Deconstruction & Criticism

Deconstruction & Criticism

Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman, Miller

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Deconstruction, as it has come to be called, refuses to identify the force of literature with any concept embodied meaning and shows how deeply such logocentric or incarnationist perspectives have influenced the way we think about art.

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(Derrida’s double analysis is an emblem of this, an expanding hendiadys, exegesis within or upon exegesis.)

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Though they understand Nietzche when he says “the deepest pathos is still aesthetic play,” they have a stake in that pathos: its persistence, its psychological provenance.

Geoffrey Hartman

BREAKING FORM: HAROLD BLOOM

(DECONSTRUCTING LANGUAGE)

p1

The word meaning goes back to the root that signifies “opinion” or “intention,” and is closely related to the word moaning. A poem’s meaning is a poem’s complaint.

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the making/breaking of form

p3

What dominates Freud’s notion is the child’s fantasy-making power….but the child’s fantastic interpretation of its parents.

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Walter Benjamin did, or else one must yield to a thoroughgoing linguistic nihilism, which in its most refined form is the mode now called Deconstruction.

For Deconstruction, irony is not a trope but finally is as Paul de Man says, ‘ the systematic undoing . . . of understanding.”

De Man

The possibility now arises that the entire construction of drives, substitutions, repressions, and representations is the aberrant, metaphorical correlative of the absolute randomness of language, prior to any figuration or meaning.

p5

Freedom of meaning is the chance to endure, and so to be heard. Freedom of meaning is wrested by combat, of meaning against meaning. But this combat consists in a reading encounter, and in an interpretative moment within that encounter.

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Rhetoric has been always unfitted to the study of poetry…

Helen Vendler

It remains true that the figures of rhetoric, while they may be thought to appear in a more concentrated form in lyric, seem equally at home in narrative and expository writing. Nothing in the figures of paradox, or irony, or metaphor, or imagery—or in the generic conventions of, say, the elegy—specifics a basis in verse.

P12

an achieved death of meaning.

P14

The breaking of form to produce meaning, as I conceive it, depends upon the operation of certain instances of language, revisionary ratios, and on certain topological displacements in language that intervene between ratios, displacements that I have been calling “crossings.”

P16

critical trope “misreading’”

Friedrich Schlegel

“The irony of irony is the fact that one becomes weary of it if one is offered it everywhere and all the time.”

To evade such destructive weariness, I return to the poetic equivalent of Freud’s concept of defense. (the wound or narcissistic scar provokes the poetic self into the aggressivity that Freud chose to call ‘defense’)

The center of the poetic self, of the speaking subject that Demanian Deconstruction dissolves into irony, is narcissistic self-regard.

Even Freud, like all the rest of us, idealized the arts

such prevalent idealization.

P19

Freud’s patterns of psychic images are the defenses, a tropological system masking itself as a group of operations directed against change,

TROPE = a figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression

P26

A mind that can turn to its own figurations and constitute an ego by love of those figurations, is a Whitmanian, transcendentalizing mind of summer. Such a mind is also that of a Freudian man, since Freud defines narcissism as being the self’s love of the ego, a love that by such cathexis veritably continues the ego.

CATHEXIS: in psychoanalysis, cathexis is defined as the process of investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea.

P37

Creation being out of our hands, our distance from even out own art seems to become greater. In this intensification of estrangement, Ashbery’s meditation gradually rejects the paradise of art,

P38

Deconstruction’s ironies a supermimesis achieved by an art that will not abandon the self to language, the art of Ashebery’s earlier Fragment:

The words sung in the next room are unavoidable

But their passionate intelligence will be studied in you.