Going on about the war without mentioning the war: the other histories of the Paul de Man affair

the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written down texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions

Paul de Man’

Whatever you do, don’t mention the war Basil Fawlty

With the discovery of Paul de Man’s wartime journalism, those of his colleagues and students who continue to carry the torch for the ‘decon- struction’ with which de Man was principally associated are suddenly interested in the day-to-day unfolding of a history - life in Brussels under the German occupation between 1940 and 1942. Their concern for detail is indeed scrupulous enough to embarrass many already declared historical materialists. Facts, unashamedly avowed as such, are flying thick and fast: when the deportations began, when the censorship at Le Soir tightened up enough to include the literary reviews, who de Man was writing about, and what positions they represented along the various spectrums defining anti- Semitism, pro-Nazi collaboration, Flemish nationalism, passive or active resistance, and so on.

The opportunities for impishness, even waspishness, are almost irresist- ible, and the current published state of the debate offers numerous examples. (In the same spirit, please allow me a reference to my favourite television show.) Those who were always sceptical of or antagonistic towards American deconstruction can hardly be expected to resist mocking the alacrity with which those who have, in their more melodramatic moments, called into question the possibility of analysing anything outside the self- referentiality of literary language as an authoritative relation to that language, now find themselves trying to find and face the facts ‘as succinctly and exactly as possible’, as J. Hillis Miller puts it.* It is to say the least an irony that all this should be happening just as deconstruction’s moment is passing in the American academy. I mean ‘passing’ in the most productive sense, for its challenges remain urgent and in my view unignorable for the newly emergent moment that is constituted by cultural and gender studies: thus one cannot say ‘assimilated’, since the very point of deconstruction

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is that it remain a constant challenge to our propensities for easy models of assumed referentiality. Nonetheless, I think one can say that its moment is ‘passing’, in the sense that it is no longer the centre of attention, the medium through which all debate within the elite sector of the profession must be conducted. Thus, at exactly this time, deconstruction finds itself once again able to bid for that centrality, and exactly by way of an appeal to the historical analysis that it had previously done so much to displace, and which is (in the elite graduate schools at least) now displacing it. And here again is Paul de Man, not now the high priest of limitation with whom we are all familiar and whose importance, for good or ill, is widely taken for granted, but himself the protagonist in a drama of historical research - a research that should be, Derrida requests, ’patient, careful, minute, and difficult’ .3

It seems likely, then, that much of this work will be done over the coming months and years, and that it will produce much evidence for informed hypotheses about the political affiliations and moral qualities of the young Paul de Man. We will all, I suspect, come to know a good deal about daily life in Nazi Brussels - who knew whom, and what, and when, and what they had for breakfast (no trivial item, this, in a country with a thriving black market and a clearly defined system of rewards for collaboration: some in Belgium made small fortunes during the war). De Man’s Brussels will be, even more than Baudelaire’s Paris (after Benjamin), a veritable Montaillou of literary theory. This will not solve all the problems. It will be hard for critics not to drop their loads at ‘the crossroads of magic and positivism’ as Adorno thought Benjamin had done, content with hooking a few facts on to a few textual motifs, with no effort - so Adorno thought - towards the investigation of a totality and the analysis of m e d i a t i ~ n . ~ But at least there will be some sort of history, and it will surely be a complex one, a result of the topic itself but even more of the motivations that will go into describing it.

At least, there will be one kind of history, the ‘candid historical analysis of de Man’s early texts’ that Werner Hamacher has called for to replace the ‘unhistorical analogies and grotesque insinuations’ that, he feels, have marked all too much of the debate so far.5 This history is unlikely to absolve de Man of some sort of complicity in collaboration and anti- Semitism, direct or indirect. What does it mean, after all, to present everything as dependent upon the commencement of the deportations, when they were preceded by various proleptic atrocities - civil service purges, beatings, curfews and yellow stars? Some will surely prove to themselves that there is a redeeming irony in these early writings, of the sort that many have found in the later writings: a consciously artful strategy

