Paul de Man

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Paul de Man (December 6, 1919 – December 21, 1983) was a Belgian-born deconstructionist literary critic and theorist.

He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in the late 1950s. He then taught at Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Zurich, before ending up on the faculty in French and Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he was considered part of the Yale School of deconstruction. At the time of his death from cancer he was Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale. After his death, the discovery of almost 200 essays he wrote during World War II for collaborationist newspapers, including some explicitly anti-Semitic articles, caused a scandal and provoked a reconsideration of his life and work.

Contents

[edit] Academic work

In 1966 de Man met Jacques Derrida at a Johns Hopkins conference on structuralism at which Derrida first delivered "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." The two became close friends and colleagues. De Man elaborated a distinct deconstruction in his philosophically-oriented literary criticism of Romanticism, both English Romanticism and German Romanticism, with particular attention to William Wordsworth, John Keats, Maurice Blanchot, Marcel Proust, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, GWF Hegel, Walter Benjamin, William Butler Yeats, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others.

While de Man's work in the 1960s is normally distinguished from his deconstructive work in the 1970s, there is considerable continuity. His 1967 essay "Criticism and Crisis" argues that because literary works are understood to be fictions rather than factual accounts, they exemplify the break between a sign and its meaning: literature "means" nothing, but critics resist this insight because it shows up "the nothingness of human matters" (de Man quoting Rousseau, one of his favorite authors). De Man would later observe that, due to this resistance to acknowledging that literature does not "mean," English departments had become "large organizations in the service of everything except their own subject matter" ("The Return to Philology"), as the study of literature became the art of applying psychology, politics, history, or other disciplines to the literary text, in an effort to make the text "mean" something.

De Man is also known for subtle readings of English and German romantic and post-romantic poetry and philosophy (The Rhetoric of Romanticism) and concise and deeply ironic essays of a quasi-programmatic theoretical orientation. For example, in the essay "The Resistance to Theory", which explores the task and philosophical bases of literary theory, de Man uses the example of the classical trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic to argue that the use of linguistic sciences in literary theory and criticism (i.e., a structuralist approach) was able to harmonize the logical and grammatical dimension of literature, but only at the expense of effacing the rhetorical elements of texts which presented the greatest interpretive demands. Taking up the example of the title of Keats' poem The Fall of Hyperion, de Man draws out an irreducible interpretive undecidability which bears strong affinities to the same term in Derrida's work and some similarity to the notion of incommensurability as developed by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition and The Differend. De Man argues forcefully that the recurring motive of theoretical readings is to subsume these decisions under theoretical, futile generalizations, which are displaced in turn into harsh polemics about theory.

[edit] Influence and legacy

De Man followed developments in contemporary French literature, criticism, and theory. De Man's influence on literary criticism was considerable for many years, in no small part through his many influential students. He was a very charismatic teacher and influenced both students and fellow faculty members profoundly.

Much of de Man's work was collected or published posthumously. The Resistance to Theory was virtually complete at the time of his death. Andrzej Warminski, previously a colleague at Yale, edited the works already published which were to appear in a planned volume with the tentative title Aesthetic Ideology.

[edit] Wartime Journalism and Anti-Semitic Writing

After de Man's death, almost 200 articles he wrote during World War II for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper were discovered by Ortwin de Graef, a Belgian student researching de Man's early life and work.[1] In one piece, titled “Jews in Contemporary Literature,” de Man examined the argument that “the Jews” had “polluted” modern literature. The article argued that “our civilization” had remained healthy by resisting “the Semitic infiltration of all aspects of European life.” It endorsed sending the Jews of Europe to a colony “isolated from Europe” as “a solution to the Jewish problem.” [2] At the time De Man published the article, March 1941, Belgium had passed anti-Jewish legislation that expelled Jews from the professions of law, teaching, government service, and journalism. On August 4, 1942, the first trainload of Belgian Jews left Brussels for Auschwitz. But de Man continued to write for the Nazi-controlled newspaper Le Soir until November 1942 (although it is unlikely he was aware of what was happening to Jews in Auschwitz). [3]

The discovery of de Man's anti-semitic writing made page 1 of the New York Times,[4] and an angry debate followed: Jeffrey Mehlman, a professor of French at Boston University, declared there were “grounds for viewing the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II,” [5] while Jacques Derrida published a long piece responding to critics, declaring that “to judge, to condemn the work or the man . . . is to reproduce the exterminating gesture which one accuses de Man of not having armed himself against sooner.”[6] That seemed to some readers to draw an objectionable connection between criticism of de Man and extermination of the Jews.[7]

In addition to the debate over the significance of de Man’s wartime writings, there was also a debate over the significance of the fact that he had hidden his collaborationist past and his anti-Semitic writing during the entire 35 years of his life in the US. De Man's colleagues, students and contemporaries attempted to come to grips with both his early anti-Semitic writings and his subsequent secrecy about them in the volume Responses: on Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (edited by Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan; Nebraska, 1989).

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ for facsimiles of all the articles, see Warner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan, eds., Wartime Journalism, 1939-1943 by Paul de Man. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
  2. ^ ”Les Juifs dans la litterature actuelle” appears in ibid., p. 45.
  3. ^ see “Paul de Man: A Chronology, 1919-1949,” in Warner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan, eds., Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989
  4. ^ ”Yale Scholar Wrote for Pro-Nazi Newspaper,” New York Times, Dec. 1, 1987, p. 1.
  5. ^ quoted in David Lehman, "Deconstructing de Man’s Life,” Newsweek, Feb. 15, 1988, p. 63
  6. ^ Jacques Derrida, “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” Critical Inquiry 14 (spring 1988), 590-65; quote from 651; see also the “Critical Responses” in Critical Inquiry 15 (Summer 1989, 765-811, and Derrida’s angry reply, “Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments,” 812-873.
  7. ^ see for example Jon Wiener, “The Responsibilities of Friendship,” Critical Inquiry 15 (summer 1989), 797.

[edit] Works

  • Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, (ISBN 0-300-02845-8) 1979
  • Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (2nd ed.), (ISBN 0-8166-1135-1) 1983
  • The Rhetoric of Romanticism, (ISBN 0-231-05527-7) 1984
  • The Resistance to Theory, (ISBN 0-8166-1294-3) 1986
  • Wartime Journalism, 1934-1943, (ISBN 0-8032-1684-X) eds. Werner Hamacher, Neil Heertz, Thomas Keenan, 1988
  • Critical Writings: 1953-1978, (ISBN 0-8166-1695-7) Lindsay Waters (ed.), 1989
  • Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, (ISBN 0-8166-1695-7) eds. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski, 1993
  • Aesthetic Ideology, (ISBN 0-8166-2204-3) ed. Andrzej Warminski, 1996

[edit] Selected secondary works

  • Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch (eds.), Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing
  • Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, Andrzej Warminski (eds.), Material Events: Paul de Men and the Afterlife of Theory (essays pertaining to de Man's posthumously published work in Aesthetic Ideology)
  • Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man
  • Rodolphe Gasché, The Wild Card of Reading
  • Neil Hertz, Werner Hamacher, and Thomas Keenan (eds.), Responses to Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism
  • Jon Wiener, "The Responsibilities of Friendship: Jacques Derrida on Paul de Man's Collaboration." Critical Inquiry 14 (1989), 797-803.
  • Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology
  • David Lehman, Signs of the times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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