Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"Semiology and Rhetoric" in Allegories of Reading
Literature as well as criticism—the difference between them being delusive—is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself.
In this snazzy short quote, we get a taste of how de Man takes down the philosophy/literature binary. His prose can be a slog, but it makes good sense if you're patient enough to give it a good old college try.
Here, de Man uses the word "criticism" to refer to what Derrida calls "metaphysics." But it's tomato/to-MAH-to, really. Both Derrida and de Man decide that these critical enterprises are only "delusively" different from literature. Translation: they're not different at all.
So literary criticism is just a kind of literature, and vice versa.
Oh, and did you notice how de Man keeps using different terms to refer to basically the same things? Not only literature/criticism, but also condemnation/privilege, rigor/unreliability, and naming /transformation. He does this in order to undo the false oppositions between these concepts. Sounds pretty Derridean, are we right?
What's great about literature and criticism alike, de Man writes, is that they let you move from naming something to transforming it. How? By "rigorously" exploring the ambiguities and other powers of language.
Obviously we realize that this is the kind of passage that would drive deconstruction's opponents positively bonkers. De Man, they'd point out, seems not only to be making very little sense here, but he also to be leaving us with no ground left to stand on. He sure does set fire to a lot of our common beliefs, but what's left aside from ashes?
These nasty nay-sayers might go on to protest: if language is both rigorous and unreliable, then what happens to truth? What is truth anyway?
And the deep-thinking de Man might reply: Tough noogies. C'est la vie. Live blind or live to embrace the world's complexities.