action when she told him her choice of subject.) There were,
Kaplan emphasizes, “a number of approaches to the anti-
semitic genre—cultural, racial, historical—which in their very
disagreements, give the appearance of a respectable ‘debate.’
What is more, all of them draw [as de Man does] on a critique
of an ‘incorrect’ form of racist thinking that is beneath their
dignity” ( 275 ). Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the great novelist who
poured out rabid fantasies of massacring the Jews, was the fre-
quent whipping boy of the sophisticated anti-Semites. The lat-
ter, in conferences and learned discussions about the Jewish
“problem,” legitimized racism as a dignified, judicious, and
“scientific” field. With “The Jews in Contemporary Literature,”
de Man assisted in such legitimation.
Derrida persists in his argument that de Man had the fate
of the Jews at heart instead of viewing this fate with indiffer-
ence. Since de Man states that the disappearance of the Jews
would have no consequences for the cultural life of Europe,
Derrida’s case is a hard one to make. Derrida does make the
case, with a nearly dire insistence. And he goes on to suggest,
even more desperately, that perhaps de Man did not write the
most offensive parts of the article in question. Derrida surely
knows that very few of his readers will be convinced that “The
Jews in Contemporary Literature” is an act of resistance to
Nazism and a praise of the Jews. So, Derrida speculates, maybe
de Man didn’t write the essay at all (or at least, not the bad, the
seeminglybad, parts of it): “Who can exclude what happens so
often in newspapers, and especially during that period and in
those conditions, when editors can always intervene at the last
moment? If that was the case, Paul de Man is no longer here to
testify to it. But at that point one can say: supposing this to
have been the case, there was still a way of protesting which
would have been to end his association with the newspaper”
206 Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger