Sara Guyer. The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies. Editor: Jonathan Auerbach & Russ Castronovo. December 2013.
Paul de Man’s posthumously published essay on “Kant and Schiller,” in which he lauds Kant’s critical philosophy and laments Friedrich Schiller’s popularization of it, ends with a curious evocation of Joseph Goebbels, the notorious Minister of Propaganda under the Third Reich. Goebbels, known for prompting an entire sports arena to stand up for “total war” under the banner “Rise up people and unleash the storm,” had been a fan of Schiller. Before his ascent to political power, Goebbels had received a Ph.D. in literature, studied under Friedrich Gundolf (who helped to revitalize Schiller’s thought), and, in his 1929 novel, Michael, Goebbels appropriates Schiller’s theory of art and aesthetic education to define the goal of politics as the molding of the masses. In the novel, he writes: “To shape a People out of the masses, and a State out of the People, this has always been the deepest intention of politics in the true sense.”
De Man invokes Goebbels at the conclusion of his own essay on Schiller to focus on the stakes—but also the inevitability—of misreading. Schiller’s English translators, Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (whose introduction presumably alerted de Man to Goebbels’s novel) want to dismiss Goebbels’s appropriation of Schiller as merely a misreading, albeit a particularly violent and misdirected one, rather than part of an actual legacy that would tie aesthetic theory to political violence, and German idealism to National Socialism. In other words, Wilkinson and Willoughby wish to save Schiller from Goebbels—and they might be right. For, as they insist, it is true that the author of Michael grounds the Nazi propaganda machine in a misreading of Schiller, and it is on the basis of this misreading that he goes on to justify politics as the aesthetic formation of the People and the State. For de Man, it is also true that this is the misreading of a misreading: Goebbels’s misreading of Schiller’s misreading of Kant. Rather than a stated program or shared political ideology, it is above all this misreading, rather than a theory of political and aesthetic formation, that Schiller and Goebbels have in common. In other words, de Man concurs with Schiller’s translators that Goebbels here misreads Schiller by turning a theory of art into a populist project, and one that ultimately had immense historical implications. He also recognizes that this misreading is part of a continuum of misreadings initiated by Schiller himself when he turns Kant’s critical rigor into a recipe for aesthetic formation. De Man’s point, as others have noted with some discomfort, at once seems to free Schiller and aesthetic theory from culpability for political violence: Goebbels misreads Schiller. At the same time, it assigns this culpability anew: Schiller, like Goebbels, misreads too.
Now, surely, the stakes of misreading turn out to be particularly high when we are talking about the Minister of Propaganda under the Third Reich and a horizon of violence justified by a vision of the People. And one would be inclined, with good reason, to argue for a strategy or pedagogy that would put a stop to such egregious mishandling of aesthetic theory. Yet, de Man suggests that Goebbels’s misreading, rather than an exception, is part of a cycle that also includes Schiller’s simplified and overly transmissible translation of Kantian critique. If, as Wilkinson and Willoughby suggest, Goebbels’s “Schillerian” theory of the state is egregious because it is based upon a misreading of Schiller’s theory, rather than being an implementation or interpretation of it, we will be hard pressed to rigorously distinguish among the master propagandist, the aesthetician who arrived at his theories through a misreading of Kant, or the teacher who wishes to inform her students through paraphrase, summary, and interpretation. And this is de Man’s point. It is an unsettling—and even hyperbolic—one. De Man’s focus on misreading seems to implicate Schiller in a violent legacy of mass manipulation, murderous racism, and extremist nationalism, not because of his theory or public acts, but because of how he reads and misreads Kant. At the same time, it seems to dismiss Goebbels’s project as only an especially “grievous” form of misreading, one that, as de Man suggests, “does not essentially differ from the misreading which Schiller inflicted on his own predecessor—namely, Kant.” In “Kant and Schiller” de Man shows not only that misreading is ubiquitous and inescapable, but also that propaganda, the manipulation of meaning with the aim of producing actual effects, can be construed as a problem of reading.
