Rethinking History

The Journal of Theory and Practice

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‘I am two distinct beings’: Paul de Man’s

authenticating project

Gregory Jones-Katz

To cite this article: Gregory Jones-Katz (2017): ‘I am two distinct beings’: Paul de Man’s
authenticating project, Rethinking History, DOI: 10.1080/19388160.2017.1299971

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19388160.2017.1299971

Published online: 24 Apr 2017.

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Rethinking History, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19388160.2017.1299971

‘I am two distinct beings’: Paul de Man’s

authenticating project
Gregory Jones-Katz
School of Humanities and Social Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen,
China

ABSTRACT
Belgian-American critic Paul de Man’s postwar relationship to his wartime past has
been fiercely debated since the 1987 discovery of almost 200 pro-German articles
that he wrote in his youth during the Nazi occupation of his native Belgium. What
were the reasons for his postwar silence over this and how did this relationship
shape his deconstructionist writings? Here, it is argued that after his 1948 emigration
to America, de Man, with single-minded, almost obsessional, determination
pursued an authenticating project, the goal of which was to become an author
who never (again) committed the mistakes of his youth. To realize his goal, de Man
underwent a decades-long spiritual conversion that can be viewed as embodying
the tension between two models of conversion in Western culture: metanoia – the
transformation of one’s way of thinking and being – and epistrophē – the return to
the source of one’s way of thinking and being. While de Man’s conversion at first
entailed the straightforward renunciation of and silence about his wartime life,
his repudiation eventually fashioned an opposition between his present and past.
This opposition remained ‘undeconstructed’ – his collaborationist identity became
an unrepresented presence, ‘a stowaway’ that endured and in great part defined
him. This opposition remained ‘undeconstructed’ – his collaborationist identity
became an unrepresented presence, ‘a stowaway’ that endured and in great part
defined him. Evidence of the tension between de Man’s opposed aims – his divided
conversion – is perhaps most legible in his postwar writings.

ARTICLE HISTORY  Received 21 February 2016; Accepted 23 February 2017

KEYWORDS  Paul de Man; deconstruction; history; presence; authenticity; conversion

During his tenure at Yale University during the 1970s and early 1980s, Professor
of French and Comparative Literature Paul de Man helped develop an influential
strategy of reading literature popularly known as ‘deconstruction’. Forswearing
the use of historical context, deconstructionists identified moments of unde-
cidability and impasse in texts in order to show that what was once overlooked

CONTACT  Gregory Jones-Katz  joneskatz@cuhk.edu.cn

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2   G. JONES-KATZ

or deemed marginal in fact lay at their center and formed the ground of their
meaning. Despite – or perhaps because of – his pedagogical and scholarly suc-
cesses, de Man and his reading technique earned many detractors. Those on
the right charged him and by extension deconstructionists in toto with placing
sole authority in a reader’s will-to-power, an approach, critics claimed, that led
to nihilism and the destruction of texts’ meaning; those on the left accused de
Man and his followers, for their rejection of the importance of the production
and reception of texts, of quietism.
Notwithstanding controversy over his work, de Man’s untimely death from
cancer in 1983 prompted outpourings of sorrow from his friends, colleagues,
and students (‘Yale Still Feeling Loss of Revered Professor’ 1984). At a January
1984 memorial service, Yale Professor of French Shoshana Felman claimed that
'through him, through his works and through his person, something extraor-
dinary spoke’ (Felman 1985, 8); French philosopher Jacques Derrida, de Man’s
closest friend in American intellectual life, sorrowfully celebrated that de Man
‘was irony itself ’ (Derrida 1985, 324). Perhaps most moving was the praise
of her former mentor offered by Barbara Johnson, Professor of French and
Comparative Literature at Harvard University. ‘In a profession full of fakeness’,
Johnson said, ‘he was real; in a world full of takers, he let others take; in a crowd
of self-seekers, he sought the truth, and distrusted it’ (Johnson 1985, 10).
Alas, de Man soon experienced a fall from grace like no other academic in
recent memory. In the summer of 1987, Belgian graduate student Ortwin de
Graef discovered that in his early twenties de Man had contributed approxi-
mately 200 articles – one explicitly anti-Semitic – to the Nazi-controlled press
during the early years of the German occupation of his native Belgium (de
Man 1988). Word of de Man’s collaborationist writings spread quickly. For his
detractors de Man had been unmasked as a fraud who used his anti-historical
reading strategy to protect himself from accusations of collaboration during his
youth (Lehman 1988, 65). While many of his colleagues came to his defense,
de Man’s friends and enemies alike wondered at the mystery of his silence and
the meaning of his postwar work. Indeed, the case of de Man raised the very
question of his authenticity (Hartman 2007, 87).
The following essay attempts to untangle the issue of Paul de Man’s ‘authen-
ticity’. It argues that after his 1948 emigration to the U.S., de Man, with sin-
gle-minded, almost obsessional, determination pursued an authenticating
project, the goal of which was to become an author who never (again) com-
mitted the mistakes of his youth. To realize his goal, de Man underwent a
decades-long spiritual conversion that embodied the tension between the two
primary models of conversion in Western culture: metanoia – the transfor-
mation of one’s way of thinking and being – and epistrophē – the return to the
source of one’s way of thinking and being (Hadot 1953). While de Man’s con-
version at first entailed the straightforward renunciation of and silence about
his Belgian life, his repudiation eventually fashioned an opposition between
 RETHINKING HISTORY   3

