On Jacques Derrida's"Paul de Man'sWar"

III
"Paul de Man's War" and the Aesthetic Ideology

JonathanCuller

Given the sweepingand ridiculouschargesin pressresponsesto the

discovery of Paul de Man's wartime writings, Jacques Derrida's "Like the
Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War" (CriticalInquiry
14 [Spring 1988]: 590-652) performs an important service in exploring
what de Man's most explicitly political newspaper columns of the period
1941-42 actually say. He had no way of knowing at the time whether
the twenty-five columns he had seen were representative. In fact, the
rest of the 180 articles from Le Soir and Het VlaamscheLand are quite
diverse and seldom express political views. The entire corpus is not aptly
characterized by Derrida's exceedingly severe statement that "the massive,
immediate,and dominanteffect of all these texts is that of a relativelycoherent
ideological ensemble which, mostoftenand in a preponderantfashion, conforms
to an official rhetoric, that of the occupation forces" (p. 607). Some
articles do take an optimistic view of the new European order established
by what seemed at the time the German victory, but de Man insists on
the value of the national traditions of Belgium and France, and on the
important future role of the French tradition in "moderating excesses"
that might be produced by the German mentality.' They take it as given
that the future of Europe now depends on Germany, but when they

1. See Paul de Man, "Le Probleme frangais: 'Dieu est-il frangais?' de F. Sieburg" (Le
Soir, 28 Apr. 1942), WartimeJournalism, 1939-1943, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz,
and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln, Nebr., 1988), pp. 226-27. This volume also includes articles
fromJeudi and Les Cahiersdu LibreExamen, written before the Occupation, and one hundred
brief notices for the monthly bulletin of Agence Dechenne, a book distribution firm.

Critical Inquiry 15 (Summer 1989)

? 1989 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/89/1504-0003$01.00. All rights reserved.

778 "Paul de Man's War"and the AestheticIdeology Jonathan Culler

praise things German it is aspects of German culture, but not Hitler, not
the Nazi party, not the German government or its policies. The articles
persistently resist the application of political tests to literature and defend,
for instance, French surrealism (notably Paul Eluard) against political
repression.2 There is no simple line, although as Derrida stresses, the
global effect of publishing in such circumstances is collaboration: the
attempt to produce a cultural future in what seemed to de Man, in 1941
and 1942, a new Europe dominated by Germany. And, whatever de Man's
intentions, he is unable to control the resonances of the articles he publishes
in these circumstances.
These articles were written, Derrida says, in "singular private and
political circumstances many of which remain unclear to us" (p. 594).
Thanks to the contributions of a number of people in Belgium and
elsewhere, more is now known about de Man's activities. On 4 January
1940, after the French and British declarations of war but before the
German invasion of Belgium, de Man wrote inJeudi, the weekly newspaper
of left-liberal students at the University of Brussels:

In declaring "we must crush Hitlerism," France and England attack

the heart of our troubles. But it is not by a military victory alone
that one can reach the goal. Just as to defeat war one must get rid
of the causes of the war, so to defeat Hitlerism one must avoid
creating propitious ground for its development.... One of the
principal attractions of the totalitarian mystique for the crowd was
that one had lost all confidence in regimes unable to remedy evils
such as unemployment and to provide the most elementary well-
being. One would win the war in vain if one did not proceed to a
reorganization and reform of the economy; one would soon find
oneself confronting misery that could only favor fascist movements.3

In May 1940, with the German invasion, de Man and his wife, with two
and a half million other Belgians, fled south through France but were
not able to get papers to cross the Spanish-French border. After three
months in Bagneres de Luchon, when reports from Belgium indicated
that the Germans were not behaving barbarously, they returned home.4
2. See de Man, "Continuite de la poesie frangaise: A propos de la revue 'Messages' "
(Le Soir, 14 July 1942), WartimeJournalism, pp. 250-51.
3. De Man, "Que pensez-vous de la guerre?" ( Jeudi, 4 Jan. 1940), WartimeJournalism,
p. 13; my translation.
4. See Edouard Colinet, "Paul de Man and the Cercle du Libre Examen," in Responses:
On Paul de Man's WartimeJournalism, ed. Hamacher, Hertz, and Keenan (Lincoln, Nebr.,
1989), pp. 426-37.

Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and comparative

literature at Cornell University, is the author of Framing the Sign: Criticism
and Its Institutions (1989).
 CriticalInquiry Summer1989 779

In addition to writing for Le Soir, de Man wrote short notices for the
catalogue of Agence Dechenne, a book distributor. After he ceased writing
for Le Soir in the fall of 1942, he arranged for the publication of Exercice
du silence, a collection of work by writers of the Resistance, which could
not be published in France. He and his collaborator in this project,
Georges Lambrichs, lost theirjobs with Dechenne in March 1943. Reporting
this, the May 1943 issue of the Podsie,which contained work by such left-
wing poets as Louis Aragon and Eluard and a group of "Imprisoned
Poets," spoke of de Man as one who had defended contemporary French
literature. De Man spent the remainder of the war in Antwerp working
on translations. After the war, Belgian commissions condemned many
collaborators-a higher percentage of the population than in any other
country. In May 1945 de Man was interrogated by the Auditeur General,
the military prosecutor's office. Although twenty-eight of the editors and
staff of Le Soir were charged and tried, the present-day Auditeur Gendral
writes that "Paul de Man was not the object of charges brought before
the Conseil de Guerre for his attitude or his activity during the war."5
In general, collaboration was judged to be much less culpable if it ceased,
as de Man's did, by the end of 1942.
Derrida devotes considerable space to the article "Les Juifs dans la
litterature actuelle," condemning both its general anti-Semitism and its
particular ideological complicities, while pointing out those puzzling ele-
ments that suggest something other than an espousal of anti-Semitism.
If the question is whether Paul de Man, in March 1941 or at any time,
held anti-Semitic views, those who knew him in Belgium, including Jewish
friends and participants in the Resistance, claim that he did not. Even
those who condemn him on other grounds, such as his Jewish friend
Georges Goriely, deny that he was anti-Semitic. There are a number of
small indications: a Jewish acquaintance, Esther Sluszny, reports that
de Man sheltered her and her husband, Nahum Sluszny, for several days.
He acted as a front for Jewish friends who were not allowed to be employed,
publishing, for instance, on 28 July 1942 an article written by Goriely.6
Moreover, if de Man had, for example, believed that Jews were contributing
to the decadence of European civilization, it is surprising that he did not
say so in other articles.
But what de Man thought is not perhaps the question so much as
what he wrote. Derrida reports that he has found no expression of anti-
Semitism in any of the other twenty-five articles (p. 625). Study of the
full corpus of articles confirms that the unpardonable anti-Semitic strain

5. Letter to the Centre de Recherches et d'itudes Historiques de la Seconde Guerre

Mondiale, quoted in the chronology in Responses,p. 475; my translation.
6. Derrida cites reports by Charles Dosogne and Georges Goriely. Goriely amplified
his remarks in a talk at the June 1988 conference on de Man in Antwerp, "Paul de Man
(Antwerp-New Haven)." Further details are reported in Colinet, "Paul de Man and the
Cercle du Libre Examen," and in the chronology in Responses.
780 "Paul de Man's War"and the AestheticIdeology Jonathan Culler

of the 4 March 1941 article is an aberration. The other articles for Le

Soir, though written in a context that would have encouraged any anti-
Semitism, bear no traces of such views, although they do repeatedly speak
of national traditions, national character, national habits of mind. The
only other invidious reference to Jews is the observation in an article on
the spirit of German literature in Het VlaamscheLand that it was "mainly
non-Germans, and specifically jews" who developed a cerebral and forced
version of German Expressionism.7
But Derrida, more than anyone else, has taught us that the marginal
or the aberrant is not to be ignored. Especially in light of the evidence
that de Man was not personally anti-Semitic, we should explore what
this aberration reveals about the conditions of possibility of literary and
cultural discourse. How far have conceptions of European culture de-
pended on opposition to something "foreign," which has sometimes been
explicitly identified as Jewish? In particular, to what extent has a potential
anti-Semitism been ingrained in that aesthetic tradition which associates
excellence with conceptions of purity and integrity that can easily take
on a racialist cast? In addition to de Man's complicity with fascism through
his contributions to a collaborationist newspaper, there is the complicity
between the aesthetic ideology that informs so much thinking about lit-
erature-including de Man's early articles-and anti-Semitism.
While debates about the relations to fascism exhibited in de Man's
newspaper articles will no doubt continue (although whatever interpretation
one gives them, de Man is guilty of having written an anti-Semitic article
and of working in the collaborationist press), the important question is
what value his critical and theoretical writings have for us, the productivity
of his critical and theoretical work for our thinking. The wartime writings
give a new dimension to much of de Man's work in America, helping
one to understand more plainly what is implied by his critique of the
aesthetic ideology, as in late essays on Kleist and on Kant and Schiller.
Walter Benjamin called fascism the introduction of aesthetics into politics.
De Man's critique of the aesthetic ideology now resonates also as a critique
of the fascist tendencies he had known.
In her study of fascism in French literary and intellectual life, Alice
Yaeger Kaplan stresses fascism's revolt against alienation and the fascist
conception of the state as an organism: "Against the distance between
the state and the people, they hoped for immediacy; against alienation
and fragmentation, they hoped for unity of experience. ... Their fascism
involved a new poetic language, an immediate vocal presence, an entirely
new way of writing and speaking about the state and the world."8 This
7. De Man, "Blik op de huidige Duitsche romanliteratuur" ["People and Books. A
View on Contemporary German Fiction"] (Het VlaamscheLand, 20 Aug. 1942), trans. Ortwin
de Graef, WartimeJournalism, p. 325.
8. Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductionsof Banality:Fascism,Literature,and FrenchIntellectual
Life, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 36 (Minneapolis, 1986), p. 3.
 CriticalInquiry Summer1989 781

