Paul de Man’s Misreadings: A Critique of Aesthetic Ideology
(x-posted to The Valve)
The following is an outline for a critique of Paul de Man’s influential essay on Blaise Pascal’s writings, and of de Man’s essay “The Concept of Irony,” in which he considers discussions of irony in Friedrich Schlegel’s writings and other philosophical and literary works.
It is not complete; it does not cover every essay in de Man’s boook Aesthetic Ideology, nor does it even respond to every part of the two very rich essays cited above. It certainly does not equate to a response to the whole of de Man’s thought.
Part One is the densest. (It is an unfortunate fact that reasoning from within other texts often leads one down narrow and apparently irrelevant corridors.) It deals with the role of intentionality in the construction of space, and with the related question of the “ground” of beings. Part Two deals with Pascal’s pensée on justice, the determination of linguistic meaning, and the apparent problems of power and seduction as they manifest themselves in language. Part Three concerns irony and The Karate Kid.
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One of the commonest things one hears about Paul de Man is that he was an exceptionally good close reader. I remember having a dinner with some other academics where his name came up; I expressed some disagreement with his ideas, and the man next to me said: “It doesn’t matter whether you agree with him or not. His readings are beyond question.”
Let us turn, then, to de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology, and see whether these readings, on which his whole theory of language and allegory are based, are in fact adequate to the texts they employ. I will be looking first at “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” which de Man’s editor Andrzej Warminski calls “something of a ‘key’ to the project and the other texts in the volume” (23).
1. Pascal’s Zero
De Man focuses on a section from Pascal’s obscure text Réflexions sur la géométrie en général, and more specifically on the moment when Pascal introduces the concept of “zero” in order to maintain his system, based on the twin hypotheses of infinite largeness and infinite smallness, against the objections of another philosopher named Méré, who argued that space could be imagined as consisting of indivisible “blocks” in which matter was suspended.
De Man is not approaching this problem from a mathematical standpoint; if he were, he would have to reconcile his argument with the fact that the zero “works,” i.e. that it allows engineers to do their jobs in the real world. Instead, he is approaching Pascal’s zero structurally: he wants to understand what function in performs in the system, and whether it creates logical contradictions by performing this function.
De Man writes,
Méré uses the principle of homogeneity between space and number, which is also the ground of Pascal’s cosmology […] At the end of [Pascal’s exposition of the zero], the homogeneity of the universe is recovered, and the principle of infinitesimal symmetry is well established. But this has happened at a price: the coherence of the system is now seen to be entirely dependent on the introduction of an element — the zero and its equivalencies in time and motion — that is itself entirely heterogeneous with regard to the system and is nowhere a part of it. The continuous universe held together by the double wings of the two infinites is interrupted, disrupted at all points by a principle of radical heterogeneity without which it cannot come into being. Moreover, this rupture of the infinitesimal and the homogeneous does nt occur on the transcendental level, but on the level of language, in the ability of a theory of langauge as sign or as name (nominal definition) to ground this homogeneity without having recourse to the signifying function, the real definition, that makes the zero of signification the necessary condition for grounded knowledge. (59)
I draw the following conclusions from this:
a. For de Man, the zero is the ironic element in Pascal’s geometric system. I will discuss de Man’s theory of irony more fully later; for now, it is enough to explain that by irony I mean a change in the register of the communication. Instead of describing the position, number, or movement of beings, the zero, which is not a number, indicates the fact that beings are being signified. The “really indivisible space” signified by the zero is signification itself.
b. The zero is the foundation of the whole geometric system; number is “dependent” on it, has “recourse” to it, and is “grounded” by it. Since the zero is incommensurate with number, it is an illegitimate foundation. The geometry becomes incoherent and topples over.
Let’s start with (b). This is an evasion of dialectical logic, despite de Man’s supposed attention to “the dialectical model, capable of recovering totalities threatened by the most radical contradictions” (60-61). The zero does not constitute the “ground” of numbered beings in the unidirectional manner de Man suggests, because it is equally the case that the beings themselves give rise our notion of the “space” they inhabit.
For example, if I take a blank sheet of paper, and draw a geometrical problem on it, I have done two things simultaneously. First, I have created a set of figures that constitute the problem. Second, by creating those figures, I have indicated that the sheet of paper is now a signifying field, and that its white space should be interpreted as a Euclidean allegory for absence, distance, and so on. In other words, the “zero” of motionlessness, of absence, and of timelessness, is brought into being by the exposition of presence and the teleologic end for which those beings were posited (in this case, the working out of the geometry problem).
Another example will help explain this new reference to teleology, the “end” to which the representation refers. If I have a collection of used, leather baseballs, I have a collection of extremely heterogeneous things. Every one of them will have different nicks, stains, and tears in the stitching. However, for the purposes of batting practice, the baseballs are homogeneous: all of them suffice. In other words, the differences between them are “zeroed” out when they are allegorized as materials for batting practice. However, this creates a tension that de Man correctly identifies as irony, because the homogeneity is imposed, or posited as Hegel would say. The zero is thus always a reference to, and, in a sense, an apology for the allegorization of being towards a particular end. One is apologizing for having thus reduced being, and thus the irony of (a). Were I to paint the baseballs, in imitation of Van Gogh and his peasant shoes, all the differences between them would immediately re-appear as essential.
De Man is therefore right to refuse Pascal’s desired distinction between “axiomatic” propositions, which make a claim and impose obligations, and “nominal” propositions, which supposedly are mere definitions and therefore inarguable. Every statement is axiomatic, even if its “end” is occluded. However, the radical heterogeneity that makes language into allegory is not language functioning as “rudderless signification,” in which case language would be completely incoherent and useless, but rather the heterogeneity of potential versus actual purpose that compels language to designate that part of its subject which must be treated as unmeaning “noise.” The role of heterogeneity of purpose is easily discernible in the fact that Pascal’s zero only arises in response to another person’s different way of imagining space.
Another way of putting this is that the zero is incapable, by itself, of attracting all the determinative negativity in the system, despite de Man’s conclusion that the zero is the exclusive heterogeneous element. He needs to make this claim in order to prove that the foundation of the system is non-functional, but actually notes earlier that Euclid “decreed the one not to be a number” (58). The negations required to posit an object as self-subsistent are no less severe than those required to designate absence or lack; therefore, it is not that the axiomatic nature of the system reveals itself in the zero, but rather than it reveals itself as the continually necessary ground for number as well as lack of number. (For more on self-subsistence as a posited quality, see my paper Another Sphere and Science: Aesthetics and Difference in the Science of Logic.)
Thus de Man’s reading of the zero, which is supposed to reveal the stuttering, rudderless nature of signification, actually reveals the linguistic assumption of intention, the a priori judgement that convokes both beings and the ground (here “space”) of being.
2. Pascal on Power and Justice
De Man moves from this technical discussion of the zero to an analysis of the Pensées, where he considers the theological and epistemological consequences of his argument about heterogeneity. The stakes are higher, and of course one is obliged to follow along and see whether the alternative hypothesis — that language assumes intention — produces a sounder reading of Pascal.
De Man presents us with the following passage from the Pensées (no. 103/298):
It is just that what is just should be followed; it is necessary that what has the most power should be followed.
Justice without power is impotent, power without justice is tyrannical.
Justice without power is open to contradiction, because there always are wrongdoers. Power without justice stands accused. Justice and power must therefore be brought together, by making the just strong and the strong just.
Justice is subject to dispute. Power is easily recognizable and without dispute. Thus it has been impossible to give power to justice, because power has contradicted justice and said that it is unjust, and said that it is itself just.
And thus, not being able to make the just strong, one has made the strong to be just.
De Man begins his analysis by claiming, “A new complication has been introduced and is observable in an opposition that gives each of the key words a double register that is no longer, as in the previous passages, an opposition between two modes of cognition” (67-68).
This is half right. De Man’s curious insistence that this pensée is an exception to the rest of the text is the moment where he fails to live up to one of Pascal’s greatest challenges to the reader. The previous passages are a guide to this one, and the two modes of cognition are secular reason and the progress of faith. It is actually through this pensée that Pascal reconciles these two modes and introduces a new justification for the “roundabout” method of allegory.
Read secularly, this is an objective, even “historicist” account of how power establishes its own values and arrogates the right to decide justice. It is similar to a condensed version of Nietzsche’s project in The Genealogy of Morals, and it ends somewhat wistfully on a note of surrender.
However, read religiously, this is a narrative about the recognition of human vanity and the necessity of faith. As de Man observes, the French word justesse is to be read as “the precision of rational argument” and “in the sense of the judicial praxis of a court of law” (68). De Man reads these two meanings as highly different, but in the religious reading they merge together as representative of the insufficiency of human reason, which is one of Pascal’s great and continuing themes throughout. It is the divine that has contradicted human justice by imposing suffering, and has calleed human justice insufficient even though divine justice is incomprehensible to human beings. Reading the Pensées, one is brought up against both Pascal’s hatred of suffering, and his recognition of its place in the salvation of mankind (because it makes men realize their abjection). This accounts for his deep ambivalence towards the despotic God of the passage.
Why, then, should Pascal write such a deliberately ironic passage that seems to invite misreading? Well, first of all, in the seventeenth century the notion of multiple registers was not at all unsettling — in fact, the Christian church had codified this method of reading in its method of exegesis. But more to the point, Pascal is only imitating the Gospels themselves, and Jesus’s discussion of coded speech (Matt. 13:10-11): “And the disciples came and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.” Pascal, who writes (as De Man notes) that “in order to understand an author’s meaning, one must reconcile all the contradictory passages” (257/684), challenges his reader to understand him in a fashion that will illustrate both the process of faith, and the limits of reason without faith.
The reconciliation of these two readings comes through the invention of the reader (by Pascal) as a subject capable of reconciling them, and returning in that fashion to the meaning of the author, who is understood thereby. (Not all readers can do this, nor can any reader do it every time; this is the appearance of sin in the realm of hermeneutics, and explains why de Man is almost right to claim that for Pascal language is incapable of justice by itself, i.e. without a reader.) The text here performs what it seeks to describe: it confirms our belief in the limitations of secular reasoning by taking us through and beyond a secular reading of “might” that excludes God. The final necessary reading of the line “one has made the strong to be just” is as an allegory of persuasion, wherein Pascal proposes converting the powerful to Christianity through persuasion, rather than arming the just. For this persuasion to be effective, it is imperative that the falsely reasoning person not be able to foresee it: this is the final reason for Pascal to write in code.
In Part One, I argued that “being” stands in dialectical opposition to absence and lack (the “zero”), which allows the imposition of homogeneity through allegory. Here, the recovery of that purpose, which is identical with understanding the author, requires the reader to use a method of decoding that is itself the most powerful means of persuasion. Taken together, that is how one answers de Man’s question: “Why is it that the furthest-reaching truths about ourselves and the world have to be stated in such a lopsided, referentially indirect mode?” (52).
3. Irony
According to de Man, in his essay “The Concept of Irony,” there are three ways of dealing with irony: as a literary device, as a “dialectic of the self,” and as a “dialectics of history” (170). My response to de Man’s theory of irony is really a response to the second “way of dealing” with irony that he enumerates. I agree with him that irony is a literary device (would disagreement even be possible?). The stakes of its uses in literature depend on whether one interprets its dialectic of self as a dialectic of self and other, or as a retreat into absolute negativity.
My claim is as follows: while de Man may be giving an adequate reading of Fichte, he is doing a poor job explaining irony itself. I will show that a resistance to irony is expressed as a theory of “infinite” irony, and has really to do with de Man’s belief that finitude is shameful, a belief that also implies an erasure of the Other.
De Man wastes no time in trying to make us ashamed of finite irony: “There would be in irony something very threatening, against which interpreters of literature, who have a stake in the understandability of literature, would want to put themselves on their guard — very legitimate to want, as [Wayne] Booth wants, to stop, to stabilize, to control the trope” (167).
It is easy to discern the battle here between the interpreters of literature, a self-interested police force who love conformity and easy answers, and the Dionysian energies of irony, which may be too much for the faint of heart, which refuse every limit — which, in fact, bear a remarkable resemblance to bliss or the French jouissance, and which thrive on the very impossibility of ever being understood.
It is a pleasure to return the favor of shaming by tentatively terming Paul de Man’s infinite irony the irony of the adolescent. The adolescent, at least as a socially important figure, thrives on the feeling of being misunderstood, because he has stumbled onto the existential doctrine that human beings are never merely the sum of their prior actions and present circumstances. They surpass all of these towards freedom.
That is all very well, but it is negativity in the abstract, and as such does not represent a real possibility towards which the individual can direct her energies. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus’s prickly insistence on his own freedom only serves to paralyze his muse. He is ironic towards his family, country, and religious upbringing, but not towards his own habits and mistakes. The same shallowness haunts purely ironic interpretations of texts. It is certainly possible to claim that Catch-22 is actually an ironic satire of ironic protests against war, since “there is no inherent reason for discontinuing the process of doubt at any point short of infinity” (166). That reading, however, is doomed to remain pure declaration, unable to realize itself through actual close readings and original syntheses. One of the misleading effects of calling abstract negativity “infinite irony” is that it tends to obscure just how dully predictable such supposed ironies become, on the level of both thought and grammar. Thus there is a formal criterion for irony’s stopping-place in criticism, even if there is no consistent marker of irony in the content of a work.
