Literal Material

This paper asserts that recent and popular trends in the academic study of religion, together loosely designated by the tag “the material turn,” proceed from a mistaken rejection of deconstruction, and its associated semiotic conceptualization of textuality. After showing how deconstruction, especially its stakes for perception and cognition, is misunderstood and misrepresented in representative writings of the material turn, the paper shifts focus to the work of Paul de Man in order to counter the material turn’s mistaken opposition of deconstruction to materialism. De Man argues that it is precisely in language that materiality, denoting that which refuses “transform[ation]…into the phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judgment,” registers for the subject, albeit only ever in the mode of error. Against this more rigorous account of materiality, the so-called material turn scans as an uncritical flight into the refuge of aesthetic mystification.