Customer Reviews

Signs Of The Times - Deconstruction And The Fall Of Paul De Man

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Why is this book out of print? It should be taught in universities as a classic work on 20th century literary criticism and "theory". Its take on the posthumous Paul De Man scandal is clear, comprehensive, and mostly convincing. De Man, a dead deconstrutionist, was revealed to have been a cad in his public and private lives. Lehman demonstrates how the equivoque and equivoation that are central to deconstrutionism allowed De Man to rationalize his past as a Nazi collaborator, as a liar to USA immigration and to influential American intellectuals in the 1950s, and as a shuffler off of responsibilities to his first wife and family, all as mere textual details that didn't need addressing in his later career as a very respected American literary critic and academic. I disliked De Man's mandarin literary criticism even before I knew he was involved in deconstructionism--I thought his insistence on universal textual equivocation, universal lack of definitive textual commitment, and universal textual self-referentiality was part of the conservative, literature-has-no-social-bearing school of literary criticism which dominated the academy in the 1950s, and remained vital though not unchallenged there in the 1960s and early 70s. I dock Lehman's book one star for his too indiscriminately lumping De Man and deconstrutionism with other, more socially involved movements in academic thought that Lehmann also happens to dislike.

"Signs of the Times" is one of those very rare books that can actually change your life by altering your consciousness about perception and reality. It's a fascinating, riveting and funny account of how Yale University deconstruction guru Paul De Man was exposed after his death as an anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator in Belgium during World War II. It does something unusual and extremely valuable: it turns the tables on the professional cynics of academic theory, by subjecting them to the same rigorous skepticism that they assume they alone are worthy to wield. Lehman's wonderful defense of objectivity, historical truth, and ideological non-dogmatism is one of the most entertaining, exhilarating books I've ever read. After reading it I would never again take at face value the relativistic blitherings of university "experts." Lehman's book does something wonderful: it assumes that a common, decently educated reader and citizen can come to know truths about life. What a fabulous, unique concept for contemporary intellectual life!

Books on deconstruction tend to come in one of two varieties--those that are self-referential and highly reverent (like Culler's ON DECONSTRUCTION) and those that seek to explain deconstruction in a more grounded more linguistically accessible way. David Lehman in SIGNS OF THE TIMES thankfully falls into this latter category. It is no secret that deconstruction with its attendant de-valuation of logocentrism and the concept of Great Books has been the rule in academia since the 1970s. What Professor Lehman has done was to show how deconstruction arose and to identify its salient traits. Further, he discusses the lamentable case of noted deconstructionist Paul de Man who in his youth wrote various articles during WWII in the Belgian newspaper "Le Soir" that were virulently anti-Semitic.

Part of the joy in reading Lehman's account of the origin of deconstruction lies in comparing his prose style with someone like Jonathan Culler whose own style of circularity well matches with the self-referentiality of orthodox deconstructionism. Both Culler and Lehman hold a PhD in English, but where Culler writes primarily for clones of himself, Lehman strives to write in a manner that is clear, consise, and intelligible--exactly the contrary to the spirit of Derridean deconstructive tenets. I do not mean to imply that Lehman is "dumbing down" an admittedly abstruse and convoluted topic. Rather, he proves that one need not get bogged down in a linguistic fog when the topic resists easy comprehension.

The second half of Lehman's book is dedicated to coming to grips with the disturbing linkage of de Man's Nazi writings of the 1940s with his later exposition of deconstruction. If this linkage of the two is "disturbing" then Lehman insists that it is rightfully so. And I agree. Yes, on one hand, one must not automatically place an equal sign between two sets of writings spread apart over several decades, but on the other, if the logic of the later writings is used (misused?) to recontextualize the reality of the former, then it is eminently justified to call into question a theory of criticism that basically allows anyone to say, to do, or to write anything and not have to worry about consequence. It is not likely that SIGNS OF THE TIMES will ever be assigned on a required reading list for Intro to Literary Theory at Columbia anytime soon, and that is a shame.