These are not merely the truisms of certain works of literature and criticism; they are a key to the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, who created his own version of the ironic adolescent in Either/Or. Kierkegaard expands on the Socrates of The Concept of Irony (from which de Man borrows his title) by creating a Socratic youth, Johannes Climacus, and then contrasting him with a middle-aged, married judge.
The structure of Either/Or matters for two reasons. First, it shows that, in practical terms, the end of an infinitely negative sensibility, that never discovers a new real possibility for itself, is the collapse into utter conventionality. After all, if Johannes recovers from his despair, the bright future ahead of him leads down the judge’s path. Second, the “marriage plot” in Either/Or is one of Kierkegaard’s many remorseful attempts to deal with the consequences of jilting Regina Olsen, which he fictionalizes in the “Seducer’s Diary” section of Either/Or.
The association is not only between finitude and dependence on the other, as one spouse is dependent on another, or as reader and writer depend on each other in the act of communication. The rejection of finitude is also a rejection of the body, as has been explored through numerous famous characters: Hamlet’s pathological treatment of his mother and Ophelia, Stephen’s mortification at the flesh, and the cold, shamming eroticism of the “Seducer’s Diary.”
There is identical evidence of shame in de Man’s essay. De Man gives, as proof of Schlegel’s annihilating and “infinite” irony, the following anecdote:
There is in the middle of [Schlegel’s short novel] Lucinde a short chapter called “Eine Reflexion” (A reflection), which reads like a philosophical treatise or argument (using philosophical language which can be identified as that of Fichte), but it doesn’t take a very perverse mind, only a slightly perverse one, to see that what is actually being described is not a philosophical argument at all but is — well, how shall I put it? — a reflection on the very physical questions involved in sexual intercourse. Discourse which seems to be purely philosophical can be read in a double code, and what it really is describing is something which we do not generally consider worthy of philosophical discourse. (168-169)
This problem of the “double code” then becomes the basis for de Man’s explication of “parabasis,” meaning the continual interruption of the meaning of the text by another meaning. De Man continues, “You are writing a splendid and coherent philosophical argument but, lo and behold, you are describing sexual intercourse” (181). What of it? Is it really so surprising that the problems “involved in sexual intercourse” bear some relation to other problems of communication? It is not ironic that practicing one’s writing is beneficial, and so is practicing one’s free throw — the two things are simply homologous. It is merely that we are supposed to find Schlegel’s homology between sex and philosophy so embarrassing that philosophical discourse immediately and entirely breaks down. Well, maybe Schlegel is right about the perverse core of philosophy, and maybe he isn’t, but in any case homologies do not mean the end of literary readings.
I will close by offering two alternatives to the embarrassed, solipsistic discourse of infinite negativity, which exhausts itself quickly as doubt without content, and freedom without substance.
The first is compassionate irony. As de Man reminds us, the “chaos” that Schlegel valorized “is error, madness, and stupidity, in all its forms” (184). In the best satires, we are laughing at our own entanglement in stupidity, madness, and error, which is inevitable given our limitations — our finitude. At the same time, the satire forces us to admit the existence of obligations greater than ourselves. Almost every single moment in television shows like The Simpsons or Arrested Development involve an “unsympathetic” character struggling, against the odds, to persist in some perverse denial or other, to our great amusement.
The second is social irony. Shakespeare is not primarily notable for his “negative capability,” as de Man (referencing Keats) suggests — that is, his being
the man who can take on all selves and stand above all of them without being anything specific himself, a self that is infinitely elastic, infinitely mobile, an infinitely active and agile subject that stands above any of its experiences. (175)
Such a man would speak like Edmund, or Iago: “Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus” (Othello I.iii). Rather, Shakespeare was able to portray a kind of consciousness that accepts its own limits at the moment of integration into a social whole, as when Prospero abandons sorcery and abdicates power, or Lear in the tempest realizes the circumstances of the poor. It is an irony bound up with an awareness of the needs of others. I remember my grandfather telling me that, as an employee for the phone company, he stopped supporting the labor union as soon as he was promoted to foreman. He considered it his responsibility to change his mind. That is the mentality from which Shakespeare tries to free himself.
In The Karate Kid, a film of Shakespearean resonance and depth, Mr. Miyagi forces “Daniel-san” to paint his fence, wax his vintage cars, and perform other chores for him, supposedly in exchange for teaching him karate. When Daniel can take it no longer, he goes on strike and tells Mr. Miyagi that he hasn’t learned a thing. At that moment, Miyagi has him repeat the motions of each chore, and reveals that Daniel has learned a series of karate moves.
This is parabasis par excellence. We are thrown into the very uncertainty that made Schlegel’s little novel so subversive. What is the meaning of Daniel’s work? Has he been doing chores for Mr. Miyagi, or has he been learning karate? It should be obvious that we do not need to resolve this question, and that the over-determination of his training is the very thing that separates Daniel from his opponents, who are merely learning brutality. It teaches him patience, and prevents him from thinking of Miyagi instrumentally, as his servant.
There is probably no such thing as infinite irony; there is only irony that presents us our finitude in different ways. For De Man, irony represents finitude in the form of a refusal to be finite, descended from a notion of the body as the irony of spirit, and which finds one expression in the refusal to ever reach the end of a reading. In that case there is nowhere to go but to God, which may explain de Man’s fascination with Pascal and Kierkegaard, both of whom wrote narratives in which one ends up compelled by religion. On the other hand, supposing man transcended himself towards others — there one would find the zero of the social, by which I mean heterogeneous subjectivities, as well as the material fact of suffering. In Paul de Man’s account of heterogeneity, these remain an 0 without a figure.
I’m only through part 1 (that’ll be all for tonight, and probably my focus for at least a comment or two, since that’s the part of the de Man essay I know best), but, two quick questions:
–How does your drawing of a geometrical problem on a piece of paper signify motionlessness, absence, timelessness, and the infinitely small? Particularly that last one. How could it?
–For what “purpose” or “intention” are the zero and the infinitely small “homogenous”?
Huh…before I can answer either of these questions, we need to be clear about how we’re reading de Man’s reading of Pascal’s geometry on the matter of the “infinitely small.” As I understand Euclidean geometry, which is what Pascal is using, the “infinitely small” is actually the point, rather than the zero. So the zero is used to separate the infinitely small point from actual nothingness: on the sheet of paper, the dot I draw with my pencil is an allegorical representation of the infinitely small, whereas the white space around it is the “zero.”
