Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation: de Man, Nichol, and the Resistance to Postmodernism

In a theoretical age often enamoured by the “playfulness” of the sign and the pleasure of the text, Paul de Man’s last writings stand out as darkly sobering, driven as they are by an almost ascetic desire to bring thinking into proximity with what he calls, after Walter Benjamin, “reine Sprache,” pure language, or, more precisely, that which is purely language.2 From the stringent and self-cancelling perspective afforded by de Man’s late …