Blindness and insight: in putting these categories at the core of his work, Paul de Man offers psychoanalytical resources to philosophy in its ancient quarrel with the poets. But the terms do something more to place de Man at the center of contemporary theoretical criticism. The blindness and insight model traffics in the ocular rhetoric with which theorists in the past three decades have been engaged, sometimes to the point of obsession. De Man's ironic use of the term insight (ironic because insight, though initially desirable, will inevitably solidify into a standard mode of perception, a form of blindness, and must thus be regarded with some suspicion) conveys a much more measured and dialectical position than most theorists hold.

For the majority of those writers who have had major impact on Anglo-American literary criticism in the latter part of the century have been uninhibitedly anti-visual. That is, they have aimed their polemical energies at forms of thinking that, as they understand it, uncritically use the experience of seeing as an ideal image for understanding.