Talk:Paul de Man

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.
Biography Portal
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the project's quality scale. [FAQ]

Please rate the article and, if you wish, leave comments here regarding your assessment or the strengths and weaknesses of the article.
Photo request It is requested that a picture or pictures of this person be included in this article to improve its quality.
Socrates
Philosophy Portal
This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Philosophy, which collaborates on articles related to philosophy. To participate, you can edit this article or visit the project page for more details.
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
??? This article has not yet received an importance rating on the importance scale.

Lots to be said. Not a lot of information on the kind of thing most people want to know about from de Man: the wartime journalism. I reckon a reading of "The Resistance to Theory" would be a reasonable start. Buffyg 13:21, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Contents which put De Man in the controversy has no source. I added "Advocate/defender of De Man claim that" to make it bit more NPOV. Darida's deconstruction of anti semetic writing is a well known fact. So I don't think it is NPOV to say Darida did not try to excuse DeMan's anti semetism. Vapour

I'd say this is obscurantism that results in POV pushing and unsupportable inference. There is evidence. That's it, whoever said it or put it to whatever use is a distinct problem, and you end up pushing far more POV by insisting that someone pointing out this or that bit of evidence is doing to so to advocate or defend this or that cause. If I say that de Man helped out Jews shortly after penning an antisemitic literary review, which is backed up by evidence, am really I trying to advocate some cause that might be called his? If I have to include all of that here, I'd have to disagree that that implies that I am defending him, as that would be the responsible task of anyone trying to report on these matters. Conversely, if someone were to exclude such information in characterising de Man, that would not necessarily mean that such a person were "criticising" or "attacking" him, but it certainly would mean try to provide an account that would be partial in some sense that would need to be accounted for. I'd say there's a lot more POV being pushed when someone removes a reasonable characterisation of "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell" and claims that its form could just as easily be employed to declare Mein Kampf rehabilitated, which is plainly untrue and an exercise in the very thing to which one claims to object. If it's POV to say that someone said what they said, wikipedia's a doomed enterprise. The fact that others do not accept certain facts that are not matters of interpretation does not mean that Derrida did not say this and did not cease to restate that point throughout his career, as the matter was raised with some regularity. That being said, it's reasonable to say that articles appeared in The Nation and The National Review which made contrary insistences, even if one can readily ascertain that truth is manifestly and immediately given absurdly relativist treatment in advancing those articles. To that end I'm more than happy to make the revisions and cite the sources. Perhaps Professor Wiener might be willing to make an opportunity of this article to issue some long-overdue corrections. Buffyg 01:21, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wartime writing