To clarify the point, I mean that, before I’ve drawn on the sheet of paper, its whiteness doesn’t signify anything in particular. (Most of the time we use blank sheets of white paper for writing or drawing, but what I’m talking about could apply equally to a dinner napkin.) It’s only after I’ve drawn two points that the white space becomes “where there are no points” and also “the distance between two points.” In other words, absence and determinative negation.
My initial response to your second question is that, given the way Euclidean geometry is constructed, every possible application of the system (i.e. every solvable problem) puts the “zero” (absence) into a dialectical relationship with the continuum of presence that begins with the infinitely small, the point. This dialectic, which is not exactly the same thing as homogeneity, finds its ground in the reasoning subject. That is why de Man, who is very honest about the most worrisome challenges to his ideas, nods approvingly at the English translation of Pascal’s title: “The Mind of the Geometrician.”
At the risk of being simple, one could say that in the limited field of geometry, the general form of the “intention” is always going to be “solving a geometric problem,” in which case the point, the zero, and the “plane” that contains them both come into being in order that the problem be solvable.
re: “As I understand Euclidean geometry, which is what Pascal is using, the ‘infinitely small’ is actually the point, rather than the zero.” This is true, and even, one might say, “the point.” But the main stake of Pascal’s argument for Pascal, according to de Man, if I remember it correctly, is to articulate a connection between the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) by way of arithmetic. For this to work, for him to be able to close off the system and posit the system of divine harmony that is crucial for his religious ideology, he has to posit a homogeneity between number, space, motion and time. This means he needs to find an equivalent of the infinitely small (the point, as you put it) in the system of numbers. He thinks he has found it in the zero, but the very oversimplified version of de Man’s argument is that this move doesn’t work–in order for the zero to be homogenous to the infinitely small, it has to be defined in such a way that it is incompatible with the definition of number on which the rest of his system relies. Zero can be defined in a different way that makes it part of the system of numbers, but doing so makes it suddenly heterogenous with the infinitely small. Thus, he cannot simultanouesly define the zero in a way that makes it the equivalent of the infinitely small in the system of numbers. Either it is not a number, or it is not the equivalent of the infinitely small. A lot of things happen after this point that tie the conclusion back to (rudderless) signification, but I think we have to think through the point in these terms first before we jump to the implications for signification.
I don’t think calling the relationship between the zero and the infinitely small dialectic rather than homogenous solves this problem in a way that allows us to recover the totality of Pascal’s project, but I will think about it, and look forward to any thoughts you might have on the subject. The answer may be that it turns Pascal’s project into a different one, namely, Hegel’s project, which means that the same problematics do not apply, but different problematics may arise in their place.
As far as the intention of “solving a geometric problem,” I don’t think de Man has any doubt that this is possible or even pragmatic. His target is not applied mathematics, but the philosophy or ideology of mathematics that informs Pascal’s treatise (one that perhaps has traces, perhaps, in the Cartesian grid, or in Heidegger’s ideas about science). The problem that he has doubts about solving is not a geometric problem, but the problem of geometry as such….
…sorry, I know that last sentence is too neat to sound intelligent, but I couldn’t resist.
Why is no de Man findable in the electronic libraries of academic texts? Is it because he was a nazi like Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, or are there other reasons?
Jennifer: Although I, like you, am troubled by de Man’s Nazism, some of my favorite writers (like Heidegger, Carl Jung, and T. S. Eliot) were either actually Nazis, or had totalitarian leanings. I think that it’s a reasonable point to bring to bear on their work. However, they still can and should be read. The real problems with de Man are ideological and logical problems in his work.
You can’t find him electronically because he’s only recently deceased, and I believe his family is still maintaining control over copyright.
Ah. Thank you. I had no idea it was a copyright issue. I thought he’s been erased by some broadbased intellectual conspiracy. (I would have thought some articles might have been translated into English for Jstor, though.)
Matt: The problem with de Man’s distinction between the zero, and the rest of the numbers in Pascal’s geometry, is that none of the rest of the numbers “work” any better than the zero.
I take this to be the relevant passage from the original post:
Another way of putting this is that the zero is incapable, by itself, of attracting all the determinative negativity in the system, despite de Man’s conclusion that the zero is the exclusive heterogeneous element. He needs to make this claim in order to prove that the foundation of the system is non-functional, but actually notes earlier that Euclid “decreed the one not to be a number” (58). The negations required to posit an object as self-subsistent are no less severe than those required to designate absence or lack; therefore, it is not that the axiomatic nature of the system reveals itself in the zero, but rather than it reveals itself as the continually necessary ground for number as well as lack of number.
Since the “one” is not a number any more than the “zero,” all concepts of number can only be guaranteed by the intentionality of the proposition. This pragmatic structuring, built around intention, may seem foreign to Pascal’s supposed intention to construct a “closed-off” geometry — which is why I think that the “closing off” really belongs to Paul de Man and not to Pascal.
After all, Pascal does not advocate a “closed off” subject-position; rather, he urges us to be open to grace, without which we cannot be saved. He does not wish to “close off” geometry from other discourses, but rather (as you write) wishes to connect it to the rest of the symbolic disciplines (rhetoric, logic, etc.). Instead, it is Paul de Man, who consistently writes about language as though it is “closed off” from reality, who is interpreting Pascal. (One thinks of de Man’s curious and obvious insistence that a metaphorical reference to light does not illuminate a room, though which he demonstrates that the word is “closed off” from the real.)
Instead, the “zero” stands in as the irony of the proposition, the totality which appears empty in the context of the limited, determined proposition, but which is also the site of God. (This is my point about there being “no” difference between the baseballs when I use them for batting practice.) It is not heterogeneous because it is the sign of negation, and negation is not heterogeneous because the Being of beings is a process.
This is very Hegelian, and owes a great deal to Hegel’s thesis that “every determination is a negation.” However, considering the highly dialectical structure of Pascal’s work — to which de Man frequently alludes — I cannot reject the dialectical method out of hand. The only place where Pascal himself seems to say something different is where he talks about axiomatic as opposed to nominal propositions. Here I agree with de Man that Pascal’s distinction makes no sense. However, I don’t think the nominal is at all necessary to Pascal’s zero, since the justification for the zero is totally axiomatic: for Pascal, the zero is necessary because God must exist in a certain way.
As for the problem of geometry as such…well, I don’t know what constitutes that problem. I can see how non-Euclidean geometries (spherical and hyperbolic geometries) raised and resolved the problem of geometry as such; but how can we compare the spherical geometry of Einstein with the mere exposition of vaporous doubts?
