396 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
Why do people pretend not to see that deconstruction is any-
thing but a nihilism or a skepticism? Why can one still read this
claim despite so many texts that, explicitly, thematically, and
for more than twenty years have been demonstrating the oppo-
site? Why the charge of irrationalism as soon as anyone asks a
question about reason, its forms, its history, its mutations? Or
the charge of antihumanism, with the fi rst question put to the
essence of man and the construction of its concept?
In short, what are people afraid of? Whom do they want to
make afraid?^40As so often, it is in the footnotes that Derrida is most direct
and aggressive. He attacks with particular virulence an article by
Jon Wiener called ‘Deconstructing de Man’ and published in The
Nation.
From its title to its fi nal sentence, this spiteful and error-ridden
article gathers within its pages more or less all the reading mis-
takes I have evoked up until now. It is frightening to think that
its author teaches history at a university. Attempting to trans-
fer onto deconstruction and its ‘politics’ (such as he imagines
them) a stream of calumny or slanderous insinuation, he has
the nerve to speak of de Man as an ‘academic Waldheim’ [.. .].
There is thus nothing surprising in the fact that Jon Wiener’s
article has provided a model. The author of this article is,
however, famous for his mistakes in The Nation: on more than
one occasion, this journal has had to publish strongly-worded
and overwhelming rectifi cations after the contributions of this
collaborator, who has thus proved to be something of a liability
[malencontreux].^41The de Man aff air caused a considerable stir across American
campuses, leading to several violent quarrels, even within Derridean
circles. On 26 April 1988, David Carroll, who had been among the
fi rst of Derrida’s followers, addressed a long open letter to Derrida.
It was not the content of Derrida’s remarks that he disagreed with,
but the strategy adopted. He could not understand why Derrida
had taken his defence of de Man so far, or why he had been ready
to take the attacks onto himself and even to ‘assume the worst of
what he had written and in a sense assume responsibility for it’,
when such writings were diametrically opposed to all his political
convictions and choices.^42 Derrida was too sore to accept these criti-
cisms, however moderate. He furiously annotated David Carroll’s
text, and felt that his former student was incapable of reading him.
Relations between the two men would be profoundly undermined
by this spat for several months.