Paul de Man
Encyclopedia
Paul de Man was a Belgian
-born deconstruction
ist literary critic
and theorist
.
He began teaching at Bard College
. Later, he completed his Ph.D.
at Harvard University
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 and chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale. After his death, the discovery of some two hundred articles he wrote during World War II
for collaborationist
newspapers, including one explicitly anti-Semitic
, caused a scandal and provoked a reconsideration of his life and work. De Man oversaw the dissertations of Gayatri Spivak (at Cornell), Barbara Johnson
(at Yale), Samuel Weber
(at Cornell), and many other noted scholars.
at a conference at Johns Hopkins University on structuralism
during which Derrida first delivered his essay "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
, G.W.F. Hegel
, Walter Benjamin
, William Butler Yeats
, Friedrich Hoelderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke
.
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 lays bare "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.
Among the central threads running through de Man's work is his attempt to tease out the tension between rhetoric (which in de Man's usage tends to mean figural language and trope) and meaning, seeking out moments in the text where linguistic forces "tie themselves into a knot which arrests the process of understanding." De Man's earlier essays from the 1960s, collected in Blindness and Insight, represent an attempt to seek out these paradox
es in the texts of New Criticism
and move beyond formalism
. One of De Man's central topoi
is of the blindness on which these critical readings are predicated, that the "insight seems instead to have been gained from a negative movement that animates the critic's thought, an unstated principle that leads his language away from its asserted stand...as if the very possibility of assertion had been put into question." Here de Man attempts to undercut the notion of the poetic work as a unified, atemporal icon
, a self-possessed repository of meaning freed from the intentionalist and affective fallacies. In de Man's argument, formalist and New Critical valorization of the "organic" nature of poetry is ultimately self-defeating: the notion of the verbal icon is undermined by the irony and ambiguity inherit within it. Form ultimately acts as "both a creator and undoer of organic totalities," and "the final insight...annihilated the premises which led up to it."
In Allegories of Reading, de Man further explores the tensions arising in figural language in Nietzsche, Rousseau, Rilke, and Proust. In these essays, he concentrates on crucial passages which have a metalinguistic
function or metacritical implications, particularly those where figural language has a dependency on classical philosophical oppositions (essence
/accident, synchronic/diachronic, appearance/reality) which are so central to Western discourse
. Many of the essays in this volume attempt to undercut figural totalization, the notion that one can control or dominate a discourse or phenomenon through metaphor
. In de Man's discussion of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, for instance, he claims that genetic conceptions of history appearing in the text are undercut by the rhetoric
al strategies Nietzsche employs: "the deconstruction does not occur between statements, as in a logical refutation or a dialectic, but happens instead between, on the one hand, metalinguistic statements about the rhetorical nature of language and, on the other hand, a rhetorical praxis that puts these statements into question." For de Man, an "Allegory of Reading" emerges when texts are subjected to such scrutiny and reveal this tension; a reading wherein the text reveals its own assumptions about language, and in so doing dictates a statement about undecidability
, the difficulties inherent in totalization, their own readability, or the "limitations of textual authority."
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. Specifically noteworthy is his critical dismantling of the Romantic ideology and the linguistic assumptions which underlie it. His arguments follow roughly as follows. First, de Man seeks to deconstruct the privileged claims in Romanticism of symbol
over allegory
, and metaphor
over metonymy
. In his reading, because of the implication of self-identity
and wholeness which is inherent in the Romantics' conception of metaphor, when this self-identity decomposes, so also does the means of overcoming the dualism
between subject
and object
, which Romantic metaphor sought to transcend. In de Man's reading, to compensate for this inability, Romanticism constantly relies on allegory to attain the wholeness established by the totality of the symbol.
In addition, in his 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. He posits that the resistance to theory is the resistance to reading, thus the resistance to theory is theory itself. Or the resistance to theory is what constitutes the possibility and existence of theory. 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 polemic
s about theory.