If there’s a way to more fully define the problem of geometry as such, go for it, as it would be a useful next step in the consideration of de Man’s essay.
So, since my longer response to this post on my blog (still in progress) will focus on the third part of you essay, I need to clear up some of the debate here first.
After returning to the text, my previous explanation appears mistaken, in a way that does more to confirm your argument than refute it. It isn’t, as I said, that the zero can be defined as both number and non-number, that it can’t be defined as a number and at the same time be considered as the equivalent to the infinitely small in the system of numbers. It’s actually a bit more complicated.
In fact, it is the one, and not the zero, that de Man calls both number and non-number; that is, nominally non-number (not technically a number, as Euclid says, because it has “no plurality”; not that this doesn’t have anything to do with a claim about self-subsistence, as you suggest), and yet, homogeneous to number. “Homogeneous” here has a very specific meaning–“magnitudes are said to be of the same kind or species when one magnitude can be made to exceed another by reiterated multiplication.” So, the one is homogeneous to number because you can add up a bunch of ones and get two or three or four, etc.
This is quite different from the zero, which de Man calls “radically” different from number–that is, neither “nominally” a number (for the same reason that the one isn’t a number) nor homogeneous to number (because you can’t add up a bunch of zeros and get two or three, etc.).
As a result, it is not correct to say, as you insist, that “the ‘one’ is not a number any more than the ‘zero.'” So long as there exists a reliable definition of homogeneity (indeed, so long as Pascal’s entire system depends on a reliable definition of homogeneity), it IS more correct, in Pascal’s own terms, to say that one is a number than that zero is a number: although neither one nor zero are nominally numbers, numbers can at least be made by adding together ones. And this means that your discussion of baseballs, of whether homogeneity can ever be anything other than the function of an intention, is quite important.
But first, an aside. It’s important to recognize that until we start talking about the zero and negative infinity, this whole business about the one DOES produce a functioning system, and indeed, one that lets us “do geometry.” The one does seem to work, since we’re not talking about self-subsistent objects like baseballs. We’re talking about extension. The real definition of extension should call to mind something like a ruler. Call any unit of extension a “one,” and you can string together several such units to produce larger extensions–two inches, three inches, etc. The fact that the “one” is indivisible and the “1 inch” extension is divisible is only nominally a problem, and now we are in a position to understand why: the divided extension, the “1/2 inch” can always be redefined as the unit of measurement, as the one, without causing any problems. We only get problems when it comes time to take into account the infinitely small.
Of course, this all depends on depends on the definition of homogeneity, that is, it depends on a notion of homogeneity which isn’t a mere intentional reduction of difference. The problem is that, for Pascal to articulate his system, for space, time, motion, and number to be homogeneous within that system, he needs a notion of homogeneity that is homogeneous for each. In other words, homogeneity in space needs to be defined in the same way as homogeneity in number, time, motion, etc. And Pascal accomplishes this by defining homogeneity in terms of multiplied magnitudes, as above.
This means that, within Pascal’s system, it remains correct to say that one is more of a number than zero It is, of course, also still correct to say, as you do in your latest response, that “all concepts of number can only be guaranteed by the intentionality of the proposition,” but (though I’m still not clear on why that matters) the zero nonetheless does, as you say “attract all the determinative negativity in the system.” That is to say, it undermines the system because even if all intentions are granted, it is still disruptive. It is the only point which no intention can close.
Now, as for the discussion of “closing off” in your latest response, you are absolutely playing on the fact that “closing off” means two things: closed means, first, complete, and second, separated from an outside. A closed linguistic system is either one that is logically consistent, or one that does not refer to an outside, to space or experience or time. In the second sense, you are right to say that de Man wants to close language off, or at least testify to its closure, whereas Pascal wants to open it by articulating a connection between the trivium and the quadrivium, between language and experience, by way of mathematics. But this whole attempt at opening RELIES upon the closure of the system in the first sense, a closure which patently fails because of the zero.
Now, you can turn everything around (and this is where irony comes in) by saying that this was what he intended to do in the first place, to testify to the impossibility of closure in the first sense, to the inadequacy of human reason. You can then call the zero the irony of the system and the place of God, God being no longer a real definition of an actual being, but a nominal definition for the impossibility of human reason to close itself off, but all you’ve done then is to prove de Man correct. That is exactly the irony.
(note: confusing typo in paragraph 3 of my latest response: “NOT that this doesn’t have anything to do with a claim about self-subsistence” should be “NOTE that this doesn’t have anything to do with a claim about self-subsistence,” which means the opposite)…
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surlacarte, a thousand apologies for the delay, and a quick note: I very much appreciated your closing statement on the other thread (the discussion with myself and Steven Augustine).
What you’ve done, very conclusively, is to show that the existence of the “zero” within the geometric system proves that something other than Pascalian geometry is possible. One can look within the geometry and find proof that the “world-in-itself” has not been exhausted by the descriptions this particular geometry can generate. (The phrase “world-in-itself” is deliberate, of course. The “possibility” disclosed by the zero bears an obvious similarity to the noumenal “thing-in-itself” from Kant.)
That is both interesting and valuable to me, and I could see citing de Man to that effect somewhere down the line.
What you haven’t done, as far as I can see, is prove that the nature of the zero disrupts the functioning of the geometric system. On the contrary: the zero is precisely what doesn’t disrupt the system.
On the level of arithmetic, this is expressed as 1 + 0 = 1. The zero does not affect the identity of the thing with itself. On a more phenomenological level, the bits of snow that appear on a television screen while we’re watching a program never become the content of the show; until a certain threshold of lost fidelity is reached, the show remains, for all intents and purposes, exactly the same.
“For all intents and purposes” is a common phrase, but I use it deliberately here. The things people might want out of a television show — dramatic excitement, or practical information, or comedy — they’re still going to get. The show continues to “work,” just as the geometry continues to work.
There is no way to get around this assignation of significance; for example, even if you could eliminate all the hisses and pops while playing a vinyl record, there would still be sounds coming from outside or elsewhere in the house, and these would still be “zeroed” as insignificant.
This negation, which founds the system, is not different from the negation that happens within the system to allow it to be dynamic (in other words, in the creation of logical statements and the performance of operations). That is why “self-subsistence” matters. If I draw the figure of a triangle, I am radically negating everything around it as “not the triangle.” I am assigning the meaning of an absence to the space all around the triangle.
This is really the same as saying, with Hegel, first that every determination is a negation, and second that every positing is also a positing of its opposite.
