"True" Criticism, and Its Rhetoric of Crisis and Failure
"True" Criticism, and Its Rhetoric of Crisis and Failure

Summary/Abstract: The present article focuses on Paul de Man’s concept of "true criticism" or "true reading", understood as an epistemological event that is utterly different from logocentric reading: a non-metaphysical, non-totalising, non-univocal critical approach that always occurs "in the mode of crisis" and is shaped on the model of the text under analysis, therefore repeating, through its own disjunctions, the text's own failure to "read" itself. It aims to clarify the notion of criticism as an unavoidably "failed" activity (comparable to translation, philosophy and history) by virtue of its secondary status in relation to an elusive "original" it can never substitute for. Like translation, literary criticism, according to Paul de Man, never lives up to its promise of wholeness and coherence, and this is partly because the starting-point in both cases is an already fragmented "original", and partly because an essay (or a translation) is also a text, and as such, it partakes of the discontinuity and disjunction characteristic of all texts. Finally, the present article examines the ambivalence of what de Man refers to as critical "failure": an inconclusive effort marked by an "anxiety of ignorance" that nevertheless contributes to a deeper understanding of the text's mechanism and logic.

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