Shelley - de Man Unbound ; Or, The Knot of Revolutionary Irony

Shelley - de Man Unbound ; Or, The Knot of Revolutionary Irony

This essay thematises, and further radicalises, textual materialism in Paul de Man's 1979 essay on Shelley's The Triumph of Life, "Shelley Disfigured", where Shelley's poetics of despair and ironic scepticism is approached from the viewpoint not of dialectical self-consciousness but of inscriptive language. Ultimately, the present work argues in support of de Man's often-trivialised or misunderstood contention, that such performativity of irony is to be understood ontologically rather than hermeneutically: Romantic irony, as exemplified in Shelley's last poem as well as de Man's critical disclosure of its textual mechanics, is a revolutionary event in itself that allows a different line of time to be drawn, rather than an aesthetic dissolution or consummation of teleological consciousness. The opening (Ⅰ) discussion of the constitutive fragmentarity of The Triumph of Life seeks to reveal the extent to which the standard, unity-driven, ideologically saturated readings of Shelley tend to repress and even disguise the 'originary' incompletion of Romantic literature, which is in fact its very resounding force. Part Ⅱ that deals with language, especially 'phonic drive', then focuses, with de Man, on the musical autonomy of Shelley's language, separate from consciousness, as a marker of such material forces at work. Part Ⅲ reinforces the key contention by highlighting repetition as the temporal mode of ontological irony, time taken here as the Benjaminian signature of the bodily disruption of history itself, i.e., as the very possibility of revolution, which, with de Man the essay affirms, is inscriptively (or performatively) embodied in the fragment, The Triumph of Life.