ABSTRACT
De Man’s second book, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (1979), is perhaps his most important contribution to literary studies. It is a book that sets itself up for endless rereading and no summary of its complex architecture can do it justice. However, as a point of entry one might consider the title itself as an extension of themes previously outlined in Blindness and Insight. As with the essays discussed in the preceding chapter, Allegories is concerned with questions of reading and with a study of figural language (rhetoric or so-called literary language). While many of the essays in Blindness and Insight remain fixed within a traditional critical vocabulary, Allegories is de Man’s breakthrough into an unfettered use of the term deconstruction. The first half of this chapter will consider the general thesis of Allegories, the second half will examine de Man’s bravura reading of Rousseau’s Confessions, which closes the book, as a case-study in the work de Man attempts here.
