Top 14 Quotes & Sayings by Paul de Man

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Belgian critic Paul de Man.

Last updated on November 8, 2024.

Paul de Man, born Paul Adolph Michel Deman, was a Belgian-born literary critic and literary theorist. At the time of his death, de Man was one of the most prominent literary critics in the United States—known particularly for his importation of German and French philosophical approaches into Anglo-American literary studies and critical theory. Along with Jacques Derrida, he was part of an influential critical movement that went beyond traditional interpretation of literary texts to reflect on the epistemological difficulties inherent in any textual, literary, or critical activity. This approach aroused considerable opposition, which de Man attributed to "resistance" inherent in the difficult enterprise of literary interpretation itself.

Belgian - Critic | December 6, 1919 - December 21, 1983

Source: Wikipedia

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

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

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

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

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

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

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

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

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

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

Paul de Man

Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.

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

If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.

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