When de Man talks about misreading here, he also demonstrates how the political stakes of the aesthetic—even in an instance with an explicit political agenda—can be tied not to a stated claim or program, but to an experience of the text. He refers to a form of totalization that can be understood as continuous with violence—that is, with the imposition of form, meaning, and continuity, where there otherwise may be none. This totalization is at work both thematically and rhetorically in Schiller’s work (as it is in Goebbels). And although there is some overlap between the rhetorical and the thematic, de Man’s claim is surprising because in it, reading, rather than a political program, is at issue. The latter, the thematization of violence tied to aesthetics, might be found throughout the texts of Schillerian idealism and National Socialist propaganda. For example, in a passage from the Fourth Letter that proved especially productive for Goebbels’s understanding of the statesman, cited above, Schiller undertakes to compare the work of artisan and artist, teacher and politician:
When the artisan lays hands upon the formless mass in order to shape it to his ends, he has no scruple in doing it violence; for the natural material he is working merits no respect for itself, and his concern is not with the whole for the sake of the parts, but with the part for the sake of the whole. When the artist lays hands upon the same mass, he has just as little scruple in doing it violence; but he avoids showing it. For the material he is handling he has not a whit more respect than has the artisan; but the eye which would seek to protect the freedom of the material he will endeavour to deceive by a show of yielding to this latter.
Schiller goes on to distinguish the plastic artist (as deceiver of eye and mind) from the teacher or politician: “With the pedagogic or political artist things are very different indeed. For him Man is at once the material on which he works and the goal toward which he strives. In this case the end turns back upon itself and becomes identical with the medium; and it is only inasmuch as the whole serves the parts that the parts are in any way bound to submit to the whole.” Although the statesman is figured as respectful, rather than deceiving, and although the object is already the form, rather than a merely “formless mass,” artisan and artist, like statesman and teacher, are all engaged in a process of formation that, respectful or not, is ordered by violence.
But it is in focusing on Schiller’s reading of Kant, his use of chiasmus and metaphor, tropes of substitution that resolve differences by fiat and thus efface nuances, distinctions, and deviations, that de Man accounts for the way that Schiller converts Kant’s critical philosophy into a popular project in which every opposition or disruption can be reappropriated into the whole. It is in this sense that de Man points to Schiller’s reading as something “inflicted on his own predecessor” (my emphasis), and, in doing so, identifies textual or interpretive violence with the violence that Schiller describes in the Fourth Letter and that Goebbels inflicted on Germany and the European Jews. Yet, de Man is not making a cultural, philosophical, or historical claim about the continuity between Schiller’s aesthetic theory (or aesthetic education) and the Nazi genocide, and, unlike Walter Benjamin or Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, he is not focused on the aestheticization of the political or the legacies of romantic aesthetics. Rather, he is identifying a mode of reading, one that, insofar as it relies on a certain smoothing over of interruptions, is tied precisely to questions of aesthetics, democracy, and freedom.
When Willoughby and Wilkinson acknowledge Goebbels’s misreading of Schiller, they note that “he plundered Schiller’s aesthetics—while cunningly omitting Schiller’s operative distinctions” (cxli; 1967, my emphasis). Here reading is a criminal act, and misreading—the omission of key distinctions, say, between the artist and the politician—becomes the source of a new ideology. In other words, they differentiate Goebbels from Schiller by holding him accountable for reading in the way that de Man will show that Schiller reads. De Man also goes on to suggest that misreading, cunning or naive, can have disastrous effects. It is a form of violence. However, if misreading is Goebbels’ error, it is one for which Schiller, like anyone who summarizes or covers over the gaps between language and cognition—that is, anyone who writes, teaches, informs, or communicates, even in the name of freedom or resistance, and in doing so “omit[s] … operative distinctions”—is also guilty. Here de Man turns to the first person plural, to suggest that even he is at risk: “Whatever writing ed do, whatever way we have of talking about art, whatever way we have of teaching, whatever justification we give ourselves for teaching, whatever the standards are and the values by means of which we teach, they are more than ever and profoundly Schillerian. They come from Schiller and not from Kant.” This is not simply to say that Schiller or any of us who write or teach are indistinguishable from the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, but rather that the criterion used here to dismiss the links between aesthetics and fascism—misreading and the manipulation of a text to serve an aim—and hence to protect us from culpability are far more ubiquitous and unavoidable than we might like to believe.8 It is not that there are no significant differences between the impacts and contexts of these forms of violence (a point that a critic of de Man’s rhetorical reading might here be inclined to make), but only that they cannot be gauged by misreading. In other words, from the perspective of rhetoric, propaganda is not tied to one device rather than another, but to misreading itself.
The evocation of Goebbels in the essay on “Kant and Schiller” is unsettling for it seems to assume a homogeny between catastrophic violence and acts of reading, a homogeny between the manipulation of language and ideas, the coercion of the masses, and the attempted destruction of a population. It is unsettling because what is at stake here is not even the use of a particular rhetorical device, but rather reading itself. More than this, the example, which de Man admits is “grievous,” points to the question of how a text can have external effects, how it can involve not only the coercion of another text that it may analyze or appropriate (Schiller’s Kant), but also the coercion of a group (Goebbels’s Germany). For readers of de Man’s essay, what is at stake then is the possibility of maintaining these distinctions, when—as his very theory and practice of reading suggest— indistinction and undecidability are unavoidable.
Analysts of propaganda have sought to distinguish between propaganda and persuasion (e.g., Jowett and O’Donnell) and also to consider the empirical problem of tracking the impact of media events on action and cognition (Zaller 1992; Perse 2001; Bryant and Thompson 2002). In the first case, there has been significant concern that the identification and critique of propaganda (e.g., in the work of Jacques Ellul [1973]) entails the rejection of all suasory discourse; the latter suggests that it is all too easy to overstate the powers of media on a population and all too difficult to measure cause and effect.
Rhetoric or Propaganda (de Man)
For Paul de Man, the question of impact is also related to the very conception of rhetoric. In the 1970s and ’80s, de Man developed an approach to literary and philosophical study focused on the recovery and reinvention of rhetorical reading (i.e., the close reading of tropes and figures as levers that expose the fundamental unreadability or illegibility of any text). Tropes and figures reveal the failure of a text to mean what it says and the vigorous, if unfulfilled, attempt at concealing this failure to maintain the false promise of a cognizable universe, temporal continuity, and a closed circuit of meaning.
In the preface to Allegories of Reading, de Man (1982) reflects upon the approach that he calls “the rhetoric of reading” and explains that “what emerges is a process of reading in which rhetoric is a disruptive intertwining of trope and persuasion or—which is not quite the same thing—of cognitive and performative language.” In other words, the very vehicle of persuasion impedes its outcome. Elsewhere, de Man seems to distinguish between alternative conceptions of rhetoric: rhetoric “as persuasion, as actual action upon others” and rhetoric “as an intralingusitic figure or trope.” Yet, although rhetoric may be figured as “actual action,” albeit action in and through speech, it is far from effective or unidirectional. Instead, as dramatized through his readings of two rhetorical questions, one derived from mass culture (the television show All in the Family) and the other from a poem in part about aesthetic education (W. B. Yeats’s “Among School Children”), even a mean-spirited or aggressive communication by a known racist and sexist or an instance of pedagogical formation ends in confusion and frustration, rather than coherence and power. As de Man’s strategies of reading expose in this context, rhetoric interferes with rather than supports the power of persuasion—let alone propaganda. So, whereas on the one hand, he registers a continuity between aesthetic education and mass manipulation, on the other hand, he suggests that this continuity is tied to a failure of reading. It is a failure that we might learn to resist and identify, but never without succumbing to the failure ourselves. Rhetorical reading, far from a mode of permanent resistance to ideological reading or a form of consistent ideology critique, will be subject to a version of the very failure that it purports to recognize and overcome.
In 1937, less than ten years after the publication of Michael and in the same year of Goebbels’s “Degenerate Art” exhibit, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) published a well-known and widely circulated article on how to detect propaganda. In the article, which appeared in the second issue of the journal, the anonymous author (recently identified as Clyde Miller) recognized “seven common propaganda devices”: name calling, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial, plain folk, card stacking, and bandwagon. Although these are not quite the Greek or Latin terms found in Quintilian or Cicero, or even the modern terms found in Burke or Fontanier, the IPA nevertheless understands propaganda as effected by key fallacies, substitutions, and additions that are identifiable across texts. The article aimed to catalogue easily identifiable tropes and figures and to create a highly teachable rhetoric that would lead to basic training in propaganda critique. In this respect, it was a project in rhetorical analysis and critical reading issued at a moment when in Europe—and in the United States—propaganda was rising and freedom of expression at risk. Although the IPA article certainly led to the increased identification of tropes and figures, as registered by the catalogue of responses that J. Michael Sproule compiles, it did not in any way produce a more radical sense of rhetorical reading. Instead, it generated a sense of mastery and even protection without acknowledging that the very tools of such mastery were not fine enough either to distinguish between rhetoric and propaganda or to reveal the proximity between them. In other words, despite the apparent focus on critical reading and rhetoric promoted in the IPA article, the approach to propaganda as identification and categorization turned out to be an uncritical mode. Rather than expose a fundamental limit of language, communication, or rhetoric, it merely registers a particular instance of ideology that could presumably be removed, thus allowing language to operate freely and without violence.
More recently, groups like the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) have added to the IPA’s list an extensive catalogue of “propaganda techniques” that “may rely on some element of censorship or manipulation, either omitting significant information or distorting it.” Whereas, elsewhere in their materials, the CMD defines propaganda in terms of its intention (“serving an agenda”), the list of rhetorical techniques and the suggestion of omission or distortion as their main mode also fails to distinguish propaganda from communication in general, insofar as communication’s effectiveness relies upon “omission and distortion” or tropes and figures. Put another way, the definition of propaganda offered here suggests that there can be no communication—indeed no pedagogy—without some element of propaganda. With this definition, we have another version of Jacques Ellul’s account of propaganda, an account that implicates social science and offers an implicit call for the value of the humanities.
Returning to “Kant and Schiller,” we see that de Man also can be understood to register the continuity between propaganda and persuasion. Yet, here, de Man, as I already have suggested, focuses not on the identification of particular tropes and figures as propaganda’s markers, but on reading and misreading, where misreading is the unavoidable production of textual meaning through the assumption of transmissible unity rather than the recognition of the text as a scene of self-interruption. Reading, understanding, sense-making, communication, and teaching itself, far from being prophylaxis against the manipulation of language and ideas are, in de Man’s account, inevitably continuous with it. The point here is then not a slippery slope argument about textual and physical violence, nor is it a claim about the legacies of German aesthetic theory and its passage into politics, but rather a claim about acts of reading, communication, and understanding. It is not a matter of how Schiller or Goebbels conceive of formation or force, but rather, at least in the context of de Man’s essay, a matter of how they conceive of and practice reading. The focus of de Man’s claim, in other words, is not the theory of the aesthetic, but misreading as a practice of aestheticization. If this is a focus on rhetoric, it is not the rhetoric of persuasion or propaganda, but rather the incompatibility between rhetorical reading and suasory discourse, whether in a quotidian or a more cunningly propagandistic sense. It is rhetoric as a mode of often egregious substitution that cannot simply be expunged from discourse, and it is in this focus on rhetoric and misreading that de Man offers a radical response to the conventional approaches to propaganda critique. Two postwar philosophical accounts of literature and democracy, those of Sartre and Derrida, illuminate further the implications of de Man’s account of misreading and its relation to violent political discourse.
Literature or Propaganda (Sartre and Derrida)
In his 1948 essay “Why Write?,” which belongs to a series of essays on the question of literature, Jean-Paul Sartre reflects on the relation between writing and democracy, explaining: “The art of prose is bound up with the only regime in which prose has meaning, democracy. When one is threatened, the other is too.” Sartre arrives at this claim for literature through a consideration of literary themes and the political intentionalities manifest in literary works. In his understanding, freedom is a human possibility tied to nature and politics, rather than a literary possibility tied to uncertainty and irresolution. Sartre argues that literature, specifically prose, is coterminus with democracy by presenting two instances of racist violence and considering the possibility that they could legitimately appear in a literary work. Sartre’s examples are the enslavement of African Americans and the genocide of Jews. He claims, on the one hand, that “one can imagine a good novel being written by an American negro even if hatred of the whites were spread all over it, because it is the freedom of his race that he demands through this hatred” and, on the other, that “nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in support of anti-Semitism.” The author of a Publishers Weekly review of the English translation of Goebbels’s Michael seems to share Sartre’s sentiment when calling Michael “the poorly written ‘novel’ in diary form by Hitler’s calculating and sinister propaganda minister.” The review manifests all of the pathos absent from de Man’s dismissal of the book as a “grievous misreading,” and putting novel in quotation marks, also repeats Sartre’s claim that an anti-Semitic text could not be a literary work, let alone a good one. Setting aside for the moment the affect evident in this review and the possibility that a novel by an African American need not be about her experience or identity, a point that Sartre crucially misses, we can see in Sartre’s example a politically motivated or “committed” literature that would be justified because its motivation would be freedom and its source would be the resistance to slavery. An anti-Semitic work, to the contrary, would have oppression as its aim, and oppression is at odds with literature figured as freedom. Yet freedom here is not the autonomy of the work, which Sartre rejects, but human freedom, a freedom that is essentially human, measured not within but beyond the work and, for Sartre, manifest in the relation between writers and readers.