In a first-rate piece of literary reportage, David Lehman chronicles the movement known as "deconstructionism" within the larger movement in the humanities known as "critical theory." With more empathy for his subjects than this reviewer can muster, Lehman shows how hubris, greed, parochialism, and elitism led to an "emperor's new clothes" community in which a former Nazi collaborator could become idolized by a generation of impressionable academic lefties.

A must-have addition to all prospective academics who want to retain...if not their souls, may we at least say their individual identities?

This is the story of an intellectual movement built on a foundation of sand. Deconstructionism is yet another literary movement that accompanied the rise of feminist, ethnic, Marxist and liberation literature, movements that swept the academic world. It is dangerous in its implications and startling in its conclusions. Its founder, Paul de Man, taught literature at Yale.

He hid a dirty secret for forty years: He assisted the Nazis in their occupation of France. In deconstructionist fashion, the response to this news was that the Jews themselves were to blame and he was the victim. Deconstructionists claim that the subject cannot be defined - it is a theory or method or even structure. But among gthe disturbing elements are: History is bunk (so we can't believe or learn anything), words control us (not the other way around), the critic is of more importance than the subject, absence is presence and most importantly, language, not knowledge, is true power.

The term itself derives from a call for the destruction of ontolgy, the study of the nature of being. A close look at the advocates of deconstructionism reveals a fascist undertone throughout. Not only was de Man a one-time supporter but so was Vladimir Sokolov (Yale), Heidegger (Germany), Blanchot (France) and Man's number one disciple, Jacque Derrida, the Algerian Frenchman. Derrida has defended de Man (as well as the others) arguing, in deconstructionist terms, that everything is theory yet nothing can be defined - even terms like good and bad. The fact that this group identified with the far Left is indicative of the totalitarian nature of both movements.

The description of the politicalization of academia should be required reading for every tax payer or parent of a prospective college student. This is an important, well-written brilliant study of a tragic event in our nation's history. It should serve as a warning.

The most fascinating part of the De Man saga is the fact that he lived a lie for roughly forty years, like some sort of film noir of a lie lived in plain sight. Everything he wrote after the war can only be seen in the light of the fact, not only that he was a collaborator, but that he must have known that his past would eventually turn up, and that everything he wrote about guilt and truth and language would eventually be read in that light. His nihilism was in a sense one long exculpation. And why was he never fingered during his life? Was there no other Belgian refugee who said, "Wait a minute, I remember this guy from Le soir vole!" How could a highly visible collaborator survive a very public career in the US without even changing his name? The only way to explain it is by saying that he was Belgian and wrote in Flemish, but even that doesn't explain it. And if he was such a cad, how come none of his Belgian friends--or even his wife, who he deserted--ratted him out? Strangely, Lehman never even mentions that, as if the question never occurs to him. De Man's writing is magisterial and affectless, and it is not hard to understand why his students admired him so greatly. His story reminds me a great deal of that of Leo Strauss, another refugee who came to the US (under very different circumstances) and also founded a sect on the basis of a method of reading, deconstruction in the one case and esotericism in the other.

Lehman is a decent historian of modern poetry, but he is completely out of his depth with the philosophical and theoretical questions raised by deconstruction and other forms of post-structuralism. Far from, as other reviewers imply, offering an impressive defence of objectivity, he actually fails to grasp what the issues are. Robust common sense has its place in everyday life, but is a crude tool with which to tackle technical philosophical problems with which subtle - and qualified - thinkers have been wrestling for centuries.

The supposed scandal about Paul de Man is merely seasoning. Before getting excited about connections between his youthful political errors and his mature theoretical work, it's worth remembering that scientists, logicians, analytical philosophers, professors of law, theologians - and indeed butchers and bakers - have been bedfellows of anti-semitism and fascism. It takes a special kind of ignorance, or prejudice, to suppose that it is a specialty of deconstructionists.