Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- I From chaos to case
- II The bizarre territory
- III The curve of the mirror
- IV From ‘so complex an irony’ to ‘such a textual logic’
- V From ‘wit’ to ‘astonishment’
- VI ‘Fool’ and ‘pharmakon’
- VII ‘The monstrous clarity’
- VIII From ‘ensemble’ to ‘exception’
- IX Pagan perspectives
- X The Tao of criticism
- Notes
- Index
VIII - From ‘ensemble’ to ‘exception’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- I From chaos to case
- II The bizarre territory
- III The curve of the mirror
- IV From ‘so complex an irony’ to ‘such a textual logic’
- V From ‘wit’ to ‘astonishment’
- VI ‘Fool’ and ‘pharmakon’
- VII ‘The monstrous clarity’
- VIII From ‘ensemble’ to ‘exception’
- IX Pagan perspectives
- X The Tao of criticism
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The vanishing enigma
What one has seen in de Man has been transformed into a commonplace: we find in moments of contradiction the established and institutionalised features of our intellectual landscape - as ‘irony’ and ‘ambiguity’ were half a century ago - and which are now attaining their own form of domestication. What has been called ‘absurdist criticism’ has found its proper repertoire of moves, its canonical concepts, in ‘indeterminacy’, ‘undecidability’, ‘impossibility’, etc. A short précis by Leo Bersani can serve as a classic statement:
Criticism, far from solving the enigmas of literature, has perhaps even put into question the very category of the enigma by dissolving it in a more radical view of literary language (a view to which narrative resolutions of enigmatic sense are irrelevant) as continuously performing the deferral, or the absence of its meanings. In a sense, the peculiar achievement of contemporary criticism has been to demonstrate the unreadability of the literary text.
There is something strangely open and shut about this, as if the achievement were definitive and the force of demonstration conclusive. One thinks of the strength of ‘achieved’ in Bloom's ‘achieved dearth of meaning’, the hard-won product of the poet's art and negation in his utterance. One can see this point as one of no return, of the surrender of any possibility of reading to a meditation on the blank spaces that frame the intellectual space of the quixotic enterprise.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Myth of Theory , pp. 149 - 169Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994