his present and past. This opposition remained ‘undeconstructed’ – his col-
laborationist identity became an unrepresented presence, ‘a stowaway’ that
endured and in great part defined him (Runia 2006a, 2006b). Put differently,
de Man’s postwar authenticating project to develop his ‘real’ mode of thinking
and acting involved keeping his collaboration ‘at hand’ (Hadot 2001, 61) so as
to guard his present from his past mistake. Yet, precisely by virtue of keeping
his past errors at hand, de Man ensured his past became a specter that flooded
into his present. de Man’s life and work in America emerged out of the tensions
between his metanoic transformation of his way of thinking and being and his
epistrophic return to the source of his way of thinking and being.
de Man underwent his conversion to his ‘real’ manner of thinking and acting
via spiritual exercises of self-transformation (Hadot 1995, 83, 91). However,
de Man’s salvation process occurred not through metaphysical means but in
and with his writing, the very medium of his youthful misdeeds. The vehicle
of his private conversion, his essays – outwardly literary criticisms of poets,
novelists, and other writers – were performances of his authenticating project,
inwardly directed assays to substantiate his postwar manner of thinking and
being. Rather than openly referring to his past, de Man converted to his ‘real’
way of thinking and being by writing in the ‘middle voice’, with his past and
present united and the subject and object of his writings conflated (White 2010,
260, 261). One might even say that de Man’s (auto)biography was in, and was
performed by, his oeuvre.
The case of de Man highlights pressing methodological and historiographical
issues. A number of critical portraits have depicted de Man as a narcissist or a
sociopath who ‘employed many lies in many forms in his lifetime’ and whose
‘path’ was ‘erasure and repression of the past’ (Barish 2014, 13, 14, 360, 400, 401,
441; Bartlett 2013; Menand 2014). Such portrayals fail to locate de Man’s dishon-
esty in the context of his lifelong divided conversion. Moreover, historians have
read the post-Vietnam period in American humanities departments as one in
which the theoretically-informed vanguard took the so-called linguistic turn,
a style of interpretation that at its root rejected any access to the ‘real’. But this
essay demonstrates that de Man – often cast as an arch-theorist of language’s
inability to connect with reality – always remained resolutely committed to his
authenticating project and that it was through his writings that he performed his
divided conversion. It therefore points to the insufficiency of existing histories
of postmodernism and their underlying assumptions about the ‘fracturing’ of
communities, discourses, and institutions (Rodgers 2011).
By the same token, deconstructionists have overlooked de Man’s spiritual
biography. Their disregard resulted from an extreme anti-essentialist skepticism
towards the idea that de Man cultivated an ‘authentic presence’ (Derrida 1988;
Gumbrecht 2007). Deconstructionists’ commitments also precluded recogni-
tion that de Man’s postwar project developed with and out of the unrepresented
‘presence’ of his past; hence they were unable to construct a coherent narrative
4   G. JONES-KATZ

