nators of Jews. But Derrida did exactly this. According to Der-
rida, it was not de Man but rather American journalists who
had abandoned their “elementary duties,” showing themselves
allies of “the ignorance, the simplism [sic], the sensationalist
flurry full of hatred” ( 128 ). These journalists were like “the
worst totalitarian police” ( 152 ). They were not merely fascists,
but also idiots: “Finding as always its foothold in aggressivity,
simplism has produced the most unbelievably stupid state-
ments” ( 154 ). Standing against the monstrous danger posed
by the American press, Derrida asserted that deconstruction
provided the means to “identify and combat the totalitarian
risk” ( 155 ).
It is painful, as well as exhausting, to read through “The
Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” the
sixty-page attempt to exculpate de Man that Derrida wrote for
Critical Inquiry,a journal of theory published by the Univer-
sity of Chicago, in January 1988. The more one reads, the more
one winces at Derrida’s desperate need for de Man to have
been a resister of the Nazis rather than an eager sympathizer
with them.
Derrida insists that de Man, in 1942 , was in a state of
“private torment” over the war ( 129 ), and was actually trying
to do good, to defeat the Nazis. During his speech at a Univer-
sity of Alabama conference on de Man’s journalism in October
1987 , Derrida remarked, “What I begin to see clearly [in de
Man’s work for Le Soir] is... an enormous suffering, an agony,
that we cannot yet know the extent of ” ( 149 ). The problem for
Derrida, of course, is how to get to a conclusion that goes so
obviously against the evidence. So now, in the hour of need,
deconstruction rides in, ready to do its intricate work.
In his Critical Inquirypiece, Derrida circles warily around
a few of de Man’s other articles before finally arriving at the
202 Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger