De Man’s Kant: From Literary Modernity to Material Event

Paul de Man's lectures on Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790) respond to his own "Literary History and Literary Modernity." While the earlier essay describes the impossibility of modernity, the Kant lectures try to perform modernity. De Man discovers in Kant an absolute renunciation of "substitutive exchange" that prevents the singular poetic experience from being incorporated into a tradition. But de Man's lectures forsake persuasiveness in order to allegorize the same shift from the cognitive to the performative that they impute to Kant's third Critique. De Man's notion of materiality is so resistant to appropriation that it resists itself—a metaresistance notable in key failures of reasoning: de Man's inability to distinguish "reversal" from "relapse" and his misreading of Kant's wordplay as a form of linguistic fragmentation. The upshot is a radically allegorical form of literary theory.