Paul de Man - Posthumous Controversy

Posthumous Controversy

The discovery of de Man's wartime writing made the front page of the New York Times, and angry debate followed. Jeffrey Mehlman, a professor of French at Boston University, declared there were “grounds for viewing the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II”, while Derrida published a long piece responding to critics, declaring that “To judge, to condemn the work or the man on the basis of what was a brief episode, to call for closing, that is to say, at least figuratively, for censuring or burning his books is to reproduce the exterminating gesture which one accuses de Man of not having armed himself against sooner with the necessary vigilance. It is not even to draw a lesson that he, de Man, learned to draw from the war.” That seemed to some readers to draw an objectionable connection between criticism of de Man and extermination of the Jews. Derrida, a Jew himself, however, did not refrain from condemning de Man's wartime writings.

Richard J. Evans, in his book In Defence of History, states that the defence of De Man by other relativists and postmodernists went too far. According to him, the defenders used deconstruction to argue away his collaboration. He heavily criticises Derrida, and calls the critique of the deconstructionists "riddled with contradictions". He says that, on the one hand, they state (in their theories) the infinite possibilities of textual interpretation, but on the other hand they argued that it was wrong to call De Man's early writings antisemitic.

In addition to the debate over the significance of de Man’s wartime writings, there was also a debate over the fact that he had not publicly declared his wartime writings throughout the thirty-five years of his life in America. However, it has since come to light that in 1955, while de Man was at Harvard, there was an anonymous denunciation concerning his activity in Belgium during the war. de Man explained himself in a letter to the Head of the Society of Fellows: "In 1940 and 1941 I wrote some literary articles in the newspaper "Le Soir" and I, like most of the other contributors, stopped doing so when Nazi thought-control did no longer allow freedom of statement. During the rest of the occupation I did what was the duty of any decent person. After the war, everyone was subjected to a very severe examination of his political behaviour, and my name was not a favourable recommendation. In order to obtain a passport one had not merely to produce a certificate of good conduct but also a so-called "certificat de civisime" which stated one was cleared of any collaboration. I could not possibly have come to this country two times, with proper passport and visa, if there had been the slightest reproach against me. To accuse me now, behind my back... is a slanderous attack which leaves me helpless." (His reference to his name's "recommendation" alludes to his uncle, Hendrik de Man, who was a prominent collaborationist and convicted of treason after the war.)

De Man's colleagues, students and contemporaries attempted to come to grips with both his early writings and his subsequent silence about them in the volume Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (edited by Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan; Nebraska, 1989).

After the war de Man's career took him to the United States. His wife, Anaïde Baraghian, was denied a visa because she had no work waiting for her in America. Instead she and the children sailed to Argentina where her parents had recently emigrated. De Man would remarry in America. This period in de Man's life, heavily fictionalized, formed the basis of Henri Thomas's 1954 novel Le parjure.

The New York Times reported in 1992, on the basis of interviews with people who knew de Man and documents which are not publicly available, that de Man married his second wife prior to obtaining a divorce from his first, that this second wife was a student at Bard College (where de Man worked from 1949–1951) and that he was fired from that institution upon accusations of "petty thievery and chicanery". The Times also reported that de Man had abandoned his first wife and their two youngest sons, leaving them destitute in Argentina, and given his eldest son to his second wife's parents to raise