On Jacques Derrida's "Paul de Man's War" V

The Responsibilities of Friendship: Jacques Derrida on Paul de Man's Collaboration

Jon Wiener

In his article "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War" (CriticalInquiry 14 [Spring 1988]: 590-652), Jacques Derrida indicates that his purpose is not to provide what he calls a "general judgment" of Paul de Man's writings for the collaborationist Belgian newspaper Le Soir between 1940 and 1942; instead, he seeks to fulfill what he describes as his "responsibilities" to a "friend" (pp. 631, 595). He could have limited himself to a straightforward acknowledgment that these articles were bad, and de Man's subsequent silence about them was bad, but it could have been worse: de Man did not fight for the Nazis, he stopped writing at the end of 1942, and he never again expressed anything like a pro-Nazi sentiment; his mature works were immensely valuable and significant; therefore, the many good and brilliant things de Man did in his life outweigh the objectionable things he did during the war. Although those who have criticized de Man's collaboration might not agree with that argument, it would provide an honorable way to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship. But Derrida has taken a different course, offering a wide variety of arguments and readings of the articles in question in an effort to defend his friend against criticism. In this project Derrida has adopted some familiar strategies, including turning the tables on de Man's critics and accusing them of committing even more serious offenses than de Man's. "To judge, to condemn the work or the man," Derrida writes, ". .. is to
Mark Poster provided valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper; the errors that are present are the responsibility of the author.
CriticalInquiry 15 (Summer 1989) ? 1989 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/89/1504-0011$01.00. All rights reserved.

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reproduce the exterminating gesture which one accuses de Man of not having armed himself against sooner" (p. 651). Derrida thus draws a rhetorical connection between criticism of de Man and extermination of the Jews-an offensive argument that hardly helps de Man's case. Derrida's argument is objectionable in other ways. De Man's problem was not that he failed to "arm himself" against Nazism, but that he collaborated with it and made explicitly anti-Semitic statements. To review briefly: de Man wrote 170 articles for the Brussels newspaper Le Soir, at a time when that publication, in the words of its editors today, "'was stolen and controlled by the occupiers, the directors and the editorial board of our newspaper having, on the contrary, decided not to collaborate' " (p. 604 n. 11). Le Soir in those years was thus a Nazi publication, and the official postwar tribunal-the Conseil de Guerre--considered those who published in its pages to be collaborators. Even if de Man had published nothing but sports scores or recipes in Le Soir, he would properly be defined as a collaborator. But de Man went well beyond that, publishing praise for leading collaborators and in one article adopting an explicitly anti-Semitic position.' Nevertheless, Derrida refuses to use the term "collaborator" to characterize de Man and displays great ingenuity in finding euphemisms for it. De Man's writing "conforms to official rhetoric" and makes "concessions to the occupier" (pp. 607, 599). Derrida refers to "the fund of coded and stereotyped arguments from which Paul de Man had to draw" (pp. of course de Man "had to" draw on those arguments 599-600)-but because he had committed himself to collaboration. Derrida goes only even further, concluding with a quote that de Man "'was anything but a collaborator' " (p. 652). This refusal to admit that de Man collaborated does not provide a persuasive defense of him. The best of Derrida's varied arguments is the appeal to context. De Man made his initial decision to begin writing for Le Soir in a political context whose uniqueness deserves emphasis: in 1940, no power on the European continent challenged Nazism, no resistance movement had yet been formed, Stalin was an ally of Hitler, England stood alone, the United States was neutral, the war seemed to be over; moreover, the genocidal intention of the Nazis had not yet been institutionalized, the decision for the Final Solution lay in the future. At this moment, it made sense to
1. De Man was questioned by the Auditeur G neral in 1945 but not formally charged, while twenty-eight staff members of Le Soir were charged. Jonathan Culler, letter to author, 12 Aug. 1988.

Jon Wiener is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. His articles "Deconstructingde Man" and "Debating de Man" appeared in TheNation.

