This is a book about the work of Paul de Man on the critique of aesthetic ideology and the strange “materiality” – a “materiality without materialism,” as Derrida has put it – that emerges from it. It consists of three groups of essays – “I. Aesthetic Ideology,” “II. Hegel/Marx,” “III. Heidegger/Derrida” – and it is “about” de Man in two senses. Approximately half of the book – in particular, Chapters 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 – consists of an explication and a reading of crucial articulations in de Man's project; and the other half would extend this project and its implications by a reading of “material” moments in Hegel, Marx, and the Marxian tradition (Lukács, Jameson) on the one hand and in Heidegger's hermeneutics (and its radicalization by Derrida) on the other. The book's subtitle – “For De Man” – could be read somewhat like Althusser's Pour Marx.

Paul de Man's turn to questions of ideology and the political in his late work was anything but an arbitrary choice or an accident of biography. Rather it was a move that comes directly out of de Man's particular kind of rhetorical reading – i.e., one which goes through and past tropes to demonstrate how tropological systems undo themselves and produce a material remainder or residue, what de Man comes to call “material inscription.” And since what gets undone in this self-undoing of tropological systems is the phenomenality – including what de Man calls “the phenomenality of the linguistic sign” – that tropes on the one hand make possible, one main casualty is the value of the aesthetic (and of the aesthetic function of literature).