ABSTRACT
Paul De Man finds inspiration in Karl Marx's German Ideology for his explorations of ideology, which are therefore to be understood in some sort of connection with the critique of religion. If de Man wished to excise the sacred from the poetic it seems that Walter Benjamin's text is an odd place to go, unless he is just going to take it as a target, an egregious example of what he criticizes. De Man links the perpetual wandering, errance, of the de-canonized original language, an exile without a homeland, with history. There is no final authorized manuscript of de Man's lecture on Benjamin, it remains an essential text for the question of the relation between the sacred and what is called there, following Benjamin, 'pure language'. De Man presses his reading closely through Benjamin's final version of the linguistic disjunction between logos and lexis, the nonadequation between 'trope as such and the meaning as a totalizing power of tropological substitutions'.
