Paul De Man Famous Quotes
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The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements.
And to read is to understand, to question, to know, to forget, to erase, to deface, to repeat--that is to say, the endless prosopopoeia by which the dead are made to have a face and a voice which tells the allegory of their demise and allows us to apostrophize them in our turn. No degree of knowledge can ever stop this madness, for it is the madness of words.
The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.
Consciousness ("here" and "now") is not
"false and misleading" because of language; consciousness is language, and
nothing else, because it is false and misleading.
Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.
Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.
...asked by his wife whether he wants to have his bowling shoes laced over or laced under, Archie Bunker answers the question: "What's the difference?" Being a reader of sublime simplicity, his wife replies by patiently explaining the difference between lacing over and lacing under, whatever this may be, but provokes only ire. "What's the difference" did not ask for difference but means instead "I don't give a damn what the difference is.
Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.
The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
Literature ... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.
Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.
If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.
Prior to any generalization about literature, literary texts have to be read, and the possibility of reading can never be taken for granted. It is an act of understanding that can never be observed, nor in any way prescribed or verified.
