Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)
ÉVA ANTAL The Rhetoric and Ethics of Reading
64 Éva Antal That is, the ethicity of deconstruction can be named 'ethics-in-difference' as being sensitive to variety it pays more attention to differences and consciously accepts them. In de Man's theory, the new term of ethicity is strongly connected with the practice of reading, more exactly, the allegorical reading practice. In Allegories of Readings his analyses are about the universality and the impossibility of Reading (written with capital 'r') as he says "any narrative (that is, story-telling) is primarily the allegory of his own reading ... the allegory of reading narrates the impossibility of reading" (de Man AR, 76-7). However good we are as readers, we inevitably fail to read allegories due to the fact that a rhetorical trope says one thing and always means another, and its final reading thus becomes impossible. For de Man, "Reading" (written in quotation marks and capitalized) —also as an allegory —"includes not just ... the act of reading works of literature, but sensation, perception, and therefore every human act whatsoever" (Miller ER, 58). That is, it gives "the ground and foundation of human life" (Miller ER, 48) and, consequently, in a given text, event or experience we cannot reach a totality of understanding; that is, we cannot have a single, definitive interpretation. De Man's theory certainly can be applied to de Man's reading of his own text or my understanding of his reading. In his Ethics of Reading J. H. Miller as a good reader tries to understand the impossible and reads de Man's ideas on ethicity in one of his chapters titled "Reading Unreadability: de Man". Analysing the famous quotation, Miller calls attention to the way de Man rejects the traditional, basically Kantian theory of ethics. Though de Man still uses the words, 'category' and 'imperative' alluding to the Kantian 'categorical imperative', for him the ethical category is neither subjective, nor transcendental —but linguistic. Being taken as a linguistic phenomenon, the ethical refers to a necessary element in language and life, namely that "we cannot help making judgments of right or wrong or commanding others to act according to those judgments (or) condemning them for not doing so"—says Miller (Miller ER, 46). In his chapter on de Man's ethicity, he also emphasises the existential importance of reading and the fictional' (imagined sequence of allegories) nature of the (neverending) process of understanding that "mix(es) tropological, allegorical, referential, ethical, political, and historical dimensions" (Miller ER, 44). As de Man claims, the ethical just like the allegorical is only one of the possible 'discursive modes'; not a primary, but a secondary or a tertiary category, that is, they do not and cannot come first in textual understanding. Then what comes first? Referring again to the quotation it clearly says that the reading process starts from "a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction", then due to its