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.
were discovered by Ortwin de Graef, a Belgian student researching de Man's early life and work. de Graef contacted Samuel Weber
who, in turn, consulted Derrida. Derrida would later arrange for the collection and publication of de Man's war time journalism. In one piece, titled “Jews in Contemporary Literature,” de Man examined the way "[v]ulgar anti-semitism willingly takes pleasure in considering post-war cultural phenomenon (after the war of 14-18) as degenerate and decadent because they are [enjewished]." He notes that "Literature does not escape this lapidary judgement: it is sufficient to discover a few Jewish writers under Latinized pseudonyms for all contemporary production to be considered polluted and evil. This conception entails rather dangerous consequences... it would be a rather unflattering appreciation of western writers to reduce them to being mere imitators of a Jewish culture which is foreign to them." The article continued to claim that contemporary literature had not broken from tradition as a result of the First World War and that "the Jews cannot claim to have been its creators, nor even to have exercised a preponderant influence over its development. On any closer examination, this influence appears to have extraordinarily little importance since one might have expected that, given the specific characteristics of the Jewish Spirit, the later would have played a more brilliant role in this artistic production." The article concluded that “our civilization... [b]y keeping, in spite of semitic interference in all aspects of European life, an intact originality and character... has shown that its basic character is healthy." It concluded that "the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe" as “a solution to the Jewish problem
” (probably referring to a suggested Jewish colony in Madagascar
, but not to Hitler's Final Solution
, which was not widely known at this early period) would lack any "deplorable consequences" for "the literary life of the west."
This is the only known article in which de Man pronounced such views. 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 Mechelen
for Auschwitz
. De Man continued to write for the (during the war) Nazi
-controlled newspaper Le Soir
until November 1942, although it is unlikely he was aware of what was happening to the Jews in Auschwitz. Subsequently, several facts that have come to light rendered any sweeping Anti-semitic allegations questionable: "...in 1942 or 1943, about a year after the journalistic publication of his compromising statement, he and his wife sheltered for several days in their apartment the Jewish pianist Esther Sluszny and her husband, who were then illegal citizens in hiding from the Nazis. During this same period, de Man was meeting regularly with Georges Goriely, a member of the Belgian Resistance. According to Goriely's own testimony, he never for one minute feared denunciation of his underground activities by Paul de Man." It is intriguing as well that De Man's example in "Jews and Contemporary Literature" of a solidly "European" contemporary author is Franz Kafka
, though there is no way to determine whether he was privately aware of Kafka's Jewish ancestry.
, declared there were “grounds for viewing the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II”, while Derrida published a long piece responding to critics, declaring that “To judge, to condemn the work or the man on the basis of what was a brief episode, to call for closing, that is to say, at least figuratively, for censuring or burning his books is to reproduce the exterminating gesture which one accuses de Man of not having armed himself against sooner with the necessary vigilance. It is not even to draw a lesson that he, de Man, learned to draw from the war.” That seemed to some readers to draw an objectionable connection between criticism of de Man and extermination of the Jews. Derrida, a Jew himself, however, does not refrain from condemning de Man's wartime writings.
Richard J. Evans
, in his book "In Defence of History", states that the defence of De Man by other relativists and postmodernists went too far. According to him, the defenders used deconstruction to argue away his collaboration. He heavily criticises Derrida, and calls the critique of the deconstructionists "riddled with contradictions". He says that, on the one hand, they state (in their theories) the infinte possibilities of textual interpretation, but on the other hand they argued that it was wrong to call De Man's early writings antisemitic.
In addition to the debate over the significance of de Man’s wartime writings, there was also a debate over the fact that he had not publicly declared his wartime writings throughout the thirty-five years of his life in America. However, it has since come to light that in 1955, while de Man was at Harvard, there was an anonymous denunciation concerning his activity in Belgium during the war. de Man explained himself in a letter to the Head of the Society of Fellows: "In 1940 and 1941 I wrote some literary articles in the newspaper "Le Soir" and I, like most of the other contributors, stopped doing so when Nazi thought-control did no longer allow freedom of statement. During the rest of the occupation I did what was the duty of any decent person. After the war, everyone was subjected to a very severe examination of his political behaviour, and my name was not a favourable recommendation. In order to obtain a passport one had not merely to produce a certificate of good conduct but also a so-called "certificat de civisime" which stated one was cleared of any collaboration. I could not possibly have come to this country two times, with proper passport and visa, if there had been the slightest reproach against me. To accuse me now, behind my back... is a slanderous attack which leaves me helpless."
De Man's colleagues, students and contemporaries attempted to come to grips with both his early writings and his subsequent silence about them in the volume Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (edited by Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan; Nebraska, 1989).
After the war de Man's career took him to the United States. His wife, Anaïde Baraghian, was denied a visa because she had no work waiting for her in America. Instead she and the children sailed to Argentina where her parents had recently emigrated. De Man would remarry in America. This period in de Man's life, heavily fictionalized, formed the basis of Henri Thomas's
1954 novel Le parjure.
A 1992 newspaper article reports, on the basis of interviews with people who knew de Man and documents which are not publicly available, that de Man married his second wife prior to obtaining a divorce from his first, that this second wife was a student at Bard College (where de Man worked from 1949–1951) and that he was fired from that institution upon accusations of petty thievery and chicanery.
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
-born deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
ist literary critic
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
and theorist
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
.
He began teaching at Bard College
Bard College
Bard College, founded in 1860 as "St. Stephen's College", is a small four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.-Location:...
. Later, he completed his Ph.D.
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
in the late 1950s. He then taught at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
, Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
, and the University of Zurich
University of Zurich
The University of Zurich , located in the city of Zurich, is the largest university in Switzerland, with over 25,000 students. It was founded in 1833 from the existing colleges of theology, law, medicine and a new faculty of philosophy....
, before ending up on the faculty in French and Comparative Literature at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
, where he was considered part of the Yale School
Yale school (deconstruction)
The Yale School is a colloquial name for an influential group of literary critics, theorists, and philosophers of literature that were influenced by Jacques Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction...
of deconstruction. At the time of his death from cancer, he was Sterling Professor
Sterling Professor
A Sterling Professorship is the highest academic rank at Yale University, awarded to a tenured faculty member considered one of the best in his or her field...
of the Humanities and chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale. After his death, the discovery of some two hundred articles he wrote during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
for collaborationist
Collaborationism
Collaborationism is cooperation with enemy forces against one's country. Legally, it may be considered as a form of treason. Collaborationism may be associated with criminal deeds in the service of the occupying power, which may include complicity with the occupying power in murder, persecutions,...
newspapers, including one explicitly anti-Semitic
Anti-Semitism
Antisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...
, caused a scandal and provoked a reconsideration of his life and work. De Man oversaw the dissertations of Gayatri Spivak (at Cornell), Barbara Johnson
Barbara Johnson
Barbara Johnson was an American literary critic and translator. She was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University...
(at Yale), Samuel Weber
Samuel Weber
Samuel Weber is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, as well as a professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland....
(at Cornell), and many other noted scholars.
Academic work
In 1966, de Man met Jacques DerridaJacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
at a conference at Johns Hopkins University on structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
during which Derrida first delivered his essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences". The two became close friends and colleagues. De Man elaborated a distinct deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...
in his philosophically
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
-oriented literary criticism
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
of Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
, both English Romanticism and German Romanticism
German Romanticism
For the general context, see Romanticism.In the philosophy, art, and culture of German-speaking countries, German Romanticism was the dominant movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. German Romanticism developed relatively late compared to its English counterpart, coinciding in its...
, with particular attention to William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
, John Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
, Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida.-Works:...
, Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
, Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
, Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
, G.W.F. Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
, Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...
, William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
, Friedrich Hoelderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke , better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language...
.
