de Man, Paul (1919—83)
Belgian literary theorist and leading figure in the Yale School of Deconstruction. Although his work is associated with deconstruction it had its own well-formed character, established long before he met Derrida, Jacques. De Man was principally interested in allegory, i.e. any mode of literary writing that can be seen to function on more than one level at a time. De Man’s essential hypothesis is that all texts consistently exceed both the author’s and the reader’s attempts to state what their meaning is. This is because the very process of trying to state a text’s meaning creates the conditions for producing still further meaning. Thus a text cannot close off the possibility of finding meaning in it, including meanings that are not only unintended by the author but antithetical to the author. De Man’s work can be read as journey from New Criticism to post-structuralism that took off from the wrong platform and never quite arrived at its destination. It never fully repudiates the former and never fully embraces the latter. In contrast to New Criticism, de Man’s subject matter tends to be not only European (rather than American) in origin and ranging across a broader spectrum of languages, time periods, and histories, but also more philosophical than strictly literary-critical in intent. For better or worse his name is most closely associated with that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, about whom he wrote several important essays (see in particular Allegories of Reading (1979)), including one written in response to Derrida’s reading of Rousseau (see Blindness and Insight (1971)). De Man was particularly interested in the ‘blindness’ inherent in previous interpretations of Rousseau, by which he means the strange way literal readings of Rousseau are privileged over figural readings despite the fact that it is generally agreed that the most basic elements of Rousseau’s thinking, such as his concept of the ‘state of nature’, are in fact fictions. The concept of ‘blindness’, which came to be attached to de Man’s name, was brought full circle when, three and half years after his death, a trove of some 200 pieces de Man wrote during World War Two for the Nazi-controlled Belgian newspapers Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land was uncovered by Ortwin de Graef, then a PhD student at the University of Leuven. To the shock of many, his work was overtly anti-Semitic and openly pro-Nazi. Derrida, himself a Jew, wrote a long piece bravely trying to defend de Man’s wartime writing (Memoires for Paul de Man (1986)), but despite his heroic efforts the shadow of collaboration continues to hang heavily over de Man. Jameson, Fredric also defends de Man in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), arguing, reasonably enough, that most of de Man’s critics lack experience of war and cannot know the choices one might be forced to make under such circumstances. Further Reading: E. Barish The Double Life of Paul de Man (2015). R. Gasché The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man (1998).