DeMan posits metaphor as the cause rather than opponent of literal illusion

Evidence

Indeed, paradoxically, metaphor “is essentially anti-poetic” (AR47); even more paradoxically, far from being the very heartland of the figural and the space in which language is liberated from the literal and the referential (in general, the viewpoint of romantic and modernist aesthetics, at least when these become ideologies of the aesthetic and are loosely transmitted as general ideas), metaphor is for DeMan something like the source and origin, the deeper cause, of the literal and referential illusions themselves: “Metaphor overlooks the fictional, textual element in the nature of the entity it connotes. It assumes a world in which intraand extra-textual events, literal and figural forms of language, can be distinguished, a world in which the literal and the figural are properties that can be isolated and, consequently, exchanged and substituted for each other” (AR152). “This is an error,” he adds, “although it can be said that no language would be possible without this error.” — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 505

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines DeMan’s counterintuitive sense of metaphor as an error that generates the literal/figural distinction.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does this figure-reversal relate to Jameson’s own staging of pastiche vs parody as ‘dead’ vs ‘living’ styles — is pastiche also a ‘metaphor-like’ error?