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of disengagement from and commentary upon the assumptions motivating public life. We have already seen a number of versions of these arguments, which tend to take the form of a reading back from the mature (that is, from a thesis about the mature) to the youthful texts. This presupposes a ‘con- tinuous’ Paul de Man, a person in whom the past and present were in some existential sense connected and held together. In this spirit, people speculate about whether he tried to ‘tell’ his friends about his past, assuming that the past was always with him. This has produced a range of response that I at least find both intellectually and morally unsatisfactory. Geoffrey Hartman, de Man’s close friend and colleague, thinks that he ‘must have faced’ the question of genocide, and sees in the later work ‘the fragments of a great confession’.6 James Atlas ends his New York Times Magazine article with the trenchant declaration: ‘He knew .” And Derrida, even Derrida, than whom no one has done more to disrupt the notion of a self that is continuous through time in any but the purely and undiscussably materialist sense, is emphatic about his faith in a piously redemptive moral suffering in his friend. Thus Derrida speaks of his war, ‘the war that this man must have lived and endured in himself’ (p. 594): notice, must have. Again, ‘this man must have lived areal agony’ (p. 636): again, must have, and this man (while other men might not have). No one can imagine, writes Derrida, that ‘this man . .. would not have been torn apart’ by his secret knowledge (p. 594).

These assertions seem to me extraordinary, given that one is here dealing with that most devious of identities, the human psyche and its place in language - the language of knowing, of telling, of being. I can imagine perfectly well that this man, or any other man, could have gone through life without any anxiety, perhaps not even that attendant upon the problem of concealment itself. No one has accused de Man of being a war criminal. But many who were war criminals seem to have found ways of coming to terms with their past, a past far more outrageously evil than anything suggested by the de Man file. We are unlikely to know the state of de Man’s post-war psyche. As Hartman has said, ‘we do not have his thoughts’ (p. 29). And even if we did, they would be unlikely to authorise simple belief or disbelief. After all, these are some of the lessons that Paul de Man himself taught. As Stanley Corngold has aptly written, ‘de Man did not maintain that the profit of suffering is self-knowledge’. Quite the opposite. He affirmed in many ways that ‘the human self is dispersed in advance of the possibility of self-knowledge’.6 Those who are so sure that ‘he knew’ should ponder what they mean by knowing, and indeed by he. These are precisely the categories in question, most of all when they are set in conjunction with the commonplace observation that it is perfectly possible for all sorts of people not to ‘know’ what they have very good reasons to

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know, and therefore very good reasons for repressing. Assurances that de Man knew are shamelessly obstructive to a possible understanding, and can only be designed to rescue him from accusations that cannot as yet even be properly lodged. The dependence of this rescue effort on a flagrant model of knowledge through (and because of) suffering does no real credit to de Man, and none to his theories. The moral self-righteousness of de Man’s defenders - Derrida speaks of a ‘sensationalist flurry full of hatred’ (p. 591) - fails to recognise its own complicity in a more subtle and therefore perhaps more dangerous sensationalism, that of the suffering human subject in whom knowledge and suffering constitute subjectivity itself.

Obviously, one must allow for the place of personal loyalty in these assurances that ‘he knew’. For the consequences of allowing that he did not know, or might not have known, are terrifying. But the terror, after all, is not unfamiliar or unthinkable: it is the rather commonplace terror that comes from realising that we do not after all ‘know’ the person we are close to, and have faith in. This, it seems to me, should be a thinkable terror, even for de Man’s friends, and even if it prove, in time, inadequate. Is the failure to think this possibility, at least as evident in what I have seen of the published debate so far, evidence of some other repressions, some other unthought possibilities? The same Georges Goriely who is cited by Derrida (pp. 651 -2) and Miller (p. 685) for his statement that de Man showed no evidence of anti-Semitism, that he helped a Jewish pianist and his wife, and that he even helped in the publication of a pro-Resistance journal, is cited by Atlas for his declaration (in public, in Antwerp) that the real secret of de Man’s past is a sordid and quite unglamorous financial scandal that forced him to flee Belgium in 1947 (Atlas, p.37).

Let us entertain this possibility. I say entertuin, since I have seen no evidence beyond Atlas’s article, and have no interest, so far as I am aware, in either accusing or redeeming de Man in this respect. But the consequences for us of entertaining this explanation are quite revealing. It seems to fit some of the facts as they now appear. It implies the relative unimportance of the wartime journalism; and, after all, de Man did not go to trial with the Le Soir collaborators in 1945. What if de Man really were prone to the ‘pathological’ dishonesty that Goriely identified in him (Atlas, p. 37)’ not so much in the sphere of world-historical events (the destruction of European Jewry) - or not just there - but in the distinctly petty sphere of petit-bourgeois swindling and profiteering? The debate has not taken much notice of the de Man that Atlas projects - a man who seems not to have informed his second family of the existence of his first, and who may have told (or is this a mistake?) different people at different times that Hendrik de Man was, respectively, his father and his uncle (Atlas, pp. 66, 68, 69).

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The effect of entertaining this hypothesis (and, I say again, that is all I mean to do) is to disperse the moment of exemplary tragedy, or incrimi- nation (frequently itself reduced to a single article on the Jewish element in literature), into a plethora of other determinations, some of them more appropriate to denomination as farce. Most importantly, for us the inter- preters, it shatters the myth of world-historicality that inevitably comes to define the doings of a twenty-two-year-old columnist who was commenting, inevitably, on one of the greatest evils in the recorded history of the human species. There is, I think, an uncomfortable element of self-inflation at work in the way in which we have made de Man’s relation to the persecution and extermination of the Jews the central item in the Paul de Man affair. This is emphatically not to suggest that the genocide was not central to the history of those times, and it is surely the major fact with which we who come afterwards have to reckon, and to reckon continually. But it is to say that de Man’s relation to that phenomenon (which was surely a series of phenomena, not just a moment of deportation) might not have been as central to his life as it has necessarily come to be to ours. This is difficult to say: but we must at least suspect ourselves of a glamorisation of our profession (and incidentally of de Man) if we place the entire emphasis of the enquiry on de Man’s relation to the fate of European Jewry. Such an emphasis places us all, by association, into one of the most critical moments of the history of our century. It allows us to walk for a while (and as literary critics, members of a profession we mostly think of as powerless, without significant history) in the full glare of the great fact of our times, the attempted destruction of millions of people (let us not simply acquiesce in the term race). This cannot be ignored as part of de Man‘s history, but to make it the whole may be to glamorise him (whether by heroisation or demonisation) and, by contagion, ourselves. It is also to refuse to ponder a possibility for which there is already much evidence elsewhere: that the treatment of the Jews was assimilated by many (though certainly not all) as a matter of the ordinary, as unremarkable, as unevocative of absolute resistance.

Thus it may be that the deportation of Belgium’s Jews is not the only or the most important fact that we have to consider. Suppose it were irrelevant, or minor, in the field of determinations we might hypothesise as playing on and around the young de Man? How do we know that de Man did not realise, in October-November 1942, that the war had turned, that a German victory was no longer inevitable? Even Hitler’s generals had been sceptical about the wisdom of invading Russia. In September 1942 the deadlock at Stalingrad had begun: Russian reinforcements would arrive in November. That same month (1 -2 November) the British stopped

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Rommel at El Alamein, and turned the course of the war in North Africa. The United States had not only entered the war, but had won the critical Battle of Midway (June 1942). Surely anyone working for or around a newspaper would have known these things, however efficient the censor- ship? A prudent young man might well have decided that this would be a good time to remove his name from the roster of an occupied newspaper. He might have done this whether or not he felt that the deportation of the Jews (beginning, apparently, in August 1942) were a crime against humanity; he might have seen the need to insure against a future that now looked far more open than it had in 1940; and he might have shown good sense in so doing, if it really came to pass that Le Soir’s other literary critic were assassinated by the Resistance two months after de Man stopped writing (Atlas, p.68).