When I take a bunch of individual baseballs and re-group them as “eight baseballs,” the result is a negation of a negation (the first negation being the individuation of the objects). Extension is not different; whether I hold two inches apart along the length of a ruler, or two physical objects apart in space, the conceptual thing separating the two is the radical negativity of thought. A “triangle” would have no sense were it not for the accompanying negation; it would simply be the All.
What de Man sees as some kind of terrifying void disrupting Pascal’s geometry, I see as running its course in the working-out of the geometric “problem.” Geometry has to “look beyond itself,” since it is a technology for solving certain kinds of problems, yet cannot ask the question “why solve this problem?” or “why should such problems exist?” The solution to that has to lie outside geometry; but that fact wouldn’t alarm any geometrician I know.
This may seem to you like agreement, or even surrender, in the guise of difference, so I want to stress again that “disruption” is not the same as “incompleteness.” For de Man, geometry appears as fundamentally impossible, even if superficially “practical.” For me, and possibly for Hegel, geometry appears as a positivity, constituted by intention, and heterogeneous with the repressed “other” of intention.
A very practical example will suffice, one that returns to the earlier case of the vinyl record. We know what it is like when a listener cannot tune out one crackle or pop, one intrusion of outside noise, one tiny deviation from absoute fidelity — it is hysteria rather than appreciation, fastidiousness rather than passion, madness and not discernment. The poor man or woman may insist that listening to music has in fact become impossible, but that is only true for them. The fault lies not in the sounds, but in themselves, and though we pity them we cannot agree with them.
Many postmodern political theorists have used Kant to show that the “other” of the system (e.g. “the subaltern”) actually can be disruptive in the event of a revolution. This is where I would look for a useful revision of Hegel via his predecessor Kant; Kant may be better at theorizing the moment when the “radical negativity” of the system acquires content through a process that can only be described as material.
Thanks for the reply, Joe. Again, I don’t mind the delay, as I think these discussions (especially since they are so abstract) are best served by long delays, so I hope I won’t be contradicting myself too much by offering my response right away.
It seems to me, in reading your latest comment, that a lot of our disagreement here is guided by differing understandings of exactly what Pascal’s geometry is trying to do. The difference, for example, between a disruption and a mere “incompleteness” may be entirely a matter of what it means for the system to work.
So, in other words, if Pascal’s primary goal were to produce a working geometry that lets us, say, decide how long to cut a piece of wood for a building, or calculate the orbits of the planets, we could write off the zero as a mere incompleteness to a system that nonetheless “works” “for all intents and purposes,” or at least, for the aforementioned intents and purposes. [Similarly, I don’t think you have to imagine de Man as a threat to such practical calculations, or deconstruction as a threat to actual buildings]. But one of the things I’ve tried to emphasize in my comments is that “completeness” IS Pascal’s goal here, so that being “complete” is exactly what it means for the system to “work,” and incompleteness is, correspondingly, synonymous with not working. Pascal is not Euclid. He’s not writing a geometry. He’s writing an essay on the “mind of the geometer,” which is to say, a meta-geometry. That’s what I mean about the “problem of geometry as such”–the problem of where geometry fits in a complete system uniting trivium and quadrivium.
In order to show this, I’ll need to go back to the Pascal and the de Man, and this will take a longer delay. Before I do that, though, I’d like to try to wrap up the preliminary questions, so I’ll wait on you to respond to the following question: IF Pasal’s goal were itself (or at least required) a certain kind of completeness, would the argument I’ve offered suffice to undermine Pascal’s project, to show that it doesn’t work?
To respond to the argument about the record player, I think this helps me to articulate why it’s a mistake to equate the contradiction implied by the zero with mere static. Static is a convenient foil for the zero, because it is a kind of imperfection that is non-essential or contingent. We can in a sense conjure away static by imagining a theoretically possible but practically impossible ideal object from which the static has removed. Your example works because you can imagine a listener capable of “tuning out” the static and hearing or inferring and ideal aesthetic object behind it. The only thing that stands between the listener and this ideal object is a contingent product of the recording technology which can be sidestepped through imagination towards a real possibility that, with better recording technology, could perhaps have been realizable.
De Man’s claim about the zero, however, is not that it is a contingent, reparable error which a better system could have avoided. De Man’s point is that the zero, or a moment like it, is a necessary feature of all systems which aim for a certain kind of logical completeness. We can’t simply tune it out, because it’s impossible to imagine an alternate system in which a similar gap would not exist. Of course, we can imagine one nominally, but because no system could actually fulfill that criterion, such a nominally complete ideal system would be a mere placeholder for the real absence of such a system–this imagined system would be not unlike the zero itself.
surlacarte,
De Man, particularly in your careful and valuable account of him, does a good job undermining the distinction between nominal and axiomatic propositions. So de Man describes for us the “ambivalence of definitional language,” which is that it is not purely definitional at all.
I agree with this critique, which means that I don’t find Pascal’s text wholly convincing. If I were completely on board with him, I would be a post-Cartesian Christian living in an entirely Euclidean universe. I am actually a post-Hegelian agnostic, living in a world that can be described by multiple geometries.
De Man’s critique enables us to move from an unhelpful division between “axiomatic” and “nominal” language, to a dialectical account of propositions and their others. His misreading lies in his insistence that as Pascal goes, so goes the world — in other words, that Pascal legitimately stands for every attempt to read consistent meanings (homologies) into a text.
The substance of this line of inquiry fits best with your posts on your own site, so I’ll save that for my comment over there. Let me respond now to the specific issues surrounding Pascal’s geometry.
The Penseés are not an inferior version of the geometry, as de Man would have us believe. He claims that “the interest of the Réflexions is that it spells out, more explicitly than can be the case in the apologetic and religious context of the Pensées” (57), the link between the geometric system and the Divine order.
Again, since this analogy is based on faith in nominal definitions, it doesn’t hold up and has to be resolved in a different fashion. The problems with his system troubled Pascal, such that the Penseés were not a compromised version of the geometry, but rather an important revision of them that foreshadowed the full articulation of the dialectical method in Kant and Hegel. Three pieces of evidence support this:
1. The analogy to other disciplines. If geometry is a “complete system,” then it should contain no excess or opening that would allow it open out onto other forms of thought (such as persuasion, when one makes the argument for faith). The fact that it does open out in this way makes it an allegory, rather than an accurate representation. Which leads us to #2 and the Kantian aesthetic allegory of purposiveness.
2. To claim that an ordered system of geometry accurately duplicates the order of the universe is equivalent to claiming that human beings can in fact attain the Divine vision of universal order. This is the height of false pride. The narrative of progress in Pascal’s thought, which de Man tells us is endorsed by most scholars of Pascal, would suggest that Pascal realized this problem and began revising his account of knowledge, so that it became the prerogative of knowledge to encounter and be humbled by its own limits, and to willingly give place to faith.
