Heidegger Aff air to the de Man Aff air 1987–1988 393
enough to investigate his links with his uncle Henri de Man (1885–
1953), the author of the famous work Beyond Marxism who was
president of the Belgian Workers’ Party from 1938 before support-
ing the Nazis under the Occupation. Henri de Man was a character
of great importance, whose infl uence during the 1930s went far
beyond the borders of Belgium. His former political brother-in-
arms, Paul-Henri Spaak, has spoken of him in these terms: ‘His
errors, which were great, and made him an outcast and an exile,
cannot prevent me from saying that he is the most authentic social-
ist thinker of the twentieth century, and one of the few men who, on
certain occasions, gave me the sense that he was a genius.’^31 As for
the historian Zeev Sternhell, he grants him an essential place in his
book Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, explaining
that the ‘planism’ of Henri de Man ‘was, for the socialism of the
time, the most thoroughgoing example of anticonformist thinking of
the interwar period. Where political theory was concerned, it was an
original experiment of great importance.’^32 But Paul de Man’s past
might still have surfaced another way. The famous critic Georges
Poulet, the author of Studies in Human Time, a professor at Johns
Hopkins and Zurich, was the younger brother of Robert Poulet, a
much more radical Belgian collaborator than Paul de Man: arrested
and sentenced to death in 1945, Robert Poulet later saw his sentence
commuted to exile. Thus it seems unthinkable that Georges Poulet
would not have known, at least in outline, about ‘Paul de Man’s
war’. So if the aff air did not break out in Paul de Man’s lifetime, this
was also because nobody wished it to, for as long as he ran the best
comparative literature department in the United States.
All those who knew Paul de Man insist on his discretion regard-
ing his life before he arrived in the United States. He had found
his vocation in America; everything before that no longer counted.
When Geoff rey Hartman asked him one day why he had written so
little before 1953, saying that he must after all have published some
things before that date, de Man had laconically replied: ‘Nothing
but journalism.’^33
At the end of 1987, the scandal unleashed by the New York Times
assumed considerable proportions. And, as in the Heidegger aff air,
the polemic soon extended to deconstruction as a whole. Though
de Man had been dead for four years, Derrida and his colleagues
were alive and kicking. For all the detractors of the Yale School and
Derrida’s work, this was an unexpected opportunity. According to
Newsweek, Jeff rey Mehlman, professor of French at the University
of Boston, went so far as to declare that there were ‘even grounds
for viewing the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project
for the politics of collaboration during World War II’.^34 This con-
fused view, as absurd as it was mean-spirited, was repeated over the