In the 1983 Messenger Lectures, Paul de Man set out to formulate a critique of critical philosophy and Romantic literature as dynamically involved in a post-Romantic predicament that centers around the ‘philosophical phantasm’ of ‘the reconciliation of knowledge with phenomenal, aesthetic experience’. While critical attention has mainly focused on the shift in terminology in de Man's later writings towards linguistic materiality and aesthetic ideology, this article argues that this shift simultaneously implies a radicalisation of de Man's theory and practice of rhetorical reading into an epistemological critique of reading in terms of the incompatibility between cognition and perception, and of the material event and its inevitable reinscription into tropological linguistic models. This shift culminates in de Man's claim, in ‘The Resistance to Theory’, that all theory necessarily avoids the reading it advocates and contains a necessarily pragmatic moment that reinscribes it into the ideological aberration it attempts to resist. De Man's turn to Kant and Schiller in his later writings thus not only supplements his earlier rhetorical readings of Wordsworth, but also implies a radical revaluation of the act of reading that decisively repositions it towards ideology.
