Paul de Man

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.

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 John Keats, Maurice Blanchot, Marcel Proust, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, GWF Hegel, Walter Benjamin, German Romanticism, 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.

Wartime journalism, his influence and legacy

A controversy arose in 1987, when, after de Man's death, his articles for a Nazi-collaborationist Belgian newspaper during the war were rediscovered by Ortwin de Graef, a Belgian student researching de Man's early life and work, who found that de Man had written almost 200 articles for Nazi-controlled publications during the period 1940 through 1942. In one piece, de Man stated a "solution to the Jewish problem that envisions the creations of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not have, for the literary life of the West, regrettable consequences." (see Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2006).

De Man was the nephew of Hendrik de Man, an eminent politician who served in the collaborationist government and whose influence probably secured Paul a position as a literary critic for Le Soir, a Brussels daily which was seized by the German occupation military government. De Man retained his job until November 1942. It is claimed that he left the post after it had become clear that collaboration would not protect the integrity of Belgium and that collaboration not only implicated one in various crimes against humanity but put one at risk for one's life. Journalists were given an amnesty by the government-in-exile just as the Resistance began to assassinate collaborationist journalists. The adovocates also argue that there are some evidence to suggest that de Man risked his personal safety to help Jewish friends to avoid arrest as they became subject to increasingly arbitrary decrees in the summer of 1942. De Man later assisted censored publications in illegal press operations in Brussels (mostly works by the Parisian Surrealists), for which he was later fired by Agence Dechenne.

The volume Responses: on Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (edited by Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan; Nebraska, 1989) collects many articles from de Man's students, colleagues, and contemporaries about the articles' discovery and the ensuing controversy. His journalism includes at least one article of overtly antisemitic content. Derrida's attempt to deconstruct de Man's anti-semitic writing to suggest an alternative non-anti-semitic interpretation was derided by many critics, some suggesting that "Mein Kampf" can be rehabilitated under deconstruction.

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.

Works

Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, (ISBN 0300028458) 1979
Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (2nd ed.), (ISBN 0816611351) 1983
The Rhetoric of Romanticism, (ISBN 0231055277) 1984
The Resistance to Theory, (ISBN 0816612943) 1986
Wartime Journalism, 1934-1943, (ISBN 080321684X) eds. Werner Hamacher, Neil Heertz, Thomas Keenan, 1988
Critical Writings: 1953-1978, (ISBN 0816616957) Lindsay Waters (ed.), 1989
Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, (ISBN 0816616957) eds. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski, 1993
Aesthetic Ideology, (ISBN 0816622043) ed. Andrzej Warminski, 1996

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, Memories 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
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.

External links

Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Paul de Man

Academic work

Wartime journalism, his influence and legacy

Works

Selected secondary works

External links