Blinds Bluffing of Vision: Paul de Man on Text

Abstract

Because of its figural or rhetorical component, language cannot be a reliable medium for stating truth. Rhetoric continually undermines the abstract systems of grammar and logic and any attempt to fix a connection between the book and the world is futile. Regarding the metaphoricity of language, this article tries to prove that how the critic’s search for meaning is defied by the difference between what is meant and what is said which is a de Man’s focal point. To have a correct misreading, we have to allow language express itself in its full multiplicity, taking as many possible significations as it can and as many various contradictory direction that it heads toward. There is no authoritative, authentic voice in a text. Each is as helpless and baseless as any other. The text dismantles itself. It annihilates the ground on which it stands.