de Man argued, were made possible by the fact that they over-
looked something central in the works they discussed. Such
blindness made possible the critics’ insights.
The centerpiece ofBlindness and Insightis an essay on the
reading of Rousseau by... Jacques Derrida. Derrida, de Man
charges, constructs a naïve version of Rousseau, a Rousseau
who didn’t know what he was doing, so that Derrida himself
can claim the upper hand as a knowledgeable, sophisticated
interpreter. Derrida tries to show that he, unlike Rousseau,
cannot be tricked by false oppositions between nature and cul-
ture, or wholesomeness and decadence.
But was Rousseau really so unreflective, so easily deluded?
De Man argues that he was not: the genius Rousseau was no
fool. Moreover, de Man suggests in a telling aside, Derrida
himself does not actually believe that Rousseau was a naïf.
He has simply decided to portray him that way in order to
bolster his argument. “Either [Derrida] actually misreads
Rousseau,” de Man writes with a grin, “or he deliberately mis-
reads Rousseau for the sake of his own exposition and rheto-
ric,” thereby “deconstructing a pseudo-Rousseau,” a much eas-
ier target than the real one. “The pattern is too interesting not
to be deliberate,” de Man concludes of Derrida’s interpretive
maneuvers (Blindness 139 – 40 ).
According to de Man, then, Derrida had made Rousseau
blind in order to generate his own insights. The blindness (to
Rousseau’s sophistication) was apparently Derrida’s own, de
Man surmised. And it was likely that Derrida wasn’t in fact
blind to Rousseau’s true complexity, but just pretending to be.
He merely wanted to secure an advantage over his chosen au-
thor, who could be shown to be hamstrung by logocentric
prejudice. De Man’s suggestion may seem ungenerous, but it is
largely accurate. The implicit claim to superiority over the au-
Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 199