Paul de Man

Paul de Man (born December 6, 1919, Antwerp, Belgium—died December 21, 1983, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.) Belgian-born literary critic and theorist, along with Jacques Derrida one of the two major proponents of deconstruction, a controversial form of philosophical and literary analysis that was influential within many academic disciplines in the 1970s and ’80s.

Life and career

De Man was born into a wealthy Belgian family. From an early age he was recognized for his intellect and charm as well as for his good looks. He was influenced by his uncle, Henri de Man, an internationally known and charismatic political leader who began his career as a socialist but turned to fascism as Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. In 1937, at age 17, Paul de Man entered the Free University of Brussels (ULB) but was soon derailed by the lingering effects of family tragedies, including the accidental death of his brother and the suicide of his mother, whose body he had found. He failed many of his courses and never earned a degree. Following the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940, his uncle became de facto prime minister of the country and urged Belgians to cooperate with the German authorities. Like many other Belgians, Paul de Man believed at the time that the war was over.

While still a student in 1940, de Man became involved in a ménage à trois with a married woman, who gave birth to his son one year later. He lived with her and her husband for two years, helping to raise the child. After she obtained a divorce in 1943, she and de Man were married and later had two other sons.

In December 1940 de Man became a collaborator by accepting a position as an assistant to the music critic of the newspaper Le Soir (“The Evening”), which had been seized by German authorities during the previous summer (it was soon referred to by Belgians as Le Soir [Volé]—“The [Stolen] Evening”). In March 1941 the newspaper published a set of articles attacking Jews, to which de Man contributed an anti-Semitic essay, “The Jews in Present-Day Literature.” Three weeks later he was promoted and given a weekly book-review column, which ran for two years under his byline. De Man wrote under visible censorship, as the newspaper was vetted by a German officer installed in the city room. Moreover, powerful preliminary censorship in Paris meant that de Man received only those books that had already passed German review. In his column de Man showed self-assured literary judgment and a strong cultural and political stance that promoted Flemish and German literature, criticized what was “degenerate” in French productions, and urged readers not to “wait and see” but to support Germany in the war.

De Man was ambitious for prominence but kept his activities hidden from his friends. In addition to his job at Le Soir, he simultaneously held two, other more-important positions with German-controlled media companies, achieving high rank and salary. Two years later, however, he lost all three positions when his underhanded attempt to take control of one of the companies was discovered, along with other acts of negligence and mismanagement. After the war, the newspaper and both media companies were investigated and found treasonous; two of their leaders were sentenced to death in judgments that were later commuted. De Man was interrogated because of his former employment and his notorious article but was released, neither prosecuted nor exonerated.

Prevented from returning to ULB because of its ban on collaborators, in 1946 de Man, working alone, opened his own publishing house, Hermès, with money invested by associates of his father. He published only one or two books (one of them in unsellable condition), however, and in less than two years all of the capital of 1.45 million Belgian francs had disappeared, de Man having used much of it for his personal expenses. Because de Man’s father was responsible as a silent partner in the business, he was forced to report his son to the police. Facing two trials, in 1948 de Man fled to the United States with a visa that his father had managed to obtain for him, sending his wife and children to Argentina to join her parents. He never lived with them (or wished to see them) again. Two courts in Antwerp prosecuted de Man in absentia, finding him guilty on 16 counts of fraud, forgery, swindling, and falsifying the financial records of his company; he was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay heavy fines. Now a fugitive, de Man could not return to Belgium, where there was an open warrant for his arrest. His father nearly bankrupted himself to pay some of de Man’s creditors but refused any further contact with him. He died unreconciled with his son.

De Man began a new life in New York City in June 1948 as an unknown bookstore clerk. With help from the French writer Georges Bataille, who had been one of his intellectual heroes and a mentor in Belgium, and possibly through prior contacts he had made in New York, de Man was soon befriended by two icons of the American intellectual left, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy. McCarthy and de Man grew close, and in 1949 she arranged for his first academic job, at Bard College, as a temporary replacement for a professor of French. De Man was immediately popular there. Almost upon arriving, however, he fell in love with an undergraduate student, Patricia Kelley, who soon became pregnant by him. Unable to secure a divorce, in June 1950 de Man married Kelley in a union that she did not know was bigamous, and their child was born in September (they were finally legally married in 1960). Over the protests of his devoted students, the college fired de Man in December 1950. Its decision was influenced by the scandal created by his relationship with Kelley and the enmity of the professor whom de Man had replaced and whose house he had agreed to rent. Earning a meagre salary, de Man had paid nothing for it until forced to do so by garnishment of his pay. Penniless, in another quiet exile, and now the head of a family of three, he left for Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Harvard University, arriving in July 1951.

In teaching French intellectual ideas at Bard, de Man had found his true vocation, and he established lifelong relations with certain students and colleagues. Despite his lack of an undergraduate degree, de Man impressed the influential Harvard professor Harry Levin in conversation, and, with a letter of recommendation from Ted Weiss—a poet, editor, and colleague at Bard—de Man was admitted as an unmatriculated student to Levin’s advanced seminar in comparative literature at Harvard, where he performed well. In the next academic year de Man persuaded Renato Poggioli, the department’s chairman, to admit him formally to the graduate program in comparative literature, despite the failures recorded on his transcript from ULB. The copy of the transcript submitted by de Man shows what appears to be his own added handwritten claim that he had gained a “license” from a “State Board” there, though none is known to have existed. Meanwhile, de Man taught full-time at the Berlitz language school in Boston, though his advisers thought he did so only occasionally; he was the best-paid and most sought-after instructor there throughout the 1950s, and he also tutored privately.

