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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
MANY READERS HAVE DIFFICULTY IMAGINING WHAT THE FORMS OF SELFHOOD proposed by poststructuralist theory are supposed to feel like, and some assume that the very idea of strong emotion is inconsistent with poststructuralist theories of the self. Alongside this concern runs another one, that poststructuralist texts are not very affective. De Man's work has been used to exemplify both the claim that poststructuralist writing is cold and the claim that it does not possess an adequate account of emotion.(1) John Guillory, for example, argues that de Man's students are forced by their belief in de Manian rhetorical theory to repress their passionate relation to de Man himself. Guillory implies that the emotions of de Man's students speak louder than their poststructuralist ideas, circulating in anecdotes "alongside the doctrine ... but not in immediate logical relation to that doctrine."(2) Leaving aside, for the most part, the separate question of whether de Man's texts themselves seem to embody emotions, I would like to propose here that after 1971, de Man develops an explicit and highly organized theory of emotion consistent with poststructuralist notions of selfhood and de Man's own rhetorical principles. It is one of the main purposes of Allegories of Reading to convey this theory.
The inverse ratio, in Allegories, between the ardor of de Man's chosen authors and his own apparent ease is interesting. De Man comments on his texts' emotionality in his preface:
The choice of Proust and of Rilke as examples is partly due to chance, but since the ostensible pathos of their tone and depth of their statement make them particularly resistant to a reading that is no longer entirely thematic, one could argue that if their work yields to such a rhetorical scheme, the same would necessarily be true for writers whose rhetorical strategies are less hidden behind the seductive powers of identification.(3)
De Man associates pathos with thematics: pathos urges the reader toward an "entirely thematic" interpretation. By "thematic," de Man also means "referential"--not in the direct sense in which everything represented would be understood as having occurred, but in an indirect one in which the general meanings of the texts would be located in their authors' intentionality and psychology. Thus, de Man connects pathos to the popular-epistemological assumption that keenly affecting texts must be based in the real--in real, not fictive, emotions. According to de Man, then, his book undertakes an expose of "ostensible pathos" in literary texts; it calls our attention to the deployment of pathos as a persuasive tactic. This self-description helps to create the impression that de Man is hostile to emotion, or at least believes it to be a mere illusion behind which lurks "a rhetorical scheme." But this would follow only if we assumed, first, that de Man believed all emotions were "ostensible"; and, second, that he believed such phenomena were not real emotions.(4) Allegories of Reading attacks the second of these views. De Man is skeptical about emotions in that he questions our motives for representing them and even having them: we use emotions, he argues, to mitigate epistemological uncertainties. When we don't know what to think, emotions give us something to feel; they make our unstable perceptions and sensations seem more stable and nameable. The analysis of emotions therefore reveals self-serving elements in the way we think about ourselves. To inquire into the motivation of emotions, however, is to doubt neither their experiential existence nor their ability to affect us. Indeed, de Man's preface assumes the power of emotions not only to move the self, but to become "seductive," or contagious. Still less--and this should be obvious--does his inquiry underestimate, neglect, or somehow fail to face up to emotion.
The originality and controversy of de Man's view lies in his identification of emotions and figures. When de Man writes that "the referential representation of what Rousseau calls a passion ... is in fact the representation of a rhetorical structure" (AR 172), it sounds as though passions, in contrast to rhetorical structures, were something other than facts--as though after stripping away apparent passions, one struck the reality of rhetoric. I would suggest that we read de Man's formulation in a different but equally possible way, as saying that passions themselves are rhetorical structures, a fact which becomes especially clear when we examine their would-be referential representations. In de Man's account, emotions organize analogies and exchanges between perceptible things and possible inner states. Love in Rousseau, for example, is a complex network of analogies in which lovers exchange features, inner qualities, and even entire identities. Love "crosses from `visage' (`outside') to `ame' (inside) by way of `traits' (`les traits de l'ame') which are said to be both inside and outside," while "simultaneously, we pass from `sens' and `yeux' (outside) to `sentiments' by means of the synecdoche `organe'" (AR 211). "Love" in this passage names an entire set of interpretations--a view of the world--while the affect of love links and justifies the various connections in the set: lovers believe that their emotion leads them from outer traits to inner states and back. Love, then, is not merely an inner content but a would-be means of access to others' feelings. One's own emotion, an "inner" quality, becomes a bridge through the external world to someone else's interior. More importantly, one's own emotion comes to be known in the first place only through exchange with others. Emotions tend to make us believe that perceptible things express unknown inner states, and therefore imply the unity of outsides and insides. Of all the means of encouraging such belief, de Man writes, emotions work "most effectively of all" (AR 219). As rhetorical structures, emotions are "blind metaphorization[s]" (AR 156), over-forceful interpretive acts that trigger narratives of their own undoing and repetition. Yet to say this does not discount emotion--suggest that "`love' does not mean or intend or desire anything"(5)--but rather unhinges it from a traditional model of emotion as an interior content expressed outward.
