and snaking into pages-long footnotes, Derrida’s denuncia-
tions become more and more bitter. As for the Nation’s piece
on de Man by Jon Wiener: “One shudders to think that its au-
thor teaches history at a university” ( 160 ). And, Derrida adds,
the “venomous but always moralizing attacks” of Tzvetan
Todorov, Derrida’s old friend, are full of “mistakes, lies and
falsifications number[ing] about three out of every four alle-
gations” ( 163 ). Again Derrida makes it clear that, in his fantasy
of the de Man case, the reporters who charge deconstruction-
ists with a nihilistic indifference to morality are the true Nazis:
“Those who toss around the word nihilism so gravely or so
lightly should, however, be aware of what they’re doing: under
the occupation, the ‘propagators’ of dangerous ideas were
often denounced by accusing them of ‘nihilism,’ sometimes in
violently antisemitic tracts, and always in the name of a new
order, moral and right-thinking” ( 164 ). Derrida tells the errant
journalists: because you denounce nihilism, you resemble the
Nazis who also denounced nihilism—and they were violent
anti-Semites. The defense of a dead friend has rarely revealed
such insistent and troubled depths in the survivor.
Derrida’s treatment of Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism
has two features in common with his response to the de Man
affair: a rejection of the summary judgments enacted by the
press and the hinting at a hidden spirit of resistance within
the thinker in question, the saving element that can rehabil-
itate him. With both de Man and Heidegger, Derrida turns the
tables on the accusers. Genuine thought, he suggests, demands
that we refrain from the easy, decisive sentencing that journal-
ism relies on.
During the same year as the de Man scandal, 1987 ,Der-
rida published a book on Heidegger, titled Of Spirit.The Hei-
Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 211