Let me say again, I am entertaining these ideas chiefly because they have not been much entertained so far, and because that oversight, however it finally (or provisionally) comes to relate to de Man’s own history, about which I do not mean to pronounce, reflects very importantly on us, his interpreters. The elevation of 1942 as more important to de Man’s history than 1947 (the year he left Belgium) may be part of a narrative of self- aggrandisement on our part, and a symptom of our blindness to our own history. It is this history that I want, finally and most importantly, to open for discussion, for it has hardly been mentioned in the debate so far.

Derrida’s essay makes much play with the metaphor of war: the war (1939-451, our war (the strife among the interpreters), his war (the war inside Paul de Man - the war for which we have, I maintain, absolutely no evidence). Many may feel something troubling in this easy conflation of wars actual and painful with wars inconsequential and even imaginary. And, despite these verbal pyrotechnics, Derrida has - unlike Basil Fawlty - failed to mention the war. Hearing the end of de Man’s lecture on ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’ in 1969, in Geneva, or reading it in its published form in 1971, in America or Europe, one would not have thought of 1941 (or 1789, or 1776) aq the experience signified by the reference - found in the epigraph to this essay - to the textuality of wars and revolutions. One would have thought of more immediate revolutions that had failed or were failing: Prague or Paris, for example. One would have thought of the ’student’ revolution that was thought to be happening in Europe and the United States. And one would certainly have thought of the war in south-east Asia, of ‘Vietnam’, a war which was, by those sympathetic to the communist cause, itself nominated a revolution of an oppressed people against a puppet regime and the world’s most powerful capitalist state.

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The major question for us interpreters, and disciples, and opponents, is not then about the history of de Man in 1941 -42, or even in 1947, important as those questions are for one kind of historical enquiry. The major question for us, and in relation to our attitudes towards more recent and even contemporary genocides, is the question that is never asked about the war that is never mentioned. There have been gestures towards situating the ‘de Man affair’ in the present. J. Hillis Miller, again, thinks that the real agenda is the discrediting of deconstruction in particular and literary theory in general. Only this, for him, can explain ’the abandoning of the canons of journalistic and academic responsibility’ (p. 685). But where does Miller find these standards? Is it not almost the definition of political urgency that it inspires or requires the repression of certain truths and the non-pursuit of certain hypotheses, whether in the discussion of central America, or ‘Contragate’, to take two recent examples? Who is interested in standards, academic or journalistic? Certainly not the national newspapers, although a case could be made for some of the periodicals (The Nation, Zeta, Akwesasne Notes). And very few in the universities, when the issues take urgent form. Miller here proffers a liberal fiction of fair play that is hardly ever upheld: though one cannot disagree with him that it should be.

To return, then to the repression of our own history: in The Eighteenth B m a i r e of Louis Napoleon (1852), Karl Marx wrote of all history before the moment of the authentic revolution as made up of the cycle of tragedy and farce, with each generation responding to crisis by turning to the past for a disguise to blind itself to its own present. Marx calls this process ‘world- historical necromancy’ .9 According to this pattern, the ‘gladiators’ of the bourgeois revolution of 1789 turned back to Rome and found there ‘the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to maintain their passion on the high plane of great historical tragedy’ (pp. 104-5). In this way we all continue to ‘dull’ ourselves to our own ‘content‘ (p. 106).

The application is embarrassingly clear. As literary theorists, we have in general been reluctant to explore the terms of our own content (so far from real discontent) or unable to find a language for so doing. American deconstruction has been especially unwilling to invite such reflections on itself. It has projected, of course, a rhetoric of rigorous self-consciousness, only to define self-consciousness within the narrowest limits, those set by a model of language so implausibly totalised as to render difficult or improper any examination of particular uses of language at the service of particular interests. It has had, in other words, no historical dimension at all, let alone invited any reflection on its own historicality. For all the

