The Wild Card of Reading

The text demonstrates the systematic coherence of Paul de Man's work, insisting that he continues to merit close attention despite his notoriously difficult and obscure style. Rodolphe Gasche shows that de Man's "reading" centres on a dimension of the texts that is irreducible to any possible meaning, a dimension characterized by the "absolutely singular". Given that de Man and Derrida are both deconstructionalists, Gasche differentiates between the two by emphasizing Derrida's primary interest in "writing" and postulates that the best way to come to terms with de Man's works is to "read" them athwart the writings of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida. He shows his respect for "immanent logic" of de Man's thought - which he lays out in detail - while revealing his uneasiness at the oddness of that thought and its consequences.