While neither the man nor his theories were universally beloved, both inspired fierce devotion from the many partisans of deconstruction, who since his death have been at pains to eulogize his personal virtues as a colleague, teacher, and friend as well as to praise his intellectual gifts and scholarly accomplishments. By now, Professor de Man’s teachings and catch-phrases are parroted in departments of English and comparative literature across the country. During his years teaching at Johns Hopkins and, later, as Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, he inspired colleagues and graduate students alike to abandon the methods of traditional literary criticism for the allegedly more rigorous approach of deconstruction-an approach characterized by doctrinaire skepticism and infatuation with the thought that language is always so compromised by metaphor and ulterior motives that a text never means what it appears to mean. With the possible exception of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida-who deserves credit (if that is the word) for being the chief theoretical architect of deconstruction-Professor de Man did more than anyone to institutionalize the “demythologizing” tenets of deconstruction in the literature departments of American universities.
Indeed, by the time he died in 1983 at the age of sixty-five, Professor de Man was considered by some to be one of the most brilliant critical minds of his generation. Having come to the United States as an unknown translator and journalist after the war in 1947, he did graduate work at Harvard in the early Fifties and emerged in the mid-Seventies as one of the most sought-after literary theorists in the country. In order to understand why Professor Hartman should have troubled to provide the readers of The New Republic with this long and elaborate apologia for Paul de Man’s early writings, we must understand that Paul de Man was no ordinary college professor. Hartman, the Karl Young Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University and himself a still-glittering cynosure of academic fashion.
Entitled “Blindness and Insight” after the title of Professor de Man’s influential 1971 collection of essays, this exercise in critical legerdemain was written by Professor de Man’s former colleague, Geoffrey H. The response has shuttled between extreme consternation and incredulity, but so far most of the responses from within the academy can be grouped under the general heading of “damage control.” Perhaps the single most extraordinary-not to say egregious-attempt at damage control to date appeared in the March 7 issue of The New Republic.
The recent revelation that in the early 1940s-at the very moment when Hitler’s conquest of Europe seemed assured-the celebrated literary critic Paul de Man wrote well over one hundred articles and reviews for Belgian newspapers sympathetic to the Nazi cause has sent shock waves through the academic literary community.
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