Intimations of Accountability in the Discourse of Paul de Man

Abstract

INTIMATIONS OF ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE DISCOURSE OF PAUL DE MAN ISO BEL M. FIN D LA Y University of Saskatchewan I T h e history of the reception of Paul de Man’s version of deconstruction is marked by extremes of hostility and hospitality. Whether as saint or ser­ pent, unworldly exemplar or public enemy number one, de Man has been firmly identified with deconstruction in America, despite his tireless efforts to expose the perils of identification and the instability of names. Mean­ while, his own powerful acts of mediation have themselves been mediated in ways that pay tribute to the role of difference in those processes of citation, translation, and dissemination with which deconstruction so often concerns itself. It has been difficult to ignore de Man, and such influential exposi­ tors as Jonathan Culler, Terry Eagleton, and Frank Lentricchia have found themselves contributing more or less generously to the legend of “Paul de Man.” Recent discussion of de Man’s wartime journalism has done little to reduce hostilities or to shed light on the nature of de Man’s achievement. There are those who “read” de Man’s journalism as justification for dismissing the challenges of deconstruction and for discounting theory in general, and who hence confirm de Man’s analysis of that “recurrent strategy” of “the resistance to theory” (Resistance 5). In contrast to such resisting readers, Geoffrey Hartman strikes a more conciliatory note, suggesting that de Man’s “is not vulgar anti-Semitic writing, not by the terrible standards of the day” (26), and that “de Man’s cultural anti-Semitism” is “not all that different from T.S. Eliot’s” (29).1 However, there are limits to such historical rela­ tivism. Not even the problems of writing and publishing under conditions of occupation and persecution, Ian Balfour suggests, offer grounds for mit­ igation, since “political and ideological effects do not depend on authorial sincerity or the lack of it” (7). Given that the wartime journalism is now irrevocably part of the context of reading de Man, Balfour is nevertheless as concerned as Hartman about the “danger of reducing all to biography again,” and thus neglecting “the intellectual power in his later work” (Hartman 30).2 English Studies in Ca n a d a , x v ii i , i , March 1 9 9 2 Similar concerns have led me to attempt an accounting of Paul de Man,3to consider matters of autonomy and accountability, power and powerlessness, in the context of deconstruction, and to test the suasiveness of Christopher Norris’s claim for a shift from the early to the late work, a shift from “polit­ ical quietism” to an equation of “right reading with the power to demystify forms of aesthetic ideology” (Paul de Man 17). Norris is not alone in finding political utility in deconstruction. Its destabilizing of traditional disciplinary and cultural boundaries and resistance to totalizing gestures, to pretensions to truth and completeness, make it “a long way from the mildly revamped New Criticism that some associate with de Man’s name” (Stoekl 43).4 For some politically engaged writers deconstruction offers itself as a strategy to contest “capital and patriarchy as equally important adversaries” (Ryan xiv). And de Man confirms “the ‘politicality’ . . . of all forms of human language, and especially of rhetorically self-conscious or literary language” (Allegories 156). Yet deconstruction is widely characterized as narrowly textualist, confined by the margins of the text,5 and de Man’s practice reduced to nothing more than a change of style, a rhetorical renovation of the status quo, the con­ servation of institutional power and authority. Or, even worse, according to Eagleton, de Manian literature is “not content, as with New Criticism, to offer a cloistered alternative to material history: it now reaches out and colonizes that history, rewriting it in its own image” (Literary Theory 146). As this rhetoric attests, we are still reading news from the front, partisan commentary on a struggle that, if de Man is right, will last as long as litera­ ture itself: “The deconstruction is not something we have added to the text but it constituted the text in the first place. A literary text simultaneously asserts and denies...