of his lifelong divided conversion. One historian has recently suggested that
both ‘critics and apologists [have] overstated the relationship between de Man’s
collaboration and his deconstruction’ – viewing the latter either as a kind of
‘amnesty project’ for the former or as a decisive anti-totalitarian rejection of
it (Hartman 2015, 241). This essay offers a more complex reading of the rela-
tionship between the two, focusing specifically on how de Man conflated his
different youthful and postwar modes of thinking and being. It was this very
conflation that helped produce not only his famously powerful, if idiosyncratic,
essays but also that aura – his honesty, his integrity, indeed, his authenticity –
which so many of his friends and colleagues remarked on at his 1984 memorial
service.
de Man’s use of his writing as an instrument for self-conversion appears to
have begun during his Belgian youth. He was born into a bourgeois family in
Antwerp on 6 December 1919. Rebelling against his businessman father’s world
of X-ray equipment and ‘small factory of busy technicians’, the adolescent de
Man took an interest in seventeenth-century Christian mystic and theologian
Jakob Böhme’s and medieval philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart’s inves-
tigations into ‘preverbal illumination’ (Barish 2014, 34, 35). Though excelling
in grade school, de Man eschewed formal study as a young adult – in 1939
he matriculated at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in engineering,
but repeatedly failed his exams. de Man instead became an autodidact, inde-
pendently studying philosophy and literature. He also joined the editorial board
of Cahiers du Libre Examen, a ULB student publication that addressed social
and political topics from a liberal democratic position. In one essay, de Man’s
adolescent interest in spiritual exercises – exercises that intensely delimited the
self in order to transform one’s way of thinking and being – found affinity with
the anti-bourgeois morality of French author André Gide. Mirroring Gide, de
Man wrote:
Everything is justifiable at the moment that one wishes it, because ‘there is profit
in reassessing desires’ … ‘One must act without judging whether the act is good
or bad. Love without worrying if it’s good or evil’. (Barish 2014, 65)
Viewed through the lens of his essay, de Man seems to have acted out his
desire to purify himself of his bourgeois upbringing when he fell in love with
Romanian immigrant Anaide Baraghian who, while married to another, bore
de Man’s first child.
de Man’s proclivity for using his writing as a spiritual exercise continued
during the Second World War. When the German army invaded Belgium in
May 1940, de Man and his family fled to Southern France. de Man returned
to Brussels in August,
convinced both of the Flemish cause … and of his own great opportunity to ‘take
a place’ – perhaps alongside his influential uncle Henri de Man, advisor to King
Leopold III – ‘in the future life of his country’. (Barish 2014, 113)
 RETHINKING HISTORY   5

de Man found employment writing for the Belgian collaborationist newspaper

Le Soir and the Flemish-language journal Het Vlaamsche Land. His articles –
around 200 literary and cultural pieces published between December 1940 and
December 1942 – had a ‘cultivated, staid, and consistent tone that would have
appealed to many’ readers. de Man’s articles also seemed to be searching for
‘rules to judge literature and life’, ‘principles and abstract theories of aesthetics’
(Barish 2014, 127, 124; de Man 1988). Extending his youthful interest in Böhme
and Eckhart, de Man’s tone and ambitions in his collaborationist essays bore
affinities with what Pierre Hadot identified as an ancient Stoic ‘spiritual exercise
of the view from above’, an exercise through which one eliminates ‘all subjec-
tivity in the admiring contemplation of … ineluctable laws’ (Hadot 2001, 163).
de Man’s Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land articles also placed his identity in
the service of the Nazi cause. Chillingly, de Man contributed the anti-Semitic
article ‘The Jews in Present-Day Literature’ to a 4 March 1941 full-page spread
in Le Soir entitled ‘The Jews and Us: The Cultural Aspects’ (de Man 1988, 45,
286–292). In this essay de Man argued that Jews had played an important role
in the artificial and disordered quality of existence in Europe since 1920, were
uniquely cold and cerebral, and constituted a ‘problem’ to be solved. With his
‘refined’ and impersonal tone, both of which likely suggested to readers that
he was above the vulgar anti-Semitism of the surrounding Le Soir articles, de
Man facilitated the paper’s editorial position: the ‘Jews [were] a “race” with
negative influence on Europe (and Belgium) and one from which the West
must be freed’ (Barish 2014, 124). With this article, de Man aligned his very
manner of thinking and being with Nazi anti-Semitism.
For reasons yet unknown, de Man ceased his Le Soir column and then began
working for the publisher Agence Dechenne. Before his eventual firing in April
1943 due to mismanagement of funds, de Man continued to promote work
which explored the radical transformation of thinking and being. In December
1942 he facilitated the publication of Exercice du silence, a special issue of
Messages, a poetic journal that showcased new currents in French literature
and which had been censored by the Germans in Paris. Exercice du silence
opened with a ‘letter by [Charles] Baudelaire announcing his own suicide’ and
the volume’s editorial introduction included thoughts on the ‘death of the self
and its reduction to silence’. Exercice du silence thus ‘literally and metaphorically
[proclaimed] the annihilation of the self ’ (Felman and Laub 1992, 132–135).
This form of radical self-fashioning through literature was in tune with de Man’s
private tradition of using his writing as a spiritual exercise. The publication of
Exercice du silence also heralded de Man’s own imminent lapse into silence.
Following his dismissal he retreated to the countryside outside Antwerp where
he married the recently divorced Anaide Baraghian on 17 May 1944. For the
next two years, de Man’s sole literary endeavors constituted another exercise
in self-repudiation as he set about translating the American novel Moby-Dick
into Dutch (de Man 1945).
6   G. JONES-KATZ