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notions about what, for example, de Man’s writings might lead to, in various hands or read in a certain way, de Man himself did nothing to stimulate an enquiry into the historical moment of deconstruction itself. On the con- trary, he wrote as if, in his hands and for the first time, the truth about language were for the first time revealed to criticism, as it had before been intimated in literature itself. De Man never seems to have asked the ques- tion that we must now ask: why did he become, for so many, the authori- tative voice of literary theory between, roughly, 1968 and 1978? To be sure, there is the charisma to which many of his friends and students will attest, and there is the power of a major graduate school, with unusually influential colleagues, at a particular time and place. But Fredric Jameson also worked at Yale, to much less effect. So one cannot ascribe de Man’s influence to purely contingent circumstances: one must look for some general historical explanations for the popularity of his ideas. These ideas were always regarded more seriously in America than in Europe, and many Europeans to this day find it hard to understand de Man’s importance. Let us look again at the epigraph, the famous reference to wars and revolutions (as we know them) as texts in masquerade. What could this have meant, or have been taken to mean? Perhaps that we should not take wars and revolutions more seriously than we take texts? This need not be taken as trivial, since de Man himself took texts very seriously indeed. This very seriousness partly explains his appeal to the professional elite. Perhaps he meant to alert us to the process whereby events that are proffered as empirical (wars and revolutions) only ever came to us, or come down to us, in textualised form, a form that thus makes them subject to all sorts of necessary scepticisms.’o This is an important reminder, the forgetting of which allows for vulgar historicism. And perhaps this is a clue to the motives behind the popularity of de Man’s lessons: that they invite us to suspend the reference to history at a time when history was more than usually intrusive on American college campuses. One could read de Man’s sentence as providing a rationale for refusing the draft: don’t go off to a war that you don’t know anything about, that is presented to you only as textualised by other people’s interests. One could. Or, and additionally, one could read it as making the claim that there is nothing to be thought about in the public sphere that the literary critic is not already aware of, already ahead of. Pronounced as it was at a time of almost Manichaean divisions in public opinion about the war, de Man’s allusion seems odd, exactly because it is an allusion, rather than a declar- ation. It is so slight, indeed, as to have proved largely ignorable at the time, and often so since. It may be that de Man was here leaving a small signature of good faith with those who fled to Canada; or it may be that he here resorts to an irony that, whatever it might have been in other circumstances, is in CQ 31/4-€

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this case an evasion, a recourse to a strictly delineated professional effect whose relation to an urgently immediate crisis would be, and deliberately, inconsequential. These are the questions most important to us, because they are the questions that may help to explain our own fascination with de Man and with his lessons. Do we have here the reflections of an astutely Socratic intelligence, a thorn in the flesh of the state apparatus, or the publishings of an alienated and perhaps indifferent clerisy concerned to legitimate nothing so much as its own inactivity? There are no easy answers, least of all when no one is much interested in pursuing the questions. Geoffrey Hartman praises de Man for having refused to confuse ‘intellect and action, ideology and political praxis’ (p. 29). This is an important lesson. But with de Man, it often seems to have taken the form of lack of interest in, even hostility to, the very question of a relation between these pairings, in the spirit of what Frank Lentricchia has aptly called a ‘passionate anti- historicism’ . l l Had there been any interest, prior to the recent revelations, in deconstruction’s own history - our history - then it might have worked on from Lentricchia’s own, fine chapter in After the New Criticism.12 But there has been no interest in that kind of self-consciousness, and the debate so far suggests that there is still no interest. The ‘history’ in question has been the history of 1941-42. What did de Man offer the literary-critical avant-garde of the war years - our war years? There are various possibilities, not necessarily exclusive. Did he provide a sophisticated theoretical (and always professionalised) model for the management of what might other- wise have been unbearable social - intellectual tensions - tensions gener- ated precisely by being in the university, and thus largely protected from conscription? Among those who did not speak out clearly against the war, among those who were confused or ambivalent, could it be that de Man’s ideas appealed exactly as allusion, rather than statement? Did the experience of Vietnam inspire an aftermath in which the rejection or avoidance of history became a compulsive generational and/or occupational proclivity, as the Vietnam veterans themselves claim? Hartman, referring principally to the 1940s, confesses of de Man that ‘it is true that he does not place himself in a historical context, and he should have done so’ (p. 30). But how could he have maintained the profile of a thoroughly historical analysis (more than just a ’context’), one that included not just 1942 and 1947 but also 1969 and so on, without changing the face of everything that went by the name of deconstruction, and thus ceasing to be, in discursive terms, ‘Paul de Man’? Nor, I suspect, would any such historical criticism, if it had chanced to appear (and some did), have been popular in those years, in that way.

