Reading Demanians Reading de Man

Abstract

Now that the dust has begun to settle after the furor surrounding the discovery after Paul de Man's death in 1983 of his war-time journalism in Nazi-occupied Belgium, it is time to ask what there is to learn from the entire affair aside from the reminder that academics like a good fight as much as everyone else. Certainly, part of what fueled the intensity of the controversy was the sense that the reputation of deconstruction (and, in a sense, literary theory itself) was on the line. So it seems appropriate to ask now what are the consequences of the controversy for deconstruction and, more generally, for literary theory. I am not going to argue for (or against) the proposition that what the young Paul de Man did, said, thought, and wrote between 1940 and 1944 has consequences or implications for deconstruction, as I see no very direct linkbetween the ideas expressed by de Man then and the practice and theory of reading known as deconstruction developed by him, Jacques Derrida, and others twenty to forty years later.' But this does not mean that the controversy over de Man is without consequences for deconstruction or without lessons for literary theorists. On the contrary. What the de Man affair provides is the fullest display we are likely to have of how deconstructive critics actually read texts. In a sense, the de Man affair accomplished what was attempted in the 1979 collection, Deconstruction and Criticism, in which Derrida, de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom all were supposed to read the same poem, Shelley's Triumph of Life. Faced with the discovery of de Man's wartime journalism, these critics, with of course the exception of de Man (and that of Harold Bloom), but now joined by Jonathan Culler, Shoshana Felman, and a host of younger critics, read and interpreted the same texts, de Man's wartime writings, with a focus and intensity not found in the earlier, rather artificial test case. The theoretical interest of the de Man affair is thus that the body of commentary on de Man's wartime journalism gives us an unparalleled occasion to examine the relation between deconstructive interpretive theory and practice. In the 1970s, theorists commonly insisted that practice needed to accord with theory; in keeping with this, phrases of condemna-