Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Author's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- PART I Aesthetic Ideology
- PART II Hegel/Marx
- PART III Heidegger/Derrida
- 8 Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin
- 9 Discontinuous Shifts: History Reading History
- 10 Machinal Effects: Derrida With and Without de Man
- Appendix 1 A Question of an Other Order: Deflections of the Straight Man
- Appendix 2 Response to Frances Ferguson
- Index
10 - Machinal Effects: Derrida With and Without de Man
from PART III - Heidegger/Derrida
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Author's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- PART I Aesthetic Ideology
- PART II Hegel/Marx
- PART III Heidegger/Derrida
- 8 Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin
- 9 Discontinuous Shifts: History Reading History
- 10 Machinal Effects: Derrida With and Without de Man
- Appendix 1 A Question of an Other Order: Deflections of the Straight Man
- Appendix 2 Response to Frances Ferguson
- Index
Summary
Toward the end of “Acts” – the third and what would have been the last lecture and the last chapter of Derrida's Mémoires, for Paul de Man if it had not been for the necessity of adding “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War” in a revised edition of 1988 – Derrida quotes passages from two letters de Man wrote to him in 1970 and 1971 before and after the publication in Poétique (1970) of de Man's “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Derrida as Reader of Rousseau.” De Man's first letter is itself a reply to a letter that Derrida wrote to de Man in responding to the critique of his (Derrida's) reading of Rousseau in Grammatologie. In the excerpt Derrida quotes, de Man refuses to be put off by what he calls Derrida's “kindness” (gentillesse) and emphasizes the areas of disagreement or at least divergence: “The other day was neither the time nor the place to speak again of Rousseau (pour reparler de Rousseau) and I do not know if you have any reason to return to the question. Your supposed ‘agreement’ (accord) [This is a word I must have written in my letter (Derrida interjects)] can only be kindness, for if you object to what I say about metaphor, you must, as it should be, object to everything.” And a bit later in the excerpt, de Man adds: “I do not yet know why you keep refusing Rousseau the value of radicality which you attribute to Mallarmé and no doubt to Nietzsche; I believe that it is for hermeneutic rather than historical reasons, but I am probably wrong” (M 129, 127).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ideology, Rhetoric, AestheticsFor De Man, pp. 185 - 202Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013