Allegory·Language·Ideology

As an important and typical representative deconstructionism critic in Yale School, Paul de Man plays a vital role in contemporary western theoretical circle. My thesis mainly discusses Paul de Man's original reading theories, So as to get further understanding for his deconstruction thoughts. Paul de Man takes language as reading's major code, applying language's rhetoric nature to deconstructing all texts, including politics, history, law and social systems. Within text, he realizes the mutual contradiction between grammar and rhetoric, the literal and the figurative sense, which leads to the indeterminacy of text's meaning. Therefore, text meaning is not definite. Each reading is a misreading of the previous one. It is an endless circle. A reader's misreading for a text is an inevitable outcome of language's rhetoric nature.In de Man's view, allegory is more than something of time. It is a rhetoric inter-text, a negative force and a damage of reading as well. Allegory is a precondition and a most important principle of our application of language. Allegoric reading enables us to find the interior tension (contradiction between grammar and rhetoric, the literal and the ignorant sense) in text. It has decided reading's embarrassment. Reading is always in face of unsettled and ignorant meaning. That is reading's impossibility; At the same time, the whole structure built by reading is probably undermined by literal reading. As a result, all texts possess the characteristics of self-deconstruction.Through reading all phenomena as texts, de Man has developed the connotation of texts and obscured their bounds. That is de Man's deconstruction tactics. On one hand, he has disintegrated the thinking mode of western logocentrism and binaryoppositions, thinking that all research should be attributed to the research of language. As to literariness, the essence of texts is identical; on the other hand, he thinks human being's political destiny has an identical structure with language. Language identifies the mode of ideology and co-exists with it. Reading of language is an explanation of the necessity of ideology's appearance as language. The code of linguistic necessity from context shows text's ideology (application of social power within language). In de Man's opinion, language has an ideological function, so allegoric reading way of texts can also be used in ideology, which provides a new perspective for learning the essence of ideology. De Man thinks ideology has a permanent nature. As to the relations between art and ideology that are much concerned by Western Marxists, de Man, from his reading theories, thinks that language has a function of resisting ideology. That should be responded by allegoric reading. Enlightened by Derrida's deconstruction thoughts, de Man's reading and Heidegger's explanatory cycle theories. They have also assimilated Benjamin's views that allegory can grasp history in breakage, seeing through allegoric reading's essence of penetrating to a text's interior operation and self-deconstructing. De Man, from language, applies allegoric reading to attempting to illustrate politics, ideology and social system's nature of illusion, falsehood and self-deconstruction function. It is also the essence of the complicated social reality. Among deconstructionism theorists, de Man is one of most powerful critics. He theoretically and practically probes text's nature of ambiguity, illusion and deconstruction, shaping a new method of reading. At the same time, his view of linguistic ideology has greatly criticized Capitalism's control over ideology and alienated reality. It is a great significance for us to use his view for reference to learn current international situation and form a reading theory with characteristics of China.