Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

Le Soirpieces, de Man speculated coolly about the conse-
quences for Europe if it were to be deprived of its Jews: nothing
bad, since the loss of millions of Jews would have no real effect
on European culture. Derrida, electrified by the shocking news
of de Man’s willing proximity to Nazism, immediately began a
campaign, conducted largely by telephone, to rally professors
of literature and philosophy to the defense of de Man. For Der-
rida, journalists were the enemy. They hated real thought, and
they would be eager to bring down de Man, one of our great
thinkers, by exposing him as a Nazi sympathizer.
Newsweekdid indeed publish a photograph of de Man
next to one of marching storm troopers, and the fact that the
youthful de Man was never a Nazi, but rather an author of
pro-collaborationist articles, was forgotten by some journal-
ists. David Lehman, a talented poet and critic, published a
book,Signs of the Times( 1988 ), in which he (implausibly and
unfortunately) proposed an affinity between the methods of
deconstruction and de Man’s wartime apologetics for German
fascism.
Derrida was determined to attack the journalists’ treat-
ment of de Man, mercilessly if need be, before they won the
battle over deconstruction, which was de Man’s legacy and
his own. It is no exaggeration to say that, for Derrida, journal-
ists were the real Nazis. Derrida makes this analogy explicit in
the course of his lengthy essay on the de Man affair, “Paul de
Man’s War.”
During this time, if you weren’t with Derrida you were
against him. Almost as soon as the scandal broke, he started a
petition against the press coverage of de Man and energetically
set about organizing a conference on the Le Soirarticles. In a
published essay, Derrida accused de Man’s dear friend Harold
Bloom of acting more reprehensibly than de Man himself in


192 Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger

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