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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 11-27 The Death of the Author:
Ladies and Gentlemen, I do not know how well you know the life of Paul de Man. But for the sake of a portrait that we can all recognize, I shall set down the main stages of his career. Paul de Man was born in Antwerp in 1919, the nephew of Hendrik (or Henri) de Man, who was to become the president of the Belgian Socialist party and, after the Nazi invasion, head of the puppet government. Paul attended the University of Brussels, where he studied chemical engineering and social science and wrote occasional articles of a political-ideological stripe for the student newspaper. They are left-wing socialist in their tenor. In May 1940, after the German invasion, de Man attempted to flee Belgium but gave up before reaching the southern border. He returned to Brussels, where he began publishing reviews and articles (ultimately 170 in all) in the collaborationist newspaper Le Soir, popularly referred to, on account of its dubious, alienated character, as Le soir volé. Of these journalistic pieces, relatively few (no more than a dozen) have an identifiably pro-Nazi character. In one, for example, Le Soir of 14 October 1941, de Man refers acquiescingly to the Nazi occupation as "the present revolution" and asserts that "the necessity of action which is present in the form of immediate collaboration is obvious to every objective mind." Another piece is exceptionally invidious — an anti-Semitic piece that reads as follows: Jewish writers [in France] have always been second-rate.... This finding is a comfort for Western intellectuals: that they have been able to safeguard themselves from the Jewish influence in a [end page 11] domain as representative of culture as literature proves their vitality. There would not have been much hope for the future of our civilization if it had allowed itself to be invaded without resistance by a foreign force. In keeping its originality and character intact, despite the Semitic meddling into all aspects of European life, it has shown that its nature was healthy at the core. Furthermore, one sees therefore that a solution to the Jewish question that envisages the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not lead to deplorable consequences for the literary life of the West. It would lose, all told, a few personalities of mediocre value and would continue, as in the past, to develop according to its own great evolutionary principles.[2] This article was written almost a year after tens of thousands of Jews had been forced to flee from Brussels and Antwerp.[3] What may be even more troubling is that after de Man quit writing for Le Soir — in winter 1942, shortly before the German defeat at Stalingrad — he wrote a piece in Flemish for Het Vlaamsche Land, in which he speaks of the decadent side of Expressionism as owed "no wonder... mainly to non-Germans, and specifically Jews."[4] In the years following, de Man withdrew from the journalistic scene but lived under a cloud: a brochure put together by resisters describes him as a "traitor." But after the war, brought before a tribunal assembled for the purpose of evaluating persons accused of collaboration, de Man was cleared. In Antwerp and Paris, de Man began a publishing venture that failed, and then, in 1948, emigrated to the United States, where, in New York, he took low-paying jobs and began writing literary articles. With the patronage of several New York intellectuals, including Mary McCarthy, he got a job teaching at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York — Bard College — where, incidentally, he lectured on and translated Hölderlin — one of the very first Americans to do so — and ultimately, after losing his job under scandalous circumstances, was admitted, now well over thirty, to Harvard as a graduate student of comparative literature. Some of these events were fictionalized in a novel written by Henri Thomas entitled Le Parjure, which could be subtitled Hölderlin en Amérique. Owing to some remarkable public events, as I shall explain, de Man became a professor of comparative literature at Cornell. His elevation stemmed directly from the Russians having put Sputnik in orbit years before the Americans were able to perform comparable feats of higher rocketry. Smarting under this blow to the national technological and engineering ego, Congress launched the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), whose immediate concern was to beef up the state of science [end page 12] teaching at American universities, but also to create language programs in which "critical" languages like Russian, Chinese, and Vietnamese would be taught; they were critical in the sense of being spoken by an enemy. So, under the mistaken apprehension that in 1958 comparative literature had something to do with strategic language teaching, Congress provided abundant funds to a number of major universities (Cornell included) to inaugurate programs and departments of Comparative Literature. It was thus in response to Sputnik and the need to strengthen the American defense posture that Paul de Man arrived at Cornell to launch deconstructtion in America, the philosophy of the necessary destruction of binary oppositions, which may (or may not) have played a role in bringing about the fall of the Evil Empire, since it proved the untenability of the opposition between NATO and the Soviet bloc ("nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf"). In America, at the Universities of Cornell and thereafter Johns Hopkins and Yale, and also at the University of Zurich, de Man enjoyed an exemplary academic career, rising to a level of fame that few academic humanists attain, at once through the force of his writings (charged with radical, if elusive, ideas stated in an European-American diction part Hegel and part street language), the charm of his personality, and the enthusiasm of his students. Literature departments in major American universities began to want at least one "deconstructive" hire, for "deconstruction" was a compelling discourse, depending for its appeal (to my mind) on its denigration of the category of experience — a denigration that can have promised personal justification to a number of apolitical American graduate students who, isolated on provincial campuses, were otherwise unable to satisfy the punishing American demand of experienceing Life on a grand scale. De Man died of cancer in 1983 and was greatly mourned, especially at Yale, until, some years later, another tone came to be heard around the land. In 1986, a young Belgian scholar, Ortwin de Graef, published the news that, while 22 and 23 years old, de Man had written a number of highly compromising newspaper articles in Belgium. Then the terrible controversy began, which turned again and again on a key question that is the main subject of this lecture. This is the question of the alleged disparity between (1) the empirical person of the author and (2) the structural intentions that inform the work. The question was focused thus: Should this disparity be viewed as absolute or as capable of being altered or even erased by the author's empirical interests? For a central article of de Man's own theory is his view of the absolute divergence between the language of art and critique and the language of so-called empirical claims, viz. [end page 13] The distinction between the personal form of the author and the self that reaches a measure of totality in the work becomes concretely manifest in these divergent destinies. The divergence is not a contingent accident but is constitutive of the work of art as such. Art originates in and by means of the divergence.[5] Could this claim have been advanced by de Man to erase his personal responsibility for the sentiments and ideas expressed in his collaborative journalism, a "work," perhaps, of ascetic critique in the sense of the work of art in the quotation above? I think some renewed reflection on this matter is in order, especially after the essay that has appeared in the March 1998 issue of Merkur under the title "Kann eine Biographie ein Werk zerstören? Bemerkungen zu de Man, Jauß, Schwerte, Hermlin" (Can a biography destroy a literary work? Reflections on de Man, Jauss, Schwerte, and Hermlin)?[6] This piece is written by the Berlin journalist Gustav Seibt, the author of a volume of essays entitled (mirabile dictu!) Das Komma in der Erdnussbutter (The comma in the peanut butter)[7]; and so this will not have been his first corrective intervention in a basically American and rather sticky affair. Seibt begins by following the deconstructionist damage control line, repeating two basic theses about de Man and the de Man affair. I shall take them one at a time and express my disagreement with them. Seibt writes, first, that "[i]n fact, none of de Man's critics asserted a continuity between the articles in Le Soir and the theoretical works of his late maturity."[8] This claim is untrue. The name of one such critic who has proposed the connection is Herman Rapoport, the name of another — John Brenkman, the name of a third — myself. All three pieces are to be found in Wartime Journalism 1939-1943, which Seibt claims to have consulted. In due course I shall try to suggest what these sorts of continuity are. Seibt's second thesis reads: The deconstructive reading... is applicable only to texts possessing a certain degree of complexity, from which point on the logic of language can unfold a dynamic of its own, even if one that is contradictory and hence runs counter to the intentions of the author.... Of course everyday speech acts, political statements, or murderous racist cries cannot be read deconstructively. They reflect on [or: turn back against] their authors.[9] This proposition is wrong in a number of ways. First, there is no provision in de Manian deconstruction for identifying "the intention of the author" against which the text-specific "dynamic" could be posed. Aside from the [end page 14] vacuousness of the enterprise (since, according to de Man, the empirical intention of the author is an entirely contingent affair), we have no access to that intention except as it might be stated in yet another text itself subject to deconstruction. Practically speaking, what happens when de Man does literary analysis is that one rather more explicit "meaning" is opposed — and undermined — by another, a more nearly implicit meaning, which is derived from the rhetorical form of the text, such as its figures or the oddness of its syntax. For example: we have such an aporia in the question concluding Yeats's great poem "Among School Children": O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, The crux is this: Is the question "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" a rhetorical question, implying that here no real question is being asked, since it is so evidently a good thing that we cannot tell the dancer from the dance, so perfect is their union? Or is this question "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" a real question, an urgent appeal for information (How can we know...?), since our fragile individuality does after all depend on its being distinguished from the annihilating Juggernaut of The Dance?