Having established some basic principles of rhetorical reading in his account of the Second Discourse and then established a process for ‘the deconstruction of metaphor’ in the example of ‘Self (Pygmalion)’, the 1979 published text of Allegories of Reading goes on to consider further the fictional text of the Julie. De Man finds in the second half of that book the extrapolation of the ethical relation between the lovers played out in a presentation of the relation between religion and politics in Clarens, the implications of which he will bundle out into the next two chapters in an inter-related analysis of the Profession de foi and The Social Contract. In both cases he wishes to understand whether religious texts and political texts differ from a rhetorical point of view; in the background to this analysis lies the question that de Man is working toward answering: whether literary and philosophical texts differ rhetorically. While de Man's seamless exposition appears to swing from one text of Rousseau to another in a series of interlocking readings, the manuscript of Textual Allegories shows up certain difficulties he experiences in extending his thesis ever further into the text of Rousseau. In order to produce the appearance of a continuous argument in Allegories of Reading, de Man systematically edits out the difficulties he attempts to work through in Textual Allegories, resulting in an argument that is simultaneously both more cohesive and, in its concentration, leaves itself open to precisely the sort of rhetorical effects that de Man describes in his reading of Rousseau.