Paul de Man - What is the difference? (not the main assignment)

Paul de Man, in his Semiology and Rhetoric, provides the example of Archie Bunker asking his wife "what is the difference" between tying laces over and under and his wife trying to explain to him those differences. However, Archie Bunker gets annoyed because his question was a rhetorical question. De Man uses that example to show that rhetoric and grammar cannot be equaled. In our example, it turns out that one question has two meanings - one is logical (grammatical) and one is rhetorical and they are mutually exclusive. The logical one assumes that the one who asks actually wants to know the difference. The rhetorical one implies it is a rhetorical question that seeks no answer. By using this example de Man proves that within one sentence there can exist multiple mutually exclusive meanings and that, by reducing a sentence to its grammatical structure, we oversee those meanings. He continues to explain that rhetoric "suspends logic" and opens up figural possibilities of language. De Man, therefore, equals rhetoric to literature because it is precisely in literature that language detaches from its literal (logical) meaning and enters the sphere of figural and associative (rhetorical).