Material Inscriptions Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory

249 Pages·2013·0.34 MB·English

by  Andrzej Warminski

The Frontiers of Theory
The Frontiers of Theory
First Currie
Series Editor: Martin McQuillan, Kingston University Material
This series brings together internationally respected figures to comment on and Completed
Warminski re-describe the state of theory in the twenty-first century.
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Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory
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‘Reading Veering generates the intense joy of veering. An exuberantly successful medium, ia
Royle calls up swarms of passages from literature and elsewhere where the word or concept l
“veering” is salient. On this basis he creates new theories of literature and of creative writing’s I Rhetorical Reading in
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place in criticism. Royle’s best book yet.’
J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine s
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‘Nicholas Royle is one of the most interesting, inventive, and provocative thinkers of literary r Current Currie
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language currently writing in English, and he has done something truly extraordinary here. p
By allowing a theory of literature to emerge right from the traces of the veering movements t colours not
of fiction and poetry, he has thoroughly renewed the possibility of thinking in the wake of i
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our literary encounters. Veering issues a general license to read, once again, with all the chosen
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wonder, generosity, and freedom it calls forth on every page.’
s Andrzej Warminski
Professor Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California
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‘Every genre, every great work has its way of veering. This fascinating, richly compendious, nh
necessary book shows the way forward for literary studies. Nicholas Royle’s twisty key opens Pe
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and magically re-opens the wonders of the canon and beyond. The spiralling pleasure he ao
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takes in doing so lightens, refreshes, instructs and inspires. Royle is a wonderful ti
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communicator about literature and theory and a uniquely powerful, original critical voice. ca
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This is his most exciting and widely relevant work so far.’ a R
Sarah Wood, University of Kent ne
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Brilliantly traces a strange but compelling ‘literary turn’
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Exploring images of swerving, loss of control, digressing and deviating, Veering provides new r
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critical perspectives on the novel, poetry, drama, the short story and the essay, as well as
‘creative writing’. With wit and irony Royle investigates the figure of ‘veering’ in the writings
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of Jonson, Milton, Dryden, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Melville, Hardy, Proust, Lawrence, Bowen,
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J. H. Prynne and many others. d
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Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His books include Telepathy e
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and Literature (1991), The Uncanny (2003) and In Memory of Jacques Derrida (2009). W
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Cover image: Dolmen in the Snow, 1807, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840).
ISBN 978–0–7486–8122–8
Cover design: Michael Chatfield chosen colour
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Approx. Pantone colour 649
Material Inscriptions
The Frontiers of Theory
Series Editor: Martin McQuillan
Available Titles Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and
Reading and Responsibility: Genius
Deconstruction’s Traces Jacques Derrida
Derek Attridge
Scandalous Knowledge: Science,
Of Jews and Animals Truth, and the Human
Andrew Benjamin Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Not Half No End: Militantly To Follow: The Wake of Jacques
Melancholic Essays in Memory of Derrida
Jacques Derrida Peggy Kamuf
Geoffrey Bennington
Death- Drive: Freudian Hauntings in
Dream I Tell You Literature and Art
Hélène Cixous Robert Rowland Smith
Insister of Jacques Derrida Veering: A Theory of Literature
Hélène Cixous Nicholas Royle
Volleys of Humanity: Essays Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics: For De
1972–2009 Man
Hélène Cixous Andrzej Warminski
Poetry in Painting: Writings on Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical
Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics Reading in Practice and Theory
Hélène Cixous, ed. Marta Segarra and Andrzej Warminski
Joana Masó
Forthcoming Titles
The Poetics of Singularity: The
Working with Walter Benjamin:
Counter- C ulturalist Turn in
Recovering a Political Philosophy
Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the
Andrew Benjamin
later Gadamer
Timothy Clark Readings of Derrida
Sarah Kofman, trans. Patience Moll
About Time: Narrative, Fiction and
the Philosophy of Time Hélène Cixous’s Semi-F ictions: At the
Mark Currie Borders of Theory
Mairéad Hanrahan
The Unexpected: Narrative
Temporality and the Philosophy of Against Mastery: Creative Readings
Surprise and Weak Force
Mark Currie Sarah Wood
The Post- Romantic Predicament The Paul de Man Notebooks
Paul de Man, ed. Martin McQuillan Paul de Man, ed. Martin McQuillan
Visit the Frontiers of Theory website at www.euppublishing.com/series/tfot
Material Inscriptions
Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory
Andrzej Warminski
For Cathrine
© Andrzej Warminski, 2013
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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Contents
Series Editor’s Preface vi
Author’s Preface viii
Acknowledgements xii
1. Facing Language: Wordsworth’s First Poetic Spirits (“Blest
Babe,” “Drowned Man,” “Blind Beggar”) 1
2. Aesthetic Ideology and Material Inscription: On Hegel’s
Aesthetics and Keats’s Urn 35
3. Spectre Shapes: “The Body of Descartes?” 63
4. Reading for Example: A Metaphor in Nietzsche’s Birth of
Tragedy 79
5. Towards a Fabulous Reading: Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie
in the Extramoral Sense” 101
6. Reading Over Endless Histories: Henry James’s “The Altar
of the Dead” 130
7. Ending Up/Taking Back (with Two Postscripts on Paul de
Man’s Historical Materialism) 159
8. The Future Past of Literary Theory 190
Appendix: Interview: “Deconstruction at Yale” 213
Index 233
Series Editor’s Preface
Since its inception Theory has been concerned with its own limits, ends
and after-l ife. It would be an illusion to imagine that the academy is no
