Page 183 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

those things which are merely our own anthro- pomorphic fictions:
What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhe- torically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a nationfixed,canonic and binding...
In a manner reminiscent of the Socrates of the Cratylus, he self-consciously uses the metaphor, for our notions of truth, of coins whose obverses have become effaced, and which have lost their value as a result. Perception of nature can only be, originally, metaphorical but man, argues Nietzsche, 'forgets that the original metaphors of perception are metaphors, and takes them for things themselves.'
There are two main areas in which this argument has been influential.
First, some of the most eloquent writing about literature in the immediate postwar period takes up this antihumanist posture and attacks anthro- pomorphic fictions in literary language. This leads to experiments in a new form of writing in the Paris- based group, the Nouveau Roman, led by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet's explicit hostility to figurative language, including metaphor in particular, as a literary 'consolation,' is recorded in a number of brilliant essays, of which perhaps the most notable is 'Nature, humanism and tragedy' (1958) which uses the same argument as seen in Nietzsche (i.e., that 'nature knows no forms') to make a plea for a new kind of literature which will not 'take refuge' in tropes. Robbe-Grillet himself experiments in writing which agonizingly prolongs the act of meticulous description without figuration, notably in the opening of his novel Le Voyeur (1958). This posture is echoed in the early critical work of Roland Barthes, particularly in Writ- ing Degree Zero (1953, transl. 1967) which argues for a neutral 'zero' style in prose fiction which rejects the bourgeois compromise of 'style.'
Second, explicitly indebted to Nietzsche for its cen- tral metaphor of worn-out coins, stands the elaborate discussion of metaphor by Jacques Derrida, 'White mythology' (1974). The basic point which Derrida seeks to demonstrate is that it is impossible to arrive at a 'metaphorology' because metaphor cannot be eradicated from any metalanguage which would sta- bilize itself as non-metaphorical. This is because the nature of metaphor is such that it leaves its mark upon concepts—in a passage of almost Socratic bravura, Derrida reveals the metaphorical element in the Greek term 'trope' which means 'a turning,' and which is used, as shown above, as a stable instrument of taxonomy, to confine metaphor to a linguistic level only and remove it from the domain of the conceptual. Thus he argues that anything that claimed to be a metalanguage would have to have a meta-meta- language which would 'lead to classifying metaphors
by their source'; but the self-defeating nature of such a tropology is obvious:
If we wanted to conceive and classify all the metaphorical possibilities of philosophy, there would always be at least one metaphor which would be extended and remain out- side the system: that one, at least, which was needed to construct the concept of metaphor or,... the metaphor of metaphor.
Thus metaphor is assimilated to aporia and mis-en- abyme and made the instrument of an infinite regress at the heart of any empirical effort to separate the defining from the defined.
Paradoxically, in the realm of literary criticism, metaphor has once again assumed a position of tremendous power and is cultivated, by the Yale group of poststructuralists who follow Derrida, in particular Paul de Man and Hillis Miller, as a critical instrument for revealing the aporia of largely romantic, lyric poetry. Deconstruction, as it has come to be known, is in practice a secondary wave of Anglo-American formalism, using self-conscious metaphors of infinite regress to draw a charmed circle around literariness, largely in the genre of lyric poetry. Deconstruction— because of its obsession with the 'tropical'—is not a method which can be readily used in the discussion of extended narrative or prose fiction.
However, the discussion of metaphor has recently begun to use more representational assumptions. These are even evident in the earlier Derrida of Dis- semination (transl. 1972). The tour de force of this volume is the essay called 'Plato's Pharmakon" in which, drawing on the work of J. P. Vernant, he exposes the complexities of hidden metaphor in the Greek text of Plato's Phaedrus, using the technique triumphantly to draw attention to the metaphor used by Socrates, at the climactic point of his exposition, in claiming that truth is 'written upon the soul' and thus ostensibly to defeat his argument that 'writing,' and indeed rhetoric, is logically secondary to the spoken dialectic. The claim that Socrates is con- tradicting himself rests upon the presence of what Derrida takes to be unacknowledged metaphor in this text.
The implication here is that the use of a metaphor for Derrida, is not only conceptual, but also rep- resentational: the metaphor can drag along with it, it is implied, the whole of a belief system:
But it is not any less remarkable here that the so-called living discourse should suddenly be described by a 'meta- phor' borrowed from the order of the very thing one is trying to exclude from it, the order of its simulacrum. Yet this borrowing is rendered necessary by that which structurally links the intelligible to its copy, and the language describing dialectics cannot fail to call upon it.
[Author's italics] Derrida is using, ironically, against Plato, the Platonic
argument of the Cratylus. But: 'that which structurally 161
Metaphor inLiterature