Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul de Man

De Man’s line is a neat little booby trap: it flatters “meaning” while quietly detonating the idea that meaning can ever be delivered straight. The paradox is the point. If ordinary language pretends to be transparent, rhetorical language (irony, metaphor, allegory, understatement) admits it’s doing something else - and in that admission, de Man claims, it becomes the only honest route to saying anything “true.”

The specific intent is to reframe figuration not as ornamental detour but as the engine of intelligibility. A “mode of language which does not mean what it says” sounds like evasion or deception; de Man flips it into a condition of precision. He’s arguing that when language tries to be purely denotative, it smuggles in assumptions it can’t police: stable reference, stable speaker intention, stable context. Figurative language foregrounds that slippage instead of denying it.

Subtext: sincerity is not the opposite of rhetoric; sincerity is often rhetoric’s most effective disguise. The line also needles the reader’s desire for a final, literal takeaway. If you demand plain speech, you’re already caught in a fantasy of immediacy - the fantasy de Man’s deconstruction spends its time dismantling.

Context matters. Writing in the high theory moment of postwar literary criticism, de Man is part of the turn that treats reading as an encounter with language’s internal contradictions rather than a retrieval of authorial intention. The “curiously enough” is doing cultural work: it signals that what feels counterintuitive is actually the rule. Meaning, for de Man, isn’t delivered; it’s produced in the friction between what words claim to do and what they inevitably do instead.