The following critique is from a letter to Frances Ferguson, 21 December 1987:

Although we are dealing here with complex and, call it, multi-layered arguments – both de Man's and yours – I think that the point at which your representation of de Man's argument diverges from it can be determined. That point of divergence, I would say, is most clearly visible in your essay's understanding of de Man's reading of “Marion” as a question of “ambiguity,” “positional equivalence,” and “self-contradiction.” In general terms, as I see it, such an account of de Man's argument diverges from it because it continues to understand what is at stake in the case of the utterance of the name “Marion” as within the transformational (tropological) system that the text has set up: i.e., the system of guilt, shame, confession, excuse, etc. (or, as de Man puts it: “the system of truth, virtue, and understanding (or of deceit, evil, and error) that gives meaning to the passage” [AR 289]). That is, for de Man, this utterance is not a matter of an ambiguity where “Marion” can mean either Marion or “nothing.” Rather it is a matter of an utter disjunction between, on the one hand, the entire system of meaning (which, like the number system, is a transformational, tropological system in which terms can be rendered equivalent or in which they can come into contradiction with one another) and “something” that comes from outside it, that is a “foreign element,” as de Man puts it, that makes us enter “an entirely different system in which such terms as desire, shame, guilt, exposure, and repression no longer have any place” (AR 289).