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
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
: literature "means" nothing, but critics resist this insight because it lays bare "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
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, politics
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
, history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
, or other disciplines to the literary text, in an effort to make the text "mean" something.
Among the central threads running through de Man's work is his attempt to tease out the tension between rhetoric (which in de Man's usage tends to mean figural language and trope) and meaning, seeking out moments in the text where linguistic forces "tie themselves into a knot which arrests the process of understanding." De Man's earlier essays from the 1960s, collected in Blindness and Insight, represent an attempt to seek out these paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
es in the texts of New Criticism
New Criticism
New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...
and move beyond formalism
Formalism (literature)
Formalism is a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text.In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar...
. One of De Man's central topoi
Topos
In mathematics, a topos is a type of category that behaves like the category of sheaves of sets on a topological space...
is of the blindness on which these critical readings are predicated, that the "insight seems instead to have been gained from a negative movement that animates the critic's thought, an unstated principle that leads his language away from its asserted stand...as if the very possibility of assertion had been put into question." Here de Man attempts to undercut the notion of the poetic work as a unified, atemporal icon
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
, a self-possessed repository of meaning freed from the intentionalist and affective fallacies. In de Man's argument, formalist and New Critical valorization of the "organic" nature of poetry is ultimately self-defeating: the notion of the verbal icon is undermined by the irony and ambiguity inherit within it. Form ultimately acts as "both a creator and undoer of organic totalities," and "the final insight...annihilated the premises which led up to it."
In Allegories of Reading, de Man further explores the tensions arising in figural language in Nietzsche, Rousseau, Rilke, and Proust. In these essays, he concentrates on crucial passages which have a metalinguistic
Metalinguistics
Metalinguistics is the branch of linguistics that studies language and its relationship to culture and society. It is the study of dialogue relationships between units of speech communication as manifestations and enactments of co-existence. The neologism 'metalinguistics' emerged between 1950 and...
function or metacritical implications, particularly those where figural language has a dependency on classical philosophical oppositions (essence
Essence
In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the object or substance has contingently, without...
/accident, synchronic/diachronic, appearance/reality) which are so central to Western discourse
Discourse
Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...
. Many of the essays in this volume attempt to undercut figural totalization, the notion that one can control or dominate a discourse or phenomenon through metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
. In de Man's discussion of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, for instance, he claims that genetic conceptions of history appearing in the text are undercut by the rhetoric
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. As a subject of formal study and a productive civic practice, rhetoric has played a central role in the Western...
al strategies Nietzsche employs: "the deconstruction does not occur between statements, as in a logical refutation or a dialectic, but happens instead between, on the one hand, metalinguistic statements about the rhetorical nature of language and, on the other hand, a rhetorical praxis that puts these statements into question." For de Man, an "Allegory of Reading" emerges when texts are subjected to such scrutiny and reveal this tension; a reading wherein the text reveals its own assumptions about language, and in so doing dictates a statement about undecidability
Undecidable
Undecidable may refer to:In mathematics and logic* Undecidable problem - a decision problem which no algorithm can decide* "Undecidable" is sometimes used as a synonym of "independent", where a formula in mathematical logic is independent of a logical theory if neither that formula nor its negation...
, the difficulties inherent in totalization, their own readability, or the "limitations of textual authority."
De Man is also known for subtle readings of English and German
German Romanticism
For the general context, see Romanticism.In the philosophy, art, and culture of German-speaking countries, German Romanticism was the dominant movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. German Romanticism developed relatively late compared to its English counterpart, coinciding in its...
romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
and post-romantic poetry and philosophy (The Rhetoric of Romanticism) and concise and deeply ironic essays of a quasi-programmatic theoretical orientation. Specifically noteworthy is his critical dismantling of the Romantic ideology and the linguistic assumptions which underlie it. His arguments follow roughly as follows. First, de Man seeks to deconstruct the privileged claims in Romanticism of symbol
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
over allegory
Allegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
, and metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
over metonymy
Metonymy
Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept...