Following the Nazi surrender on 7 May 1945 de Man was summoned before
a military court but no charges were ever brought against him over his col-
laboration – in contrast to the fate of his infamous uncle. Having avoided
imprisonment, in 1946 de Man established Editions Hermès, a publishing
house dedicated to fine art monographs. Two years later, he wrote an essay on
the drawings of French poet, essayist, and philosopher Paul Valéry, one of the
most important Symbolist writers. This not only openly aimed to persuade his
financial backers of the prospects for Hermès, but also spoke to the possibilities
of using writing as a spiritual exercise to transform one’s way of thinking and
acting (de Man [1948] 2014). In Valéry’s mind, de Man argued, he adopted ‘an
attitude [of] unremitting application, discipline and constraint’ on ‘his inte-
rior space’, training to ‘compose and form the Self ’ (de Man [1948] 2014, 25,
35). ‘Nothing’, de Man wrote, ‘solicited [Valéry] that he failed to refer to the
problems which obsessed him and to the most crucial of them all: possession
of himself ’. Whether Valéry succeeded in achieving self-possession was irrel-
evant, according to de Man. Rather, the ‘fact that he drew and engraved’ was
itself significant, as it led ‘him to lay bare the “mental figure” of the person he
potentially was’. The act of drawing in other words led de Man’s Valéry back to
the self that he could have been. ‘Thus in his work’, de Man wrote, ‘the author
approaches his goal, approaches himself ’. In the essay’s conclusion, Valéry even
appeared triumphant: ‘On the page where the words … are superimposed …
the author appears; he discerns himself … that shadow of countenance which
is himself, which varies and does not change’ (de Man [1948] 2014, 35, 36, 37).
With Valéry, de Man retreated into an inner citadel to excise the unessential
from his way of thinking and being.
By 1948 Editions Hermès was failing and in order to evade creditors de
Man left Antwerp for New York while his wife and three children departed for
Argentina, expecting to join him once he was established. de Man’s business col-
lapsed, bringing financial ruin to his investors, including close family members.
Rather than face his failure de Man, like Melville’s Ishmael, self-expropriated
himself through multiple acts of reinvention. After spending time with figures
of the New York literary world, he was recommended for a teaching post at Bard
College in New York where he taught from 1949 to 1951. At Bard de Man fell
in love with and married one of his advisees, Patricia Kelley, though without
divorcing his first wife. When Anaide Baraghian arrived in the spring of 1950
with their three young boys, Patricia de Man was pregnant. After Baraghian
returned to Argentina, rumors of his bigamy followed by a formal complaint
lodged to college authorities that he had not paid almost a year’s worth of rent
tarnished his reputation. Bard administrators notified de Man that his contract
would not be renewed (Lehman 1992).
Before he left the hamlet of Annandale-on-Hudson, however, de Man deliv-
ered a rousing graduation speech. de Man’s talk, ‘Morality of Literature’, is best
understood as yet another Stoic spiritual exercise. ‘[M]oral systems’, de Man was
 RETHINKING HISTORY   7

