Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

IV Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger merica is deconstruction.” Derrida’s pronouncement certainly seemed to be true in the 1980 ...

The eighties began for Derrida with a major disappoint- ment. He had been nominated for a prestigious chair at the University of ...

the divide between Derrida and Gadamer in their readings of Paul Celan.) With de Man and Heidegger, the personality of the think ...

World War I and, after studying with Heidegger in Freiburg, became one of his nation’s best-known philosophers. His life- time w ...

by becoming seriously involved with others. The willing expo- sure of self that occurs in such exchanges is for Gadamer the stan ...

anomaly in interpretation, Gadamer insists. In particular, the patient’s dream, which provides material for the analyst, occu- p ...

ments on his interlocutors, treats Gadamer as if the two have little to say to each other. At least this is how Gadamer took Der ...

titled “Who Am I and Who Are You?” But whereas Gadamer pictures Celan’s difficult poetic texts asking questions of the reader an ...

pulse of a writer like Celan: his need for an other, for someone he can reach toward and make understand. Derrida’s more her- me ...

ready. Then Derrida began, speaking of course in French (later, he was to learn English quite well, but this was 1984 ). “Le mém ...

Le Soirpieces, de Man speculated coolly about the conse- quences for Europe if it were to be deprived of its Jews: nothing bad, ...

his writings for Le Soir.Bloom had suggested that de Man’s wartime actions, being a matter of personal conscience, should not be ...

The lightning-quick German invasion of Belgium took place in May 1940. De Man’s articles in Le Soirappeared shortly af- terwards ...

fession full of fakeness, he was real.” Another professor, Ellen Burt, praised de Man as follows: “He had no time to waste being ...

deal, as they say, when one gets to know it close up” (Yale 326 ). De Man’s resolve in his last days was extraordinarily noble, ...

Man. In his Le Soirarticles, de Man gladly evoked the passions of the völkischheart, writing of “the Hitlerian soul and the Germ ...

Man moved (with the student he had married, the daughter of a U.S. Senator) to Boston. (He had left a wife and children in Argen ...

de Man argued, were made possible by the fact that they over- looked something central in the works they discussed. Such blindne ...

thor is in fact a common pattern in Derrida’s readings, as we have seen. As de Man sees it, Derrida knows what Rousseau also kno ...

Man, strangely, insists that reading is an essential practice, and his disciple J. Hillis Miller has even asserted that de Man’s ...