Paul de Man

Paul de Man (born the December 6th 1919 and deceased of a cancer the December 21st 1983) was a Belgian theorist of the literature having made its career with the the United States. He in particular was a theorist of the Déconstruction.

He wrote his pH. D with Harvard at the end of the years 1950. He taught thereafter at the university of Cornell, the Université John Hopkins, the Université of Zurich, and finally with the faculty of literature French and compared with the Université of Yale, where he took part in the movement Déconstruction nist. After its death, a scandal was caused by the discovery of approximately two hundred articles, of which some openly anti-semites, that it wrote for newspapers collaborationnists during the Second world war.

Academic work

It is in 1966, at the time of a conference on the Structuralisme with the Université John Hopkins, that of Man Jacques Derrida meets, which pronounces for the first time “the structure, the sign and the play in the speech of the social sciences”. A friendship was born between the two colleagues. De Man had a personal practice of the déconstruction, directed towards the Critique arts person, of philosophical inspiration, the Romantisme, as well English as German; he studied as a paticulier William Wordsworth, John Keats, Maurice Blanchot, Marcel Proust, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, Walter Benjamin, William Butler Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke.

In spite of great differences in work of Man between the years 1960 and the orientation deconstructivist of the years 1970, there exists a deep continuity. Its article of 1967 “Criticisme and crisis” supports that, insofar as literary works are held for fictions more than for factual accounts, they illustrate the rupture between a sign and its significance: the literature “does not mean” anything, but the critic escapes this characteristic because it reveals “the nullity of the human problems” ( the nothingness off human matters ); of Man quotes on this subject Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of her favorite authors. De Man noticed later that the refusal to admit that the literature “did not mean” anything was cause of what the English departments had become “great organizations with the service of all, except theirs own object” (“the return to philology”): the study of the literature had become art to apply psychology, the policy, the history or other disciplines with the literary text, in order to make that the text “means” something.

One of principal conducting wire of the work of Man is an effort to reduce the tension between Rhétorique, i.e. the illustrated language and the tropes, and the significance; it thus puts at the day in the texts the passages in which the linguistic forces “gather in a node which puts an end to the process of comprehension”. The preceding articles of Man, in the Years 1960, gathered in Blindness and Insight , show a will to reveal these paradoxes in the texts of the Nouveau criticism and to exceed the Formalisme.

(To continue the translation.)

Articles anti-semites

After the death of Man, Ortwin de Graef, a Belgian student whose research related to the former life and the work of Man, discovered approximately two hundred articles written for a newspaper collaborationnist during the Second world war. In an article of March 1941 entitled “the Jews in the current literature”, of Man affirms that “the Jews” “polluted” the modern literature, and that it is while resisting “the Semitic infiltration of all the aspects of the European life” that “our civilization” knew to preserve all its strength. Its conclusion is that to send the Jews of Europe in a colony “isolated from Europe” would be “a solution with the Jewish problem”, and would be without “deplorable consequence” for the literature. At that time, the Belgian antijuives laws had already been promulgated, excluding the Jews from the legal professions, teaching, the public office, and journalism. The August 4th 1942, the first train of Belgian Jews left for Auschwitz; but of Man continued until November 1942 to write for the newspaper the Evening , controlled by the Nazis, and where it seems to have obtained a station thanks to his uncle Hendrik de Man, influential politician - though it is probable that it was unaware of what he really occurred of the Jews sent to Auschwitz.

The discovery of the writings anti-semites of Man did the one of the NewYork Times , and caused an ignited debate: Jeffrey Mehlman, professor of French to the University of Boston, declared that there were “reasons to see the déconstruction in his globality like a vast project of amnéstie for the policies of collaboration of the Second world war”, while Jacques Derrida published a long article of answer to criticisms, while affirming that “to judge, condemn work or the man, it is to reproduce the gesture of extermination from which one shows of Man not to be oneself protected earlier” (to check the French quotation). Certain readers transfer there a contestable connection between the criticism of Man and the extermination of the Jews. Derrida also wrote Mémoires: for Paul de Man .

Moreover, the debate related to the significance owing to the fact that of Man could hide during the thirty-five years of its life in America its past collaborationnist and his writings anti-semites. Colleagues, students and contemporaries of Man tried to give an account at the same time of this past and the secrecy which followed in Responses: One Paul de Man' S Wartime Journalism , published by Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan.

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