Heidegger Aff air to the de Man Aff air 1987–1988 395
enjuivés’, the author of Writing and Diff erence attributed to the
phrase a subtle game of ulterior motives:
It is indeed a matter of criticizing vulgar antisemitism. That
is the primary, declared, and underscored intention. But to
scoff at vulgar antisemitism, is that also to scoff at or mock
the vulgarity of antisemitism? This latter syntactic modula-
tion leaves the door open to two interpretations. To condemn
vulgar antisemitism may leave one to understand that there is
a distinguished antisemitism in whose name the vulgar variety
is put down. De Man never says such a thing, even though one
may condemn his silence. But the phrase can also mean some-
thing else, and this reading can always contaminate the other in
a clandestine fashion: to condemn ‘vulgar antisemitism’, espe-
cially if one makes no mention of the other kind, is to condemn
antisemitism itself inasmuch as it is vulgar, always and essen-
tially vulgar. De Man does not say that either. If that is what he
thought, a possibility I will never exclude, he could not say so
clearly in this context.^38In writing this long defence of de Man, Derrida knew what risks
he was running. He did so out of loyalty to his dead friend and
out of concern for justice, giving full scope to his 1984 lectures on
the promise which ‘has meaning and gravity only with the death
of the other’: ‘I could not know that one day, the experience of
such a wound would have to include responding for Paul de Man
[.. .], speaking once again, of-him-for-him, at a moment when his
memory or his legacy risk being accused and he is no longer there to
speak in his own name.’^39
But ‘Like the sound.. .’ was also an act of ‘legitimate defence’,
for de Man’s early articles had given Derrida’s enemies the oppor-
tunity to launch a radical attack on him. Hardly able to believe their
luck, his long-standing opponents – positivist philosophers, con-
servative humanists, and leftist Marxists – suddenly combined their
forces to get rid of a man and a theory that had caused them unease
for quite some time. Derrida began by waxing ironical, before
counter-attacking:
One may also wonder, with the same smiling indulgence: but,
after all, what does deconstruction (in the singular) have to do
with what was written in 1940–42 by a very young man in a
Belgian newspaper? Is it not ridiculous and dishonest to extend
to a ‘theory’, that has itself been simplifi ed and homogenized,
as well as to all those who are interested in it and develop it,
the trial one would like to conduct of a man for texts written
in Belgian newspapers forty-fi ve years ago and that moreover,
once again, one has not really read? [.. .]