2 - Polemics against presence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
Summary
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to SEE something and tell what it SAW in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion - all in one. John Ruskin
The visual is essentially pornographic.
Fredric JamesonBlindness and insight: in putting these categories at the core of his work, Paul de Man offers psychoanalytical resources to philosophy in its ancient quarrel with the poets. But the terms do something more to place de Man at the center of contemporary theoretical criticism. The blindness and insight model traffics in the ocular rhetoric with which theorists in the past three decades have been engaged, sometimes to the point of obsession. De Man's ironic use of the term insight (ironic because insight, though initially desirable, will inevitably solidify into a standard mode of perception, a form of blindness, and must thus be regarded with some suspicion) conveys a much more measured and dialectical position than most theorists hold.
For the majority of those writers who have had major impact on Anglo-American literary criticism in the latter part of the century have been uninhibitedly anti-visual. That is, they have aimed their polemical energies at forms of thinking that, as they understand it, uncritically use the experience of seeing as an ideal image for understanding.
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- Literature against Philosophy, Plato to DerridaA Defence of Poetry, pp. 67 - 113Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995