Paul de Man: Indeterminacy as the Empowerment of the Texts

초록

This article aims to argue that Paul de Man’s idea of indeterminacy is not only a challenge to the traditional Western understanding of representation, but also the empowerment of the texts. He criticized the unity between the sign and the signified. For him, there is a discrepancy between them because of the various features of language; rhetorical and figurative, materiality, allegory over against symbol, temporality, intentionality. Thus he rejects a mimetic notion of representation in terms of language, which brings about the idea of indeterminacy. The sense of incompleteness and undecidability can be also found in the Romanticism and New Criticism, but de Man’s thought shows its own unique feature. The idea of indeterminacy can demonstrate a constructive aspect as well as a limitation of language. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger, the two main precursors of deconstruction, challenge traditional understanding of representation, but that challenge create a room for empowering the oppressed or neglected part to speak out. Likewise de Man’s indeterminacy disputes the established meanings of the texts but can be the empowerment of the texts by disclosing a new possibility for dynamic multiple meanings.

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