For Sartre, freedom is not freedom of speech or poetic freedom—the end to which a writer commits himself—but rather human freedom as an essential condition (and right). Prose, understood here as the genre of democracy, can only bear expressions of freedom, which is to say that, for Sartre, what makes literature a democratic form is not the right to say anything, but the supposed impossibility of saying anything that would deny the right to freedom. The freedom that Sartre hails is prior to or beyond literature; it is writing’s source or its aim, but never its form. Although the risk that literature might be constrained to intentionality, motives, or outcomes in the world makes this form of democracy difficult to distinguish from propaganda as it is conventionally understood (and, indeed, Sartre admits that when literature fails, it is time to take up arms), the limits on freedom are also inherent in Sartre’s own formulation.
In defining literature and answering the question “Why Write?” Sartre here is concerned with thinking against Schillerian aesthetics, understood as autonomous formation (or l’art pour l’art). As the text of Michael and the works of national aestheticism more generally show, a vision of art as absolute would seem to be an anathema to freedom. Yet Sartre’s theory gets caught in its own vision of writing’s political possibility, its intention and motivation. In addition to understanding literature as fundamentally incapable of enslavement through violent representations, Sartre also construes of writing as a form of intentionality toward freedom. As he explains: “Writing is a certain way of wanting freedom; once you have begun, you are committed, willy-nilly.” Writing, in other words, is not (or not only) bound up with the manifestation of democracy but is an expression of desire and, in this sense, the revelation of a lack of freedom. More than this, as much as it is an expression of intentionality, it is also the collapse of personal power, for “once you have begun, you are committed, willy-nilly.” To write is to become the object of writing and its attendant politics, rather than to remain its subject. Thus, the very expression of freedom and desire in Sartre, the gesture through which writing becomes a form of political engagement, turns out to operate as a form of objectification. If literature cannot be literature when its message is one of enslavement or when it advocates for a world without freedom, writing, insofar as it is conceived as an act of commitment, becomes—far from an act of subjectivity—an experience of subjection and even desubjectification.19 Sartre, despite his own program, reveals that the writer’s commitment is not an expression of subjectivity or freedom; he reveals—despite himself—that the focus on political ends or ideological themes is not only insufficient for conceiving of the relation between discourse and action, but that it is a form of violence itself.
Not even Theodor Adorno, one of Sartre’s great detractors, goes this far. In his 1962 essay “Commitment,” Adorno focuses on the impossibility of maintaining the opposition between autonomous (art pour l’art) and engaged art, as Sartre envisions it. He points out that commitment in the Sartrean sense remains either meaningless or propagandistic precisely because it remains at the level of theme rather than form, because it remains committed to political and social outcomes, which are the purview of propaganda rather than literature: “Commitment as such, even if politically intended remains politically ambiguous as long as it does not reduce itself to propaganda, the obliging shape of which mocks any commitment on the part of the subject.” In other words, commitment is meaningful only when it fails to be art, only when it becomes force, when it effaces the ambiguity—or the freedom—of the work’s meaning. More than this, Adorno suggests that the very ambiguity of commitment, the impossibility of an art (or rhetoric) that is fully autonomous or a work (or discourse) that is fully engaged (its very language requires detachment), renders a false opposition, one too weak to stand up to the dialectic that Adorno devises, and one that reveals the autonomous work as bearing political possibility.