[11] The collision of these meanings produces an irresolvable contradiction; but the clash most certainly does not occur between what the author meant to say versus what his language says. The meanings in play are all features of his language, what de Man calls earlier "the constitutive power of the sign" (BI 17). The second, less trivial error in Seibt's thesis is his claim that only works at the level of complexity, say, of Die Geburt der Tragödie or poems of Yeats or Rilke could be deconstructed. This is quite untrue. The soul of deconstruction, the entire question of its efficacy, depends on its applicability to language — which, for de Man, is always political — and not to language of an alleged "certain [high] degree of complexity."[12] Imagine the desperate comedy arising from Seibt's axiom: I am faced with the text of a despot who seeks to crush me. I have only the arms of rigorous critical analysis at my disposal. Yet this text, which seeks my death or degradation, falls short of the requisite degree of rhetorical complexity. And so I do not despair, I exhale, for its crudity is a blessing in disguise. These dagger-point words will "reflect on" or "turn back against" my persecutor: they are not complex enough to elicit a deconstructive reading. Seibt presumably has a motive for wanting to exclude "political utterances" from such analysis: it is to distinguish de Man's articles in Le Soir from his later theoretical writings. But this effort comes too late, since [end page 15] Derrida himself undertook a most elaborate analysis of the worst of de Man's Le Soir pieces (confirming the high degree of its complexity) in order to suggest that the piece was both anti-Semitic, as "conforming to official rhetoric" and, at the same time, the very opposite — hence undecidable — and also, but with little consistency, in order to suggest that, perhaps with the exception of the last line (fostering the deportation of Jewish writers, inevitably mediocre writers, to Madagascar), a brave subversion had somehow occurred of the plain and obnoxious tendency of the piece.[13] One of these supporting cruxes was buried in the counter-examples de Man had given of first-rate, necessarily non-Jewish European writers who had managed to resist the Jewish influence: "Gide, Kafha [sic], D.H. Lawrence, Hemingway."[14] How impudently subversive, Derrida suggests, to have included the Jew Kafka among the modern masters. But did not Derrida know that in an essay entitled "Le Roman anglais contemporain" published in a student newspaper a year before, de Man had revealed the source of this quartet? (Rather disingenuously, Derrida calls them authors who were already "important references" for him.[15]) The group is taken from a list in Aldous Huxley's Music at Night that cites the following masters: "Proust, D.H. Lawrence, A. Gide, Kafka, Hemingway."[16] In his article in Le Soir, de Man is using Huxley's list in a way that is neither inventive nor subversive. Note, too, that Huxley's list of the genuine makers of modern literature contains a name that de Man has chosen to omit — that is "Proust," the one writer in the list whose Jewish ancestry, unlike Kafka's, would have been immediately recognized. Now, I said earlier that I would examine Seibt's claim that there is no continuity and that no one has even presumed to suggest a continuity between the articles in Le Soir and de Man's later theoretical works. This calls first for a heightened sense of what is at stake in this issue. The stake is high because it is a crucial support of de Man's entire theoretical enterprise, the claim that literature and philosophy come into being by means of an irreducible divergence from the interests of the empirical personality of the author, an absolute divergence from the author's desires, beliefs, and experiences. This question, however, starts at once to turn upon itself and ask: What is the status of the claim that de Man makes on behalf of this divergence? Is this claim itself a transcendental claim, having the status of the claims made in literary and philosophical writing; or can it, too, be an only pseudo-theoretical proposition grounded on the author's interests, desires, and experiences? If the first thesis is true, namely, that the claim to the absolute divergence between literature and life is itself a transcenddental claim, then it cannot in any way contribute to the enterprise of explaining the transcendental claims of literature or philosophy with [end page 16] reference to their origin, mode, or value. The claim to an absolute divergence is simply a priori and inexplicable, freed from what, let us say, Derrida, in his essay "Signature Event Context," calls "a context determined by a will to know, by an epistemic intention, by a conscious relation to the object as an object of knowledge within a horizon of truth."[17] The divergence-claim cannot say anything about the relation between the epistemic intentions of the empirical person — the author (here, de Man) — and the kind of claim it is; it is, as it is said, absolutely disinterested. If, however — on the other hand — de Man's claim about the distinctive character of literature and philosophy is itself empirical, contingent, and interested and is therefore a sentence of the same type as, let us say, "The only thing comparable to a suit at law is a life-threatening illness" (wisdom), "Pass the salt" (practical), or "The paintings of Giorgione are beautiful" (aesthetic), then it is entirely permissible to ask about the usefulness of such a claim (as to the absolutely distinctive character of literature, philosophy, and literary theory) to the empirical person de Man — or, in Nietzsche's famous formulation of the matter, to examine the interest that informs the claim of disinterestedness, invoking "the naked truth, which is surely not hard to come by, that the 'disinterested' action is an exceedingly interesting and interested action."