Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics

Book excerpt: Readings of de Man's critique of aesthetic ideology and the strange 'materiality' that emerges from it. This volume explicates Paul de Man's late project of a critique of aesthetic ideology and attempts to extend it in ways productive for critical thought. After a reading of de Man's work in all its rigour - and hence also the aesthetic theory of Kant, Schiller, and Hegel- the book goes on to uncover a 'material moment' in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that lives on in Marx and in the Marxist tradition. The book also elucidates de Man's critical reading of Heidegger on the example of Holderlin-a moment essential for de Man's shifts to the question of rhetoric and then to the question of ideology-and ends with a reading of Derrida's 'last' text on de Man and its uncanny self-inscription in Rousseau's episode of the stolen ribbon.