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THE CRITIC AND THE “BLIND FORCE” OF LANGUAGE: A “THEORETICAL” READING OF ROUSSEAU
Authors: Virginia Mihaela DUMITRESCU
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The present article looks at a type of reading which Paul de Man calls “theretical” to distinguish it from the traditional, “aesthetic” approach. The “theoretical” close reading, characterised by increased analytical rigour and focused on a clear-cut distinction between the linguistic and the phenomenal, aims to identify the “literariness” of literary language (a term used by the American critic with reference to “the autonomous potential of language”, to all the non-intuitive linguistic “factors” and “functions” that are not
accessible to perceptive knowledge and constitute the incontrollable, “inhuman”,mechanism of language). The “linguistics of literariness” underlying it is used as an
instrument for denouncing “ideological aberrations”, or the confusion between the materiality of the signifier and the materiality of the object designated by it. Unlike the traditional, totalising, “aesthetic reading” which starts from the premise of the possibility
of knowledge, and the intelligibility of the text, the non-cognitive “theoretical” reading is an extreme example of linguistic and epistemological scepticism. Ironically, the critic himself cannot escape the error he criticises, as shown in the initial stage of his reading of a fragment of Rousseau’s Confessions: he tends to resort to the totalising, defensive strategy he later denounces as pure mystification, in an effort to elude the “blind force” of the linguistic mechanism by attributing meaning to structures created mechanically through the “positing power” of language.