reported to have declared, ‘are … by their very nature destructive[,] unserious

in that they are liable to change, and in order to certify themselves are forced to
travel to their limits expending energy value on the way’. ‘Upon arriving at their
limit’, de Man stated, ‘moral systems decay and become stagnant’. Consequently,
‘history is not continuous, but a discrete system in that there must be a rejection
of the past in order to invent the validity of a different present’ (Lehman 1992).
de Man’s speech – his assertion of the hollowness and violence of morality and
claim that the discontinuity of history obliges one to restrict attention to the
present via repudiation of the past – was certainly a thinly-veiled justification
for renouncing his European ties and abandonment of his Belgian family. But
the speech was also a tool with which he labored to fashion a space for his ‘real’
manner of thinking and being.
After Bard de Man, like Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, fled forward – this
time by finagling his way into the graduate program in Comparative Literature
at Harvard in 1952. The continuing development of his private authenticating
project is legible in his 1953 essay on philosopher of the French Renaissance
Michel de Montaigne. Today Montaigne is known for popularizing the essay as
a literary genre, and his famous declaration that ‘I am myself the matter of my
book’ likely struck a chord with de Man. In his article published in Critique, a
journal then central to French intellectual life, de Man argued that Montaigne
used his Essais to address ‘the problem … of our ambiguous relations with
our own being … in … its existential form’ (de Man 1953 [1989], 4). For de
Man, Montaigne continually reworked his unclear link to his own being by
submitting himself to the paradoxes that resulted from holding different epis-
temological, ethical, and aesthetic commitments. Most indicative of de Man’s
purpose, however, was his assertion that Montaigne’s ‘tense is exclusively the
present … But – a fundamental nuance – this present tense is not the present of
Montaigne living through this or that experience; it is the present of Montaigne
writing’. And, de Man continued, the exclusively present tense of Montaigne’s
essays accompanied his forgetting his past assertions: ‘[H]ave we sufficiently
understood the extraordinary fact that Montaigne never refers to his previous
declarations? Quite literally, he has forgotten them’ (de Man 1953 [1989], 11).
In de Man’s reading, Montaigne – like de Man himself – employed his writing
as a spiritual exercise to delimit his way of thinking and being to the present,
to a space where he meditated on his contradictory links to his existence. Like
Montaigne, de Man was ‘the matter’ of his own writing.
Though he tried to conceal the existence of his wartime articles, de Man’s
troubling past endured as a specter and one that did not remain completely
hidden from others. As a consequence of his application for a new Belgian
passport in January 1955, Harvard officials were anonymously alerted to his
wartime life in Europe (Atlas 1988). In a letter to Harvard meant to explain
himself de Man undeniably contorted the facts of his past – he characterized
his collaborationist writings as ‘some literary articles’, and limited the years of
8   G. JONES-KATZ

his participation to ‘1940 and 1941’, stating that he stopped his contributions
‘when Nazi thought-control … no longer allow[ed] freedom of statement’, as
well as claiming that he was the son – not the nephew – of Henri de Man
(de Man 1955 [1989], 476). From de Man’s standpoint, these distortions were
doubtless necessitated by his goal of self-transformation.
In the concluding paragraph of his letter, de Man tellingly wrote:
The sudden reflux of a past presented in such a light, when I had devoted the last
seven years of my life to building an existence entirely separated from former
painful experiences, leaves me weary and exhausted. The only incentive I have
to face up to all this, aside from my family, is the strong desire to continue and
finish my work. (de Man 1955 [1989], 477)
The ‘sudden reflux’ of de Man’s past exposed the tension between contrasting
strategies in his authenticating project, between the metanoic transformation
of his way of thinking and being and the epistrophic return to the source of his
way of thinking and being. Yet he continued to seek salvation with and in his
writing; we also know that around the time of the Harvard letter he was reading
the ancient philosopher Plotinus, another devotee of spiritual exercises aiming
to ‘return [the self] to the essential’, to ‘that which is truly “ourselves”’ (Barish
2014, 347; Hadot 1995, 102). At any rate, and fortunately for de Man, his letter
quelled concerns at Harvard and the matter was dropped.
At Harvard, de Man further advanced his inner-directed project by adapting
aspects of others’ reading techniques for use in his writing. For example, he
began to further push the Anglo-American New Critical style of ‘close reading’
– an interpretive approach that cared for literature not primarily as a product
of biographical or historical contexts but as a self-contained and self-referential
harmony between form and content – to its limits; in his 1960 dissertation, ‘The
Post-Romantic Predicament: A Study in the Poetry of Mallarmé and Yeats’ this
amounted to adopting a proto-deconstructive method. It is also clear that de
Man used his dissertation as a spiritual exercise. In it, he argued that French
poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé delimited and then purified his self via
writing. One finds in Mallarmé’s poem ‘Las de l’amer repos …’, de Man reveal-
ingly suggested, the ‘genesis of a stoical attitude as well as its connection with
a formalist type of art’. According to de Man, Mallarmé initially
surmount[ed] his despair at [the] discovery … that his language is powerless
to recapture … the plenitude of a natural unity of being … by objectifying his
negative knowledge, and making it into a form which has this knowledge for
its content.
Mallarmé conquered his knowledge that language failed to recollect the fullness
of existence by crafting a poem that cultivated this destructive understand-
ing. But, de Man argued, while ‘[t]he personage of Hérodiade [a character in
Mallarmé’s poem] … dramatize[d] the experience of stoicism by rejecting all
immediate spontaneity and making herself … into a pure form’, Hérodiade
came to recognize that her inwardness led to a ‘formalist aesthetic’ of ‘pure
 RETHINKING HISTORY   9