This is the great theme of the Penseés: that God is not within the scope of human knowledge, but rather outside of it, and that thought is capable of this self-overcoming epiphany.
Perhaps, in the Penseés, God thus becomes a necessary disruption, but it is easy to see that Kant is the real inheritor of this line of thought. Kant asserts that the homologies of mathematical and logical thought are subjective syntheses only — they are posited, as I’ve been arguing throughout. He also argues that the perceptible symmmetry of the beautiful is the allegory of an unknowable purposiveness. The beautiful is not undone by its limited status as an allegory, but neither is it complete in any sense. That privilege is reserved, rightfully, for God.
3. Pascal may have grasped that his initial, un-dialectical definitional method was inadequate to deal with the heterogeneity of different projects. In his discussion of the “one” (58), de Man compares the dialectical nature of the one (which both is and is not a number) to the fact that “a house is not a city, yet a city is made up of houses that are of the same species as the city, since one can always add a house to a city and it remains a city.”
De Man does not give a clear indication of whether this example appears in Pascal. It seems like it does, as I read the text. In any case, the paradox of this leap (from a group of houses, to a “city”) has been around since the Greeks.
This is such an important moment in the essay because it totally shatters the notion of an everyday, practical homogeneity of number in which a new “one” can be created by adjusting the common divisor — making 0.5 the “one,” for example. The “city” has no common divisor, only a minimum: Washington, D.C. and London are both cities, even though they are structured very differently and are of very different size.
Hegel has the capacity to deal with this shift. He writes that a quantitative leap (growth in the number of houses) eventually produces a qualitative leap (the formation of a city). But where does this change in quality come from? It cannot come from within the system, because it changes the whole ground of the system from the single house to the community network that produces a city.
Ultimately, the only possible conclusion is that the over-determination produced by the qualitative leap is not merely a function of the intensification of predictable phenomena (such as traffic), but an ambiguity resolved by intention. Thus, a house is part of a city when we need it to show up “on the grid,” in order to provide electricity, waste disposal, districts for elections, and so forth, and it’s a house when we need a place to live, when we build or re-build, and in the course of ordinary life after work. The ambivalent meaning of the house in the city is — for all practical purposes — resolved moment by moment according to the needs of the subject(s), and this ambivalence is actually liberating (because we can use and serve the house in multiple ways) rather than crippling.
Let me give another example that will help clarify the difficult question of the essentiality of static. My friend Thurston recently received a letter from his boss that was full of criticism and invective, but in which the boss also apologized for treating Thurston badly, and offered to expand his job duties.
From a psychological standpoint, of course, the invective was essential. Without it, the boss would not have been willing to write the letter at all. Nonetheless, my reading of the letter, when Thurston asked me about it, was that the criticisms of him were essentially unmeaning, and that the “truth” of the letter was the apology and promotion. He and his boss had already talked out those same criticisms several times already, so that we could be sure they were expressions of resentment rather than something new to be dealt with.
The literary critic who writes about a book knows that some of the book’s words will be left over, or at least some of the possible determinations of those words. A reading leaves a remainder behind. The only thing the critic tries to ensure is that that remainder will not contradict her reading.
The result is that, far from making the system more complete, the critic actually creates fractures in the text. Of course this is a risky venture; for example, until I bought actual songs for my cellphone, I frequently heard sounds in electronic songs that I thought were my phone going off. As a result, I was treating as static (important static, no less) something that was actually part of the song, because thinking the sound was coming from my phone meant mentally subtracting it from what was coming through my headphones. The remainder can turn out to have teeth: maybe my interpretation of the letter is wrong, and Thurston should leave his job, because his boss will never get over being resentful and will make Thurston’s life a living hell.
All of which I will address more fully when I comment on your posts.
The first thing I’ve concluded from reading this last comment is that we won’t really be able to settle certain points of this discussion until I read Hegel, which may be quite a long while from now. The positions you derive from Hegel are nuanced enough that I can’t work through them seriously on the strength of de Manian strategies alone without a greater understanding of Hegel. Beyond this, I think this side of the discussion seems to have mostly run its course; my comments will therefore be in the spirit of cleaning up before we move on.
You write:
It feels here as if you are setting de Man up for failure here by attributing to the Pascal essay claims not made therein, claims defended in other essays, and then faulting the Pascal essay for not defending claims that it hasn’t made. Yes, in other essays (Semiology and Rhetoric, The Rhetoric of Temporality, or The Concept of Irony being good examples) de Man does defend the “so goes the world” portion of the argument. While the Pascal essay can be used, I think, as a model for the way “the world” goes, i.e. for what tends to go wrong in other texts, it would be a mistake to fault it for not offering a convincing defense of this more general critique, insofar as the essay really is a reading of Pascal. If you conceed that his critique of Pascal is sufficient, perhaps it’s time we shifted focus to the debate on the Concept of Irony where the more general argument is (mostly) made. We seem to be in agreement that it’s time to shift
You write:
I find this argument quite interesting and have no problem conceding that Pascal is making moves that anticipate the dialectical method, particularly in his reading of the “one,” so long as it’s conceded that, as per my arguments above (which I don’t think you address, or even mean to), the dialectical method does not suffice to heal the break in the system produced by the “zero.”
I look forward to continuing this discussion over chez moi and discovering where you’re going with this allegory of the letter with teeth. Your comment on the first irony post aludes to a comment on the second post. I assume said comment is forthcoming, rather than somehow lost in the abyss of the internet?
surlacarte,
The reason that I move from de Man’s work on Pascal’s geometry, to de Man’s more general theory of textual paradoxes, is that de Man writes in the essay on Pascal that “we should be particularly wary not to decide too soon that this is indeed the case….because the consequences, from a theological and an epistemological point of view, are far-reaching” (60). De Man is arguing that, since in his view Pascal’s geometry is actually the groundwork for the Penseés, rather than an undistinguished early mistake, there in fact are theological and epistemological issues at stake.
I think we do agree that the “break” in the system cannot be healed; I disagree with Pascal (because of my reading of Hegel) on the question of whether such a break is fatal to the system, and (as you note) I think his own system begins to supply the answers why not.
Of course, the missing comment at your place (dear reader, if you haven’t visited there by now, go! go!) was dropped in favor of the full response over at the Valve.
Perhaps this is the end of this comment thread. If so, it’s been a remarkable one, and I’m looking forward to continuing the discussion via your newest post.
