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Critical Response
II
Paul de Man
383
384 CriticalResponse Paul de Man
and close readings. The exchanges within the precincts of the literary
establishment have not lacked in animation, but they tend to remain
personal, moralistic, and ideological in a manner that is not exactly con-
ductive to precision. Most of the recent polemics aimed at literary theory
bear no relationship whatever to the texts they claim to attack. Philosophical
readers, more accustomed to the rigors of argument, are less prone to
be obviously ad hominem:they have a tighter sense of the nuances and
the specificities of discursive texts. Of course, they do not have a monopoly
on the subtleties of close reading, and it is only on a first level of ap-
proximation that they can thus be set apart from their counterparts in
departments of literature. The real problem starts a little further on, in
an attempt to state the difference (if it exists) between a close "philosophical"
and a close "literary"reading of a text. It is clear, for example, that most
of Raymond Geuss' objections to my paper "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's
Aesthetics"have to do with the manner of reading philosophical writings
prior to the substance that such a reading reveals. In the remarks that
follow, I will try not to lose sight of this pragmatic aspect of the encounter.
Geuss' stance, throughout his commentary, is to shelter the canonical
reading of what Hegel actually thought and proclaimed from readings
which allow themselves, for whatever reason, to tamper with the canon.
Such an attitude, I hasten to add, is not only legitimate but admirable;
when it is pursued-as is here the case-with genuine authority, it is in
no way reductive. There is no merit whatever in upsetting a canonical
interpretation merely for the sake of destroying something that may have
been built with considerable care. This is all the more so in the case of
a truly systematic, consistent, and self-critical philosopher, who certainly
would not have taken lightly to such epithets as "vacillating"or "duplicitous"
applied to his writings. The commentator should persist as long as possible
in the canonical reading and should begin to swerve away from it only
when he encounters difficulties which the methodological and substantial
assertions of the system are no longer able to master. Whether or not
such a point has been reached should be left open as part of an ongoing
critical investigation. But it would be naive to believe that such an in-
vestigation could be avoided, even for the best of reasons. The necessity
to revise the canon arises from resistances encountered in the text itself
(extensively conceived) and not from preconceptions imported from else-
where.
(p. 381). The canonical bent of his reading here extends to my own text
and schematizes it beyond recognition. It is, for example, not the case
that, in my essay, "sign" and "symbol" stand in a constant "relation of
opposition to each other" (p. 375). This reference is presumably to my
statement that "the relationship between sign and symbol ... is one of
mutual obliteration" (p. 770). "Obliteration" is both more and less than
"opposition," and the entire argument can be seen as a way to account
for the change that leads from a "dichotomy" between sign and symbol
(see p. 763) to the metaphor of "obliteration."At the point in the exposition
when I discuss Hegel's distinction between sign and symbol, the stress
is not on the arbitrariness of the sign (which could possibly, though not
necessarily, be put in polar opposition to the motivation of the symbol)
but on the active power which permits the intellect to appropriate the
properties of the outside world to its own ends (see pp. 766-67). By this
activity (Hegel refers to Tdtigkeitder Intelligenz [Enz III, p. 270, par. 458])
the intellect becomes the subject that subjects the natural object to its
powers. Hegel's interest in the sign is entirely based on the similarity
between the intellect as speaking and thinking subject and the sign as
the product of this same intellect. There is a direct connection between
Hegel's considerations on the sign, in paragraph 458 of the Encyclopedia,
and his affirmation, in the same book, that "the simple expression of the
existing subject, as thinking subject, is I" (Enz I, p. 72, par. 20). The
move from the theory of the sign to the theory of the subject has nothing
to do with my being overconcerned with the Romantic tradition, or
narcissistic, or (c'est la memechose) too influenced by the French. It has,
in fact, nothing to do with me at all but corresponds to an inexorable
and altogether Hegelian move of theetext. That this "thinking subject"
is in no way subjective, in the ordinary sense of the term, nor even
specular, in the Cartesian mode, is something that any careful reader of
Hegel knows.
The same direct line travels from the assertion that the thinking
subject somehow erases (the term in Hegel's lexicon is tilgen) the natural
world to the disagreement on the use of the verb meinen in paragraph
20. Geuss contests my reading of meinen as having, next to others, the
connotation of "opinion" in the sentences: "Was ich nur meine, ist mein"
and "so kann ich nicht sagen, was ich nur meine"(Enz I, p. 74, par. 20;
see my pp. 768-69 and Geuss, p. 380). In my turn, I must accuse him
of mishearing the German language when he interprets meinen only as
vouloir dire (or, as in Stanley Cavell's title, can we mean what we say?),
that is, as signifying intent, as "intend[ing] to refer to some particular
individual thing" (p. 380). The "nur" in "was ich nur meine," which I in
no way neglect (and bracket on one occasion-but for entirely different
reasons than those attributed to me), is precisely what confirms the normal
vernacular use of "eine Meinung haben." Meinung, or "opinion," is, from
an epistemological point of view ("nur Meinung"), inferior to Wissen, for
388 Critical Response Paul de Man