Blindness and Insight by Paul de Man

First published: 1971; revised edition, 1983

Type of work: Literary criticism

The Work:

The idea of this work’s title, Blindness and Insight, is a paradoxical one. For Paul de Man, the qualities of blindness and insight are not polar opposites but qualities that strangely work together in exemplifying the mysteries of a complicated critical text. Often, de Man argues, critics will seem to have a blind spot and to willfully not notice aspects of a text that do not accord with the fixed ideas they bring to a text; and, he continues, these critics see some details of a literary work only to negate others. De Man does not suggest, however, that this “blindness” should be altered; instead, this blindness enables the critical insight in the first place. Insights are arrived at through the “cost” of blindness.

Blindness and Insight is de Man’s first book, published when he was fifty-two years old. Like other influential works of literary criticism, such as Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1950), Blindness and Insight is a book of essays, not written as a unified volume. Furthermore, some of the essays appeared in scholarly journals, and others in popular media such as The New York Review of Books. The essays have a wide following in critical and literary theory circles. Also, Blindness and Insight, in large measure, led to de Man’s acceptance of a professorship at Yale. He finished his career there and soon became one of the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century.

For all the complexity of de Man’s thought, Blindness and Insight is a peculiarly accessible book. De Man did not have a conventional academic career. When young in his native Belgium, he became involved in writing for literary journals that expressed a collaborationist viewpoint—a willingness to cooperate with the Nazis, who were then occupying Belgium. (This collaboration was discovered posthumously in 1988.) While in his mid-twenties, de Man emigrated to the United States and worked in a bookstore in New York. It was there that he met writer Mary McCarthy, who helped him get his first teaching position. He then did graduate work at Harvard, where he was a member of its Society of Fellows.

De Man, influenced by European philosophy and poetics, also knew of the then-dominant American critical and pedagogical method of New Criticism, which he learned from one of its finest exponents, Reuben A. Brower. New Criticism stressed the independence of the literary text from social, historical, or biographical contexts. De Man agreed with this foregrounding of literariness and its emphasis on close, attentive acts of reading what was actually on the page. He felt stymied, however, by the inertness of New Criticism, its tendency to be content with stable, well-rounded resolutions to intellectual questions.

In the essay “The Rhetoric of Blindness,” de Man further explores the metaphor of blindness as insight. Although in general sympathy with philosopher and literary critic Jacques Derrida and his deconstructive theory, de Man diverges from him on one important point. Whereas Derrida considers the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to be filled with a naïve exposition of the metaphysics of presence, of an undiluted and charismatic authenticity, de Man considers Rousseau’s texts to be knowingly exposing their own literariness. This stress on the text’s knowledge of its own instabilities is one of the major thrusts of a specifically de Manian turn in criticism.

With “Criticism and Crisis,” de Man shows that he is the first literary critic practicing in the United States to be influenced by the deconstructive thought of Derrida, whom de Man had met the previous year at the famous Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man conference convened by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Although de Man’s emphasis—sober and directed toward acts of reading—was different from his French colleague—playful and oriented toward performances of writing—he quickly was established as the spearhead of American deconstruction.

In the book’s several essays on individual critics, de Man is at times severely chastising, as when he argues that literary theorist Georg Lukács makes time into something simple and predicable that leads to a coarse view of history and ideology. At other times, de Man gently reveals ironies in a thinker he otherwise admires, such as Georges Poulet. He praises Maurice Blanchot and Ludwig Binswanger for their conscious interventions in the definition of an advanced mode of critical thought.

In “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” irony comes near to being the master trope, or figurative strategy of language. Only if language covers up its truth through the distancing of irony does it have any chance of revealing truth; straightforward declaration only leads to calcified ideology, a mode of which Marxists would call false consciousness. De Man is less interested in specific instances of irony than in irony as a categorical literary stance, although one whose nature, situated as it is in the gap between intention and meaning, is never conclusively enumerated.

“Literary History and Literary Modernity” recasts the standard mid-twentieth century assumption that modernism represented something startlingly new and unprecedented. De Man argues that if there had been any sort of break or moment of critical transformation in the Western literary tradition, it came at the beginning of the Romantic era. Modernity’s sense of linguistic self-consciousness and existential alienation was but an intensification or a recasting of the Romantic. More fundamentally, though, de Man sees literary history as the victor over literary modernity. Literary modernity tried to break out of history, to announce something new and unprecedented, both in terror and in triumph distinctively different from the past. De Man thought the past could never be entirely evaded, that traces of it would linger. He thought, too, that there was only one authentic experience of modernity: the aftermath of modernity’s realization that the declarative break it sought would never be achieved. Still, de Man’s posture is not a conservative rebuke of modernity; it is a demystified account of its real nature.

Modernity is not a fulfillment of the new, a cathartic surge into idyllic bliss of self-aggrandizing despair. Rather, modernity truly transpires when both the will to move forward and its paralytic failure are comprehended in one rich, simultaneous, contradictory gesture. Using the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche as an example of modernity, de Man differentiates between a genuine modernity that seeks to radically step beyond history from a contemporaneity that is merely faddish or current. De Man concludes the essay by notoriously remarking that “the bases for historical knowledge are written texts, even if they masquerade in the guise of wars and revolutions.”

De Man was seeking to turn literary history from dry-as-dust recitations of facts and dates to a method much less annalistic and bibliographical and much more interpretive; he was reminding readers that even wars and revolutions are known through written texts, and that written texts often lay behind wars and revolutions. Though de Man’s antihistorical language was no doubt employed to deliberate a certain strand of unreconstructed Marxism, the point behind that language is a reasonable one: What is known of history is mediated by structures and effects that are partly literary. This is the capstone to the redefinition of literariness as a sophisticated mode of textual self-awareness that preoccupies all the essays in Blindness and Insight.

Bibliography

Culler, Jonathan. The Literary in Theory. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007. This book by one of the great expositors of deconstruction and postmodernism in the United States focuses on the theoretical salience of what de Man famously called the linguistics of literariness.

Hoeveler, J. David, Jr. The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970’s. 1996. Reprint. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Places de Man’s thought in an American milieu from which it is too often excluded on account of its European origin.

McQuillan, Martin. Paul de Man. New York: Routledge, 2001. An accessible, balanced introduction to de Man’s thought. One of the best books for the beginning student of de Man and his works. Part of the Routledge Critical Thinkers series.

Melville, Stephen W. Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Places de Man in the broader context of literary and philosophical thought in the twentieth century. Part of the Theory and History of Literature series.

Redfield, Marc, ed. Legacies of Paul de Man. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. A look at whether—and if so, how—de Man’s theories have survived the comparative eclipse of his reputation in the 1990’s. Also includes fascinating appendices concerning de Man’s teaching of literature at Yale in the 1970’s.

Waters, Lindsay, and Wlad Godzich, eds. Reading de Man Reading. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. This book of essays examines de Man’s critical procedures and the vertiginous implications of his strategic acts of reading. Part of the Theory and History of Literature series.