392 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
published his fi rst articles but where next to nothing was known
about the fame later won by the master of the Yale School and even
less about the content of his work; and, on the other, the United
States, where his career took place but where there was general
ignorance about the complexities of the Belgian situation under the
German Occupation.
The most surprising thing is that de Man’s early articles had gone
unnoticed for so long. They had been published under his real name,
over a period of two years, in the biggest Belgian daily, and so they
were easily accessible. According to Jean-Marie Apostolidès, pro-
fessor at Stanford, the scandal could very easily have erupted a few
years earlier: ‘I must be the fi rst person in the United States to have
become aware of these articles,’ he says.
I was then fi nishing my book The Metamorphoses of Tintin
and, as Hergé had published in Le Soir under the Occupation,
I’d had those papers brought over to the Widener Library
at Harvard. One afternoon, towards the end of 1982, Jeff rey
Mehlman came up to me in the reading room, just as I was
reading one of the bindings of Le Soir from the wartime. He
had long been close to Derrida, before taking an interest in the
early articles of Maurice Blanchot. I told him: ‘Since you’re
interested in intellectuals’ troubled pasts, look at what I’ve
just found out about Paul de Man.’ And I showed him a few
signifi cant passages from the articles that I’d been reading over
the previous days, without attaching any particular importance
to them. Unlike me, he sensed straightaway that these texts
were a time bomb. However, he himself came from Yale, he
had known and worked with Paul de Man, and wished to come
to Harvard. He encouraged me to reveal the aff air myself. If
I refused, it was because these articles struck me as conform-
ist and insignifi cant and because Paul de Man, in my view a
secondary fi gure in literary criticism, did not deserve to be the
focus of such polemics. But I promised to keep the newspapers
for another week or two before sending them back to Belgium.
If he wanted to go through them with a fi ne-tooth comb, he
had the references, he simply needed to ask for them on his
next visit to the library. As far as I know, he didn’t do so, even
though he immediately realized the full implications of the
aff air, given what I had just shown him. I also mentioned these
articles to Barbara Johnson, another of Derrida’s colleagues,
but she paid little attention: history didn’t interest her.^30It has to be acknowledged that the de Man trail was very easy
to follow for anyone knowing something of the history of Belgium
between the wars and under the Occupation. It would have been