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The Bleatings of a Moral Coward, July 2, 2011
In December of 1987, The New York Times ran an article by a Belgian graduate student named Ortwin de Graef who was researching the early writings of the noted deconstructionist Paul de Man. De Graef discovered more than one hundred essays and articles published by de Man in the early 1940s in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir. One of these articles was a vicious anti-Semitic pro-Nazi piece called "The Jews in Contemporary Literature." Le Soir was a mouthpiece for the Nazi party and often ran essays calling for what would soon be termed "The Final Solution." What was surprising was that de Man had written them, a fact that he understandably did not publicize after he had immigrated to America after the war to find a job as a university professor of literature.
De Man wrote this essay in 1941 and in it he describes a Europe that would benefit if all its Jews were to go elsewhere. De Man accuses European Jewry of "meddling in all aspects of European life...Moreover, one thus sees that a solution to the Jewish question that envisions the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not involve deplorable consequences for the literary life of the West. It (Europe) would lose, all told, a few personalities of mediocre value and would continue, as in the past, to develop according to its own great evolutionary laws." This was not the only published essay critical of Jews and laudatory of Nazi Germany that appeared in Le Soir. In another article, De Man praises Hitler for defeating a debilitated French society and for reinvigorating it with a similar set of racial purity laws then prevalent in Germany. In yet another, de Man foresees a time when "the war will only bring about a more intimate union of two things that have always been close, the Hitlerian soul and the German soul, until they have been made one single and unique power."
One might think that when these articles were published for all the world to see as Wartime Journalism in 1989, the majority of thinkers, writers, philosophers, and professors would have loudly and immediately denounced de Man for his radical views. One would, unfortunately, be wrong. What happened instead is that a surprisingly vocal group of supporters rushed to his defense. Even prior to the publication of Wartime Journalism, a duo of de Man's colleagues planned a spirited counterattack: J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida, both noted deconstructionists. Their plan was to use the very tenets of deconstruction to present de Man's activities as subject to contextualization, obfuscation, the indeterminacy of language, and the omission of human values as the "core" of Western culture--all of which are the trademarks of deconstructive thought. These two were soon joined by two other writers who used similar linguistic legerdemain to portray de Man as being no worse than any of his contemporaries. James Atlas, in "The Case of Paul de Man," writes that he cannot think of even one person who ever heard de Man utter just one word against Jews. Similarly, Christopher Norris in his book PAUL DE MAN: DECONSTRUCTION AND THE CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY excuses de Man's essays as the juvenile writings of an overly young man. Surely, Atlas and Norris both note, that the later writings of a mature de Man certainly should outweigh the scribblings of a youthful author who wanted only to hold on to his job. Besides, they add, what de Man did write was much less harmful and vicious than what was current in the editorials of Le Soir on any given day.
Such defenses as these and those that appear in a companion volume (RESPONSES: ON PAUL DE MAN'S WARTIME JOURNALISM) miss the point. What is critical is that de Man was neither unique nor as vicious as his fellow writers at Le Soir were. If it is true--as his defenders relentlessly urge--that de Man was not the worst beast in the cage, then it must also be granted that de Man did nothing to oppose the nightmare of the 1940s in Belgium. The anecdotal comments related to his never uttering any slurs against Jews or even harboring Jews in his flat with the Gestapo in hot pursuit seem pitiful and unconvincing. Even though de Man was still a very young man in 1941, as an exceptionally well-read intellectual well versed in European thought, he simply had to know what National Socialism was all about. It is inconceivable that he was unaware of the virulent anti-Semitic screeds of Mein Kampf. So why did so many writers of the 1980s rush to his defense? Perhaps they were too well versed in the authoritarian mind set of transplanted European intellectuals who sought to use the truth-dodging precepts of Derrida and de Man to reconstruct, re-edit, and re-write the past so that as in Orwell's 1984: "Those who control the present control the past and those who control the past control the future." The Wartime Journals of Paul de Man are the pathetic bleatings of a self-serving morally bankrupt coward who has somehow amazingly succeeded in emerging as the victim when no less than six million of them are crying from the grave to present a more realistic picture.
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