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You’re incorporation of the Karate Kid is brilliant, but I wonder if you might broaden your analysis somewhat. More specifically, when reading section 3 your write: “It teaches [Daniel] patience, and prevents him from thinking of Miyagi instrumentally.” But the word ‘instrumentality’ is a double-edged sword, id est, the instrument that “is” Miyagi is only so in the subjunctive–in the indicative this is not so, but is so in terms of the sublated (or perhaps de-lated?) wish. On the other hand, this sublation itself retrogressively becomes that which was insofar as its presence turns back into itself, much as Dasein falls (or is always already fallen) into das Man. Miyagi, then, would be so much untapped ousia, or, put differently, an uncontaminated spectrum.
So in short, I guess what I am wondering is whether or not it might have been effective to engage the first Ghostbusters movie to the extent that it allegorizes, albeit incidentally only, the circumstantial moment (or, if you prefer, event) of the (un)becoming of the tool in the very moment of its engagment vis-a-vis the phantom menace of a Blanchot-esque de-termination of value. Thoughts?
Paul, we have to consider the possibility that you are, as the British so colorfully say, taking the piss. While I would wholeheartedly enjoy placing any reading of Ghostbusters alongside readings of Pascal and Schlegel, I would have to know how that reading was grounded in the specifics of the film, if only to be sure that you weren’t just kidding around by referring to Blanchot etc.
As for the first part, your point is basically that a purely negative statement (“Miyagi is not an instrument”) eventually collapses back into a positive statement (“I wish Miyagi was just around to help me with my bullies” and finally “Miyagi is an instrument”).
This is certainly the psychological truth of negative statements; hence the famous command “Do not think of a white elephant” produces, immediately, the image of a white elephant.
In the context of the film, however, Daniel’s un-instrumental relationship to Miyagi is dramatized by the real friendship that develops between them. This friendship is projected beyond the end of the film, and outlasts the successful completion of Daniel’s personal projects.
If anything, the movement is in the other direction. Karate itself becomes de-instrumentalized, to the extent that Daniel learns principles of patience and forbearance from it that exceed the particular needs of the moment.
Paul DuPuis, links to http://www.dupuisrestaurant.com (which, by the way, oddly previews in WordPress but doesn’t load)…perhaps you’re truly a restauranteur, but it looks more like we’re getting served, Joe. Or maybe just you.
I’d like to point out the beautiful irony (I’m usually loathe to aestheticize, but I can’t resist here) that, when Mr. DuPuis responds to a post in which you, Joe, defend the possibility of finite irony, with a parody of academic jargon applied to pop culture, you brilliantly respond (after calling him out on it) by playing along, exploiting permanent parabasis of his of parody, which is to say, ironizing the ironizer by treating his apparent parody as potentially serious, which I think, at Dupuis’ Restaurant, is the equivalent if giving advice as a “tip.”
I’m not really aiming to score points in the larger discussion here, but this does kind of underscore the problems with the version of finite irony that Baudelaire calls the “irony of superiority.” On the one hand, bravo, Paul, you’ve occasioned a laugh. On the other hand, it’s kind of sad if this is how Joe’s writing, or academic writing in general, or academic writing on pop culture, sounds to someone outside of it or, as seems to be the case here, someone at least partially inside of it. I find Joe’s effort to write intelligently about films like the Karate Kid admirable, even if they’re occasionally (maybe even often) in the service of positions with which I disagree, and, Paul, if all you can hear in them is jargon, then I think the joke may be on you. Unless this is all in good fun.
surlacarte,
I really appreciated this comment.
I have often looked at this blog, but never yet submitted a response. However, the question of the limits, uses, and responses to irony intrigue me very much.
Surlacarte, your response was measured and generous, but your diagnosis of Mr. DuPuix was a little suspicious. Namely, the sentence that ends with “[. . .] to someone outside of it or, as seems to be the case here, someone at least partially inside of it.” Surely we cannot countenance this very tenative description. The trickiness of setting up this inside/outside distinction is nowhere better dealt with than by De Man, and your proviso “someone at least partially inside of it” only reinforces the way in which these labels don’t stick.
I do not intend to come off persnickety, as I think this distinction speaks to the heart of the issue at hand: namely, how do you know this a parody? When I read Mr. Du Puix’s comments, I found them rather cloudy and pretensious, but for that not lacking in something edging a genuine point (by the way, I suspect that Blanchot-Ghostbusters bit was in reference to the discussion period of the University of Luxembourg’s recent forum on _Spectre’s of Marx_).
That said, I believe Mr. DuPuix would do well to (1) get an editor, and (2) get off his high horse. No one better than Kierkegaard himself lamented the inability of people not to ironize (okay, maybe Shlegel did it better)–the sincerity via irony that permeates thought and expression alike. This sort of grandstanding, does not further debate but arrests it at the core. Kudos to the respondants for, as Surlacarte put it, “playing along” to the insolent and puerile intial attack. I use the term “attack” as literally as possible, too, since, whether or not it was intended, Mr. DuPuix has fallen into a certain will to jargon that cannot but be hostile to any serious dialogue.
As Joseph wrote in the original essay (if I may take liberties with context here), “the satire forces us to admit the existence of obligations greater than ourselves.”
My reading has undone itself. I ought to have written “DuPuis.”
Pat,
It really gladdens me to have new commenters join the fray.
I don’t know what, exactly, Paul is thinking, and on the chance that he was writing in good faith, I don’t want to speculate just yet. So, while I very much appreciate your comment also, let’s wait and see if he adds anything. Regardless, I’ll write a genuine response to you and surlacarte later tonight.
I Stumbled across your text and find it very touching and admire the dexterity of your analysis. Such an interesting and convincing reading of the ethical implications of De Man’s concept of irony – especially in the references from Shakespeare to popular film. Although I do believe that you’re argument is closer to De Man’s own understanding of “infinite irony” than you in fact claim. De Man was clear enough when he suggested that following “infinite irony” to its logical conclusion leads not merely to a question of death, but to death itself. Thus, I have always thought that Irony for De Man must necessarily be interrupted by an ethical decision whether in reading or responding to the other. It would be nice to understand more clearly how, in De Man’s work itself, you differ on this point?
Dean,
Let me begin with a short response to your very kind comment; it may help me to get clearer about where you want to take your argument. Then, when I feel surer of your position, I can say more.
The notion of the necessary interruption of irony along the way to death — an interruption that preserves life and makes dialogue possible — puts hermeneutic resolution in a frame that makes it arbitrary and essentially false. You would not, for example, call finishing a meal the “interruption of infinite consumption” that would otherwise produce death, even though it is certainly possible to eat until you die. The notion of satiety and completion inheres to our very concept of “the meal,” as it should, and to suggest otherwise is to try, without justification, to identify derangement with truth.