longer resistant to Theory but a significant consensus has been estab-
lished and it can be said that Theory has now entered the mainstream
of the humanities. Reaction against Theory is now a minority view and
new generations of scholars have grown up with Theory. This leaves
so- called Theory in an interesting position which its own procedures
of auto- critique need to consider: what is the nature of this mainstream
Theory and what is the relation of Theory to philosophy and the other
disciplines which inform it? What is the history of its construction and
what processes of amnesia and the repression of difference have taken
place to establish this thing called Theory? Is Theory still the site of a
more-t han- critical affirmation of a negotiation with thought, which
thinks thought’s own limits?
‘Theory’ is a name that traps by an aberrant nominal effect the trans-
formative critique which seeks to reinscribe the conditions of thought in
an inaugural founding gesture that is without ground or precedent: as a
‘name’, a word and a concept, Theory arrests or misprisions such think-
ing. To imagine the frontiers of Theory is not to dismiss or to abandon
Theory (on the contrary one must always insist on the it-i s- necessary of
Theory even if one has given up belief in theories of all kinds). Rather,
this series is concerned with the presentation of work which challenges
complacency and continues the transformative work of critical thinking.
It seeks to offer the very best of contemporary theoretical practice in
the humanities, work which continues to push ever further the frontiers
of what is accepted, including the name of Theory. In particular, it is
interested in that work which involves the necessary endeavour of cross-
ing disciplinary frontiers without dissolving the specificity of disciplines.
Published by Edinburgh University Press, in the city of Enlightenment,
this series promotes a certain closeness to that spirit: the continued
Series Editor’s Preface vii
exercise of critical thought as an attitude of inquiry which counters
modes of closed or conservative opinion. In this respect the series aims
to make thinking think at the frontiers of theory.
Martin McQuillan
Author’s Preface
This is a book of rhetorical readings whose theory and practice comes
out of a particular teaching experience at Yale University: an under-
graduate course called “Reading and Rhetorical Structures.” Indeed, a
number of the chapters started out as lectures in this course. The course
was conceived by Paul de Man and co-t aught by him and Geoffrey
Hartman, together with a number of Teaching Assistants who would
usually give one lecture during the semester. I had the good fortune to
serve as Teaching Assistant in this course and then as co- lecturer – once
with Hartman, once with de Man, and then twice with Kevin Newmark
– from 1979 to 1987. (De Man designed the course somewhat on the
model of still another undergraduate course at Harvard [Hum 6] in
which he served during his graduate student days as a Teaching Assistant
for Reuben Brower.1) The course was focused insistently on the practice
of rhetorical reading and followed an itinerary from short poetic texts to
narratives by way of a detour through philosophical or theoretical texts.
The book follows this itinerary. It begins with some readings of poetry
by Wordsworth and Keats that try to take into account the rhetorical
dimension of the texts. After a detour through rhetorical readings of the
interplay of trope and concept in (and the peculiar narrativity of) some
“theoretical” texts by Descartes and Nietzsche, it reads a tale by Henry
James to demonstrate how the self-u ndoing of tropological systems nec-
essarily generates narratives which, in the end, turn out to be allegories
of their own conditions of (im)possibility. The volume also contains a
couple of essays on literary theory (as literary theory) and an interview
1 On Hum 6 see de Man’s “The Return to Philology” in The Resistance to Theory
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). On Lit. z (later Lit. 130) at
Yale, see Marc Redfield’s remarks and de Man’s original course proposal in Marc
Redfield (ed.), Legacies of Paul de Man (New York: Fordham University Press,
2007).
Author’s Preface ix
on the topic of “Deconstruction at Yale.” All three of these latter texts
are explicitly about the “place” of rhetoric – for example, “between”
grammar and logic in the trivium – and its importance for any critical
reading worthy of the name.
Rhetoric in this volume means above all the rhetoric of tropes, and
its place “between” grammar and logic amounts to the following: that
tropes, which on the one hand make the passage from grammatical
structures to meaning possible, on the other hand also always make
it impossible for this “passage” to take place in an epistemologically
stable or reliable way. This renders the meaning of any and every text
not simply “indeterminate” but radically overdetermined. Hence the
practice of “rhetorical reading” in this volume is not a matter of identi-
fying and classifying tropological structures to show how the meaning
of literary and philosophical texts depends on them. Although it is true
that attempting to determine the meaning of a text always begins with
a reconstruction of the text as a tropological system, reading the text
“rhetorically” entails a demonstration of how this tropological system,
in its attempt to close itself off, undergoes a process of self- undoing.
This process leaves a residue or remainder: the materiality of an inscrip-
tion that lies at the origin of the text and that made the text possible in
the first place but that also makes it forever impossible for the text to
know or to account for its own production. Such “rhetorical reading” is
indeed a species of “deconstructive reading” – in the full “de Manian”
sense – but one that, rather than harkening back to a past over and done
with, would open the texts to a different future.
Serving in place of an Introduction, the programmatic Chapter 1
is a reading of three moments in Wordsworth’s Prelude – “the Blest
Babe,” “the drowned man,” and “the Blind Beggar” – as examples
of “performative,” “tropological,” and “inscriptional” models of lan-
guage and the text that leave something of a material residue. In doing
so, the chapter also offers a “paradigm” for how to read the Prelude.
After an introductory section on how Hegel’s Aesthetics already in
its Introduction winds up undermining the category of the aesthetic,
Chapter 2 reads Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as a late example of
the minor poetic genre called “inscription” (or “epigram”). Once the
hypogram underlying Keats’s ode is read, this arch- aestheticist poem
turns out to be a text that puts into question the value of the aesthetic
as it issues in a peculiar “historical materialism.” Chapter 3 turns
to a reading of Descartes’ Cogito as trope by following the figure of
garments (“hats and cloaks that may cover ghosts or automatons”)
through the First and Second Meditations. The upshot is that the ego
cogito can constitute itself only by virtue of a tropological system