subjectivity and narcissistic self-adoration’ (de Man 1960a [2012], 55, 56).
Mallarmé’s Hérodiade realized that her withdrawal into a work of negative
knowledge led to the idolization of her self.
de Man’s Mallarmé nevertheless sought to overcome such narcissistic iso-
lation, as in his poem ‘Igitur’ which was written, de Man observed, during his
‘highly subjective and often pathetic spiritual crisis’ (de Man 1960a [2012],
80). ‘Igitur’, de Man argued, ‘is the story of a man who’ looked into ‘the mirror
of self-reflection’ and recognized the ‘essential alienation [that] separates us
from all things’. This isolation led Igitur ‘to reject the given, natural world’,
and this rejection ‘appear[ed] on the form of our despair before the ceaseless
flow of time’ (de Man 1960a [2012], 60, 61). However, de Man suggested, by
steadfastly concentrating on his present Mallarmé’s Igitur was able to overcome
his despondency:
Mallarmé’s attitude on this point is admirably uncompromising: the way to be
present to one’s time begins in total inwardness, certainly not out of indiffer-
ence towards history, but because the urgency of one’s concern demands a lucid
self-insight; action will follow from itself, when this insight has been gained. (de
Man 1960a [2012], 102)
Like an ancient Stoic, Mallarmé’s Igitur turned inward, constructing a private
shelter with his writing in the hope of attaining insight about his self-absorbed
alienation. Only after achieving this self-knowledge, de Man implied, would
action – political, historical, or otherwise – follow. For de Man’s Mallarmé, and
by proxy for de Man, the path toward redemption, to the conversion to his ‘real’
way of thinking and being, was in and with the work.
Though de Man entered the academic job market in 1960 with a degree from
Harvard and during the most extraordinary period of growth for institutions
of American higher education, he was initially unable to secure a position as
his graduation approached. But in the fall of 1959 de Man again experienced
a stroke of luck. Geoffrey Hartman, professor of English Literature at Cornell
University whom de Man impressed at the 1957 MLA meeting with a paper
on English Romantic poet John Keats, suggested to M. H. Abrams, master of
literary studies in Ithaca, that he offer de Man a position (Barish 2014, 421).
On the strength of Hartman’s endorsement and Abrams’ own impression of
de Man’s 1960 article, ‘Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image’ (de Man
1960b [1984]), Cornell offered de Man a tenure-track position in Comparative
Literature which he took up in the fall of 1960.
While de Man’s article became known as ‘the most Xeroxed essay ever
circulated among English graduate students’ (Barish 2014, 417), its signifi-
cance extends beyond its reception history. de Man compared the writings of
Francophone Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, English Romantic
poet William Wordsworth, and German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin.
Yet again, de Man’s essay was also a spiritual exercise. He claimed that ‘the
present predicament of the poetic imagination’ – the dilemma of the unresolved
10   G. JONES-KATZ

tension between imagination and nature – was specifically legible in passages

from ‘writers that belong to the earlier phases of romanticism’ (de Man 1960b
[1984], 10). ‘[E]ach [selection] represent[s] a moment of spiritual revelation’:
the ‘passage from a certain type of nature, earthly and material, to another
nature which could be called mental and celestial, although the “Heaven”
referred to is devoid of specific theological connotations’ (de Man 1960b [1984],
10, 13). The selections that de Man chose from Rousseau, Wordsworth, and
Hölderlin each described secular revelations: Rousseau’s passage, taken from
his 1761 epistolary novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, portrayed Saint-Preux’s
experience during his sojourn through the Canton of Valais in Switzerland;
Wordsworth’s selection ‘describe[d] the poet’s impressions in crossing the
Alps’ after participating ‘in one of the celebrations that mark the triumph of
the French Revolution’; and Hölderlin’s passage describe[d] ‘the sunrise in the
mountains’ during ‘his return from Switzerland to his native Swabia’ (de Man
1960b [1984], 11, 12).
But, de Man maintained, though Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Hölderlin
seemed to narrate secular revelations – to have wholly immersed their thinking
into a higher mental perspective, into what Hadot described as a ‘view from
above’ in the manner of the ancient Stoic philosophers – their passages actually
described the irresolvable conflicts between their imaginations and the higher,
natural state that prevented them from achieving a condition of pure salvation.
‘The[ir] passages describe[d] the ascent of a consciousness trapped within the
contradictions of a half-earthly, half-heavenly nature’ (de Man 1960b [1984],
15). As a result of this imprisonment, de Man claimed,
[r]adical contradictions abound in each of the passages. Rousseau deliber-
ately mixes and blurs the order of the seasons and the laws of geography …
Wordsworth transposes similar contradictions into the complexity of a language
that unites irreconcilable opposites … Hölderlin’s text also is particularly rich in
oxymorons; every word-combination, every motion expresses a contradiction.
(de Man 1960b [1984], 14)
And yet, notwithstanding their imprisonment in the dilemmas of conversion,
de Man’s Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Hölderlin inched closer to realizing a
complete spiritual transformation:
The works of the early romantics give us no actual examples [of a conscious-
ness entirely free of the contradictions between imagination and nature], for
they are, at most, underway toward renewed insights and inhabit the mixed and
self-contradictory regions that we encountered in the three passages. (de Man
1960b [1984], 16)
Resembling de Man himself, de Man’s Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Hölderlin,
though failing to achieve a harmony between their consciousness and their way
of being, Stoically continued to use their writing as vehicles of self-conversion.
The effects of de Man’s private authenticating project while at Cornell and
later at other institutions were never limited to the content of his written work.
 RETHINKING HISTORY   11

