Patrícia San Payo
No que diz respeito à escrita enquanto inscrição material em de Man veja-se seguinte excerto de "Kant and Schiller" incluído em Aesthetic Ideology, citado igualmente por Barbara Johnson (Johnson, 1992): "When I speak of irreversibility, it is because in all those juxtaposition of texts, we have been aware of something which one could call a progression though it shouldn't be, a movement from cognition, to something which is no longuer a cognition but which is to some extent an ocurrence, which as the materiality of something that actually hapens, that actually occurs. And there, the sort of material ocurrence…that…leaves a trace on the world, that does something to the world as such, that notion of occurrence is not opposed in any sense to the notion of writing". Comentando esta passagem Barbara Johnson observa que a teoria da história em de Man surge associada a "actos de disrupção" responsáveis por descontinuidades que suspendem a cognição ao mesmo tempo que permitem a actualidade das ocorrências, na leitura.