As wikipedia's verifiability policy states: "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth." The point is that verifiability is not simply that someone said such and such but whether the claims that one reproduces are themselves verifiable and are untrue by implication. To be excluded from the article, one needn't evaluate the second claim, as the first suffices. Credulous treatment of sources is not NPOV, particularly where the result is to introduce claims and a tone that strongly favours a particular point of view. In particular: "Notable among those essays was Derrida's attempt to deconstruct de Man's anti-semitic writing to suggest an alternative interpretation that was not anti-semitic; that effort was derided by many critics, some suggesting that it showed how "Mein Kampf" could be rehabilitated with the same approach." As well as: "His defenders replied that secrecy was not the same as deceit." I see a lot of claims that I view as POV pushing because the attribution is imprecise and makes characterisations about the motives of the sources that are not themselves given to verifiability. I have added tags accordingly and brought the matter to the attention of the editor who made these changes. I'm away from home for another two weeks and therefore can't pull sources myself, but it is the responsibility of those who have introduced these edits to show that their claims can be verified and to present them in a genuinely neutral voice. Buffyg 03:55, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Not that I disagree with the tagging, but I think the main problem with this passage is not bias but citation of sources on either side of the argument. There werew only a few unattributed statements of opinion that seemed to me to run afoul of WP:NPOV, and so I have removed them and, provisionally, removed the NPOV tag. Also, it would be nice if possible to cite more authoritative sources than the Wall Street Journal (hardly a literary-critical or European-history review). -- Rbellin|Talk 04:14, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
You lost me on NPOV in revising the claim to state that Derrida was "suggesting an alternative interpretation that was not anti-semitic", which goes so far beyond verifiability that's counterfactual POV pushing. As this requires Derrida to say the opposite of what he wrote, I don't see how the edit can pull the claim out of a nosedive. How does one can maintain NPOV by attributing any claim that offers any indication of nuance to "defenders" and the like? Buffyg 04:43, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
If you object to that sentence, remove it. I was trying to reword the existing sentence away from simple self-contradiction (it claimed that Derrida interpreted anti-Semitic writing as not anti-Semitic), not claiming that it adequately summarized Derrida's piece in Memoires. And in this case, since opinions do legitimately vary (even some critics who are big fans of his "nuance" elsewhere see no room for moral ambiguity in de Man's wartime writing), the best way to proceed is not to make any absolute claims but to find specific citations to replace the (currently unacceptably weasel-worded, I agree) statements about "opponents" and "defenders." Think of the weasel words as mere placeholders until specific citations can be found, and if that doesn't happen after a few months, we can revisit the issue of whether they should remain in the article. -- Rbellin|Talk 05:37, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
Fair enough on needing to weed out the weaseling. I would not for a moment dispute that a number of people who had associated themselves with Derrida and de Man decided to contribute to the Responses volume with comments critical of de Manian deconstruction and thereafter dissociate themselves with deconstruction tout court. It would probably be useful to note that a great deal of attention has focused on de Man's reading of Rousseau's Confessions in "The Purloined Ribbon", collected as "Confession (Excuses)" in Allegories of Reading, as well as his comments on autobiographical writing in "Autobiography as De-Facement" (forgive me, but the cites are mostly from memory). Derrida had some sharper words to say about de Manian deconstruction much later (in life.after.theory, again, if memory serves) and indicated that he felt it necessary to defer elaboration and articulation of certain differences with de Man regarding deconstruction until much later, as to do so in 1986 would have been "disastrous" (again from memory) to the reception of de Man's work, which Derrida nevertheless continued to see as valuable. Buffyg 13:51, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
Why is it that the only statements tagged by BuffyG as requiring citations concern criticism of de Man's antisemitic writings -- nothing else in the essay? That itself seems to be a kind of violation of NPOV. I'm willing to add the citations-- virtually all will be either to the "Responses" volume, the Lehman book, or the special issue of Critical Inquiry -- all of which are cited in "Secondary Works" bibliography in the article, and well-known to those who followed the controversy--including, presumably, BuffyG.Jonwiener 06:38, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Please note that most of the requests for citation of specific claims were not inserted by me, so it's not a matter of "statements tagged by BuffyG".

In any case, the more controversial the claims, the higher the burden for verification and attribution. The section on academic work offers summaries of clearly identified essays, so verification and attribution is less of a problem in such cases because they refer to a more precisely specified work rather than to a list of sources. That's not nearly the same problem for citation, attribution, or verification as is presented by a claim like "His defenders replied that secrecy was not the same as deceit" (as I've asked you on your talk page: which defenders? replying to whom? what exactly is the charge of deceit?). Verification is far more difficult when it isn't clear what sources you are using or how you are weighting them. To be frank, having consulted those sources extensively (I've read much of that material several times over the course of more than a decade), I don't believe many of the claims you've added can in fact be verified or need to be evaluated far more rigourously as to their credibility. Buffyg 22:30, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

So the Wikipedia entry for Paul de Man was cleansed of any references to his wartime writing. His students and defenders apparently don't want readers to find out about that. They could have corrected errors or added alternative interpretations or provided missing citations--but they prefer to conceal this part of de Man's life and work. Let's see if my new effort is deleted like the old one was. Jonwiener 19:55, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Did de Man "endorse" a territorial solution?

The "Territorial Solution to the Jewish Question" was the Nazi scheme to deport the European Jews to some colony, like Madagascar -- not in the hopes of their thriving or even surviving, but a step shy of genocide per se.

I've edited the article to remove the false claim that de Man "endorsed" such a program in "The Jews in Contemporary Literature." What he actually said was this:

Furthermore, one sees that a solution of the Jewish problem that would aim at the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not entail, for the literary life of the west, deplorable consequences.

(Martin McQuillan transl., in McQuillan, Paul de Man (Routledge 2001).

The actual statement is obnoxious enough without exaggerating it into an "endorsement" when it's no such thing. Depending on the syntax, one could even argue that de Man concedes "deplorable consequences" for the Jews themselves, though that is a stretch. ----Andersonblog 18:32, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] How do you pronounce his last name?

Specifically, do you drop the 'n'? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Critic9328 (talk • contribs) 01:39, 7 April 2008 (UTC)