ABSTRACT
I In his essay “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” de Man addresses what he takes to be the crucial and unresolved problem inhabiting all versions of high-Romantic or symbolist aesthetics.1 This problem has to do with the relationship between art and philosophy, and the fact (as de Man argues) that Hegel’s compulsion to theorize the nature of art leads to a series of discrepancies or blind spots in his argument which undermine his own explicit claims. I want to look closely at this essay, along with another of de Man’s late productions, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant.”2 Together they present a detailed working out of de Man’s arguments on the topic of Romantic ideology, a topic that focused all his major concerns, from the early essays collected in Blindness and Insight (1971) to the posthumous volume The Resistance to Theory (1986). In Kant and Hegel de Man reads a series of persistent contradictions, aporias, or antinomies which characterize the discourse of Romanticism and continue to vex modern thought in its attempts to make terms with that problematic heritage.
