Notion of Paul de Man on Romantic Aesthetic

Phenomenology of Hartman shifts to the materiality of Paul de Man, what he calls the "prosaic materiality of the letter" or words which create a question of epistemological uncertainty or in other words, known as the indeterminacy of meaning.

Paul de Man, following and adapting Derrida, discuss that rhetorical tropes (language) used are "not deviations from names or descriptions of objects but they themselves are objects. Here the deconstructive insight is that, language does not simply fail to refer to objects, but fail to refer to them "adequately". Language itself is an object and it also has its own ontological status. Paul de Man challenges Kant's aesthetic formalism claiming that what appears to the human eye (the object) is equally responsible for the aesthetic experience an individual gets; emphasizing the materiality of the object. The deconstructive focus on the materiality and formal aspects of language makes de Man to argue that what is said in language is nothing more than the linguistic material; the signs which are objects. Interesting thing is that new criticism had emphasized the multitudes of meaning united on a whole by the ambiguity but for de Man language is inadequate due to the ambiguity created by the ambivalence ( having multiple meaning) of linguistic sign.