In 1954 he was elected a junior fellow at Harvard, a significant academic achievement that also provided him with a stipend for three years. Simultaneously, however, he was under continual pressure from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), as he had overstayed his visa by many years and faced deportation. At about that time he was also denounced in a letter to Harvard that presented detailed information about his activities in Belgium (the identity of the writer was not revealed to de Man and remains uncertain). De Man’s reply nevertheless satisfied the university and turned aside accusations concerning his lack of a college degree and his irregular status as an immigrant.

Having been threatened with deportation by the INS, in January 1955 de Man left with his family for France, staying nearly two years. While there he worked with the philosopher Jean Wahl, who had written extensively on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, and other French thinkers. During that exceptionally prolific period, de Man developed his philosophical approach to language and wrote some of the 12 articles (one of them a translation of a work by Heidegger) that he eventually published in French and English between 1953 and 1960. Those ideas, which were not generally taught in the United States, underlay de Man’s teaching and later became the foundation of his reputation and status.

Although still lacking a visa and even a passport, de Man returned with his family to the United States in December 1956, arriving in New York City after a two-week voyage on a Greek freighter. Fortuitously, INS agents at the scene were more interested in other passengers, and de Man was waved through without questions.

Meanwhile, however, de Man had not made sufficient progress on his Ph.D. thesis, which all junior fellows at Harvard were expected to finish. Uncomfortable with tests since his days at ULB and not having had sufficient time to study, in October 1957 he failed the department’s general examination for dissertation students, a fact that he concealed (he retook the test successfully in 1959). He finally submitted his dissertation in May 1960, and it was accepted despite complaints from his advisers that it was excessively late, incomplete, and more philosophical than literary, reflecting the existentialist ideas of Heidegger and other Continental philosophers. De Man was accordingly offered only a terminal two-year appointment rather than a tenure-track position at Harvard. His disappointed colleagues, ignorant of this history, blamed his misfortune on the supposed jealousy of de Man’s mentors.

He surprised his circle, however, when he announced that he had been offered an associate professorship of comparative literature at Cornell University. Accepting it, he moved to Ithaca, New York, in the summer of 1960. Four years later he was promoted to full professor. At Cornell, de Man flourished as an academic, becoming very popular with students and with many colleagues, though his lectures often seemed opaque. His private life became conventional and quiet and was even perceived as austere, for he avoided personal entanglements. His new colleagues were unaware of his background. Nor did they know that he simultaneously held another tenured professorship at the University of Zürich, a serious breach of professional ethics that had been facilitated by the deans of the two institutions, who had secretly agreed to pay de Man two full salaries and to reduce his teaching loads at both universities.

In the mid-1960s de Man befriended the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, with whom he developed deconstruction, at first a form of literary analysis that aimed to show the “seams” existent in all texts and to demonstrate that, if examined in detail, all language contradicts itself, and its claims to “meaning” are “slippery.” Their approach soon gained influence in a wide range of other academic disciplines—including law, architecture, anthropology, and theology—and was taken up by feminist and other movements, in which it was perceived as a means of subverting oppressive social and political forces.

In 1971 de Man moved to Yale University largely through the influence of the Yale literary theorist Geoffrey H. Hartman. Yale, however, required all prospective tenured professors to have published at least one book—a stumbling block, because de Man had written only essays. To overcome it, Hartman and others cobbled together a book out of de Man’s published articles; the work, titled Blindness and Insight (1971), became widely influential. Initially hired by the university as a professor of French, de Man later joined and became chairman of the department of comparative literature and was elevated to the rank of Sterling Professor of the Humanities.

In his early work, de Man argued that post-Kantian philosophy and literary criticism suffer from the tendency to confuse the structure of language with the principles that organize natural reality. In time de Man, often citing Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, evolved into being what he called a “linguistic philosopher,” though that claim was disputed by some established philosophers, such as Robert Nozick. De Man’s work was controversial also because deconstruction employed a variety of apparently indefinable descriptors and opaque terms, which critics rejected as empty jargon. De Man’s students, however, defended his use of language on the grounds that every discipline has the right to invent its own technical language.

With the notice attending Blindness and Insight, Yale became the centre for deconstructive literary criticism in the United States. Later collections of academic essays by de Man include Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (1979), The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984), The Resistance to Theory (1986), and Aesthetic Ideology (1988).

De Man’s reputation suffered after 1988, when at a conference on de Man held in Antwerp his anti-Semitic essay of 1941 was discussed in a talk by Ortwin de Graef, a graduate student. Coincidentally, at the same conference de Man’s marital and financial misconduct was described in a paper by the historian Georges Goriély, who had been de Man’s friend in Belgium before and during the war. After those presentations, some popular publications seized on the little that was known of de Man’s activities under the German occupation to conclude that he had been a “Nazi”—an exaggeration—and to criticize deconstruction and its practitioners by name. Fearing that their careers and reputations were at stake, some academic followers of de Man acted in concert, refusing to discuss him with the press or, in some cases, with other scholars. Others contributed to an anthology, Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism (1989). An earlier volume, Wartime Journalism (1988), provided all the disputed texts in the original French and Flemish and in English translation.

Jacques Derrida, who by then had an independent reputation, preserved his standing by first publishing a long essay on his relationship with de Man (“Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War” [1988]) and then by refusing ever to speak about de Man again.