ABSTRACT
Literary critic and theorist Paul de Man (1919-83) never wrote an essay on Kierkegaard. In fact, somewhat ironically, even his 1977 lecture, later transcribed and included in Aesthetic Ideology, titled “The Concept of Irony,” contains only a handful of sentences about Kierkegaard’s book of the same title. He manages some praise (Kierkegaard’s is “the best book on irony that’s available”),1 some criticism (Kierkegaard “has to invent…a whole theory of history to justify the fact that one should get rid of Friedrich Schlegel, that he’s not a real ironist”),2 but the vast majority of the essay is dedicated to Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), with one lengthy digression into Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814). The other references to Kierkegaard strewn about de Man’s texts amount to little more than modest, at times even vague recognition. These gestures to Kierkegaard in de Man’s oeuvre number between 12 and 20, depending on one’s definition of a single reference. Of them all, the most provocative might not even be a reference in the typical sense. Instead, it is the title for the eighth projected chapter in the table of contents of a projected book that eventually (posthumously) came to be titled Aesthetic Ideology: “Critique of Religion and Political Ideology in Kierkegaard and Marx,” with an 0 marked beside it to denote that the work was supposedly “in progress.”3 Paul de Man died in December, 1983, before he had the chance to write this proposed essay on Kierkegaard. Therefore, the one substantial indicator of de Man’s understanding of Kierkegaard’s work and of specifically how he positioned himself and his criticallinguistic analyses in relation to Kierkegaard, remains unavailable, impossible. It is perhaps even fitting that the great theorist of the aporetical, a true champion of the logjams of meaning, should leave this final impasse for his readers permanently to confront.
