de Man is Da Man, yo?

The 6th of December is Paul de Man's birthday. From his--as the amazing Michael Riffaterre calls it--"seminal discussion of Nietzsche's On Truth and Lie," de Man makes a bold statement about poetry that I have spent several years pondering profitably:

What we call the lyric, the instance of represented voice includes the grammatical transformation of the declarative into the vocative modes of question, exclamation, address, hypothesis, etc., the tropological transformation of analogy into apostrophe or the equivalent, more general… transformation of trope into anthropomorphism.

He redescribes poetry as a series of figural moves of the voice and then resolves it into anthropomorphism. It's brilliant. It's fucking brilliant. It is a laser beam-direct insight into what makes representative language (and there is no other kind) happen, on the level of Rhetoric, on the level of Grammar (which he played with in oppositions, throughout his late career), as such. It is vital. It is indispensable. And I don't care if important readers, like Lydia Davis, whom I admire, and Louis Menand, who is an idiot, don't care for de Man. He's one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, even if he wasn't really a Nazi.

Have a great day.

On Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis

Is it indisputable that psychoanalysis is indispensable to deconstruction. I frame this as a statement in the form of a question, or rather a question in the form of a statement. Even if it is not true. Is deconstruction indispensable to psychoanalysis. 

In reading The Factor/Postman/Purveyor of Truth, it becomes possible to regard this inimitable dissection-discussion on letters, circulation, address, addresses and trajectories, dead letter offices, the letter or the lack in its, or not in its place; or, most uncredible to Derrida, having a place, a discourse we refuse to not call indispensable, as much as we refuse to not call it Derridean, it becomes possible to wonder if the notion of not being able to tell it all, of knowledges that only touch at points, or a point, or no point at all, intervenes here to raise a question. And we might well wonder, perhaps too late, how The Postman of Truth and The Postcard--two indubitably deconstructive discourses on psychoanalysis--relate in ways heretofore not discussed, in reading them one may well wonder how the discourse of deconstruction may well not be indispensable to psychoanalysis, though the converse is true, even though deconstruction remains itself indispensable. How is it possible to discuss the unreadable mark on the mind, the subject we suppose because--though we never see it--we detect its spoor, within Derrida's enormously and enjoyably clever and careful terms, without losing Lacan's very "point de vue" and the points at which his psychoanalytic discourse very much agrees with Derrida and his creation, deconstruction? And at last we have arrived at a question. Which may, to that point be utterly useless for being, by being, utterly not possible, and yet, yes yet, still, being unquestionably indispensable.