DeMan’s position is nominalism, not nihilism or materialism

Evidence

Thus, unlike Rousseau, DeMan did not even seek to make such a bridge between the universal and the particular (although he acknowledged the inevitability of assuming it to exist, that is, of continuing to use language). Is his practice then to be described, as people have loosely done (particularly in the last few years), as a “nihilism”? DeMan consistently described himself as a materialist, but that is surely not the same thing. Nihilism evokes a kind of global ideology or “pessimistic” worldview of the type to which he was in general allergic. The more precise designation of his “philosophical” position lies elsewhere and opens up an even more archaic and unseasonable problematic behind the already seemingly antiquated one of eighteenth-century materialism. What DeMan clearly was was not a nihilist but a nominalist, and the scandalized reception that greeted his views on language when they finally became clear to his readers is comparable to nothing quite so much as the agitation of Thomist clerks confronted unexpectedly with the nominalist enormity. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 548

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes nominalism from nihilism and materialism precisely — a key conceptual clarification for understanding DeMan’s linguistic skepticism.