ABSTRACT
The remaining books in the de Man corpus are all collections of essays edited by others and published after his death. Sometimes these collections follow a selection outlined in de Man’s own notes, sometimes they do not. This guide will concentrate on key individual essays, chosen for their particular importance in terms of de Man’s contribution to literary studies. This chapter will examine two pieces from the collection entitled The Resistance to Theory: the 1982 essay which gives the collection its name and ‘The Task of the Translator’, a transcript of a lecture given in 1983. In ‘Force of Law: the Mystical Foundation of Authority’, Jacques Derrida writes that ‘deconstruction is the experience of the impossible’ (Derrida 1992, 15). The two essays to be examined here reveal the importance of this idea for the work of Paul de Man. They also represent some of most de Man’s most influential work, marking the period after the publication of Allegories of Reading when de Man’s fame and critical powers were both at their highest point.
