated form in Qui Parle11, no. 1 (1998); the essay is
reprinted here by permission of the author, Judith Butler.
“Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law” first appeared in a slightly longer
form in Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities10 (1998): 549–74; the
essayis reprinted by permission of the author, Barbara Johnson, and Yale
Journal of Law and the Humanities.
Copyright 2001 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
“Phenomenality and Materiality in Cézanne” copyright T. J. Clark.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
aretrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior writ-
tenpermission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Material events : Paul de Man and the afterlife of theory / Tom Cohen . . .
[et al.], editors.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-3613-3 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-3614-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. De Man, Paul—Contributions in criticism. 2. Criticism—History—20th
century. 3. Deconstruction. I. Cohen, Tom, 1953– II. Title.
PN75.D45 M38 2000
801'.95'092—dc21
00-009996
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
A “Materiality without Matter”?
Tom Cohen,J. Hillis Miller,
and Barbara Cohen
vii
I. Ideologies of/and the Aesthetic
“As the Poets Do It”: On the Material Sublime
Andrzej Warminski
3
Art and Ideology: Althusser and de Man
Michael Sprinker
32
Algebra and Allegory: Nonclassical Epistemology,
Quantum Theory,and the Work of Paul de Man
Arkady Plotnitsky
49
II. Deadly Apollo: “Phenomenality,” Agency,the Sensorium
Phenomenality and Materiality in Cézanne
T. J. Clark
93
Political Thrillers: Hitchcock,de Man,
and Secret Agency in the “Aesthetic State”
Tom Cohen
114
Resistance in Theory
Laurence A. Rickels
153
III. Re-Marking “de Man”
Paul de Man as Allergen
J. Hillis Miller
183
Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law
Barbara Johnson
205
IV. The Mnemopolitical Event
The Politics of Rhetoric
Ernesto Laclau
229
How Can I Deny That These Hands
and This Body Are Mine?
Judith Butler
254
V. Materiality without Matter
Typewriter Ribbon:
Limited Ink (2) (“within such limits”)
Jacques Derrida
277
Contributors
361
Index
365
A “Materiality without Matter”?
Tom Cohen,J. Hillis Miller,and Barbara Cohen
Why de Man today? What if any claim might a project so linked to a
“theory” that seems out of fashion—that is, rightly or not, to literary
preoccupations and close reading—have in an era, say, moving beyond
“cultural studies” to a reworking of technology, of technicity, of concert-
ed political imaginaries and revived notions of materiality? Such ques-
tions were deferred not only in the overdetermined violence of de Man’s
occlusion following discussions of the wartime journalism but in the ar-
tificially delayed and seemingly untimelypublication of the last essays,
collected in Aesthetic Ideology(1996). Is it in these texts, primarily, that
de Man moves away from preoccupations with tropological displace-
ments to what perhaps precedes figuration itself, to inscription, a certain
“materiality,” the mnemonic, the historial “event”—or does it still an-
ticipate that as work “to come”? What value is this most “literary” of
microtextual projects to a time undergoing the transformations of the
electronic archive and political and terrestrial impasses concerned with
anything but textual reading (ecoterrestrial catastrophes, the homoge-
nizations dictated by global capital, resurgent genocidal sidebars, the
“University in ruins”)? What, after all, has a riddle that haunts the his-
tory of the “aesthetic”—and, for that matter, “materiality”—to do with
world history or today’s critical aporia? This would only be true, say, if
the former were attempting in fact to access and alter the program and
definition of the “human” itself, and the epistemo-aesthetic regime that
shapes and participates in these “impasses” as well.1Here, on the far
side of the era of “cultural studies,” and at a time of increasing preoccu-
pation with the politics of the (electronic) archive, with mnemotechnics
and with the posthuman, is there again reason to ask this?
vii
viii Tom Cohen,J. Hillis Miller,and Barbara Cohen
What was de Man doing with “materiality” (what Derrida reminds
us is a materiality without “matter”), with inscription, mnemotechnics,
the “event”? One might address these late texts today not as relentless
pursuits of the “linguistics of literariness,” if we still have an ear for
such a phrase, but as something pragmatic in the extreme. Here the
terms necessary for any mnemotechnic intervention in the historial
areexamined, put in play, performatively tested?2At stake in de Man’s
late writings, we might say, is the gamble of a transformation within
the conceptual programming of the historial, of agency and event, of
the “human” (a preoccupation of these essays).3That presumed “pas-
sage” seems linked to one of the older and more metaphysical terms in
the tradition, to a redefinition of the “material.” Given the competing
idioms, today, that would claim the term materialism in order to au-
thorize themselves, what is at stake in this usage—this “materialism”
without matter?