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address the issue of German hegemony over European culture, which was indeed de Man's intention in many of his Le Soir pieces. But of course Derrida's appeal to context and to authorial intention constitutes an abandonment of the deconstructive method. As Christopher Norris has written of de Man, "we read in defiance of his own repeated counsel" if we read his work "by asking what might have been the motives, political or otherwise, that led to his adopting the stance they exhibit."2 Derrida emphasizes repeatedly that de Man's objectionable acts were committed almost half a century ago, when he was twenty-one and twentytwo years old. That's an important argument. But the moral problems de Man poses do not end in 1942 when he stopped writing for Le Soir; a second and in some ways more serious moral problem recurs throughout his adult life, during which de Man kept his youthful pro-Nazi and antiSemitic writings a secret. Should de Man have told the truth about his past to his students and colleagues? Derrida answers that telling the truth would have been a "pretentious, ridiculous" gesture for de Man, one that was "indiscreet and indecent," a "pointlessly painful theatricalization"(p. 638). Moreover, telling the truth "would have deprived us of a part of his work" because it "would have consumed his time and energy." Thus de Man "did the right thing" when he hid the truth about his past (p. 639). Telling the truth should be avoided because it is time-consuming: that is a morally bankrupt argument. Derrida might have asked how de Man could have acknowledged his wartime writing if he had wanted to. What could he have donecall a press conference? But in fact we do have appropriate examples of acknowledgments by intellectuals of past offenses--offered by former Stalinists who came to regret their previous writings and to want to explain what had led them to adopt such a position and then to reject it. Many examples from this genre are unappealing; they display some of the problems Derrida raises--pretentiousness, self-dramatization, and so on. But others are serious intellectual works: that of Arthur Koestler, for example. If Paul de Man had wanted to, he could have found a way during his adult life to explain what he had done and what he thought about it. In this case as in others, Derrida minimizes the extent of the problem de Man's actions pose. De Man did more than "hide the thing" (p. 636). One of his students has reported that when asked about his past, de Man lied. Derrida was aware of this evidence when he wrote his essay: Juliet MacCannell, who teaches comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, was a student of de Man at Cornell in the mid-sixties.

2. Christopher Norris, "Paul de Man's Past," London Review of Books, 4 Feb. 1988, p. 9.

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"'I asked him what he did during the war. He said "I went to England and worked as a translator."'"3 Among the information revealed for the first time in Derrida's article is de Man's 1955 explanation of his wartime collaboration, written in response to a denunciation Harvard received: "'In 1940 and 1941 I wrote some literary articles in the newspaper "Le Soir" and, I like most of the other contributors, stopped doing so when nazi thought-control did no longer allow freedom of statement. During the rest of the occupation I did what was the duty of any decent person' " (p. 636 n.45). Derrida declares that with this letter de Man "explained himself" in "a public act" (p. 636). But it was not public, it was private-a private letter to a Harvard official, a letter de Man concealed from the public at that time and subsequently. The letter, moreover, is misleading: he wrote not only "'in 1940 and 1941,' " but also in 1942-the year that the Final Solution was initiated, the year that Jews in Belgium were first sent to Auschwitz. And de Man's statement that his writings were limited to "'some literary articles'" conceals the fact that he wrote 170 articles, which, in the words of one authority, "'plugged the Nazi hit parade' ",4 and included an explicitly anti-Semitic article. Thus de Man's 1955 statement to Harvard does not provide a truthful explanation of his actions. Some acknowledgment by Derrida of these problems would have been better than denying them. Derrida writes that de Man, in collaborating with the Nazis, was "accepting what we know today to be unacceptable" (p. 599). The fact is that "we" knew Nazism was unacceptable then. Only a small number of French and Belgian intellectuals cast their lot with the Nazis, as de Man did.5 De Man himself seems to have known Nazism was unacceptable before the war began, as Derrida indicates elsewhere in his piece: when Germany invaded Belgium and France, de Man was editor of a journal, Les Cahiersdu Libre Examen, that defined itself as "democratic" and "antifascist." De Man wrote in its pages in February 1940, at the beginning of the war and before the defeat of France, "againstGermany andfor democracy, for 'the victory of the democracies' in a war defined as a 'struggle ... against barbarity' " (pp. 600-601). Is there a connection between de Man's youthful collaborationist writings and his mature criticism? J. Hillis Miller has said there is "'no connection' " ("D," p. 23)-a position that is consistent with the poststructuralist critique of the unified subject. Derrida could have argued that those who see a continuity between the collaborationist and the mature writings are committed to an untenable assumption-the unity
3. Jon Wiener, "Deconstructing de Man," The Nation, 9 Jan. 1988, p. 22; hereafter abbreviated "D." 4. Jeffrey Mehlman, quoted in ibid. 5. See James D. Wilkinson, The Intellectual Resistance in Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), esp. chap. 1.

