Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

fession full of fakeness, he was real.” Another professor, Ellen
Burt, praised de Man as follows: “He had no time to waste
being seduced, disquieted, or threatened by women” (Signs
143 – 44 ).
I was present at the memorial service for de Man, as were
virtually all of the students and professors in Yale’s compara-
tive literature, French, and English departments. Many of us
were struck by the fervent devotion, almost religious in tone,
shown to the dead de Man by his disciples. They would carry
his work on, in his memory; he had shown the way for all
future reading. Derrida spoke, movingly, in French. He re-
marked on de Man’s “generosity, his lucidity... the ever so
gentle force of his thought: since that morning in 1966 when I
met him at a breakfast table in Baltimore....From then on,”
Derrida added, “nothing has ever come between us, not even a
hint of disagreement” (Yale 323 – 24 ).
In stating that there had been no disagreements between
himself and de Man, Derrida performed a tender revision of
the historical record. As they met and chatted eagerly at that
1966 breakfast in Baltimore, during Derrida’s first visit to the
United States, Derrida and de Man learned that they had both
been working on Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Language,a
little-studied text. The next year, 1967 , Derrida would publish
his epic reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology;and de
Man, in an essay that appeared three years later, would loudly
voice his differences from Derrida.
In his eulogy, Derrida touchingly remarked on de Man’s
heroic good spirits in the face of death. He quoted from a letter
de Man had written during his final illness, in which he re-
marked with cheerful self-possession, “All of this... seems
prodigiously interesting to me and I’m enjoying myself a lot. I
knew it all along but it is being borne out: death gains a great


Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 195

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