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“To read what was never written”: From Deconstruction to the Poetics of Redemption
Author(s) -
Juan E. San
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.1991.tb01916.x
Subject(s) - deconstruction (building) , situated , interpretation (philosophy) , poetics , historicism , reading (process) , dialectic , philosophy , meaning (existential) , epistemology , irony , literature , aesthetics , sociology , art , linguistics , ecology , poetry , artificial intelligence , computer science , biology
The current controversy on the “undecidability” of literary meaning and the possibility of reliable translation has focused attention on the intervention of deconstruction as a critical theory of reading and interpretation. The model of deconstruction examined here is Paul de Man's commentary on Walter Benjamin's text “The Task of the Translator.” This essay argues that de Man's mis‐construing of Benjamin's ideas reveals the basic methodological and philosophical inadequacies of deconstruction. Deconstruction refuses the historical, cultural and biographical contexts of cultural artifacts it claims to appraise and judge. De Man's neo‐Nietzschean perspective (aptly captured by the postmodernist allegories of Borges) cannot comprehend Benjamin's radical historicism. Postmodernist irony is thus no substitute for the rigor of dialectical thinking. This lesson is inscribed in Benjamin's concept of translation situated in the framework of his complex project of an aesthetics of redemption.