BOOKS
313
efforts to unmask the " fallacy of reference" had to be stated in "a
necessarily referential mode. " But Nietzsche inaugurates a self–
conscious program of deconstruction in his discovery that "deconstruc–
tion ... is coextensive with any use of language." Nietzsche exposed
the bad conscience at the heart of the nineteenth century's desire to
purge discourse, prosaic as well as poetic, of every trace of rhetoric.
Nietzsche shows us that the very distinctions between prose and poetry,
factual and fictional discourse, philosophy and literature, referential
and expressive prose, all variations on the "lie" which informs the
distinction between "literalness" and "figurativeness," are untenable.
The "content" or "referent" of every text is the dominant "trope"
which presides over the sleights of hand by which the text is consti–
tuted.
If
this is true of the literary text, it is no less true of the critical text
which questions it. Ques tioning the text-in whatever way-involves
an inquest that is always uncertain about whether its questions are
intended seriously or only "rhetorically, " a questioning which is
uncertain about the questions it is
really
asking, even whether it is
"questioning" at all. And, as de Man writes at the end of his opening
essay, "The resulting pathos" of this situation "is an anxiety (or bliss,
depending on one's momentary mood or individual temperament) of
ignorance, not an anxiety of reference.... " This is clearly seen, we are
assured, in Proust's representation of the "act" of reading, "not as an
emotive reaction to what language does, but as an emotive reaction to
the impossibility of knowing what it might be up to. " And in
consequence, therefore, we are instructed
to
recognize that "Literature
as well as criticism-the difference between them being delusive-is
condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, conse–
quently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names
and transforms himself."
If
the pathos of modern critical theory stems from an "anxiety of
ignorance," de Man 's own method of reading requires, for its actualiza–
tion, what might be called a willful suspension of this anxiety. There is
nothing "anxious" about de Man's own critical performances. He
picks his way with the utmost confidence among the complex texts
with which he deals and with previous critics' efforts to come to terms
with them. The texts he favors are those which are eminently self–
reflexive, those which implicitly turn back upon themselves, and
undermine the assumptions-about language, representation, and
truth-necessary for their own elaboration. He delights in those texts
which, in the very act of affirming a possible truth or a possible lie,
