Paul de Man Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Paul de Man
The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear – and even, in certain respects, would be –the most modern of critical movements.

Paul de Man
Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place.

Paul de Man
Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at least a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.

Paul de Man
Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

Paul de Man
Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Paul de Man
The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

Paul de Man
The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.

Paul de Man
Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

Paul de Man
What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism

Paul de Man
Prior to any generalization about literature, literary texts have to be read, and the possibility of reading can never be taken for granted. It is an act of understanding that can never be observed, nor in any way prescribed or verified.

Paul de Man