Abstract
This essay is an attempt to explicate the relationship between Paul de Man’s three ideas—occurrence, passage, and translation—in the context of his last lectures at Cornell in 1983, in which de Man’s interest is largely directed to the aesthetic ideology and its limit. De Man’s version of “deconstruction” has drawn a considerable amount of criticism, which often sees it as a certain form of cynicism. Starting from pointing out that both criticism and defense of de Man’s “deconstruction” presupposes its indefinite repetition, I argue that de Man’s shift of terminology from “deconstruction” to these three words in his later works indicates a change of focus in de Man’s thinking concerning the idea of “text” and its fate, in particular, in their relations to the limit of ideology.