We will take the position for the sake of argument and because it is
interesting to consider, that what remains unengaged in de Man’s text
addresses the possibility of intervention in the mnemonic, the pro-
gramming of the “historial,” and a treatment of “materiality” that
compels a rethinking of technicity and the “sensorium” on the basis of
inscription. Among other things it would be an approach, given the
“materiality of inscription,” to the notion of the “virtual” and toward
a rendering virtual—and hence, toward alternative histories to those
programmed by inherited regimes of definition and perception.
Of course, in referencing an other “materiality” to inscription, we
are left with one that inverts the usual promise of the term that in-
cludes in its genealogy the promise of reference, the irreducible real,
the prefigural and nonlinguistic. Whatever inscription designates, it
conjures sheer anteriority. It does not deliver us to any immediacy of
reference, to any historical narrative that presumes to encode such, but
to mnemonic programs that appear to precede and legislate these—
together, necessarily, with reading models, the “senses” for that matter,
the “human” as fiction or category, perhaps the humanities as an insti-
tution situated over (and against) a disturbance he finds within the
“aesthetic” as routinely defined. The “materiality of inscription” as
phrase invokes a prefigural domain, the domain of the event and the
“performative.” To alter this domain, to intervene in the historial and
thus allow for the possibility of alternative futures to those now pre-
scribed entails a recasting (the figure of chance must remain a part of
this calculation) of inscription. Behind de Man’s relentless turn toward
A “Materiality without Matter”? ix
inscription and away from “tropological systems” of substitution lies the
rather banal but imponderably necessary task not only of the “trans-
lator” but of the engineer.To alter the archive, the prerecordings out of
which experience is projected and semantic economies policed is at
issue (one term for this, in de Man, is the “aesthetic state,” the manner
in which hermeneutic and humanistic programs function in a repres-
sively epistemo-political and statist fashion). De Man speaks here of a
movement or passage that can go only in “one direction.” One cannot
simply go back from having entered the problematics of inscription.
This passage is, in Benjamin’s terms, a one-way street, “irreversible.”
Perhaps one way of laying out or momentarily caricaturing this
project for the sake of today’s readership is as an appropriation and
precision of Benjamin’s own “materialistic historiography.” The last is
one term or conceit that redistributes (and voids) the inherited uses of
each term to designate how a rewriting of the archive stands to inter-
vene in received narratives, with the aim of optioning alternative pasts,
and hence futures. In the essays of Aesthetic Ideology there appears a
rather open subtext that we are pointlessly warned not to be distracted
by: an appropriation and effacement of Benjamin—darting, violent,
dismissed, but marked. Most explicit in the one essay of de Man’s
overtly on Benjamin, significantly that on the “translation” essay, this
is also heard in the recurrence of Benjaminian preoccupations to the
point of being a kind of white noise (“shock,” a movement “beyond”
mourning, recurrent exploitation of terms such as passage, of course
allegory and translation, and a use of “materiality” that is at least in-
formed by Benjamin’s “materialistic historiography”).4 It may be use-
ful to hypothesize for the moment, as one can do, that we see de Man
as working out the means and mechanics of the sort of interventionist
machine Benjamin proposed much too metaphorically and elliptically—
a fact responsible for traditional misappropriations of Benjamin—
under the term materialistic historiography in the Theses on History.
If “materiality” as differently redeployed by Benjamin and de Man
entails both a radical displacement of the term (most explicitly, for
Benjamin, in Marxist tradition) and a strategic or nomadic reinscrip-
tion, in both instances we witness not a “theorization” but a perfor-
mative attempting to disperse a political-referential regime or archive
that Benjamin terms historicism and that he allies, despite its intents,
with what he terms epistemo-political “fascism.”5 De Man’s perform-
ances may be read perhaps as explorations in how such intervention in
received programs of history prepares for and theorizes itself as an