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of the subject. One of the achievements of post-structuralism has been to question this assumption. But Derrida apparently doesn't believe the critique of the unified subject applies to Paul de Man. Derrida writes that de Man's youthful work "has to have marked his public gestures, his teaching and writing" (p. 594). With this argument, Derrida centers de Man as a subject, and thereby abandons what Derrida elsewhere in his essay calls "the lessons of Paul de Man" (p. 591). Yet Derrida goes on to attack critics who have made this kind of argument. Their view, Derrida declares, is that "everything [in de Man's mature work] is already there in the 'early writings,' everything derives from them or comes down to them," that de Man's mature writing was "the pursuit of the same war by other means" (pp. 640-41). This is dishonest; no one has said Blindness and Insight or any of de Man's other mature works pursue Nazi goals. The critics to whom Derrida is referring have made an argument similar to his own: de Man's early writing "has to have marked" his mature work. Derrida also adopts the strategy of denouncing the messenger for bringing bad news about his friend. Thus Derrida attacks what he calls "the sensationalist flurry full of hatred" displayed by the New YorkTimes, which first carried the story (p. 591). The article in question, however, was hardly "full of hatred"; it began, "In a finding that has stunned scholars, a Yale professor revered as one of the most brilliant intellectuals of his generation wrote for an anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi newspaper in Belgium during World War II.,"6 "Full of hatred" is a description that applies more to Derrida, responding to those who have reported the news about his friend. De Man's anti-Semitic article, "Les Juifs dans la litterature actuelle," receives Derrida's most energetic efforts. In that article de Man addressed the issue of whether Jews had "polluted" modern literature and concluded that "a solution to the Jewish problem that aimed at the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would entail no deplorable conseDerrida points out, correctly, quences for the literary life of the West."'7 that the article begins with a "critique of 'vulgar antisemitism' " (p. 625). He then declares that "to condemn 'vulgar antisemitism,' especiallyif one makesno mentionof the otherkind, is to condemn antisemitism itself inasmuch as it is vulgar" (p. 625). This argument is lacking in logic. If you condemn vulgar art and make no mention of the other kind, have you condemned all art? Derrida goes on to argue that since de Man's article is surrounded on the page by other vicious anti-Semitic articles, which "coincidein a literalfashion, in their vocabularyand logic, with the very thing that de Man
6. "Yale Scholar's Articles Found in Pro-Nazi Paper," New YorkTimes, 1 Dec. 1987. 7. Paul de Man, "Les Juifs dans la litterature actuelle," Le Soir, 4 Mar. 1941; my translation.

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accuses,"it is "as if his article were denouncing the neighboring articles" (pp. 625-26). In writing about "a solution to the Jewish problem" in 1941, de Man was not "denouncing" anti-Semitism; he was endorsing it. Derrida's preposterous effort cannot erase this simple fact. Derrida's least persuasive strategy is to read de Man's collaborationist articles for their literary quality. He declares he found in them "an extraordinary culture," "an exceptional sense of historical, philosophical, political responsibilities" (p. 599). Wolfgang Holdheim, de Man's successor at Cornell, who spent the years of the German occupation in the Low Countries, describes de Man's Le Soir articles as "excruciatingly dull and totally unoriginal, embarrassing to read in their mediocrity," as "common Nazi hack work."8 Derrida argues that deconstruction is a tool for "the analysis of the conditions of totalitarianism" (p. 648). But the only totalitarianism he criticizes in this article is that which he claims to find in the critics of de Man. Derrida says that de Man's critics put into practice the principles of "the worst totalitarian police" (p. 641). Totalitarian acts, he writes, are "more numerous and more serious on the part of those who accuse de Man than in the latter's books or teaching" (p. 648). But no one has said de Man's "books or teaching" were pro-fascist; they said his articles in Le Soir were. The articles on de Man in the New YorkTimes and The Nation-the only publications Derrida criticizes--contain nothing that qualifies as "totalitarian." Derrida writes that "Paul de Man's war is ... the one that this man must have lived and endured in himself."He declares de Man suffered "torment," that he must have been "torn apart" by his "internal conflicts" (p. 594). Deconstruction is ill-suited to make such judgments about character and psychology. Derrida presents no evidence that de Man ever wrote or said he was tormented, or torn apart, or at war with himself over what he had done; he presents no evidence that de Man had any regrets at all, or felt any shame. Defending de Man's character, Derrida quotes Georges Goriely, a "former Belgian resistant" who "knew de Man well," as saying that de Man was not "'ideologically ... antisemitic' " (p. 651). Goriely, who today is professor emeritus of sociology at the Free University of Brussels, subsequently described de Man as "'completely, almost pathologically, dishonest,' " declaring that "'swindling, forging, lying were, at least at the time, second nature to him.' "9 That suggests de Man did not suffer "torment" about collaborating with the Nazis. Derrida suggests "rules" for "rereading de Man," the first of which is "respect for the right to error" (p. 644). That's a reasonable suggestion,
8. Wolfgang Holdheim, "Letter to the Editor," London Review of Books, 17 Mar. 1988, p. 4. 9. Georges Goriely, quoted in James Atlas, "The Case of Paul de Man," New York Times Magazine, 28 Aug. 1988, p. 37.

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but for Derrida it applies only to de Man, not to his critics. The conclusion one is left with is that what de Man did-collaborate with the Nazi of be understood and Belgium-should occupiers forgiven, but what de Man's critics have done-commit mistakes" "reading (p. 647 n.50)should be condemned as unforgivable. Outside the circle of de Man's most committed defenders, few readers will find this argument persuasive.