Andrzej Warminski is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He has published Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory with Edinburgh University Press (2013). He is also the author of Readings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger and the editor of Paul de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology.

The publication of this book is a historical event. Paul de Man (and Warminski) mean by the term "event" something that happens, something that changes history. This book does that with unparalleled intelligence, learning, and insight. It develops and deploys to wonderful effect a specifically Warminskian way of doing rhetorical readings.

• List of Abbreviations; Acknowledgements; Preface; I. Aesthetic Ideology; 1. Allegories of Reference: An Introduction to Aesthetic Ideology; 2. ‘As the poets do it’: On the Material Sublime; 3. Returns of the Sublime: Positing and Performative in Kant, Fichte, and Schiller; 4. Lightstruck: Hegel on the Sublime; II. Hegel/Marx; 5. Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life; 6. Man and Self-consciousness: Kojève, Romantic Ironist; 7. Next Steps: Lukács, Jameson, Post-Dialectics; III. Heidegger/Derrida; 8. Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin; 9. Discontinuous Shifts: History Reading History; 10. Machinal Effects: Derrida With and Without de Man; Appendix 1: A Question of an Other Order: Deflections of the Straight Man; Appendix 2: Response to Frances Ferguson.