Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul de Man

Modernity, in de Man's telling, isn’t an era so much as an itch: the compulsive need to delete the past so the present can finally feel real. The line is built like a diagnosis. “Desire” makes modernity less a historical condition than a psychological drive, a craving for purification. And “wipe out” is deliberately violent language for what often gets marketed as progress. De Man is alert to the way the modern imagination frames itself as heroic rupture, even when it’s really performing a kind of amnesia.

The subtext is skeptical: the “true present” is a mirage produced by the very act of negation. If the present must be manufactured by erasing what preceded it, then it’s already dependent on what it claims to escape. The phrase “point of origin” smuggles in a fantasy of clean beginnings, a reset button for culture, politics, art, even the self. De Man’s irony is that origins are retroactively constructed; they’re stories we tell to justify departures we wanted to make anyway.

Context matters here. As a major figure in postwar literary theory and deconstruction-adjacent criticism, de Man is circling a central problem: language can’t deliver unmediated immediacy. You can’t write or think your way into a pure “now” because meaning arrives through traces, references, and inherited forms. Modernity’s dream, he suggests, is less about living in the present than about escaping the embarrassment of continuity. The “new departure” isn’t freedom; it’s a rhetorical pose that keeps needing fresh ruins to stand on.