The notes about “Semiology and Rhetoric” before the reading made it very clear that Paul de Man, and the ideas he brought up about interpretation of literature, were not extremely welcomed by many other philosophers and such of his time. de Man was “charged with threatening the foundations of literary criticism because he radically questioned the possibility of meaning” (1363). He did this by suggesting that focusing on historical or social meanings that could be connected to texts may not be the only way to do so, but rather, one should focus on rhetoric and grammar, and the gap, aporia, between them.

de Man argues that not everything is as it seems. He starts by looking as the rhetorical question “What’s the difference?” He states that, as we know, this is not actually a question looking for an answer, but really is a statement saying “There is no difference.” Grammar always haunts rhetoric though, according to de Man, so when looking at the grammar of this sentence, it is a question, and reading it as one is not wrong, it is just a different meaning. By looking at the question through this lens, a whole new meaning arises, away from the socially understood meaning. He followed this by looking at an example in the poem “Among School Children,” where the last line says “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Again, reading this line figuratively and literally create two different meanings, but, according to de Man, we cannot necessarily say that the poem has two meanings at the same time. He says that “The two readings have to engage each other in direct confrontation, for the one reading is precisely the error denounced by the other and has to be undone by it” (1372).

After looking at other ways that authors “manipulate” grammar, de Man writes about the word “deconstruction,” and the act of “deconstructing” literature. He writes about how a lot of literary criticism is looking at the text and decoding it in a way that makes it your own reading, which we label as “deconstructing the text,” when in reality, we have not added anything to the text that was not already there, we just found the meanings of the text. He writes “A literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode, and by reading the text as we did we were only trying to come closer to being as rigorous a reader as the author had to be in order to write the sentence in the first place” (1377). Therefore, the reader of the text did nothing besides bring out what was already laid down by the author.

He finishes this piece by writing about how unreliable literature and criticism are, in the same way that Nietzsche says that we pull apart structure to rebuild it on flowing water; no text has only one meaning, and no matter how much you “deconstruct” the text, you are not adding anything of your own to it. This argument which totally goes against most of the literary critics believe, is why there must have been so much push away from his ideas by others.