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
The Rhetoric and Ethics of Reading 63 "Irony is no longer a trope but the undoing of the deconstructive allegory of all tropological cognitions, the systematic undoing, in other words, of understanding. As such, far from closing off the tropological system, irony enforces the repetition of its aberration" (de Mem AR, 301). Now, after this long —but I hope necessary and not uninteresting — digression on reading, the most important question comes: what happened to the possible covert moral implication of the New Criticism in de Man's reading? I should claim that in the rhetorical deconstructive reading it has become overt; what's more, it has become evident. In his readings de Man speaks about the "practical ethical dimension of allegory" (de Man AR, 209) and he also says that "allegories are always ethical" (de Man AR, 206). The famous quotation reads as follows: Allegories are always ethical, the term ethical designating the structural interference of two distinct value systems. In this sense, ethics has nothing to do with the will (thwarted or free) of a subject, nor a fortiori , with a relationship between subjects. The ethical category is imperative (ie., a category rather than a value) to the extent that it is linguistic and not subjective. Morality is a version of the same language aporia that gave rise to such concepts as 'man' or 'love' or 'self', and not the cause or the consequence of such concepts. The passage to an ethical tonality does not result from a transcendental imperative but it is referential (and therefore unreliable) version of a linguistic confusion. Ethics (or, one should say, ethicity) is a discursive mode among others, (de Man AR, 206). First, in this luminous paragraph, before going into details, we can find three different words related to our chosen topic: morality, ethics and ethicity. I think de Man does not simply want to play on words, since the more ancient —or modern —word, morality, and its science, ethics, are differentiated from the postmodern term, ethicity. 1 Although in their original meaning the words seem to refer to the same realm of the question of good versus wrong behaviour, from the common foundation the postmodern theory of ethics named ethicity gives rise to multiplicity. That is, in the word 'ethicity' we can see the deconstruct ion of ethics with preserving and questioning its aporetic roots. Despite the usual attack on deconstruction claiming that deconstruction turns from ethical problems in complete indifference, it rather turns to and regards such questions in their differences. 1 Moreover, in its meaning the word 'ethicity' can be taken as being closer to morality than ethics, as it is also concerned with practice, not rules or system of rules formulated in ethics.
