I’m reading some Paul de Man these days for a particular project, and however culpable his Nazi collaboration and his self-reinvention are, he certainly hits some important marks. ‘Literature, instead of being taught only as a historical and humanistic subject, should be taught as a rhetoric and a poetics prior to being taught as a hermeneutics and a history.’ ‘Perhaps the fine, nearly imperceptible line that, in the present day, separates semioticians and grammarians from theoreticians of rhetoric — a line that frequently traverses one and the same author’s work — may be inextricably intertwined with the “waning” of modernity.’
Sure, I’d argue a point or two, here or there, but I was surprised to see how apposite his observations were.