DeMan’s rhetorical promise unifies speech acts with allegory to generate history

Evidence

As the title of the chapter (“Promises”) indicates, that new impossible thing The Social Contract continues to do is to promise: so that the seeming heterogeneity of DeMan’s final chapters here can now be rejustified in terms of the wider variety of impossible “solutions” to the textual dilemma. The disparity between the terminology of speech acts (promises, excuses) and that of allegories and figures can now be seen as one last ambitious effort to open up a wider mediatory code which will finally encompass personal life and History itself (“textual allegories on this level of rhetorical complexity generate history” [AR277], a concluding sentence which seems to mark a provisional end to DeMan’s own quest for historicity as that has been characterized above). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 538

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s running thesis that aesthetic/textual form encodes History — the ‘style is economy’s way of appearing’ thread. — connects to: DeMan’s ‘metaphor’ functions as a transcoding device, not a narrow trope. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 526; DeMan’s turn from history to reading mirrors a generational retreat from diachronic narrative — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 490; A crucial rhetorical shift produces a new political narrative — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 134 (+1 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: DeMan’s ‘metaphor’ functions as a transcoding device, not a narrow trope. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 526; DeMan’s turn from history to reading mirrors a generational retreat from diachronic narrative — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 490; A crucial rhetorical shift produces a new political narrative — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 134 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• DeMan’s turn from history to reading mirrors a generational retreat from diachronic narrative #complicates (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 490