Man, strangely, insists that reading is an essential practice, and
his disciple J. Hillis Miller has even asserted that de Man’s con-
cept of reading is profoundly ethical.^7 Miller overreaches in
this claim. Ethics requires a conception of the world as deserv-
ing, and requiring, our human response. But deconstruction
falls prey to a dualism that makes any action we might choose
indifferent, and therefore incapable of being judged. Language
acts instead of us. For de Man there is the void of meaningless
existence on the one side and on the other our language, which
confronts meaninglessness (or, in its weak, wish-fulfilling mo-
ments, avoids it).
In its prizing of elite strategies, de Manian deconstruc-
tion claims that it is better to confront the universal emptiness
than to turn away from it as the weak-minded do. If we are
strong, we know that language, not we ourselves, is responsible
for what we say and do. It is hard to avoid making a connec-
tion between such a theory and de Man’s cover-up of his
wartime actions. Whatever had been written then in a news-
paper called Le Soirhad nothing to do with the biographical
entity named Paul de Man.
Derrida’s sense of identification with de Man was so deep
that, when the journalists attacked, he himself felt the wound.
And he lashed out in response. In his essay on the de Man
affair, Derrida was capable of writing the following sentence:
“To judge, to condemn the work or the man on the basis of
what was a brief episode, to call for a closing, that is to say, at
least figuratively, for censuring or burning his books is to re-
produce the exterminating gesture which one accuses de Man
of not having armed himself against sooner with the necessary
vigilance” (Responses 128 ). It was not exactly temperate, and
still less appropriate, to compare the critics of an intellectual
who collaborated with the Nazis to book burners and extermi-
Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 201