. In his reading, because of the implication of self-identity
Self-concept
Self-concept is a multi-dimensional construct that refers to an individual's perception of "self" in relation to any number of characteristics, such as academics , gender roles and sexuality, racial identity, and many others. Each of these characteristics is a research domain Self-concept (also...
and wholeness which is inherent in the Romantics' conception of metaphor, when this self-identity decomposes, so also does the means of overcoming the dualism
Dualism
Dualism denotes a state of two parts. The term 'dualism' was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse but has been diluted in general or common usages. Dualism can refer to moral dualism, Dualism (from...
between subject
Subject (philosophy)
In philosophy, a subject is a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness or a relationship with another entity . A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed...
and object
Object (philosophy)
An object in philosophy is a technical term often used in contrast to the term subject. Consciousness is a state of cognition that includes the subject, which can never be doubted as only it can be the one who doubts, and some object or objects that may or may not have real existence without...
, which Romantic metaphor sought to transcend. In de Man's reading, to compensate for this inability, Romanticism constantly relies on allegory to attain the wholeness established by the totality of the symbol.
In addition, in his essay "The Resistance to Theory
The Resistance to Theory
The Resistance to Theory is an essay by Paul de Man , a renowned literary critic and theorist belonging to the Yale School of Deconstruction which appeared in Yale French Studies, 63 and is widely anthologized...
", which explores the task and philosophical bases of literary theory
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...
, 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
Structural Linguistics
Structural linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. De Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a static system of interconnected units...
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. He posits that the resistance to theory is the resistance to reading, thus the resistance to theory is theory itself. Or the resistance to theory is what constitutes the possibility and existence of theory. 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
Jean-François Lyotard
Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher and literary theorist. He is well known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition...
in The Postmodern Condition
The Postmodern Condition
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge is a short but influential philosophy book by Jean-François Lyotard in which he analyzes the epistemology of postmodern culture as the end of 'grand narratives' or metanarratives, which he considers a quintessential feature of modernity. The book was...
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 polemic
Polemic
A polemic is a variety of arguments or controversies made against one opinion, doctrine, or person. Other variations of argument are debate and discussion...
s about theory.
Influence and legacy
De Man followed developments in contemporary FrenchFrench language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
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.
Wartime journalism and anti-Semitic writing
After de Man's death, some two hundred articles he wrote during World War II for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper Le SoirLe Soir
Le Soir is a Berliner Format Belgian newspaper. Le Soir was founded in 1887 by Emile Rossel. It is the most popular Francophone newspaper in Belgium, and considered a newspaper of record.-Editorial stance:...
were discovered by Ortwin de Graef, a Belgian student researching de Man's early life and work. de Graef contacted Samuel Weber
Samuel Weber
Samuel Weber is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, as well as a professor at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland....
who, in turn, consulted Derrida. Derrida would later arrange for the collection and publication of de Man's war time journalism. In one piece, titled “Jews in Contemporary Literature,” de Man examined the way "[v]ulgar anti-semitism willingly takes pleasure in considering post-war cultural phenomenon (after the war of 14-18) as degenerate and decadent because they are [enjewished]." He notes that "Literature does not escape this lapidary judgement: it is sufficient to discover a few Jewish writers under Latinized pseudonyms for all contemporary production to be considered polluted and evil. This conception entails rather dangerous consequences... it would be a rather unflattering appreciation of western writers to reduce them to being mere imitators of a Jewish culture which is foreign to them." The article continued to claim that contemporary literature had not broken from tradition as a result of the First World War and that "the Jews cannot claim to have been its creators, nor even to have exercised a preponderant influence over its development. On any closer examination, this influence appears to have extraordinarily little importance since one might have expected that, given the specific characteristics of the Jewish Spirit, the later would have played a more brilliant role in this artistic production." The article concluded that “our civilization... [b]y keeping, in spite of semitic interference in all aspects of European life, an intact originality and character... has shown that its basic character is healthy." It concluded that "the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe" as “a solution to the Jewish problem
Jewish Question
The Jewish question encompasses the issues and resolutions surrounding the historically unequal civil, legal and national statuses between minority Ashkenazi Jews and non-Jews, particularly in Europe. The first issues discussed and debated by societies, politicians and writers in western and...
” (probably referring to a suggested Jewish colony in Madagascar
Madagascar
The Republic of Madagascar is an island country located in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa...
, but not to Hitler's Final Solution
Final Solution
The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...
, which was not widely known at this early period) would lack any "deplorable consequences" for "the literary life of the west."
This is the only known article in which de Man pronounced such views. 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 Mechelen
Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance
The Kazerne Dossin, a former casern in Mechelen, Flanders, Belgium, was partially renovated for civil housing and, upon the Flemish Government, the Province of Antwerp and the City of Mechelen's financing the purchase of the ground floor and the basement of the right wing, in 1996 these became the...
for Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...
. De Man continued to write for the (during the war) Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
-controlled newspaper Le Soir
Le Soir
Le Soir is a Berliner Format Belgian newspaper. Le Soir was founded in 1887 by Emile Rossel. It is the most popular Francophone newspaper in Belgium, and considered a newspaper of record.-Editorial stance:...
until November 1942, although it is unlikely he was aware of what was happening to the Jews in Auschwitz. Subsequently, several facts that have come to light rendered any sweeping Anti-semitic allegations questionable: "...in 1942 or 1943, about a year after the journalistic publication of his compromising statement, he and his wife sheltered for several days in their apartment the Jewish pianist Esther Sluszny and her husband, who were then illegal citizens in hiding from the Nazis. During this same period, de Man was meeting regularly with Georges Goriely, a member of the Belgian Resistance. According to Goriely's own testimony, he never for one minute feared denunciation of his underground activities by Paul de Man." It is intriguing as well that De Man's example in "Jews and Contemporary Literature" of a solidly "European" contemporary author is Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
, though there is no way to determine whether he was privately aware of Kafka's Jewish ancestry.
Posthumous controversy
The discovery of de Man's wartime writing made the front page of the New York Times, and angry debate followed. Jeffrey Mehlman, a professor of French at Boston UniversityBoston University
Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
, declared there were “grounds for viewing the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II”, while Derrida published a long piece responding to critics, declaring that “To judge, to condemn the work or the man on the basis of what was a brief episode, to call for closing, that is to say, at least figuratively, for censuring or burning his books is to reproduce the exterminating gesture which one accuses de Man of not having armed himself against sooner with the necessary vigilance. It is not even to draw a lesson that he, de Man, learned to draw from the war.” That seemed to some readers to draw an objectionable connection between criticism of de Man and extermination of the Jews. Derrida, a Jew himself, however, does not refrain from condemning de Man's wartime writings.
Richard J. Evans
Richard J. Evans
Richard John Evans is a British academic and historian, prominently known for his history of Germany.-Life:Evans was born in London, of Welsh parentage, and is now Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and President of Wolfson College...
, in his book "In Defence of History", states that the defence of De Man by other relativists and postmodernists went too far. According to him, the defenders used deconstruction to argue away his collaboration. He heavily criticises Derrida, and calls the critique of the deconstructionists "riddled with contradictions". He says that, on the one hand, they state (in their theories) the infinte possibilities of textual interpretation, but on the other hand they argued that it was wrong to call De Man's early writings antisemitic.