[18] How is one to choose between these different standpoints? One thing to keep in mind is that the transcendental claim is dogmatic: it says that literary and philosophical claims are absolutely irreducible to human interest. The other position claims that they are an affair of interest, but the cogency of what this claim achieves is still going to depend on how good a story can be told that starts out from the empirical personality of the author and ends up with the literary work, especially in the case of a recalcitrant author like de Man, for whom literature "is not... an objective fact, an empirical psyche, or a communication..."[19] The heart of the de Man controversy concerns the application of one or the other of these principles. The historical-chronological sequence of moments in the debate is: de Man made the dogmatic claim in his books; upon the discovery of the wartime journalism, journalists — and some, very few critics, myself included — made the opposite argument, that de Man's claim was subliminally self-interested; then certain of de Man's defenders came forward, especially in the US, England, and Germany, to disparage any such attempt as cynical and reductive, repeating de Man's dogma that literature and literary theory arise through their absolute divergence from the empirical interests of the author. Notice, again, however, the different use value that one can get from these positions: from the dogmatic position one can conclude nothing more than what, say, Hans-Thies Lehmann has already said: [end page 17] The identification of an empirical subject in 1941 with the authorial instance of theoretical texts decades later remains untenable and pre-critical.... The active empirical subject is other than the subject of a theoretical or aesthetic discourse.[20] Here we will recognize the origin of Seibt's position: "The articles from Le Soir cannot be fielded in the battle against allegories of reading."[21] You just can't bring these works into any sort of juxtaposition, it is said: the theoretical claim, as a theoretical claim, resists it. But more, I believe, is gained from the starting point that theoretical claims, too, are meaningful, not simply "other," with respect to the authorial subject. Interpretation, which is needful here — the most compelling aspect of the case of de Man is one of interpretation — must sooner or later posit the presumed reproduction of a more or less conscious intention of the author, for the text is about what the author is about. In the words of a New Critic describing the program of The New Critics: "We were very strict about submitting to the poet's imaginative intentions as realized in the text, even if the poet himself were not necessarily conscious of what his own imagination had put there."[22] The intentions of the text, even when merely textually realized, are still commonly held to be the poet's, and it is hard to get away from this point.[23] From here, one is encouraged to tell a story connecting the empirical subject of 1941 with the theoretical claims written twenty years later. This, by the way, is something that has been done willy-nilly by every involved investigator, including those who begin with the assumption that de Man's empirical interests and the interests of his writing are disparate. For almost immediately after one heard that de Man's literary-theoretical texts are in a dogmatic sense without connection to his empirical interests in Belgium in 1942, one heard that they are furthermore without connection because de Man meant to put a distance between them: he meant, it is said, to increase the distance between his empirically "interested," part-Nazi utterances in 1942 and his later theory by renouncing these views in his later theory.[24] In this variant story, the meaning of de Man's literary theory now turns out to be a repudiation of the empirically interested journalistic texts of 1942; its esoteric sense is renunciation: to the title Allegories of Reading must be added the conclusion "oder die Entsagenden (or the renunciants)."[25] Well, that is one story, and I'm interested in it because it is at least one kind of story, as opposed to the dogma of absolute divergence, though it is not the story I prefer. There is another story, which I mean to tell: it is the story of an intermittent continuity of the attitude and rhetoric that informed de Man's decision to write collaborationist texts for a collaborationist newspaper and the [end page 18] attitude and rhetoric that informs his later theoretical writings. This continuity is only intermittent, but it is based on the repetition of key words and intellectual structures, whereas the argument for absolute discontinuity, including even the discontinuity of renunciation, makes things easy for itself by reiterating that there are only differences. I shall preface my conclusion with a passage from a brilliant mystery novel by the British writer Gilbert Adair, which has given me my title, The Death of the Author. Adair plays on the literary-critical thesis that varies the thesis of absolute divergence — namely, that modern writing implies the "death" of the empirical self of the author — and introduces a character who is a noble parody of Paul de Man.