ABSTRACT
While de Man sometimes described the operations of language in terms of “defacement,” “decomposition,” “radical annihilation,” and even “sheer blind violence,” the dominant emphasis, especially in his later years, falls on the mechanical, arbitrary, and “inhuman” randomness of language. In these years, in fact, the concept of the inhuman itself becomes an object of his attention. As he says in one late text, “the inhuman is: linguistic structures, the play of linguistic tensions, linguistic events that occur, possibilities which are inherent in language-independently of any intent or any drive or any wish or any desire we might have.” The record of human endeavor, history itself “is not human, because it pertains strictly to the order of language.” In fact, de Man concludes, warming to his subject, “there is, in a very radical sense, no such thing as the human” (1986: 96).