It is not a matter of visiting a simple blame upon Paul de Man for this

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oversight of the present, his present of 1968-78. How many of us, after all, would be able to look the conditions of our own reputation squarely in the eye? But if blame is inappropriate, so too is the apology that suggests the form of blaming us for failing to read him. Derrida again: ‘He must have thought that well-tuned ears knew how to hear him, and that he did not even need to confide in anyone about the war in this period’ fp. 649). {Derrida means 1939-45, of course.) Why must he have thought this, with regard to any war, of past or present? And what means need, here? Before blame or apology, we could use some analysis, some research, some hypotheses, not just about the 1940s (which we are surely going to get), but also about the 1960s (which we are much less likely to get). And this brings me to my final point: the history of the 1960s and 1970s is not the final history. Difficult as it is to heave literary theory in general, and deconstruction in particular, into this sphere of the historical, there is the further problem of our dulling ourselves to our subsequent content, that of the present; not the Vietnam war, but its aftermath and its relation to quite other concerns. De Man’s allusion to the wars and revolutions of 1969 is undecidable enough to suggest a reaction to immediate history that was rather complex - neither full acknowledgement nor complete repression but, more evasively, allusion. If this is a typical phenomenon in professional academic life, that it registers the pressures of its own times in displaced and ambivalent ways (much as Hollywood reacts to ideological debates, to continue to make money while preserving interest], then we cannot afford to assume that it is only deconstruction that shows itself in this way. If (and I say if) there is a more general cunning of theory at work here, how does it apply to what I have argued to be the emerging hegemony of cultural and gender studies in today’s elite graduate schools? I do not mean to put down the new as no better than what it replaces. As a matter of fact, I think it has the potential to be much better than what it replaces. (The fulfilment of this potential will require that it respond to the deconstructive challenge to easy referen- tiality, and develop the kind of historical self-consciousness, past and present, that deconstruction itself largely ignored in favour of a proposed uniformity called ‘language’.) But I do want to open the question, or keep it open, of whether the new materialism can be thought of as reflective of other shifts in the culture at large. We have to question, indeed, the very existence of a culture ‘at large’, and the relation of subcultures to any more total structuration of social and discursive life. If we do not yet have the language for this task - given the need to reassemble and rethink so many items in the classic Marxist analysis, for example - we can still avoid repeating the fantasy of Paul de Man’s writings: that texts are what we do, and that we need only do texts, and do them in a way that guarantees the

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same conclusions over and over again. We can certainly do better than most of the participants in the ‘Paul de Man affair’, who have so far managed to avoid reference to all kinds of wars that they do not seem to remember or recognise, then as now.

University of Colorado, Boulder January 1989

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Notes ‘Literary history and literary modernity’ (1969), in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 165. Times Literary Supplement, 17-23 June 1988, p. 676. Jacques Derrida, ‘Like the sound of the sea deep within a shell: Paul de Man’s war’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry, 14 (1987-88), 590-652, p. 594. Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukhcs, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Aesthetics and PoLitics (London: Verso, 19801, p. 129. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 24 February 1988, p. 35. My translation. Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Blindness and insight’, The NewRepublic, 7 March 1988, pp. 29, 30. James Atlas, ‘The case of Paul de Man’, New York Times Magazine, 28 August 1988, p. 69. Stanley Corngold, Times Literary Supplement, 11- 17 November 1988, p. 1251. The Complete Works of Marxand Engels, in progress (New York: International Publishers, 1975-), 11, p. 104. Derrida notes (pp. 609- lo), for what can be made of it, the frequency of references to ’revolution’ in the wartime journalism. Quoted by Jon Wieners in The Nation, 9 January 1988, p. 24. After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 282-317. Terry Eagleton’s work should also be consulted for a ‘history’ of deconstruction.