[26] Yet it is with a good deal of acuity that Adair puts these words in his hero's mouth: There could be no doubt, I repeat, about my opposition to the Nazi movement. Nevertheless, detectable in my discourse, there remained the lambent traces, the still flickering embers, of an occult and certainly unconscious attachment to the very codes and practices of the ideology I claimed to oppose.[27] In the matter of identifying these "codes and practices," there are a number of sentences in de Man's critical work, which, in the light of his wartime behavior, look as if they were boxed around by red crayon and cry out for an autobiographical reading; one can hardly read them otherwise.[28] For example, in a letter from Harvard days, written in January 1955, de Man informed his Chairman Renato Poggioli that a certain anonymous denunciation accusing him of collaboration was a slander perpetrated by the enemies of Hendrik de Man.[29] Hendrik de Man, the former Socialist minister condemned for collaborating with the Nazi occupiers, was Paul de Man's uncle, but in the apology which de Man wrote, de Man said he was his father. We have here what seems to be an intentional denial of paternity for practical advantage and psychological gratification (a sort of defiance and provocation to future historians, very likely involving the exhilarating release altogether from the Apollinian constraints of personal identity). And indeed, de Man's ruse worked: authorities at Harvard appear to have taken de Man out from under suspicion, since he would presumably have already suffered enough from the sins visited on him by his "father." To this biographical narrative, I now join the passage from de Man's critical essay in Allegories of Reading on Rousseau's Confessions — certainly his wildest piece: it is called "The Purloined Ribbon."[30] De Man writes, [end page 19] With the threatening loss of control [of the meaning of a text], the possibility arises of the entirely gratuitous and irresponsible text, not just... as an intentional denial of paternity for the sake of self-protection, but as the radical annihilation of the metaphor of selfhood and of the will. (AR 296) The passage recommends a kind of reading (gratuitous and irresponsible and skeptical of metaphors of selfhood) at the moment when the reader's resistance to such reading is strongest. For here it is precisely no longer the case that this passage could convincingly say, "Do not read literature autobiographically." Instead, in the context of the letter to Poggioli, the passage insists on being read autobiographically. It says that de Man wished that his own life-stories and critical statements, like Rousseau's, could amount to something quite different from an intentional denial of paternity for the sake of self-protection. De Man wants it to be true that his texts, too, spring from the dissolution of the individual personality and intensify that dissolution — producing for him a sort of allegorical existence, a life lived (like Thomas Mann's Felix Krull) "im Gleichnis," figuratively only. Here, now, following, is a second example of an autobiographical moment. We should imagine the burden of anxiety which de Man's past must have laid on him. At the outset of Blindness and Insight, de Man writes about "genuine" writers: Considerations of the actual and historical existence of writers are a waste of time from a critical viewpoint. These regressive stages can only reveal an emptiness of which the writer himself is well aware when he begins to write. (BI 35) This is de Man's basic position and is recognizable as the absolute divergence thesis. It is the view that the divergence between the empirical personality and the project of constituting a work of thought or art is the true "meaning" of that work (which does indeed modify the idea of the absolutely separate character of the literary intention). I stress now a certain conscious and non-violent character to this ideal divergence, conveyed by the sober and chastised tone of de Man's account: the divergence is induced by "an emptiness of which the writer is well aware."[31] The thesis cannot but be read as self-serving: the moral emptiness that a relentlessly "regressive" critique would be forced to discover at the bottom of de Man's behavior during the War is here smuggled away into a hypostatized "modern" nullity — the nullity of Dasein as such, the nullity of lost, homeless, interrupted existence as such. Practically speaking, de Man's mature criticism serves to protect his youthful journalism from the [end page 20] consequences of a too literal reading. It prevents Nazistic, collaborationist, and anti-Semitic passages from being treated as the immediate reproduction of de Man's personal intentions, desires, and beliefs. De Man's theoretical essays would have succeeded, in his own phrase, in "hid[ing] their self-obsessions behind a language of conceptual generality" (AR 138). There is more continuity of a general conceptual kind between the early and late de Man: his mature work is organized on a model uncannily like the structure of his collaborationist experience. It is based on a primary violence that the author is in league with even when he flinches from it. At times, within this scenario, de Man occupies different positions, but one position recurs. I shall define this structure with an unavoidable bleakness. In the late work (1) the primary catastrophe of the German invasion resurfaces as "the origin" of language or human society — a "power of death." (2) "Literary language," "poetic consciousness," "the text," come closest to reflecting this experience: they name the catastrophe while conveying its violence through their "relentless," "impersonal" dispersion of particular meaning. (3) The critic — viz. the alert reader — collaborates with this catastrophe as its interpreter, restating the truth of universal disruption. (4) He encourages readers to abandon any recourse to their empirical experiences (vulgarly, their "knowledge of life") for help or understanding, since experience is in ruins. To this extent the interpreter is in control of what he does. But this model leaves out the operations of a traumatic event — the incursion of an invading power, coercive — and yet offering the prospect of collaboration. If, however, you collaborate with an enemy resistingly, you will exhibit the distortions of stress; at the bursting point, you will be broken. At places those cracks and tears will be visible. The violence of the invading power — internalized, redistributed — becomes random and unmanageable. De Man was shattered in places by the operation of a force whose identity (Nazism in its manic brutality) he mystified in the 1940's. Thereafter, he continued to mystify power, calling it "literature" — literature that always had to be more exigent than any ordinary instance of it (a single book or author or reading). The whole and no longer amazing thrust of de Man's late view of literature is of an agency inhuman, mechanical, systematic, violent, and uncontainable. This power may be (mis)identified in his work; more pertinent to this discussion are the effects of violence it produces in his critical writing. My theses about (1) the principal violence and hence (2) the unreliability of de Man's autobiographically-charged theory will finally come as no surprise to listeners acquainted with de Man's later writings, since this suspicion is in line with one that de Man himself puts forward. His essay [end page 21] "Autobiography as De-facement" asserts the impoverishing and disfiguring function of autobiography while separating the notion of autobiography as specifiable genre from "the autobiographical" as a mode of reading.[32] Nothing in principle stands in the way of autobiographical reading anytime and any place.[33] That is one rule about autobiography in de Man, namely, that it is permitted. But keep in mind that according to de Man it will not, in theory, succeed, since it will not get past the rhetorical complication and scandal of its own leading figure — prosopopeia; this stricture is the second rule about autobiography. What once again emerges is that "it is not a priori certain that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but its own language."[34] This second rule, therefore, makes autobiographical reading not finally persuasive at all: this point is developed in "Autobiography as De-facement," in which the autobiographical reader figures as policeman and autobiographical writing and reading as a "defacement of the mind."[35] This thrust is also found in the earlier piece in Allegories of Reading, "Semiology and Rhetoric," first composed in 1973.[36] Here de Man addresses the only specious orderliness of the then current critical scene, where it is assumed that the formal dimensions of literary works are under control, well-policed, under the sway of "law and order." De Man is exploiting a parallel between essentialist linguistic structuralism and Spiro Agnew-like government on the grounds of their common resistance to theory and other subversive acts of thought. This atmosphere, de Man continues, has furthered a vulgar criticism sending out expeditions to referents: hence the current emphasis — he says — on "hybrid texts considered to be partly literary and partly referential, on popular fictions deliberately aimed towards social and psychological gratification, on literary autobiography as a key to the understanding of the self, and so on" (AR 3). This is the more nearly native strain: de Man is once again warning against autobiography, against the project of reading autobiographically, precisely because it introduces a false impression of order (in fact by a use of police power) into what must be the sole principle of order in reading — the technically-correct, deconstructive, rhetorical reading. The autobiographical reading, in the case of de Man's own work, would literally invite police intervention into the schoolroom, into the scene of the ascetically correct reading — would bring in school inspectors to actually disrupt more than the figure-dance of "Among School Children"; it would disrupt the life of Paul de Man, who was no schoolchild when he justified the deportation of Jewish writers.
Adair's The Death of the Author conveys a haunting sense of the great theoretician trapped in his fame — a fame that could only excite more and [end page 22] more curiosity about the man who had originated ideas of such force and attractiveness. Such curiosity about the author would kill — the author. In Adair's novel, de Man takes the way out of killing the person who would tell on him and this way avoids public humiliation; in life, de Man killed no one other than the reputation of his own empirical person. But even in life it was not as if de Man, as the proponent of a certain threatening deconstructivism, entirely escaped censure. How ironical it must have been for him to find himself under attack not for his former politics but for his theory. Indeed, this scene (of assault) must have been strangely gratifying, because it was made up of so many of the elements of the scene he had dreaded all along.[37] But whereas in that situation he would have been on trial without an excuse, in this instance he could invoke the truth, the difficult truth, the rigorous and unavoidable truth of nihilism. "Understand by nihilism," he wrote, claiming to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, "a certain kind of critical awareness which will not allow you to make certain affirmative statements when those affirmative statements go against the way things are.[38] De Man's life, however, as it has come to light, succeeds in destroying his right to such a position; for when he allowed himself to accuse "the estrangement and falsification of everyday existence" in favor of "a distinctively literary mode of totalization," he was hiding from his reader the knowledge that these statements do not go against "the way things are" but actually helped protect him from his past. For us to repeat these statements uncritically keeps alive features of the very idolatry that once inspired his delusions. (BI 45, 33)
