394 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
next few weeks: The New Republic devoted an article to the theme
‘Fascists and deconstructionists’, while the LA Times spoke of ‘The
(de) Man who put the con in deconstruction’.
Derrida reacted in the heat of the moment, when the press cam-
paign was far from over. In January 1988, hardly a month after the
article in the New York Times, he composed a meticulous account of
the aff air. While its title was poetic – ‘Like the sound of the sea deep
within a shell: Paul de Man’s war’ – the text itself came out fi ghting,
much more directly than had any of Derrida’s previous work. As
the situation dictated, this long article fi rst came out in the United
States, translated by his friend Peggy Kamuf, who was already one
of his most faithful translators.^35
‘Like the sound.. .’ comes across as more of a narrative than an
analysis. Derrida, who had said shortly after de Man’s death that he
had never been able to tell a story, this time found himself obliged to
do so. Referring to his discovery of the material in Le Soir, he made
no attempt to conceal the dismay he had at fi rst felt:
From the fi rst reading, I thought I recognized, alas, what I will
call roughly an ideological confi guration, discursive schemas, a
logic and a stock of highly marked arguments. By my situation
and by training, I had learned from childhood to detect them
easily. A strange coincidence: it so happens, on top of it all,
that these themes are the subject of seminars I have been giving
for four years as well as of my last book, on Heidegger and
Nazism. My feelings were fi rst of all that of a wound, a stupor,
and a sadness that I want neither to dissimulate nor exhibit.^36Derrida, happy to go into historical detail, placed the wartime arti-
cles published de Man in Le Soir in their context. Most of them were
innocuous. He then turned to the most problematic in the series,
‘The Jews in contemporary literature’:
Nothing in what I am about to say, analysing the article as
closely as possible, will heal over the wound I right away
felt when, my breath taken away, I perceived in it what the
newspapers have most frequently singled out as recognized
antisemitism, an antisemitism more serious than ever in such
a situation, an antisemitism that would have come close to
urging exclusions, even the most sinister deportations.^37This did not stop Derrida embarking on a closer reading of the
article in question, with an at times excessive ingenuity and generos-
ity. When the young de Man wrote: ‘Vulgar antisemitism readily
takes pleasure in considering post-war cultural phenomena (after
the war of ’14–18) as degenerate and decadent because they are