The vanishing enigma

What one has seen in de Man has been transformed into a commonplace: we find in moments of contradiction the established and institutionalised features of our intellectual landscape - as ‘irony’ and ‘ambiguity’ were half a century ago - and which are now attaining their own form of domestication. What has been called ‘absurdist criticism’ has found its proper repertoire of moves, its canonical concepts, in ‘indeterminacy’, ‘undecidability’, ‘impossibility’, etc. A short précis by Leo Bersani can serve as a classic statement:

There is something strangely open and shut about this, as if the achievement were definitive and the force of demonstration conclusive. One thinks of the strength of ‘achieved’ in Bloom's ‘achieved dearth of meaning’, the hard-won product of the poet's art and negation in his utterance. One can see this point as one of no return, of the surrender of any possibility of reading to a meditation on the blank spaces that frame the intellectual space of the quixotic enterprise.