Heidegger Aff air to the de Man Aff air 1987–1988 397
Things were hardly any easier with Avital Ronell:
We had intense disagreements at the time of the de Man aff air.
He wanted to gather his supporters and form a united front
at all costs. This didn’t strike me as being a good strategy.
Defending Paul de Man’s early texts completely and almost
blindly shouldn’t have been considered as a duty by those
inspired by Derrida. But, at the time, he tolerated even less than
usual any nuances of internal disagreement. Unfortunately,
there was nobody strong enough to persuade him to adopt
another strategy, one that would be less aggressive more
adequate to the American context. The way he responded, in
‘Like the sound.. .’, aggravated the situation even more. It was
seen as an exercise in textual manipulation, as if the sophistica-
tion of deconstructive readings had fi nally led to this: fi nding
excuses for anti-Semitic articles, getting the text to say any-
thing at all so long as it meant whitewashing it of accusations
of Nazism! The whole aff air was a disaster. In certain ways, we
never got over it.^43In the months following the publication of ‘Like the sound.. .’,
the editorial board of the review Critical Inquiry received many
letters, most of them very violent in tone. ‘It’s no exaggeration
to say that your article has provoked more discussions and led
to more extreme reactions than any text that we can remember
publishing,’ wrote one of the editors of the review to Derrida.^44
Six of these commentaries were selected for publication in Critical
Inquiry, but since they sometimes brutally attacked Derrida, they
were sent to him in good time for him to react. In the last days
of 1988, he wrote a long collective response. Immediately trans-
lated by Peggy Kamuf under the title ‘Biodegradables: Seven
diary fragments’, this sixty-page article remained unpublished in
French, being so closely tied as it was to the American context.
Derrida, stung to the quick, reacted harshly against those who had
expressed criticism or doubts of any kind. He had been expelled
from school in 1942, just as de Man was publishing his articles in
Le Soir: he now recognized that he found it very diffi cult to tolerate
all the lessons in vigilance that people claimed they could give him
on this subject.^45
Only on 10 March 1990 could a more serene and probing dis-
cussion take place in Paris, as one of the Saturday sessions at the
Collège International de Philosophie. Michel Deguy, Élisabeth de
Fontenay, Alexander García Düttmann, and Marie-Louise Mallet
each reacted to Mémoires: For Paul de Man, before Derrida
responded attentively, without immediately rejecting the objections
that some of them had raised. As he acknowledged, these questions