Paul de Man
|
|
Paul de Man (December 6, 1919-December 21, 1983) was a deconstructive literary critic and theorist.
| Contents |
Influences and associations
At the time of his death from cancer he was Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He was born in Belgium and after completing his Ph.D. at Harvard in the late 1950s, taught at Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Zurich, before ending up at Yale, where he was considered part of the Yale School of deconstruction and a member of the faculty in French and Comparative Literature. He was a close friend of Jacques Derrida and 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. Derrida and de Man met in 1966 at a Johns Hopkins conference on structuralism at a time both were immersed in studies of Rousseau.
De Man is known for subtle readings of British 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. The essay "The Resistance to Theory," which explores the task and philosophical bases of literary theory, was commissioned and then refused by the Modern Language Association for an introductory volume on theory, on the grounds that it found the pedagogical task of delimiting the field of literary criticism "impossible". Using the example of the classical trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, de Man argued that the use of linguistic sciences in literary theory and criticism was able to harmonize the logical and grammatical dimension of literature but at the expense of effacing the rhetorical elements of texts which presented the greatest interpretive demands. Taking up the example of the title 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 from the 1987, when, after de Man's death, his articles for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper during the war were rediscovered by Ortwin de Graef, a Belgian student researching de Man's early life and work, which was virtually unknown at the time (in approximately the same timeframe, Lindsay Waters of the University of Minnesota Press was collecting work dating from his early career at Harvard, which was not widely available). De Man was the nephew of Hendrik de Man, an eminent politician who served in the collaborationist government and whose influence probably secured a position as a literary critic for Le Soir, a Brussels daily seized by the Occupation military government. De Man retained his job until November 1942, leaving after it had become clear that collaboration would not protect the integrity of Belgium and that collaboration not 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; on the other hand the Germans, labelling the Belgian Resistance "terrorist," had begun to execute civilian hostages in response to such actions as the assassination of the Rexist mayor of Charleroi. On the other hand, there is evidence that de Man risked some measure of personal safety to help Jewish friends avoid arrest as they became subject to increasingly arbitrary decrees in the summer of 1942, culminating in "labour mobilization" orders which in September of that year escalated into raids on Jewish communities, particularly in Brussels and Antwerp. Those so brought into German custody were deported, mostly to meet their end at the death camps, most frequently Auschwitz (it has been argued that the general population of Belgium was by then aware of at least rumours of the death camps and genocidal ambitions). 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 response was not to excuse the "grave" wrongs done by his friend in early adulthood, even as he found them acutely painful (these wrongs were, in any case, never confessed to Derrida), but to argue that reflection on them motivated de Man's scholarly work.
De Man managed to keep track of developments in contemporary French literature, criticism, and theory, which became increasingly influential in American universities from the late 1960s to mid 1980s and contributed to his professional prominence. De Man's influence on literary criticism was considerable for many years, in no small part through his many influential students (the schools where he taught in French and Comparative Literature were among the best reputed in the United States, particularly the Yale French department, and he taught in a period in which doctoral students from such institutions would have expected to enter a strong academic job market). By reputation he was a very charismatic teacher and influenced both students and fellow faculty members profoundly. His broader influence was somewhat attenuated by the controversy attaching to his name and the sometimes harsh polemics his earliest writings provoke (a series of negative articles about his life and work were published in The New York Review of Book; even if these tempered harsher words in reviewed works, their net effect, defensible in argument or not, was to characterize deconstruction and its most prominent practitioners as ethically suspect), although increased interest has been shown in recent years.
No small amount 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. When Derrida gave his Wellek Lecture in memory of de Man in 1984, a number of the texts later collected had not been brought to his attention.
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
- Rudolph Gasché, The Wild Card of Reading
- Neil Heertz, 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
External links
- Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory (http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/paul_de_man.html)he:פול דה מאן