One of his undergraduates recalled ‘an obsessive, strange aspect to the man.
He spoke over and over again of publishing too soon … of the “shame” that
ensued when that happened’ (Foley 2011, 13). de Man’s classroom behavior is
comprehensible when placed in the context of his personal mission. He hoped
– and clearly felt disgraced when unable – to control not only the content but
also the dissemination of his writings. In addition, though his students and
colleagues expected de Man to produce a great book on romanticism, this book
would and in a way could never come. Rather, the essay form – the very genre
of his youthful misdeeds – became the life-long site of his self-conversion, the
conduit for his salvation. The effects of de Man’s authenticating project are even
discernable in the inconsistent stories he told to his Cornell graduate students
about his activities during the war – he told one that he had gone to England,
another to Switzerland and yet another to Paris. These fabrications protected
his professional position and reputation; they also fit with his habit of using
his scholarship for self-conversion (Corngold 1994, 185).
After de Man was elevated to full professor at Cornell in 1964, he was asked
to provide introductions to the collected works of various canonical poets and
writers. This writing, too, was integrated into his private project. In his 1966
‘Introduction to the Poetry of John Keats’, de Man employed Keats’ poetry to
obliquely describe his existential situation and reflect on his by-then almost
two decades-long spiritual transformation. Keats’ use of the phrase “self-
destroying” in his early poem Endymion, de Man tellingly argued, ‘is reveal-
ing, for a recurrent pattern in [Keats’] poetry indicates a strong aversion to
a direct confrontation with his own self; few poets have described the act of
self-reflection in harsher terms’ (de Man [1966] 1989, 189). Because openly
meditating on his character, actions, and motives was extraordinarily painful,
de Man maintained, Keats avoided straightforwardly challenging his own mode
of thinking and being. Instead, Keats apparently undertook a life-long, imper-
sonal self-reflection in his poetry, conceiving ‘his own work as a movement of
becoming, a gradual widening of his consciousness by successive stages’ (de
Man [1966] 1989, 188). And, for de Man, Keats’ inner journey via his poems was
most discernable when considering his last works, such as The Fall of Hyperion
and Lamia, because these writings ‘contain an attack on much that had been
held sacred in the earlier work’ (de Man [1966] 1989, 191). Indirectly, de Man
is here alerting his readers that he was contemplating his own conversion to his
‘real’ way of thinking and being in his writing; perhaps, too, he was imploring
readers to have patience, holding out the hope that his own last writings would
‘contain an attack’ on his collaborationist articles.
de Man significantly advanced his authenticating project in 1966 through
other avenues. While having breakfast with French philosopher Jacques Derrida
at the now famous Johns Hopkins University conference, ‘The Languages of
Criticism and the Sciences of Man’, de Man realized that he and Derrida were
both writing about Rousseau’s ‘Essay on the Origins of Languages’, ‘a text’,
12   G. JONES-KATZ

