As readers versed in the polemics of twentieth-century literary theory will recognize, my title pays slant homage to a well-known essay by Stanley Corngold, ‘Error in Paul de Man’ (1982). In that essay, Corngold proposes a distinction between de Man's use of the terms ‘mistake’ and ‘error’: ‘Mistakes (or what de Man sometimes calls “mere error” [see, e.g., BI 109]) are without true value: trivial, in principle corrigible according to a norm already known. But the skew of error implies a truth.’ Having discerned this difference between mistake and error, Corngold proceeds to undermine it. He attempts to show that, although (in his opinion) ‘there is no place … for mistakes’ in a de Manian dialectic of blindness and insight, mistakes nonetheless persist in de Man's work in at least two ways: as straw figures that de Man's deconstructive essays construct in order to demolish (e.g., the totalizing power of metaphor: a power that, posited only to be destroyed over the course of de Manian argumentation, functions as ‘a sheer mistake'); and as ‘an unironical and sheerly mistaken violence’, to which de Man resorts in order to achieve his readings. Claiming that in the end ‘it is not possible to distinguish’ between mistake and error in de Man's writings, Corngold identifies the entire de Manian project as a mistake: ‘De Man's final confusion of the terms “error” and “mistake” occurs through his pretending to truth in the name of error. The usefulness of the concept of error as distinct from that of mistake disappears utterly.’