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critic takes the text apart in sucR a way as to permit its reader to see the
process of its construction as if viewed in reverse and in slow-motion.
The various moves made by the writer of the texts are interpreted, not
as transformative operations governed by logical principles, but rather
as "turns" (tropes or figilfative cllsplacements), the principles of which
are to be found in rhetorical theory. Deconstruction, thus envisaged, is
the critical practice of a linguistically sophisticated appropriation of
texts which looks for its understanding of literature in a modernized
version of Renaissance rhetoric. Irl this practice the traditional distinc–
tion between literary and other forms of discourse is dissolved. Poetry
no less than prose, the lyric no less than the moral tract, philosophy no
less than everyday speech, are all viewed as "texts," the constructive
principles of which are cohstrued to be the same. Behind the superficial
variety of the forms which the history of literature seems to display, the
deconstructive critic perceives the opetations of a human consciousness
that everywhere tries to make sense but of nonsense, coherence out of
incoherence, the appearance of inevitability out of a practice of writing
that is everywhere "blind" to the arbitrariness of what it takes to be
"insights" into the nature of reality.
Allegories of Reading
is divided into two parts, one entitled
"Rhetoric," the other, " Rousseau." Part I is comprised of a theoretical
introduction, followed by successive discussions of works by Rilke,
Proust, and Nietzsche; while Part II is devoted entirely to an analysis of
Rousseau's work. The juxtaposition of the two parts is ironic, for
rhetoric is represented as the repressed content of every text, including
those of the greatest modern advocate of "sincerity" as a principle of
writing, that unrelenting enemy of
mere
rhetoric, Rousseau himself.
The title, too, is ironic. For the "allegories" referred to in the title
consist not onl y of texts that are anal yzed and shown to have "rhetoric"
as their repressed contents, but to de Man's own readings of these texts.
He offers us an allegory of allegory. De Man's own deconstructions of
the texts are allegories of
critical
reading, though saved from the
"blindness" of their own allegorization by virtue of the ironic recogni–
tion that their "insights" are themselves "blind" too.
The centerpiece of de Man's book is comprised of the three
chapters on Nietzsche in which he meditates upon the author of
Human, A II Too Human's
attempt to escape the snares of allegoriza–
tion by affirming that all language is figurative-even the most chaste
denotative discourse-that "literalness" is a myth, and that representa–
tion is impossible. Nietzsche was the quintessential "deconstructor,"
but as de Man shows in his analysis of
The Birth of Tragedy,
his own
