Paul de Man

“The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction.”

“The possibility of reading can never be taken for granted.”

“The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction.”

“Allegories are always allegories of metaphor and, as such, they are always allegories of the impossibility of reading.”

“Nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event...”

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

“Nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power... is due to the randomness of its occurrence.”

“The resistance to theory is a resistance to the use of language about language. It is a resistance to language itself...”

“Irony is no longer a trope but the undoing of the deconstructive allegory of all tropological cognitions.”

“Literature is the only form of language that is free from the fallacy of unmediated expression.”

“Allegory is sequential and narrative, yet the topic of its narration is not necessarily temporal at all.”

“Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself.”

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

“Criticism is a metaphor for the act of reading, and this act is ceaselessly renewed.”

“Literature is the only form of language that is free from the fallacy of unmediated expression.”

“To the extent that language is figure... it is indeed not the thing itself but the representation, the picture of the thing and, as such, it is silent, mute as pictures are.”

“The resistance to theory is a resistance to the rhetorical or figurative quality of language.”

“Irony is no longer a trope but the undoing of the deconstructive allegory of all tropological cognitions.”

“Death is a name for a linguistic impossibility.”

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