the apostrophe, the ‘you’ which, interrupting the silence of what is hidden and does not speak [le ‘tu’ qui, interrompant le silence de ce qui est tu], brings to birth, engenders, and provokes, calls but in truth recalls [appelle mais en vérité rappelle] the ‘he’ into being. For that act is not only an appearance that seems to give rise to [semble se donner] sexual difference, it is not simply active or decisive, creative or productive. Reading as much as it writes, deciphering or citing as much as it inscribes, this act is also an act of memory (the other is already there, irreducibly), this act enacts [cet acte prend acte]. In calling you back, it remembers. [En te rappelant, il se rappelle.]

ABSTRACT

It is a matter of great delicacy and intellectual tact to distinguish rightly between de Man and Derrida, since distinguishing between them involves getting right the deepest and most obscure bases of their thought, no easy task. Such a distinction, however, might focus on the way de Man’s notion of performative language is associated with two central and difficult ideas in his work: his particular concept of irony and his concept (if that is the right word for it) of the non-phenomenal materiality of language. Because language is material, it has force. It can make things happen. Because this materiality is non-phenomenal, not open to sense perception, its effects are not open to verification or prediction, just as irony is a pervasive force in language that makes it potentially, or in fact inevitably, unreadable, unintelligible. Performativity, prosopopoeia, irony, and non-phenomenal materiality-these in their intertwining form a knot or node in de Man’s work, especally in his last essays.