Cultural theorist, born in Belgium. Controversy has surrounded his writings for collaborationist journals during World War 2. After the war he emigrated to the USA, and taught at several universities, including Yale, where he became a leading exponent of the critical method known as deconstruction. His most important essays were published in Blindness and Insight (1971) and Allegories of Reading (1979).
Paul de Man (December 6, 1919 – December 21, 1983) was a Belgian-born deconstructionist literary critic and theorist.
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." 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.
Wartime journalism and anti-Semitic writing
After de Man's death, almost 200 articles he wrote during World War II for a Nazi-collaborationist Belgian newspaper were discovered. Ortwin de Graef, a Belgian student researching de Man's early life and work, found the articles, which had been written for Nazi-controlled publications between 1940 and 1942.
The story quickly came out: De Man had probably gotten a position as literary critic for Le Soir, a Brussels daily, because he was the nephew of Hendrik de Man, an eminent politician who served in the collaborationist government. In the controversy that followed de Graf's discovery, de Man's defenders argued 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. 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.
De Man's colleagues, students and contemporaries discussed his early anti-Semitic writings and his subsequent secrecy about them in the volume Responses: on Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (edited by Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan; Notable among those essays was Derrida's deconstructive discussion of de Man's wartime writing, suggesting an alternative interpretation that was not anti-semitic;
Influence and legacy
De Man followed developments in contemporary French literature, criticism, and theory.
Much of de Man's work was collected or published posthumously. 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, Memoires 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 Jon Wiener, "The Responsibilities of Friendship: Jacques Derrida on Paul de Man's Collaboration." 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.
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