The Figurality of Language and the Illusion of Meaning: Rousseau, Nietzsche and de Man
The Figurality of Language and the Illusion of Meaning: Rousseau, Nietzsche and de Man

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on a deconstructionist perspective on meaning that is perfectly compatible with, yet utterly different from Derrida’s antilogocentric “thesis” of the impossibility of a “transcendental signified”: Paul de Man’s conception of the disruptive and rhetorical nature of language. It analyses de Man’s scepticism about the epistemological reliability of language, his indebtedness to the groundbreaking linguistic insights of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as his deconstructionist re-reading of their texts. It shows Demanian reading as perpetually incapable of distinguishing between the literal and the figural, and fascinated by the indeterminacy that turns texts into forever “unreadable” enigmas.

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