Mick Hartley

The sordid and largely forgotten tale of Paul de Man, Yale Professor and champion of deconstruction, is being resurrected in a new off-Broadway play.

In 1987, some four years after his death, the truth about de Man's wartime record surfaced. A native of Belgium, he'd written antisemitic articles in a pro-Nazi paper during the war.

It is interesting how rapidly de Man disappeared from academic view, considering how important he was generally considered to have been in the spread of deconstruction as the dominant form of literary criticism throughout American English departments. It's almost as though there's some….embarrassment about it all.

The best analysis of the whole affair was David Lehman's excellent 1991 book Signs of the Times. There's a good review here:

Deconstructionism is then, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has observed in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, like Marxism, Nietzcheism, and Freudianism: it is a hermeneutics of suspicion; it has as its intention the unmasking or the stripping away of the merely apparent; its objective is the demystification of what linguistically seems, in favor of an announcement of what is. In the case of deconstructionism, that which is always turns out to be the bankruptcy of all metaphysics, the collapse of the whole tradition of Western intellectual thought, because it is “logocentric” or founded on a faith in language and a theology of meaning.

What invariably emerges from deconstructionist criticism is an assault on the rational principle itself, as language endeavors to express it. Every effort is made in this criticism to subvert the meaning said to be expressed in literary texts because language and reason provide no stable ground for certitude. Thus we reach very quickly, in this criticism, what the deconstructionist J. Hillis Miller calls “the abyss of ‘annihilation.’” Staring into this abyss—the meaningless of meaning— apparently gives the deconstructionist some kind of thrill. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a translator of Derrida and practicing deconstructionist in her own right, has announced that “The fall into the abyss of deconstruction inspires us with as much pleasure as fear. We are intoxicated with the prospect of never hitting bottom.” And Jonathan Culler commends the excitement of sawing off the philosophical limb one sits on. Others will know this attempt to subvert rationality by subverting language for what it is—the latest form of nihilism.

As Lehman suggested, it was perhaps no surprise that a man with such a disgraceful past, and with such a troubled relationship with reality, should go on to champion a critical approach that fundamentally undermines any notion of objective truth. If words are just signs which only attain meaning through their difference from other signs – if there is nothing outside the text – then writing is removed from the range of activities which might have consequences, and ultimately from the realm of morality. Perfect.

Evelyn Barish's 2013 The Double Life of Paul de Man added more detail  – her "revelatory and compulsively readable biography proves that Paul de Man, once considered America's foremost literary theorist, had been an active Nazi collaborator in Belgium during the war and was also a convicted embezzler, a bigamist, and a narcissist who stared at himself in the mirror for hours."

From a New Republic review, Paul de Man Was a Total Fraud:

The full picture is actually far worse than any of these initial condemnatory reports, as Barish demonstrates in carefully documented detail. What she shows is that from the beginning, de Man was a person who flagrantly disregarded rules and obligations, shamelessly and repeatedly lied about himself, and had a criminal past. A Belgian cousin reports that the young de Man once said to him, “Principles are what the idiots substitute for intelligence.” One should add that he was an extraordinarily gifted con man, persuading the most discerning intellectuals that he had credentials he did not possess and a heroic personal history, rather than a scandalous one, while he worked his charm on generations of students.

The perfect man to bring the exciting new theory of deconstruction to college literary departments across America.

And now we have the play. Kyle Smith:

For decades de Man had been an avatar not just of leftist politics but also of the leftist war on truth, the never-ending campaign to recast objective fact as subjective and open to question. And here he was, proven to have written 200 pieces for a collaborationist newspaper. Not for the first time, fascism and the far Left found themselves inconveniently linked.

Considering the question in hindsight, it ought not surprise us that a man who questioned the existence of truth turned out to be a champion liar—a “total fraud….who lied about every part of his life.” The meaning of that career in dissembling has not received the scrutiny it deserves because the embarrassed Left simply fed de Man into the memory incinerator. In that same 1987 piece the Times noted that “Venerated as a teacher and scholar, he was the originator of a controversial theory of language that some say may place him among the great thinkers of his age.” “Some” then. No one today. “De Man is now scarcely remembered by the general public"….

Deconstruction, is set in 1949, and concerns the affair that de Man is supposed to have had with Mary McCarthy:

The play derives much of its narrative energy from the arrival of a third giant of the era: the public intellectual Hannah Arendt …  Arendt, who fled Germany in 1933, is instantly suspicious of a detail from de Man’s past that McCarthy finds most attractive: his supposed role in the Resistance. But instead of grilling him about details of his biography, she challenges de Man from an oblique angle. The two spar about their competing interpretations of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Arendt’s former professor and lover and a onetime member of the Nazi party.

The play becomes, then, an erudite detective story, an inquiry into a man’s personality wrapped up in an in inquiry about philosophical concepts. By probing de Man’s views on Heidegger, Arendt gradually uncovers the young man’s hostility to truth, and this in turn leads to a devastating reckoning.

Hmm. I doubt that I'll be rushing to see it, should it make it over here to London. Even Tom Stoppard would have a hard job making competing interpretations of Heidegger interesting or amusing. Nor would I trust Hannah Arendt as a worthy antagonist and keen seeker of the truth. She was, after all, famous for that "banality of evil" phrase, which she coined after being completely fooled by Adolf Eichmann and his self-serving "just a bureaucrat following orders" defence.

As for Heidegger, well, as I've been documenting here on occasion, the news has been getting worse and worse. He's now revealed as a bona fide, unrepentant anti-Semite, and passionate early supporter of Hitler. Yet his critique of the "imperious dehumanising movement of western modernity" is still regarded by many on the left as a seminal contribution – if not the seminal contribution – to radical philosophy. As I suggested a while back, when you're keen, as so many of our critical thinkers are, to analyse the shortcomings of modern western society, it's perhaps wise not to base your analysis on the works of a thinker who saw enemies in world Jewry and British democracy, and the answer in National Socialism. 

The roots of Critical Theory lie in some very murky waters indeed.