Thirty years after Adorno’s essay, and several years after de Man’s death and the culmination of the Cold War, Jacques Derrida, de Man’s colleague and friend, revisited the question of literature’s relation to democracy, concluding that literature is the discursive form that signifies, enacts, and even conditions democracy. Literature, as Derrida explains, is bound “to a certain noncensure, to the space of democratic freedom (freedom of the press, freedom of speech, etc.).” If democratic freedom is the freedom to say anything, it is this freedom that distinguishes literature from forms in which there must be a greater allegiance to truth, reference, or representation. Although Derrida evokes Sartre’s claim about literature and democracy that “when one is threatened, the other is too,” unlike Sartre, he insists that the politics of literature do not depend on the theme or topic of a particular work (i.e., whether it hails the working-class hero or authorizes anti-Semitism or fascism). Rather, a work of literature, insofar as it is open to reading and misreading, invention and manipulation, and insofar as its laws entail the protection of this freedom—above all, the freedom of speech—is a democratic form despite anything it says. Derrida articulates this as a formula: “No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy.” And he goes on to explain that
one can always want neither one nor the other [democracy or literature], and there is no shortage of doing without them under all regimes; it is quite possible to consider neither of them to be unconditional goods and indispensable rights. But in no case can one dissociate one from the other. No analysis would be equal to it The possibility of literature, the legitimation that a society gives it, all that goes together—politically—with the unlimited right to ask any question, to suspect all dogmatism, to analyze every presupposition, even those of the ethics or the politics of responsibility.
By phrasing this formula and the ensuing discussion in a negative mode, Derrida suggests not the actuality of literature or democracy, but rather their possibilities or impossibilities. By figuring literature as insistent, unending contestation, and by figuring this contestation as the condition of democracy, Derrida accounts for the very interruptions and differentiations that Schiller and Sartre both miss. And yet, like Sartre and like Schiller, Derrida’s evocation of freedom relies on a formula. Indeed, the elegance of Derrida’s scheme is tied to its use of chiasmus (“No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy”), the very trope that allows Schiller to turn the complexities of Kant’s critical philosophy into a popular schema.
It is tempting to suggest that this formula has a parallel in de Man’s text: “No fascism without misreading; no misreading without fascism.” To do so would immediately raise the question of the relation among misreading (or propaganda), literature, and democracy. Yet de Man’s approach to reading seems to stop the chiasmic reversibility in its tracks, for misreading is indifferent to fascism and democracy alike. Misreading, as de Man understands it, is a gesture of substitution indifferent to differences, a form of metaphor that elides resistances and interruptions. In some respect, literature conceived as an experience of pure possibility also risks such elision as it allows for no negation, only this radical freedom. This relentless freedom, however, is at odds with the closing down of discourse, quelling of critical energies, and production of monocultures, which, through the example of “Kant and Schiller,” we came to see as an effect of misreading. This is because a democratic field allows for a multiplicity of meanings of which this would be only one—not the only one.
Nevertheless, when Derrida figures literature (and democracy) as possibility and unforeseeability, and figures literature as an experience of undecidability, and this experience as an experience of freedom, he does so through an instance of reversibility that de Man’s account of misreading resists. In other words, Derrida’s account of literature and democracy, although resistant to Sartre’s engagement, can be understood to explicate the experience that rhetorical reading is called upon to produce. In a slogan that, rhetorically speaking, resonates with the tropes and figures that the IPA or CMD would identify as propagandistic, Derrida provides a theory of literary democracy. And in a schema, however oriented toward freedom and complexity, that de Man would recognize as Schillerian, Derrida offers a theory of contestation. In other words, whether construed through de Man or through the IPA, whether construed as a trope that can be identified and extracted or a misreading for which we cannot but be guilty, Derrida’s conception of literature as a nonprescriptive, open form and his understanding of literature’s imbrication with democracy—which is to say, his account of a thoroughly antiprogrammatic, antipropagandistic mode of discourse—is in the end still a theory.
The Ends of Misreading
When Schiller misreads Kant, and when Goebbels misreads Schiller, a program supplants freedom—and we witness the foreclosure of contestation, ambiguity, and difference. We witness the foreclosure of democracy itself. However, such foreclosure is not merely effected through writing, but also through reading and misreading. By turning the focus of his reading of aesthetic theory from theories of the State and the People to practices of reading and misreading, de Man exposes the risk of democracy. The alternative—certainty, calculability, or the impossibility of misreading—would be the domain of fascism itself. But what happens when a formula comes to serve democracy itself and comes to serve democracy not as a program, but as an experience, like that of literature, of contestation itself?
Reading de Man after Sartre, one could say that the kind of reading practice that de Man envisions, the reading that risks, rather than forecloses, misreading, is penetrated through and through by politics. But this does not mean that reading remains immune to commitment or to the propaganda that commitment reveals. Just as autonomous art can become a vehicle of politics, as made evident in the passage from Schiller to Goebbels, so too can democratic reading. In fact, reading Derrida after de Man, we see that even an account of radical democracy attuned to complexity and differentiation can look like a misreading.