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
66 Éva Antal using the tricky affirmative of double negation. He says that in de Man's case "(the) ethics of reading imposes on the reader the 'impossible' task of reading unreadability, but that does not by any means mean that reading, even 'good' reading, cannot take place and does not have a necessary ethical dimension" (Miller EE, 59. Italics are mine). On the whole, Miller's effort, aimed at showing the ethics of reading in de Man's ethicity, cannot be seen as really convincing. Miller is apologizing all time that he is only a reader (and cannot be anybody else), which also means that he must be mistaken if he thinks his own reading as a definitive one. Despite of it being a 'mission impossible' he still insists on the necessity of the ethical in understanding, and works out his ethics of reading, relying on de Man's ethical-linguistic imperative expressed in the allegorical reading. Thus in the following chapters after interpreting de Man's ethicity, he explores passages from three novelists' (George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and Henry James) works. Although in his introductory "Reading Doing Reading" Miller confesses that his selection of texts and their ordering is not innocent, he claims that he at random chose his examples. Let us believe him in the case of the literary works, but I strongly doubt that the second chapter written on the famous de Manian passage resulted from an arbitrary choice. The same is true of the other topic dealt with in the previous chapter, since the very first chapter is concerned with Kant's categorical imperative. In fact, towards the end of the chapter on de Man's 'unreadable reading', Miller quotes Kant's concluding sentence in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten ) about the incomprehensibility of the moral imperative: "And so we do not indeed comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral imperative; yet we do not comprehend its incomprehensibility, which is all that can be fairly demanded of a philosophy which in its principles strives to reach the limit of human reason" (Miller ER, 56). According to Miller, while Kant, to some extent, still believed in the ability of language and reason to formulate an understanding of a nonlinguistic impossibility, de Man regards the moral imperative and reason as aspects of language and language cannot be used to understand/to read its own limitation. In a chapter titled "Reading Telling: Kant", Miller tries to understand and deconstruct the Kantian categorical imperative to show an example of his (mysterious) ethics of reading. The English translation of the well-known apodictic formula 2 goes "I always should act as if my private maxim were 2 ". . .ich soli niemals anders verfahren, als so, dass ich auch wollen könne, meine Maximé solle ein allgemeines Gesetz werden." I basically rely on the English translation of the Kantian formula quoted in Miller's work, but I also consulted with the original
