Metonymy, Metaphor, and Perception

In his book Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man reviews Friedrich Nietzsche's notion that the paradigmatic structure of language is rhetorical instead of representational. This chapter presents discussions in which de Man differentiates between metaphor and metonymy after Jakobson's approach: paradigmatic versus syntagmatic, analogy versus contiguity, and poetic versus prosaic. In addition, de Man analyzes Marcel Proust's transgressive play with the two figures, underlining the divided practice of a text in which the direct preference for metaphor cannot seem to prevent its poetry from dissolving into the prose of metonymy. The purpose of de Man's reading of The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche is to demonstrate the undecidability of the text, arguing that any attempt to associate Nietzsche with a theory about metaphor and metonymy would be unreasonable.