“prefer[s]” de Man’s decision not to confess, Derrida applauds
de Man for the very concealment that was most troubling to
his readers, friends, and students. It was better to keep it secret,
not to make a show of oneself, to endure alone the agony of liv-
ing a lie.
This bizarre picture of de Man’s heroic silence testifies to
the distortions of mind Derrida suffered in the shock of the de
Man affair. But it tells us something more significant, as well,
about an inclination of Derridean theory: even as it protects
the hidden self from public scrutiny, it opens that self for Der-
rida’s idealizing imagination. Twenty years earlier, Derrida had
assailed Lévi-Strauss for fantasizing about the Nambikwara:
seeing them as innocents, happy in their paradise. Now, Der-
rida himself engages in a fantasy projection—onto Paul de
Man. Derrida’s struggle with the journalists who attacked de
Man, depicted as quasi-Nazis in his prose, becomes de Man’s
equally strenuous battle with the Nazified journalism ofLe
Soir.Both Derrida and de Man are members of the resistance:
de Man silently, Derrida more overtly.
At a key point in his Critical Inquiryessay Derrida leaps
into a flurry of obscurities—but not without a plan: “Transfer-
ence and prosopopeia, like the experience of the undecidable,
seem to make a responsibility impossible. It is for that very
reason that they require it and perhaps subtract it from the cal-
culable program: they give it a chance. Or, inversely: responsi-
bility, if there is any, requires the experience of the undecidable
as well as that irreducibility of the other, some of whose names
are transference, prosopopeia, allegory. There are many others.
And the double edge and the double bind, which are other
phenomena of the undecidable” ( 151 ). These sound like the
words of a man in a panic trying to change the subject. But
Derrida means something quite specific by them. He wants to
Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 209