'S 'WARTIME JOURNALISM' AND THE CRITICS

Few professors of Judaic literature studied with Paul de Man and the other so-called deconstructive critics at Yale University. As one of De Man's last doctoral students, I felt directly involved -yet unable to articu- late my reactions - when his incriminating wartime essays were rediscov- ered in 1987. At the time I watched silently as journalists and scholars debated the significance of those writings in Le Soir. Then after the smoke had cleared, the Center for Language, Literature and Culture at Emory University asked me to respond. This article has been heavily revised from my remarks at a 1993 symposium in Atlanta, which was called 'The Thinker fr0m the Thought'. Paul de Man's rhetorical criticism first reached me during an influen- tial undergraduate seminar called 'Rhetorical Approaches to the Sign', taught by one of his students. Later I worked closely with De Man when he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. I took several more classes and began writing my dissertation at Yale under his supervi- sion - with and Geoffrey Hartman as readers - until, in 1983, he died. A few years after his death, information about his wartime journalism was reported in the media (, 1 December 1987). I vividly remember the morning when one of my colleagues handed me a photocopy of The New York Times article. Only now do I feel able to understand the debate that was set off by De Man's literary columns published during the German occupation of Belgium in 1941-

42• It was appropriate that Emory's Center for Language, Literature and Culture chose the allusive title for its symposium, 'The Thinker from the Thought', because De Man liked to teach Yeats's poem 'Among School Children'. In the book Allegories of Reading, De Man discusses the closing lines of that poem:

o chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

S. Berger, M. Brocke and 1. Zwiep (eds.), Zutot 2001, 210-217. 210 PAUL DE MAN'S 'WARTIME JOURNALISM' AND THE CRITICS

o body swayed to music, 0 brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?!

According to De Man, traditional commentaries often read the final line as a rhetorical question, indicating that we cannot separate the dancer from the dance - or, as in the title of the Emory symposium, the thinker from the thought. But De Man illustrates the phenomenon of indetermi- nacy when he shows that Yeats's last line may also be interpreted as a literal question, truly seeking a way to distinguish between dancer and dance or, for our purposes, to tell the thinker from the thought. Cynics and journalists might hasten to say that De Man had reasons for wanting to dissociate himself from his youthful thoughts. Indeed, a great divide does separate the critical dance of his mature years from the rather uncrit- ical dancer named Paul De Man, age 21 to 22, who wrote for Le Soir during World War II. The furor surrounding De Man was partly a flare up from the smol- dering blaze of prior denunciations directed at Martin Heidegger because of his collaboration with the Nazis in 1933.2 Even The New York Times lowered its standards for the case of Paul De Man, printing character defamation of a kind that is seldom allowed by a responsible newspaper.3 Apparently, the point of David Lehman's concurrent article and subse- quent book was to show that De Man was a dishonest person who deceived even those closest to him, and to suggest that this disqualifies much of what he wrote.4 The De Man affair revealed the immense amount of resentment that had built up against Yale deconstruction during the 1970S and early 1980s. This partly explains the journalists' attacks on De Man, and their unreflective arguments have been criticized by Thomas Fries, Catherine Gallagher, Rudolphe Gasche, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski.5 The jealousy and anger of dissatisfied professors surfaced in opportu- nistic scandal mongering and even in expressions of rage by major

I P. de Man, Allegories of Reading. Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, New Haven 1979, II. " V. Farias, Heideggeret Ie nazisme, trans. M. Benarroch andJ.-B. Grasset, Paris 1987. 1 See, e.g.,J. Atlas, 'The case of Paul de Man', New York Times Magazine, 28 August 1988. 4 D. Lehman, 'Deconstructing Paul de Man's Life', , 15 February 1988 and id., Signs of the Times. Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, New York 199I. 5 In W. Hamacher, N. Hertz, eds, Responses. On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism, Lincoln 1989, e.g. 194,204-208,340-341,388.

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