Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

Man. In his Le Soirarticles, de Man gladly evoked the passions
of the völkischheart, writing of “the Hitlerian soul and the
German soul which, from the start, were so close together” (Le
Soir,October 28 , 1942 ). Perhaps because of this early misstep,
he was later to avoid the language of the soul, thinking it naïve
and dangerous.
Knowingly or not, Derrida in his funeral speech was
echoing not just Plato and the young, pro-Hitler de Man, but
also the distinguished Harvard professor Reuben Brower. At
the beginning of the sixties, Brower tried to secure a profes-
sorship for de Man at Harvard, where de Man was already
teaching in an immensely influential course: Hum 6 ,Brower’s
innovative introduction to close reading (or, as Brower called
it, “slow reading”). Brower wrote in January 1960 to his col-
leagues Harry Levin and Renato Poggioli that “Paul has what I
can only call soul:for him aesthetic and moral choices are not
separable, he has some of the fine Gallic feeling that a critical
position is a position of combat. This means of course that he
is sometimes obstinate, sometimes ‘prickly.’ But aren’t all good
men ‘prickly’ at his age?”^6 A peculiar combination of battle-
ready obstinacy and amiability characterized both Derrida
and de Man, drawing the two friends together. Derrida’s own
combative nature appears more than anywhere else in his han-
dling of the de Man affair.
De Man had counted upon the devotion of his friends
during his long career in America, beginning with his arrival
in the United States in 1948. While working as a clerk in a
bookshop in Grand Central Station, he was adopted by the
Partisan Reviewcrowd, including Mary McCarthy and the Par-
tisan Review’s editor, William Phillips. A letter from McCarthy
to the poet Theodore Weiss at Bard College began de Man’s
career in the American academy. After the stint at Bard, de


Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 197

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