Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

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 Argentina, apparently without obtaining a divorce [Signs
169 – 76 ].)
Assisted by Weiss’s strong letter of recommendation to
Harry Levin at Harvard, de Man in the mid-fifties became a
member of Harvard’s illustrious Society of Fellows, along with
other future intellectual and literary stars such as Stanley
Cavell, John Hollander, Donald Hall, and Noam Chomsky. De
Man then taught at Cornell and, from the seventies on, at Yale.
As Lehman’s book attests, de Man endeared himself to his
friends in the academy (many of whom were Jewish, inciden-
tally). He was a true mensch: funny, good natured, quick wit-
ted, and without the least trace of pretension.
The rumor that de Man had been a collaborator during
the war came up while he was at Harvard in the fifties. De Man
sent a letter to Renato Poggioli, the director of the Society of
Fellows, indignantly asserting that the accusation was utterly
unfounded. He even hinted to friends that he had been in
the Resistance during the war; though, with a hero’s modesty,
he refused to provide any details of his activities. (During the
controversy over de Man’s wartime writings, Derrida would
fulfill this fantasy by implying that de Man must have been se-
cretly resisting the Nazis in his writings.)
De Man’s first book, the landmark volume Blindness
and Insight,was issued shortly after his arrival at Yale: in 1971 ,
when he was fifty-two. De Man was a late bloomer, but the
rigor and subtlety ofBlindness and Insightproved that he was
a force in contemporary literary criticism, capable of re-
defining the field with his reflections on the American New
Critics, the phenomenologist Georges Poulet, the Marxist
critic Georg Lukács, and others. These critics’ best moments,


198 Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger

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