Allegories of Reading pursues ideas about emotion in more contexts than I can discuss here: moral sentiments in Rousseau's Profession de foi, collective emotions in Rousseau's Social Contract, emotional response to music in the Essay on the Origin of Languages, and more. I will limit myself to an explication of the roots of de Man's theory of emotion in "The Rhetoric of Blindness" and passages of Allegories of Reading dealing with Rousseau's Essay, followed by some reflections on the ambivalent function of emotion as seen in de Man's readings of Rousseau's Narcisse. These analyses form a continuous narrative in which emotions hypothesize uncertainty, deny their own hypotheses, and then repeat the process. That repetition can take a truly allegorical form, in which skepticism about the claims of emotions becomes the basis for a new emotion and a new claim. "Pathos" is de Man's favorite name for second-order, allegorical emotion, as we will see in his reading of Rousseau's Julie. The allegorical nature of emotion implies its endlessness; thus, I will close by examining de Man's exploration, through Kant's idea of apatheia, of the nether reaches of emotional infinitude. Far from weakening emotion, de Man's theory of emotion asserts that there is no such thing as an unemotive state. While we can debate the merits of de Man's version of emotion, then, it is not really possible to argue that his work does not account for it.
Emotion and Figure in de Man's Rousseau
De Man's interest in emotion begins with his consideration of what he takes to be a traditional model of emotion that appears in Derrida's reading of Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages. We must look anew at this well-read passage of Rousseau, as it appears in de Man's translation:
A primitive man [un homme sauvage], on meeting other men, will first have experienced fright. His fear will make him see these men as larger and stronger than himself; he will give them the name giants. After many experiences, he will discover that the supposed giants are neither larger nor stronger than himself, and that their stature did not correspond to the idea he had originally linked to the word giant. He will then invent another name that he has in common with them, such as, for example, the word man, and will retain the word giant for the false object that impressed him while he was being deluded.(6)
De Man comments on Derrida's analysis of the Essay, twice, in "The Rhetoric of Blindness" (1970--71) and in Allegories of Reading; in both texts he assumes that Derrida (perhaps paraphrasing Rousseau) sees the word "giant" as representing an inner idea. In that case, the primitive man's fear in effect justifies his resort to the word "giant," which otherwise seems mistaken. Introducing emotion into the dynamic attempts to re-establish a "correspondence between ... properties" that suffers when "giant" fails to match the approaching man (AR 150). Whether or not de Man's reading of Derrida is persuasive,(7) I am concerned now not with the merits of that reading but with its relation to de Man's own ideas about: emotion. I mean not to revise the understanding of de Man's theory of figuration, but to place that understanding in an emotional context, showing de Man's interest in emotion's relation to uncertainty, its figurative structure, and its deceptive behavior.
In "The Rhetoric of Blindness," de Man argues that Rousseau rejects the typically expressive aesthetic of the eighteenth century. In order to make this argument, he chooses to view the giant episode not as evidence of Rousseau's expressivism, but as a "badly chosen" example of passionate figure. "Fear," he claims, is "distinctively utilitarian" in the first place, "much too practical to be called a passion," and Rousseau slipped when he used it to illustrate the relation of passion to language: "the third chapter of the Essai, the section on metaphor, should have been centered on pity, or its extension: love (or hate)."(8) Wherever Rousseau adhered to real passions such as pity and love, he "said what he meant to say" (BI 135), namely that "the metaphorical language...
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