Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

ready. Then Derrida began, speaking of course in French
(later, he was to learn English quite well, but this was 1984 ). “Le
mémoire.. .” Derrida intoned. “Lamémoire;lemémoire.”
Derrida was playing on two French words. The mascu-
line noun,le mémoire,means essay; the feminine la mém-
oire,memory. The two things were opposed yet also some-
how the same, since our memory depends upon a trace or
marking, a note left in the mind. Derrida drew his theme of
writing and memory from “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing
Pad,” the essay by Freud that he had, many years earlier, dis-
cussed in Writing and Difference.The wordplay with mémoire
was a nervous verbal fiddling on Derrida’s part, yet moving as
well in its devotion to de Man. Derrida circled around the
great critic’s memory without quite touching him. In his reac-
tion to the de Man of 1987 , whose life had become a scandal,
Derrida would more closely approach the question of de Man’s
inwardness: what he kept secret about himself, what he refused
to make public. Forced to interpret what de Man concealed,
Derrida would show the limits of his respectful caution before
the hidden self.
Famous for his mild yet slightly scurrilous wit, de Man
was also known as an unfailingly kind and helpful advisor. He
had dozens of dissertation students at any given time, and he
helped them into good positions all around the country. Most
of all—and this was said in hushed, unbelieving tones—he was
honored for never sleeping with his female students. Clearly,
de Man was the exemplar of a higher morality.
The posthumous adulation of Paul de Man came crash-
ing down when a Belgian student named Ortwin de Graef dis-
covered in 1987 , three years after de Man’s death, that he had
written collaborationist articles for the Belgian newspaper Le
Soirduring the Nazi occupation of that country. In one of the


Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 191

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