Paul de Man (1919–1983)

The Aesthetic Ideology is a very different book than I expected back when it was announced in the late 80s. The work which was originally to appear with this title was supposed to be a summa -- in particular, it was supposed to show how the privileging of aesthetics and aesthetic categories led to ideology -- "the confusion of linguistic with natural reality" -- and nationalistic ideology. It was a project which, seen in hindsight, would have marked a reflection on and critique of de Man's early attraction to a very specific nationalist ideology; this latter would not have been named, of course, but it would have been very difficult to miss the gap between the older man and the younger. Instead, Andrzej Warminski and other former de Man students were tasked with incorporating de Man's remaining unedited papers into a book -- a task that took Warminski, not known for his speed, more than several years. It is good to have this book. The essays in it -- most valuably for me, "The Concept of Irony" -- had been circulating in photocopy since the late '80s. "The Concept of Irony" is a wonderful extension of what de Man had to say in "The Rhetoric of Temporality" from Blindness and Insight. The next best essays -- forgive me for not going over them one by one -- are the ones on Hegel. In "Hegel and the Sublime," he gives his most explicit clue as to what the new work would have been about: he labels as a "confusion" the posited opposition between aesthetics and politics.

The jacket copy writer at the University of Minnesota Press saw fit to describe this book as "a necessary and vital component of your humanities bookshelf." Well, not all at once. But once you have a sense of de Man's idiom and of his projects, it would be very difficult to do without it.… (mer)