생태적 분해 불가능한 비유기체: 폴 드 만의 유산

Inorganic Non-biodegradables: Legacies of Paul de Man

This paper aims to resuscitate Paul de Man’s critical legacies, opening up the futurity of criticism he set for us. It attempts to discuss what is at stake in his notion of the inhuman language, one that possesses its own force instead of being the medium by which man makes sense of himself. Also discussed is de Man’s attack on the logic of organicism in which the human has been explained by his relation to language and history in a linearity of condition. These discussions prepare for another critical examination of de Man’s argument that the human is a conceptual figure blindly yoked to metaphors, an argument that makes the discourse about man radically ambivalent. Reading de Man today we can be aware of what is repressed under current critical vogue for ethics, life, affect, body politics, and democracy. All of these, according to de Man, might partake of illusory and reactive nature by positing life, mindlessly and mechanically. De Man, most of all, prophetically reveals a radical possibility that there is no sovereignty, no history, no man, and no future.