back to Sign/Language
1. One place where we might want to call for greater precision in de Man's formulation is in his conflation of the rhetorical, the figural, and the tropological, terms which he uses interchangeably. For the purposes of this brief sketch, however, I am leaving this unchallenged.
2. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 9.
3. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17.
4. Plato, The Republic, Book VII, 516b, trans. Paul Shorey, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, eds. Edith Hamilton and
Huntington Cairns, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963).
5. Ibid., 515c.
6. Ibid., 516b.
7. Ibid., 516c.
8. Ibid., 517b.
9. Ibid., 514b. My italics.
10. I'm fudging here, since these words appear in translation, but if one takes the idea of deManian reading seriously, one would be able to find another choice of words, if not these particular ones, to make the same point.