This article is the edited text of a lecture read at the University of Mannheim on June 9, 1998. [1]. John Keats, "Letter to George and Georgiana Keats," February 18, 1819. In Robert Gittings, ed., John Keats, Selected Letters. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002: 203. [2]. Le Soir (4 March 1941). In Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz & Thomas Keenan, eds., Wartime Journalism, 1939-1943, Paul de Man. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1988: 45. [3]. "During the months following the German takeover, many thousands of Jews fled the country, or were deported to neighboring France, so that by [end page 23] late 1940 only 52,000-55,000 [of an original Jewish population estimated at 90,000] reportedly remained in Belgium." Mark Weber, "Belgium and its Jews During the War," in The Journal for Historical Review, March/April 1999, vol. 18, no. 2: 2. [4]. 20 August 1942. Wartime Journalism: 325. [5]. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight. Essays in the rhetoric of contemporary criticism. 2nd edition, revised. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983: 41. (Hereafter BI.) [6]. Gustav Seibt, "Kann eine Biographie ein Werk zerstören? Bemerkungen zu de Man, Jauß, Schwerte, Hermlin," in Merkur 52/3, March 1998: 215-26. [7]. Gustav Seibt, Das Komma in der Erdnussbutter. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997. [8]. "In der Tat hat keiner der Kritiker de Mans eine Kontinuitaet zwischen den Artikeln in Le Soir und seinen theoretischen Alterswerken behauptet." Seibt, "Kann eine Biographie": 219. [9]. "Die dekonstruktive Lektüre... ist nur anwendbar auf Texte mit einem gewissen Komplexitätsgrad, von dem an die Logik der Sprache eine eigene, wenn auch widersprüchliche und dann den Intentionen des Autors zuwiderlaufende Dynamik entfalten kann.... Natürlich lassen sich alltägliche Sprechakte, politische Aüßerungen oder rassistische Mordaufrufe nicht dekonstruktiv lesen. Sie fallen auf ihre Urheber zurück" (219-20). [10]. W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1958: 245. [11]. Allegories of Reading. Figural language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979: 11-2. (Hereafter AR.) [12]. In "An Interview" with Paul de Man, published in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), de Man, alerted to the "frequent recurrence of the terms 'ideology' and 'politics'" in his later writing, replied: "I don't think I ever was away from these problems, they were always uppermost in my mind. I have always maintained that one could approach the problems of ideology and by extension the problems of politics only on the basis of critical-linguistic analysis, which had to be done in its own terms, in the medium of language..." (121). Here, of course, we are dealing with only the alleged empirical intentions of the personality. [13]. Jacques Derrida, "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's war," in Critical Inquiry 14/3, Spring 1988: 607. [14]. Wartime Journalism: 45. [end page 24] [15]. Derrida, 628. [16]. Wartime Journalism: 17. [17]. It is inexplicable in two ways: (1) by not saying anything about this relation; (2) by dint of its [transcendental] mode of origination. The quote is from Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," in Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982: 320. [18]. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. In Walter Kaufmann, ed. and trans., Basic Writings of Nietzsche. New York: Modern Library, 1968: 338. [19]. Paul de Man, "Literary History and Literary Modernity" (BI 164). [20]. Hans-Thies Lehmann, "Paul de Man: Dekonstruktionen," in Merkur 1988, 42, 6 (472): 445-60. [21]. Seibt, "Kann eine Biographie": 220. [22]. Norman Podhoretz (here, not neocon but neocrit), in Ex-Friends (New York: The Free Press, 1999): 61. [23]. The point is argued persuasively by Peter Juhl, Interpretation. An essay in the philosophy of literary criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. I have also discussed the ineluctable reference of the poetic intention to the poetic self in canonical German and French theorists in The Fate of the Self. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. [24]. One finds a singularly inept discussion of such matters in a New York Times report of a conference held in Antwerp in June 1988 on the case of de Man. The piece is by James Atlas, for whom de Man's later work constitutes an "exorcism" (meaning what?) and "redemption' (meaning what?) of his early memories. James Atlas, "The Case of Paul de Man," in New York Times Magazine, August 28, 1988: 36-7, 60, 66, 68, 69. [25]. Die Entsagenden (the renunciants) is the less well-known second part of the title of Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden (Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years or the Renunciants), 1821. [26]. See, for example, Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" (in Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), and Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" (in D.F. Bouchard, ed. and trans., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977). [27]. Gilbert Adair, The Death of the Author. London: Heinemann, 1992: 61. [28]. The following pages are worked up from two previously published studies: "Paul de Man's Confessional Anarchy," in Eitel Timm & Kenneth [end page 25] Mendoza, eds., Textuality and Subjectivity, vol. 2: The Poetics of Reading. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1992: 36-50, and "Remembering Paul de Man: An epoch in the history of comparative literature," in Lionel Gossman & Mihai Spăriosu, eds., Building a Profession. Autobiographical perspectives on the beginnings of comparative literature in the United States. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994: 177-92. [29]. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz & Thomas Keenan, eds., Responses. On Paul de Man's wartime journalism. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1989: 475-7. [30]. In Modern Language Notes, 106, December 1991: 1048-51, Robert Ellrich discusses the fact, long identified in academic conversation, that the sentence from Rousseau's Confessions that de Man develops in this essay is not a sentence Rousseau ever wrote. De Man has Rousseau say the very opposite of what Rousseau said — and said he meant. The distortion was interpreted in a way protective of de Man by Ortwin de Graef, in "Silence to Be Observed: A trial for Paul de Man's inexcusable confessions," in Luc Herman, Kris Humbeeck & Gert Lernout, eds., (Dis)continuities: Essays on Paul de Man. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989: 51-73. [31]. Here are some passages to help make explicit de Man's thesis of "the contingency [for literature] of the empirical intention." In the course of reading an essay by the psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, de Man writes, "[b]ut this totality of the [artistic] form by no means implies a corresponding totality of the constitutive self. Neither in its origin, nor in its later development does the completeness of the form proceed from a fulfillment of the person who constitutes this form. The distinction between the personal form of the author and the self that reaches a measure of totality in the work becomes concretely manifest in these divergent destinies. The divergence is not a contingent accident but is constitutive of the work of art as such. Art originates in and by means of the divergence" (emphasis added) (BI 41). Further in this vein, glancing at Homer, de Man writes, "[the beauty of Helen] prefigures the beauty of all future narratives as entities that point to their own fictional nature. The self-reflecting mirror-effect by means of which a work of fiction asserts, by its very existence, its separation from empirical reality, its divergence, as a sign, from a meaning that depends for its existence on the constitutive activity of this sign, characterizes the work of literature in its essence" (BI 17). Hence, it comes as no surprise that literary language "does not fulfill a plenitude but originates in the void that separates intent from reality. The imagination takes its flight only after the void, the inauthenticity of the existential project has been revealed; literature begins where the existential demystification ends and the critic has no need to linger over this pre-[end page 26]liminary stage. Considerations of the actual and historical existence of writers are a waste of time from a critical viewpoint. These regressive stages can only reveal an emptiness of which the writer himself is well aware when he begins to write. Many great writers have described the loss of reality that marks the beginning of poetic states of mind." And de Man quotes Baudelaire: "...tout pour moi devient allégorie" (BI 34-5). These passages show that the condition of the apprehension of allegory, i.e., literature, is the obliteration of the personality, which in de Man's case meant importantly the political personality that he had particular reasons to obliterate. [32]. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984: 67-81. [33]. Though that would surely involve the return, into the scene of interpretation, of the logocentric Gang of Five: perception, consciousness, intention, reference, and career. [34]. The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986: 11. [35]. This, by the way, is entirely opposite to what Rousseau explicitly says about the constructive power of the autobiographical imagination in the Confessions. For the Confessions is organized around Rousseau's claim that, by recovering the experience of spectacular intellectual power, he has proved the coherence of his moral personality. This recovery occurs as the content of a moment of déja vu," etc. See Corngold, The Fate of the Self: 223-5. [36]. Diacritics 3, 1973: 27-33. [37]. The 1971 edition of Blindness and Insight is preceded by a motto: "Cette perpétuelle erreur, qui est précisément la 'vie'...," which is attributed to Proust. This motto has been eliminated from the 1983 (second edition, revised) edition. Was the omission motivated by the fact of de Man's growing publicity and fame, for himself and for "deconstruction"; by an intuition of the proportions of the scandal that the revelation of his ideological crimes would take; and hence by his reluctance to seem to be already addressing this matter by an invocation of the ubiquitousness and ineluctableness of error an alibi for his own? [38]. The Resistance to Theory: 104.
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