( 147 ). Paul de Man, of course,didend his association with Le
Soir.And that fact, Derrida muses, suggests that Le Soir’s edi-
tors must have inserted the apparent anti-Semitism into his
article on the Jews. De Man must have resigned in protest
against this interference.
Unfortunately for Derrida, de Man did not stop writing
forLe Soiruntil more than a year after “The Jews in Contem-
porary Literature” appeared. He left the collaborationist news-
paper at the end of 1942 , just as the tide was turning and it
looked for the first time as if the Germans might lose the
war. (These facts go unmentioned by Derrida.) Derrida argues
that de Man the anticonformist couldn’t possibly have been
guilty of “cynical opportunism” ( 147 ) in quitting Le Soirthe
moment that a German defeat started to seem likely. But, one
may suggest, anticonformism is no necessary barrier to cyni-
cal opportunism—especially with a complicated character like
Paul de Man.
Derrida proceeds to recount in his Critical Inquiryessay
the way he sprang into action after hearing the revelation
about de Man’s wartime activities from Ortwin de Graef. With
Samuel Weber, he decided to turn a colloquium scheduled for
October 1987 at the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, into
a symposium on de Man’s writings from Le Soir.Photocopies
of the articles that de Graef had given Derrida in August, some
twenty-five of the more than one hundred articles de Man
wrote, were distributed to the participants.
In his talk at the Tuscaloosa conference, Derrida broods
over de Man’s silence about his collaborationist past. He re-
marks that “this man must have lived a real agony”; but “he ex-
plained himself publicly,” Derrida emphasizes. “He explained
himself publicly,” Derrida repeats twice more, mantra-like.
The explanation Derrida alludes to occurs in the letter re-
Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 207