thor is in fact a common pattern in Derrida’s readings, as we
have seen.
As de Man sees it, Derrida knows what Rousseau also
knows: that literary language is an effort to disguise the true
nothingness of existence. The effort is a necessary one. As
Nietzsche said, we need art so that we will not perish from the
truth. But the truth, the terrible vacuity that is life itself, still
looms.Blindness and Insightspeaks of our movement “toward
meaning as void” (Blindness 127 ). Yet de Man, as he evokes this
bleak cosmology, manages to sound witty and cunning rather
than grim. De Man’s supremely knowing tone makes for a
sense of excitement; the drama of his prose, though somewhat
antiseptic at times, hints at a brave look into the abyss. For
de Man, the meaningless nature of human existence is a given,
a comedy that he approaches with a certain stoic cheer. He
shares with Derrida this inclination toward seeing life as ab-
surd; for both, the appearance of meaning is the product of a
random force, signification.
Deconstruction, in de Man’s version especially but also
that of the early Derrida, begins to sound like a replay of exis-
tentialism at its height, without the existentialist’s belief in
human heroism. Life is meaningless, and we must say so.
Whereas the existentialists suggested that the criminal and the
madman provided a true glimpse into the vortex, deconstruc-
tionists preferred the staid, ascetic company of writers and
philosophers. (Though Derrida in Writing and Difference,as I
have noted, celebrated the mad author and actor Antonin
Artaud as an authentic emissary from the kingdom of the
absurd.)
Reading, as explored definitively in de Man’s magisterial
Allegories of Reading( 1979 ), seems to be a strictly useless activ-
ity, the record of a self-undoing on the part of language. Yet de
200 Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger