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 65 deconstruction it is followed (endlessly) by a sequence of "supplementary figurái superposition" which tells "the unreadability of the prior narration". And these narratives

—actually generated by the primary one are called allegorical narratives or allegories telling "the story of the failure to read" (de Man AR, 205). Thus, right at the beginning of understanding we have rhetorical figures; more exactly, language with its determining laws. And

—following de Man's ideas

—I can say this is the very first and the very last moment when the word 'right' can be truly used, as starting our reading of a text with its rhetorical figures, we must (truly) enter its false world. Although we are in the realm of falsehood, being good readers we try to read it right

; and, what's more, the ethical appears in this contextualized falsehood. For de Man "the term ethical designates the structural interference of two distinct value systems" referring to the epistemologicai true-false and the ethical right-wrong value-pairs. That is, in an allegorical reading a statement cannot be both true and right at once, as "it is impossible to respond simultaneously to those two demands" (Miller ER, 49). Therefore instead of using the expression 'ethical value', de Man speaks about 'the ethical category' regarding it as an imperative: as an obligation it is taken absolute and unconditional. Both Miller and de Man (and I myself) struggle with the real meaning of de Man's ethicity

—as can be expected in a text claiming the unreadability of reading. Miller quotes another interesting passage, where de Man clearly names his 'true' categorical imperative: "in the case of reading of a text, what takes place is a necessary understanding.

.. an understanding is an epistemologicai event prior to being an ethical or aesthetic value" (Miller ER, 51-52). I think it becomes obvious that de Man knows only one imperative: the imperative of language with its

—quite hermeneutical

—'read!' or 'understand!'. Returning to the central de Manian principle, Miller concludes that "to live is to read, or rather to commit again and again the failure to read which is the human lot.

.. each reading is strictly speaking, ethical, in the sense that it has to take place, by an implacable necessity, as a response to a categorical demand" (Miller ER, 59). Our world is full of texts and systems of signs, which we are bound to understand; we cannot help reading, but we should accept that we cannot go beyond the borders of language. And we also have to accept that the ethical is only one of the possible but necessary referential modes of our reading. Actually, Miller tries to read and interpret de Man's theory of the 'rhetorical close-reading' from an ethical point of view, but he himself cannot escape from falling into the traps of the rhetorical, of language. At the end of his reading on de Man's ethicity, Miller answers his own question