Mechanical Performatives

Abstract

In Chapter 5, I gave examples from de Man’s essays on Nietzsche and on Rousseau’s Second Discourse that showed how de Man broadens the notion of trope to include, almost without exception, all words and concepts, as well as the categories of grammar and syntax. Yet in the closing chapters of Allegories of Reading, and in ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’ (in Aesthetic Ideology), he also develops a notion of performative rhetoric. Unsurprisingly, this is as unorthodox as his treatment of tropology. In ‘Excuses (Confessions)’, he explains that ‘the linguistic model cannot be reduced to a mere system of tropes’ because ‘performative rhetoric and cognitive rhetoric, the rhetoric of tropes, fail to converge. The chain of substitutions functions next to another, differently structure [sic] system that exists independently of referential determination, in a system that is both entirely arbitrary and entirely repeatable, like a grammar’ (Allegories, p. 300).