Paul de Man Quotes

• Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

  Paul de Man

  Facts, Metaphor, Tenacious

  Paul De Man (1979). “Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust”, p.5, Yale University Press

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• Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

  Paul de Man

  Errors, Hygiene, Literature

  Paul de Man (2013). “Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism”, p.163, Routledge

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• Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

  Paul de Man

  Mean, Doe, Language

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• If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.

  Paul de Man

  Ifs

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• The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

  Paul de Man

  Writing, Degrees, Agents

  Paul de Man (2013). “Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism”, p.152, Routledge

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• Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.

  Paul de Man

  Desire, Wipe, Departure

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• The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

  Paul de Man

  Nature, Writing, Coincidence

  Paul de Man (2013). “Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism”, p.152, Routledge

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• Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

  Paul de Man

  Death, Names, Dying

  Quoted in David Lehman, Signs of the Times (1991)

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• The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.

  Paul de Man

  War, Historical Knowledge, Revolution

  Paul de Man (2013). “Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism”, p.165, Routledge

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• Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place.

  Paul de Man

  Fashion, Fire, Flames

  Paul de Man (2013). “Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism”, p.147, Routledge

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• Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.

  Paul de Man

  Book, Men, Names

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• What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism

  Paul de Man

  Reality, Confusion, Natural

  Paul De Man (1986). “The Resistance to Theory”, p.11, Manchester University Press

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• The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear -- and even, in certain respects, would be -- the most modern of critical movements.

  Paul de Man

  Criticism, Would Be, Movement

  Paul de Man (2013). “Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism”, p.164, Routledge

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