4 - Rhetoric and Rausch: de Man on Nietzsche on Value and Style

Summary

Among the most important (and ubiquitous) themes running through Paul de L Man's critique of Nietzsche, particularly given its Rousseauesque framework, is the relationship among rhetoric, value and style, within the context of narrative and language per se as the cultural meaning-making ‘machines’ ‘behind’ all senses of value. For de Man this process is quite literally a machine since, as he claims in Aesthetic Ideology, ‘in the manner of Nietzsche’, for the signifier whose grounding characteristic is free play, ‘there is a machine there, a text machine, an implacable determination and a total arbitrariness … which inhabits words on the level of the play of the signifier, which undoes any narrative consistency of lines, and which undoes the reflexive and the dialectical model … as the basis of any narration’ (AI I8I). Given that for de Man, as for Nietzsche, language is the meaning-making machine par excellence, having invented, established and arranged the very terms within which meaning and value can be understood in even the most basic ways (i.e., through style), says Rousseau, for de Man, language, while never merely dialectical, is simultaneously fundamentally – that is, on the very surface – meaning-full, and radically dehors, outside the human, the phenomenological matrix, the ‘rhetorical sense’ as such. Within the context of the de Manian narratives centrally under consideration here, rhetorical value and rhetorical style are what Nietzsche would call ‘tightrope’ concepts: quintessentially alien and all-too-human.