La retórica en cuestión

Abstract

This essay derives from a reading of the book Barthes en cuestión, which includes an article by Paul de Man on Barthesian thought and an article by Judith Podlubne on de Man's reading of Barthes. From that point, I try to continue thinking about the tensions between Barthes and de Man considering the following hypothesis: the history of literary theory is the history of a self-challenge of its foundations before the akcnowledgment of the lack of correspondence between sign and thing; akcnowledgment that opened the way to an incessant interaction between the theory of reading and the return of rhetoric —abandoned in the 19th century—. In this context, the differences between Barthes and de Man are based on the different modes of rhetoric they assume (of elocutio, in the first of them; of tropes, in the other one) and their consequent criticisms (a criticism as literature, in the first of them; a negative epistemology of reading, in the other one).