his writings for Le Soir.Bloom had suggested that de Man’s
wartime actions, being a matter of personal conscience, should
not become the subject matter of petition drives and academic
conferences. The dispute ended relations between Derrida and
Bloom, who had previously been affectionate friends.^5
The quarrel over de Man’s legacy was more than merely
an argument among his friends. By the time of his death, de
Man had become a presiding figure in literary study. In the
eighties, comparative literature at Yale was, in large part, a pri-
vate canon engineered by de Man’s charisma and kept in place
by his amazing ability to secure teaching positions for his PhD
students. Graduate students in comp lit, at least those under de
Man’s direct supervision, were encouraged to read Rousseau,
Kant, Hölderlin, Hegel, Schlegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Words-
worth, Walter Benjamin—and not too much else. The focus was
on certain touchstones in the works of these writers: the pas-
sages that demonstrated the “unreadability,” or self-undoing
capacity, of language. As with Derrida, skepticism was tri-
umphant. De Man was selling a formula, one that was fairly
easy to learn and reproduce. One’s reading was meant to dem-
onstrate a theoretical point: that it was impossible for language
to make reliable claims about the world.
Before his death, de Man told at least one close friend
that he knew that disturbing revelations about his past would
be printed after he was gone; he wanted those he loved to be
prepared for some disagreeable, even traumatic, news. He had
reason to worry. De Man in his book Blindness and Insighthad
described the biography of authors as a “waste of time”
(Blindness 35 ). At the time he wrote those words, he surely
knew that the facts of his own biography, when they were
eventually discovered, would change everything about the
way he was read.
Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 193