In addition to the debate over the significance of de Man’s wartime writings, there was also a debate over the fact that he had not publicly declared his wartime writings throughout the thirty-five years of his life in America. However, it has since come to light that in 1955, while de Man was at Harvard, there was an anonymous denunciation concerning his activity in Belgium during the war. de Man explained himself in a letter to the Head of the Society of Fellows: "In 1940 and 1941 I wrote some literary articles in the newspaper "Le Soir" and I, like most of the other contributors, stopped doing so when Nazi thought-control did no longer allow freedom of statement. During the rest of the occupation I did what was the duty of any decent person. After the war, everyone was subjected to a very severe examination of his political behaviour, and my name was not a favourable recommendation. In order to obtain a passport one had not merely to produce a certificate of good conduct but also a so-called "certificat de civisime" which stated one was cleared of any collaboration. I could not possibly have come to this country two times, with proper passport and visa, if there had been the slightest reproach against me. To accuse me now, behind my back... is a slanderous attack which leaves me helpless."
De Man's colleagues, students and contemporaries attempted to come to grips with both his early writings and his subsequent silence about them in the volume Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (edited by Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan; Nebraska, 1989).
After the war de Man's career took him to the United States. His wife, Anaïde Baraghian, was denied a visa because she had no work waiting for her in America. Instead she and the children sailed to Argentina where her parents had recently emigrated. De Man would remarry in America. This period in de Man's life, heavily fictionalized, formed the basis of Henri Thomas's
Henri Thomas
Henri Thomas was a French writer and poet.-Life:Henri Thomas was born in 1912 and grew up in the Alsace/Lorraine region of France. He moved to Paris to attend the prestigious Henri IV high school, working with the noted essayist Alain...
1954 novel Le parjure.
A 1992 newspaper article reports, on the basis of interviews with people who knew de Man and documents which are not publicly available, that de Man married his second wife prior to obtaining a divorce from his first, that this second wife was a student at Bard College (where de Man worked from 1949–1951) and that he was fired from that institution upon accusations of petty thievery and chicanery.
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 TheoryThe Resistance to TheoryThe Resistance to Theory is an essay by Paul de Man , a renowned literary critic and theorist belonging to the Yale School of Deconstruction which appeared in Yale French Studies, 63 and is widely anthologized...
, (ISBN 0-8166-1294-3) 1986 - Wartime Journalism, 1934–1943, (ISBN 0-8032-1684-X) eds. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, 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
- The Post-Romantic Predicament, (ISBN 9780748641055) ed. Martin McQuillan, forthcoming 2012 [de Man's dissertation, collected with other writings from his Harvard University years, 1956-1961]
Selected secondary works
- Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch (eds.), Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing
- Claire Colbrook, Paul de Man, Tom Cohen, and J. Hillis MillerJ. Hillis MillerJoseph Hillis Miller, Jr. is an American literary critic who has been heavily influenced by—and who has heavily influenced—deconstruction.- Early life and education :...
. Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, On Benjamin. New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2011. (Includes de Man's notes for "Conclusions: on The Task of the Translator" in facsimile and transcript form.) - Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, Andrzej Warminski (eds.), Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (essays pertaining to de Man's posthumously published work in Aesthetic Ideology)
- Ortwin De Graef. Serenity in Crisis: A Preface to Paul de Man, 1939-1960. University of Nebraska Press, 1993.
- Ortwin De Graef. Titanic Light: Paul de Man's Post-Romanticism. University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
- Jacques DerridaJacques DerridaJacques Derrida was a French philosopher, born in French Algeria. He developed the critical theory known as deconstruction and his work has been labeled as post-structuralism and associated with postmodern philosophy...
, 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
- Fredric JamesonFredric JamesonFredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism...
. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. 217-259. - Ian MacKenzie, Paradigms of Reading: Relevance Theory and Deconstruction. Palgrave, 2002.
- Jon WienerJon WienerJon Wiener is an American professor of history at the University of California Irvine, a contributing editor to The Nation magazine, and a Los Angeles radio host. He was the plaintiff in a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation for its files on John Lennon.-...
, "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.
- Lindsay Waters & Wlad GodzichWlad GodzichWlad Godzich is a literary critic, literary theorist, translator, and scholar. He is attributed with influencing the conceptualization of modern literary critical theory...
, Reading de Man Reading. University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
External links
- Guide to the Paul de Man Papers. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
- Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory