"What on earth is de Man talking about" and more!

            So I’m going to take a couple quick stabs at the de Man piece, opening a couple of wounds that might be productively healed in class. It was a difficult essay/talk for me to follow—but a couple points stood out.

            The first problem involves the movement from a trope to a performative. This is to say that something (meaning? force? focus?) moves from the realm of a trope—a figure of speech, a formal manipulator, maybe—to a performative speech act, which simply means a linguistic event (usually spoken) that causes a change in real conditions (i.e. “I pronounce you man and wife, ” “You’re fired!”, etc.). At first glance, intuitively, this seemed to make some kind of sense: You pass from a formal, almost mathematical, conception of language to an event in the real world where the trope is used to perform a certain pragmatic function. It also made sense that de Man is concerned about this because of the preceding discussion about what constitutes a historical moment, or an occurrence. Something like a speech act can indeed constitute one of these. After feeling like I had a grip on what he was getting at, I got completely lost by two subsequent propositions. The first one is the idea that this passage, from the trope to performativity “can only occur by an epistemological critique of language” [133]. Is an “epistemological critique” a cognitive process that occurs so that we might understand an utterance as a performative? Or is it something that philosophers do that shifts our general conception of language from tropological to performative? The next thing that made no sense to me here was the idea that this movement from trope to performative is not reversible. One can have a relapse, but not a reversal (135), apparently. I’m lost. What is at stake here‽‽

            The second question that I want to bring up is somewhat easier to grasp, but slightly less engaged with the text--though it does relate to the Kant and Schiller pieces we read for this week. Here is what I ask: What good does it do us to define things like the sublime? De Man notes that for Schiller this is a fairly easy question. Schiller is interested in what he calls the “practical sublime,” and his interest is likewise practical: he wants to know how he might use this to represent terror on stage. But de Man does not go into why anyone might want to represent terror on stage, and I think that is an important question here. Another approach from Schiller, from the piece we read by him, is that the sublime helps man assert his own immortality. As secular academics, we’re not allowed to buy this kind of approach (at least not publicly), but I wonder if this has any validity today. Lastly, we can mention Kant, who, as de Man notes, is on a task to map out the imagination. The sublime of course forms an important part of Kant and spends a great deal of time distinguishing the sublime from the beautiful, and delineating various aspects of it, such as the sublime’s relationship to apprehension, comprehension, and the infinite. But again, what are we getting at? Is Kant’s concern with the sublime, which he notes is ancillary to the beautiful, just so that he can “finish” his imagination map, or can we say something else? Also interesting to think about it as something on the margin of his map.

            I was hoping de Man would address this issue more, and maybe he did. If he did address this, I’d be happy to know how and where!