political context gives a new dimension to de Man's attempt-from the

early critiques of Heidegger to his late critiques of phenomenality-to
undo totalizing metaphors, myths of immediacy, organic unity, and pres-
ence, and to combat their fascinations. In the concluding chapter of The
Rhetoric of Romanticism,"Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's Uber das Mar-
ionettentheater,"de Man makes clear the stakes of his critique of aesthetic
ideology:

The aesthetic, as is clear from Schiller's formulation, is primarily

a social and political model, ethically grounded in an assumedly
Kantian notion of freedom;.... The "state" that is here being
advocated is not just a state of mind or of soul, but a principle of
political value and authority that has its own claims on the shape
and the limits of our freedom. It would lose all interest if this were
not the case. For it is as a political force that the aesthetic still
concerns us as one of the most powerful ideological drives to act
upon the reality of history.9

The Kleist essay and other articles soon to appear as AestheticIdeology

undertake a critique of an aesthetic ideology which imposes, even violently,
continuity between perception and cognition, form and idea, and which
literature can be shown to undo. Retrospectively, we can now see this
project in de Man's earlier writings as well, in his critique of the "salvational
poetics" which sees poetic imagination as a way of overcoming contra-
dictions, and of the "naive poetics" which "rests on the belief that poetry
is capable of effecting reconciliation because it provides an immediate
contact with substance through its own sensible form,"10 as well as in his
discussions of Heidegger.11 Much of his career is staked on the premise
that close reading attentive to the working of poetic language will expose
the totalizations undertaken in the name of meaning and unity.
The late essays find in Kant's work on the aesthetic a critique of the
ideology of the aesthetic developed, for instance, by Schiller and applied,
or misapplied, both in humanistic conceptions of aesthetic education and
in fascist conceptions of politics as an aesthetic project. Traditionally, the
aesthetic is the name of the attempt to find a bridge between the phe-
nomenal and the intelligible, the sensuous and the conceptual. Aesthetic
objects, with their union of sensuous form and spiritual content, serve
as guarantors of the general possibility of articulating the material and
9. De Man, The Rhetoricof Romanticism(New York, 1984), p. 264.
10. De Man, "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism"["Impasse de la critique formaliste"
(1956)], Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of ContemporaryCriticism, 2d ed. rev.,
Theory and History of Literature, vol. 7 (Minneapolis, 1983), p. 244.
11. See de Man, "Tentation de la permanence," Monde nouveau 93 (1955), and "Hei-
degger's Exegeses of H1olderlin"["Les Exegeses de Holderlin par Martin Heidegger" (1955)],
Blindness and Insight, pp. 246-66. For discussion see Christopher Norris, "Paul de Man's
Past," London Review of Books, 4 Feb. 1988, pp. 7-11.
782 "Paul de Man's War"and the AestheticIdeology Jonathan Culler

