SearchMy accountHelpBasket0 items

The Frontiers of Theory

Ideology, Rhetoric, AestheticsFor De Man

By Andrzej Warminski

Format

£100.00

In stock

About this book

Readings of de Man’s critique of aesthetic ideology and the strange ‘materiality’ that emerges from it

This volume explicates Paul de Man’s late project of a critique of aesthetic ideology and attempts to extend it in ways productive for critical thought. After a reading of de Man’s work in all its rigour - and hence also the aesthetic theory of Kant, Schiller, and Hegel- the book goes on to uncover a ‘material moment’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that lives on in Marx and in the Marxist tradition. The book also elucidates de Man’s critical reading of Heidegger on the example of Hölderlin—a moment essential for de Man’s shifts to the question of rhetoric and then to the question of ideology—and ends with a reading of Derrida’s ‘last’ text on de Man and its uncanny self-inscription in Rousseau’s episode of the stolen ribbon.

Key Features:
  • Rigorous explications of Paul de Man’s late work on aesthetic ideology and the political
  • New readings of Kant, Schiller, and Hegel that extend de Man’s project
  • Demonstrates how a certain already ‘Marxian’ self-undoing of Hegelian dialectics leaves traces in Kojève and in Marxists like Lukács and Jameson
  • Presents accounts of disagreements and altercations between de Man and Heidegger and de Man and Derrida

Reviews

The publication of this book is a historical event. Paul de Man (and Warminski) mean by the term "event" something that happens, something that changes history. This book does that with unparalleled intelligence, learning, and insight. It develops and deploys to wonderful effect a specifically Warminskian way of doing rhetorical readings.
An unavoidable book: it meets the challenge of reading Paul de Man unflinchingly and, more importantly, without compromising de Man's practice of rhetorical reading and writing. Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics stands alone in offering a rigorous explication, extension, and counter-signing of de Man's own signature-and signature intervention-within literary studies.
Table of contents
List of Abbreviations; Acknowledgements; Preface; I. Aesthetic Ideology; 1. Allegories of Reference: An Introduction to Aesthetic Ideology; 2. ‘As the poets do it’: On the Material Sublime; 3. Returns of the Sublime: Positing and Performative in Kant, Fichte, and Schiller; 4. Lightstruck: Hegel on the Sublime; II. Hegel/Marx; 5. Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life; 6. Man and Self-consciousness: Kojève, Romantic Ironist; 7. Next Steps: Lukács, Jameson, Post-Dialectics; III. Heidegger/Derrida; 8. Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin; 9. Discontinuous Shifts: History Reading History; 10. Machinal Effects: Derrida With and Without de Man; Appendix 1: A Question of an Other Order: Deflections of the Straight Man; Appendix 2: Response to Frances Ferguson.
About the author

Andrzej Warminski

Andrzej Warminski is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He has published Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory with Edinburgh University Press (2013). He is also the author of Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger and the editor of Paul de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology.

More in this series

See the series →