Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul de Man

De Man’s sentence performs the kind of double move that made deconstruction feel, to its fans and critics alike, like intellectual jujitsu. The writer isn’t merely using language as a neutral tool, he argues; language is partly “the product” of what the writer does. Yet the writer also becomes “the historian” of that same language, watching it solidify into patterns, habits, and rhetorical tics after the fact. Agency and record-keeping collapse into the same gesture: you make the thing that will later make sense of you.

The intent is to puncture the comforting picture of authorial mastery. De Man is allergic to the idea that meaning originates cleanly in a sovereign self and travels outward into obedient words. By pairing “historian” with “agent,” he suggests a writer is always arriving late to their own utterance, forced to interpret the consequences of choices already sedimented into style. The subtext is gently accusatory: if your language is partly your “action,” then you can’t fully outsource your rhetoric to tradition, genre, or “the times.” You’re implicated in the system you claim to describe.

Context matters here. Writing in the postwar academy, de Man was helping shift literary studies away from biography and toward textual operations, where figures of speech aren’t decorative but constitutive. Read against that backdrop, the line is a compact manifesto: criticism isn’t an external audit of meaning but an encounter with how language produces its own accounts of itself. There’s also a darker edge, given de Man’s later-exposed wartime journalism: the idea that one is both “agent” and “historian” of one’s language can sound less like theory and more like an unavoidable moral ledger.