the spiritual, a world of forces and magnitudes with a world of value,

and thus ultimately, in Schiller's reading, serve as model for the state,
as an organic unity in which each element plays its part, contributing to
the overarching idea.'2 Literature, conceived here as the rhetorical character
of language revealed by close reading, "involves the voiding, rather than
the affirmation, of aesthetic categories," and thus exposes the dubious
imposition they promote. For instance, the convergence of sound and
meaning in literature is an effect which language can achieve "but which
bears no substantial relationship, by analogy or by ontologically grounded
imitation, to anything beyond that particular effect. It is ... an identifiable
trope ... that operates on the level of the signifier and contains no
responsible pronouncement on the nature of the world-despite its pow-
erful potential to create the opposite illusion."'3 Literary theory, in its
attention to the functioning of language, thus "raises the unavoidable
question whether aesthetic values can be compatible with the linguistic
structures that make up the entities from which these values are derived"
(R7' p. 25). Literature itself raises this question in various ways, offering
evidence of the autonomous potential of language, of the uncontrollable
figural basis of forms, which cannot therefore serve as the basis of reliable
cognition, or, as de Man argues in the Kleist essay, allegorically expose
the violence that lies hidden behind the aesthetic and makes aesthetic
education possible.
De Man's essay "Kant and Schiller" cites a passage from a novel by
Joseph Goebbels, which casts the leader as an artist working creatively
on his material:

The statesman is an artist too. The leader and the led [Fiihrerund
Masse] presents no more of a problem than, say, painter and color.
Politics are the plastic art of the state, just as painting is the plastic
art of color. This is why politics without the people, or even against
the people, is sheer nonsense. To shape a People out of the masses
and a State out of the People, this has always been the deepest
intention of politics in the true sense.14

This aestheticization of politics, which seeks the fusion of form and idea,
is, de Man writes, "a grievous misreading of Schiller's aesthetic state,"
but Schiller's conception is itself also a misreading, which must be undone
by an analysis that takes us back to Kant. Kant had "disarticulated the
project of the aesthetic which he had undertaken and which he found,

12. As Martin Jiirgens writes, "die Asthetisierung der Politik ist Funktion der Asthetik
des Staatsmodells" ("Der Staat als Kunstwerk: Bemerkungen zur 'Asthetisierung der
Politik,' " Kursbuch20 [Mar. 1970]: 124).
13. De Man, The Resistanceto Theory,Theory and History of Literature, vol. 33 (Min-
neapolis, 1986), p. 10; hereafter abbreviated RT
14. De Man, "Kant and Schiller,"AestheticIdeology,ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis,
forthcoming).
 CriticalInquiry Summer1989 783

by the rigor of his own discourse, to break down under the power of his
own critical epistemological discourse," and to expose this disarticulation
is to expose the illicit imposition of unity through the aesthetic. The fact
that de Man's wartime juvenilia had themselves on occasion exhibited
an inclination to idealize the emergence of the German nation in aesthetic
terms gives special pertinence to his demonstration that the most insightful
literary and philosophical texts of the tradition expose the unwarranted
violence required to fuse form and idea, cognition and performance.
More generally, one should emphasize the importance of decon-
struction to this project. What makes Nazism the worst excess of Western
civilization is the fact that it took to a horrendous extreme the process
of constituting a group by opposing it to something else and attempting
to exterminate what it falsely defined as a corrupting element. Nazism
sought to construct a "pure" Aryan German nation by imagining Jews
as its opposite and then slaughtering the Jews within. Never has there
been so clear a case of the deadly functioning of a culturally constructed
binary opposition. Deconstruction seeks to undo oppositions that, in the
name of unity, purity, order, and hierarchy, try to eliminate difference.
Derrida's insistence, as one of the rules he sets for himself for his
future work on these topics, that we avoid the totalizing gesture, whatever
the costs, is crucial here. No doubt some people will be annoyed at his
insistence on reading these texts closely, preferring to find in summary
moral judgment an excuse for not reading: taking the view that if one
thing is clear, it is that Nazism and anti-Semitism are evil; therefore there
is no need to read texts involved with such matters at all. To analyze
texts that are complicitous, bringing out those complicities as well as
points of divergence or resistance, is seen as an unnecessary or perverse
complication. But such complication ought rather to be encouraged. To
read closely, attentive to the full range of involvements of a text, and to
reject totalizing judgments does not prevent political decisions; on the
contrary, whether inside or outside the university, such acts as voting,
hiring, demonstrating, or fighting, which necessarily simplify by opting
for one of two sides, must be accompanied by analysis which seeks com-
plexities if these acts are not to partake of the mindless coercion they
would oppose. Thought must be willing to seek out and entertain com-
plexities, in particular because therein lie the resources for the critique
of the totalizing movements, of which Nazi totalitarianism was only the
most extreme form. "More than any other mode of inquiry, including
economics," de Man wrote in "The Resistance to Theory," "the linguistics
of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of
ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for
their occurrence" (RT, p. 11). This will not happen by itself; it is for us
to develop such an analytic practice in our contributions to the debate
Derrida has opened, and in future writing which draws on the resources
of de Man's work. His later writings offer some of the most powerful
tools for combating ideologies with which he had earlier been complicitous.