Tom Toremans

Surfacing Materiality: Wordsworth, Kant and de Man's Epistemological Critique of Reading

In the 1983 Messenger Lectures, Paul de Man set out to formulate a critique of critical philosophy and Romantic literature as dynamically involved in a post-Romantic predicament that centers around the ‘philosophical phantasm’ of ‘the reconciliation of knowledge with phenomenal, aesthetic experience’. While critical attention has mainly focused on the shift in terminology in de Mans later writings towards linguistic materiality and aesthetic ideology, this article argues that this shift simultaneously implies a radicalisation of de Mans theory and practice of rhetorical reading into an epistemological critique of reading in terms of the incompatibility between cognition and perception, and of the material event and its inevitable reinscription into tropological linguistic models. This shift culminates in de Mans claim, in ‘The Resistance to Theory’, that all theory necessarily avoids the reading it advocates and contains a necessarily pragmatic moment that reinscribes it into the ideological aberration...