Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation: de Man, Nichol, and the Resistance to Postmodernism

Abstract

In a theoretical age often enamoured by the “playfulness” of the sign and the pleasure of the text, Paul de Man’s last writings stand out as darkly sobering, driven as they are by an almost ascetic desire to bring thinking into proximity with what he calls, after Walter Benjamin, “reine Sprache,” pure language, or, more precisely, that which is purely language.2 From the stringent and self-cancelling perspective afforded by de Man’s late essays, the affirmatively Nietzschean rhetoric of some recent, linguistically-oriented theory—Canadian postmodernism is the example that I will explore here—registers the work of a deeply rooted aesthetic ideology that determines the play of signs primarily as the play of meaningful signs, which is to say legible signs that are happily and familiarly available to comprehension. What is familiarly known about signification is not properly known, however, for the simple reason that familiarity has as its primary effect the refusal to admit the negative possibility that “Language is not exhausted by the thought of the human” (Redfield 51). It could be argued that postmodernism’s greatest insight is into the fundamental indeterminacy of sign-systems, whether graphic, phonic, psychological, political, sexual, or economic, but that this same insight tends strongly to blind it to language’s most unsettling features, blankly in-significant and in-human as such.

absolutely incomprehensible if I were not forced to confess that I suffer from a morbid horror of the pen, and that this work is for me an experience of sheer torture, quite out of proportion to its relative unimportance.

—Ferdinand de Saussure, “On a torn, undated page” ¹

The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains unthought.

—Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (107–08)