ABSTRACT
I The most concerted attack on Paul de Man’s work has come from critics of a Marxist or left-wing persuasion, notably Frank Lentricchia and Terry Eagleton. They see in it not only a private retreat from political engagement but a last-ditch attempt to discredit every form of historical knowledge and action. “In de Man’s analysis,” Lentricchia writes, “the futility, the self-delusion, and the paralysis of political activity, especially oppositional political activity, would appear to be a foregone conclusion.”1 And this not simply for the reason that de Man would treat all kinds of writing-historical narratives, political manifestos, works of Ideologiekritik-as so many complex rhetorical structures with no direct or unmediated reference to a world of reality “outside” the text. The same could be said, after all, of those left-wing activist critics like Edward Said who insist on the materiality of signifying practice, the ways in which cultural representations can work to reinforce or to challenge and subvert systems of instituted power.2 Lentricchia himself makes this point very firmly in Criticism and Social Change, where he hails Kenneth Burke as the greatest exemplar of a practice of engaged rhetorical critique, a critique that aims to transform social consciousness by revealing the mechanisms of ideological mystification. If Burke is the hero of Lentricchia’s tale, de Man figures throughout as his devilish counterpart, a “nihilist” bent upon throwing up obstacles to any hope of comprehending-and thus transforming-our historical situation.
