10 - De Man vs. ‘Deconstruction’: or, Who, Today, Speaks for the Anthropocene?

Summary

If the word man is a conceptual figure grafted upon a blind metaphor, then the referential status of the discourse about man … claims to refer to an entity (man), but this entity turns out to be the substitution of a definitional for what was only a hypothetical knowledge, an epistemological metaphor substituting certitude for ignorance.

(TA 3)

everything is ‘outside’ everything else; there are nothing but outside differences and no integration is possible.

(TA 114)

In Paul de Man's talk on Benjamin's concept of translation he at one point summarizes the latter's conception of a history without historicism, one that is neither human nor temporally indexed:

As such, history is not human, because it pertains strictly to the order of language; it is not natural, for the same reason; it is not phenomenal, in the sense that no cognition, no knowledge about man, can be derived from a history which as such is purely a linguistic complication; and it is not really temporal either, because the structure that animates it is not a temporal structure … The dimension of futurity, for example, which is present in it, is not temporal.

(RT 92)