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This chapter presents an introduction to Paul de Man's Textual Allegories. The manuscript is an extended reading of the question of figurality in Rousseau, which was to provide the material for several published articles and later the second half of the last monograph published in de Man's lifetime, Allegories of Reading. Written during the unfolding of the Watergate Scandal, which led to the resignation of President Nixon in 1974 and the re-imagining of North American political life, the European de Man was no doubt considerably less scandalized by the breach of an elected President's contract with ‘the people’ than the local journalistic voices that defined and determined the popular understanding of this event. However, it is surely no coincidence that de Man chose to respond to these particular texts by Rousseau at this time and for them to present him with particular moments of disruption within his text.

While the theme of the present volume takes aim at Allegories of Reading, many of the contributors deliver on materials from Aesthetic Ideology or The Messenger Lectures. These two California conferences seem to have a proleptic or metaleptic relation to each other. This chapter asks, what marks their mutual chiasmic pivet-point? A short answer would be the archival trap itself: with its spectral lure of textual genesis and genealogy, its promise of enlightening disclosures and concealments, the archival trap leaves no one free from imminent exposure and live burial; everyone, everything, is drawn into this privacy/publicity machine sooner or later. Concerning the so-called unpublished, long Rousseau manuscript, archival work has made clear that it was not a newly discovered, forgotten old pad of paper with handwriting on both recto and verso. It was a manuscript that since the 1980s had already been worked on patiently, had been partially transcribed, and whose parts were in current circulation. In addition, it had already been determined by scholars familiar with de Man's papers that the long Rousseau manuscript was Part II of Allegories of Reading, published in 1979.

This chapter presents a detailed exposition of de Man's project in Aesthetic Ideology and how it relates to the rhetorical readings in his Allegories of Reading. It ends with a reading of de Man's Pascal essay (in particular his difficult account of the zero) as an example of what it means to read ‘from the point of view of the quadrivium’ and as an anticipation of de Man's essays on Kant and Hegel.

This introduction to Paul de Man's essay ‘Rousseau and English Romanticism’ (1978), translated from the French Rousseau et le romantisme anglais, discusses significant variations within the manuscript. Rousseau et le romantisme anglais was presented by de Man at the University of Geneva on June 5, 1978, as the last in a series of eight guest lectures commemorating the bicentennial of the deaths of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. The lecture is a shorter variant of what appeared as ‘Shelley Disfigured’ in the 1979 collection Deconstruction and Criticism. The most obvious differences between ‘Rousseau and English Romanticism’ and ‘Shelley Disfigured’ are the titles and framings of the close reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Triumph of Life. The differences between the framings are also echoed in the introduction to Allegories of Reading, described by de Man as a byproduct of a ‘serious’ study of Rousseau originally undertaken as part of ‘a historical reflection on Romanticism’.

In this article, Paul de Man discusses his plan to complete a book entitled Allegories of Reading. The book offers a reading of four important authors — Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau — along with their texts dating from 1750 to the early twentieth century. The most extensive reading offered is that of Rousseau, who is considered at length in an overview that includes the major fictional, political, and confessional writings. In the case of Proust and Rilke, the corpus is much less extended, although it claims to be representative of structures that recur in the work as a whole. No such claim is made for Nietzsche, where the reading of The Birth of Tragedy and of some sections mostly taken from the posthumous works is preparatory to an understanding of larger works such as Zarathustra or The Genealogy of Morals.

This chapter looks at how writing and theory are superimposed in Rosseau's novel, Julie or the New Heloise. Drawing upon two of Paul de Man's readings of the novel in his Allegories of Reading, the chapter embarks on a discussion regarding passion, which is generally considered to hold the philosophical key to the novel, by deriving from two assertions. The first is that that “passion is not something which, like the senses, belongs in proper to an entity or a subject but, like music, it is a system of relationships that exists only in the terms of this system;” it is a relational notion. De Man's second assertion defines the literary category of allegory as a “narrative of the second degree,” which includes the deconstruction of its own immediate, apparently realistic signification.

In his book Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man reviews Friedrich Nietzsche's notion that the paradigmatic structure of language is rhetorical instead of representational. This chapter presents discussions in which de Man differentiates between metaphor and metonymy after Jakobson's approach: paradigmatic versus syntagmatic, analogy versus contiguity, and poetic versus prosaic. In addition, de Man analyzes Marcel Proust's transgressive play with the two figures, underlining the divided practice of a text in which the direct preference for metaphor cannot seem to prevent its poetry from dissolving into the prose of metonymy. The purpose of de Man's reading of The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche is to demonstrate the undecidability of the text, arguing that any attempt to associate Nietzsche with a theory about metaphor and metonymy would be unreasonable.

In this 1982 letter, published in the journal Critical Inquiry, Paul de Man responds to Stanley Corngold's essay ‘Error in Paul de Man’. According to de Man, he welcomes the opportunity to set the record straight on one specific point: the Friedrich Nietzsche passage which is offered as the main exhibit to establish probable cause of his guilt. This passage, which is part of material ancillary to The Birth of Tragedy but not included in the published text, deals with the altogether Kantian distinction between teleological, intentional judgments which belong to the realm of the intellect, of consciousness, and of discourse, and what Nietzsche calls ‘die Natur der Dinge’, to which such schemes cannot a priori be said to apply. Corngold pointed out a polarity, the distinction between mistake and error, that de Man has not explicitly thematised in these terms. De Man assumes that the most sustained attempt to work out the problem is in the reading of a section of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments in his (de Man) Allegories of Reading, in which ‘can’ is opposed to ‘must’.

De Man's chapter on Julie in Allegories of Reading is a brilliant interpretation of the problem of ‘passion’ as a point of superposition of epistemology and ethics that forms the objective and the crucial interest of the philosophical novel. This chapter attempts to push further de Man's insight about the conceptual effectivity of allegoric writing by removing the limit that he maintained, i.e., taking into account the complete system of ‘passions’ which are literarily performed in the writing of Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, therefore also the complete ‘world’ of protagonists involved in the texture of the correspondences exchanged among the characters of the novel. It suggests that this system of relations (bilateral and multi-lateral), which completely subverts accepted representations of the dichotomies of passion and reason, the private and the public, also embodies one of Rousseau's most original attempts at reaching what always remained his philosophical goal, namely a type of social relation that would negate its negation of the natural element in the human.