deal, as they say, when one gets to know it close up” (Yale 326 ).
De Man’s resolve in his last days was extraordinarily noble, ca-
pable of profoundly affecting even his severest critics.
Derrida concluded his speech at the funeral service with
a story of de Man, Derrida, and Derrida’s son Pierre “driving
through the streets of Chicago after a jazz concert.” De Man
and Pierre Derrida were discussing the âmeof a violin: the
piece of wood that supports the bridge. In French âmeis also
the word for “soul”—and this was a soulful occasion. Derrida
had not realized that his friend de Man was an “experienced
musician”:
I didn’t know why at that moment I was so strangely
moved and unsettled in some dim recess by the con-
versation I was listening to: no doubt it was due to
the word “soul” which always speaks to us at the
same time of life and of death and makes us dream
of immortality, like the argument of the lyre in the
Phaedo.
And I will always regret, among so many other
things, that I never again spoke of any of this with
Paul. How was I to know that one day I would speak
of that moment, that music and that soul without
him, before you who must forgive me for doing it
just now so poorly, so painfully when already every-
thing is painful, so painful? ( 326 )Despite the seeming lack of soul in de Man’s criticism, his de-
liberately icy and clinical tone, he was a practitioner of music—
like Socrates before his death, as recounted in Plato’s Phaedo.
Derrida did not yet know in January 1984 thatâme,
“soul,” had been an important word for the youthful Paul de
196 Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger