Table Of ContentThe Resistance to Theory
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The Resistance
to Theory
Paul de Man
Foreword by Wlad Godzich
Theory and History of Literature, Volume 33
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Copyright © 1986 by the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. No
part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,-mechanical, photo-
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.
Sixth printing, 2002
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De Man, Paul.
The resistance to therory.
(Theory and history of literature ; v. 33)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Criticism - Addresses, essays, lectures.
2. Literature - Philosophy - Addresses, essays, lectures.
I. Title. II. Series.
PN85.F374 1986 801'.95 85-28820
ISBN 0-8166-1293-5
ISBN 0-8166-1294-3 (pbk.)
The following works are reproduced with permission of the originating pub-
lisher: "The Resistance to Theory," Yale French Studies 63 (1982); "The
Return to Philology," Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 10,1982; "Hypogram
and Inscription," Diacritics 11 (1981), the Johns Hopkins University Press;
"Dialogue and Dialogism," Poetics Today 4:1 (1983) the Porter Institute for
Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University; "Bibliography of Texts by Paul
de Man," Yale French Studies 69 (1985.)
"An interview with Paul de Man," commissioned by RAI (The Italian Na-
tional Broadcasting System), broadcast June 1, 1983, is reprinted with per-
mission of the author © 1983 from Maurizio Ferraris and Stefano Rosso
(eds.), Deconstruzione tra filosofia e letteratura, special issue of Nuova
Corrente, vol. XXXI (1984) n. 93-94, pp. 303-13.
"Reading and History" first appeared as the introduction to Hans Robert
Jauss's Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1982). "Conclusions: Walter Benjamin's 'Task of the Transla-
tor' was given as the last in a series of six Messenger Lectures at Cornell
University on March 4, 1983; the question-and-answer session followed the
lecture.
The University of Minnesota is an
equal-opportunity educator and employer.
Contents
Foreword: The Tiger on the Paper Mat Wlad Godzich ix
The Resistance to Theory 3
The Return to Philology 21
Hypogram and Inscription 27
Reading and History 54
"Conclusions": Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" 73
Dialogue and Dialogism 106
An Interview with Paul de Man Stefano Rosso 115
Bibliography of Texts by Paul de Man Tom Keenan 122
Index 131
Theory and History of Literature
Edited by Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse
Volume 1. Tzvetan Todorov Introduction to Poetics
Volume 2. Hans Robert Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
Volume 3. Hans Robert Jauss
Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics
Volume 4. Peter Burger Theory of the Avant-Garde
Volume 5. Vladimir Propp Theory and History of Folklore
Volume 6. Edited by Jonathan Arac, Wlad Godzich,
and Wallace Martin
The Yale Critics Reconstruction in America
Volume 7. Paul de Man Blindness and Insight:
Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
2nd ed., rev.
Volume 8. Mikhail Bakhtin Problems ofDostoevsky 's Poetics
Volume 9. Erich Auerbach
Scenes from the Drama of European Literature
Volume 10. Jean-Fran§ois Lyotard
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Volume 11. Edited by John Fekete The Structural Allegory:
Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought
Volume 12. Ross Chambers Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and
the Power of Fiction
Volume 13. Tzvetan Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle
Volume 14. Georges Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writings,
1927-1939
Volume 15. Peter Szondi On Textual Understanding and Other Essays
Volume 16. Jacques Attali Noise
Volume 17. Michel de Certeau Heterologies
Volume 18. Thomas G. Pavel The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English
Renaissance Drama
Volume 19. Jay Caplan Framed Narratives: Diderot's Genealogy
of the Beholder
Volume 20. Jean-Fran<jois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud Just Gaming
Volume 21. Malek Alloula The Colonial Harem
Volume 22. Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies,
1. Women, Floods, Bodies, History
Volume 23. Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies,
2. Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror
Volume 24. Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement The Newly Born Woman
Volume 25. Jose Antonio Maravall Culture of the Baroque :
Analysis of a Historical Structure
Volume 26. Andrzej Warminski Readings in Interpretation:
Holderlin, Hegel, Heidegger
Volume 27. Stephen Melville Philosophy Beside Itself:
On Deconstruction and Modernism
Volume 28. Edited by Jonathan Arac Postmodernism and Politics
Volume 29. Peter Szondi Theory of the Modern Drama
Volume 30. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
Volume 31. Samuel Weber Institution and Interpretation
Volume 32. Djelal Kadir Questing Fictions: Latin America's Family Romance
Volume 33. Paul de Man The Resistance to Theory
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Foreword
The Tiger on the Paper Mat
Wlad Godzich
i
After the publication of Allegories of Reading in 1979, Paul de Man found himself
constantly besieged by requests for articles, introductions, conference papers,
and other forms of scholarly communication. Whereas some scholars live in a
tragic mode, the disjunction between what they consider their proper intellectual
pursuits and the demands made upon them by their profession, Paul de Man had
come to think of this disjunction as the relation between the contingency of the
historical and the necessity of coherent thought, with the former imposing a
salutary heterogeneity upon the latter's inevitable drift toward single-minded
totalization. Though he remained steadfast in his concerns, as anyone who has
read his work from the earliest essays to the very last ones will readily ac-
knowledge, he framed them according to the demands of the moment in which
they were ultimately written, and he drew a certain pleasure from the ironies
that attended their publication.
The very number of calls made upon de Man in these years and his ability
to write a great many major pieces in rapid succession eventually led him, in
late 1981 and early 1982, to formulate a general plan for publishing in book
form the essays that he had been writing and that he planned to write in the near
future. The present book was conceived as a unit of this general plan.
While he was properly suspicious of most forms of articulation, and particu-
larly of those that claimed the ability to periodize, de Man did not fail to recognize
their 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 forward the following organization of his writings. His first essays
ix