Derrida later recalled, ‘then little read’ (Derrida 1989, 127). After the confer-
ence, de Man was ‘anxious to define’ his reading technique in distinction to
Derrida’s (Rosso 1986, 117) and so composed a reading of Derrida’s recently
published analysis of Rousseau’s essay (de Man 1971). Looking back on de
Man’s essay in 1984, a year after his death, Derrida recognized that ‘the entire …
history of de Manian deconstruction passes through Rousseau’ (Derrida 1989,
127). Indeed, in ways of which Derrida was unaware, de Man’s use of Rousseau
here was again a spiritual exercise, an inwardly directed assay to transform his
manner of thinking and being.
In his essay, de Man praised Derrida for not developing his reading of
Rousseau’s ‘Essay’ by focusing on Rousseau’s ‘psychological idiosyncras[ies]’,
as previous interpreters had. A long line of commentators had concentrated
on Rousseau’s obsessions, paranoia, and preoccupation with political perse-
cution at the hands of French and Swiss authorities. One of the most influ-
ential was Geneva School critic Jean Starobinski whose 1957 Jean-Jacques
Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction explored how the psychological struc-
ture of Rousseau’s personality produced his writing. In contrast, Derrida read
Rousseau ‘without leaving the text’; by attending solely to the present – that is,
to Rousseau’s ‘Essay’ – Derrida, de Man implied, performed a Stoic spiritual
exercise. And by doing so, Derrida was able to show ‘that Rousseau’s own texts
provide the strongest evidence against his alleged doctrine’ of ‘unmediated pres-
ence’, a doctrine that asserted the ‘primacy of voice over the written word’ and
adhered ‘to the myth of original innocence’ (de Man 1971, 114–116). Whereas
other interpreters suggested that Rousseau – often considered the father of
Romanticism – described and longed for naïve and childlike ways of thinking
and being in an immediate relation to truth, to origins, and to ‘unmediated
presence’, Derrida, de Man argued, showed Rousseau’s ostensible moments
of presence as actually always positing another, earlier moment. In Derrida’s
reading, Rousseau’s state of innocence thereby implicitly lost its privileged status
as a point of origin.
But, de Man went on to argue, Derrida ultimately remained blind to the very
insight that made his reading so radical. For Derrida contended that Rousseau
remained unaware that his language undermined his ontology of presence. For
de Man, however, Rousseau was ‘not deluded and said what he meant to say’.
‘The key’, de Man wrote, ‘to the status of Rousseau’s language is not to be found
… in his greater or lesser awareness or control over the cognitive value of his
language’, as Derrida implied, but only in ‘the knowledge that this language, as
language, conveys about itself ’ (de Man 1971, 119, 135). And, according to de
Man, this knowledge that Rousseau’s language offered about itself was ‘“literary,”
in the full sense of the term’, because Rousseau’s ‘vocabulary of substance and
of presence is no longer used declaratively but rhetorically, for the very reasons
that are being (metaphorically) stated’ (de Man 1971, 136, 138–139). For de
Man, Rousseau’s language showed him to have been the most self-aware of
 RETHINKING HISTORY   13

writers, a writer who possesses a sort of metacognition of his own insights and
punctum caecum. ‘Rousseau’s text’, de Man wrote, ‘has no blind spots’ and ‘[t]
here is no need to deconstruct Rousseau’, because Rousseau self-deconstructs
(de Man 1971, 139). Whereas in his earlier conversion efforts de Man remained
hopeful that his essays might eventually yield self-insights that could lead to
moral judgment, or provide a spiritual revelation that might free him from the
contradictions of poetic imagination, he seems to now deny these possibilities.
In place of such hope de Man embraced ‘literary’ knowledge, the knowledge that
texts would endlessly oscillate between critical blindness and critical insight.
de Man, it appears, made literature his private sanctuary where he meditated
on how not to repeat his youthful mistakes of yielding his writing to political
and historical causes.
Evidence of de Man’s inner-directed conversion project is strewn across
his writing and actions during the late 1960s and 1970s. In his 1970 essay
‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’ de Man indirectly catalogued the
pain that his unrepresented past exerted on his present efforts. He argued that
because the writer of literature was ‘historian and agent’ of his own innovative
language, the writer was caught in a contradiction, and one neither ‘serene’ nor
‘detached’. Unlike de Man’s historians who calmly used their pens because their
‘language and the events that the language denotes are clearly distinct entities’,
for writers of literature, ‘[m]odernity turn[ed] out to be … a source of torment’
because their gestures of originality always unintentionally preserved the past
(de Man [1970] 1971, 152, 161). de Man offered a series of examples including
the work of French writer Antonin Artaud whose experimental texts showed
that ‘[t]he more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater
the dependence on the past’ (de Man [1970] 1971, 159). Regardless – indeed
because – of their acts of originality, de Man suggested, the modern writer’s
mode of thinking and being depended on history. And, by remaining unable
to wholly convert themselves to the modern – their writing instead simulta-
neously bearing the weight of the past and serving as an instrument of radical
change – de Man’s writer of literature endlessly suffered. As a result of these
contradictions: ‘The distinctive character of literature thus becomes manifest
as an inability to escape from a condition that is felt to be unbearable’ (de Man
[1970] 1971, 162).
Many readers – especially after the 1987 discovery of his wartime articles
– interpreted de Man’s essay as an attack on the very notion of literary history.
de Man suggested in his conclusion that ‘good literary historians’ focused on
the contradictions between modernity and history in literature because ‘the
bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even
if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions’ (de Man [1970]
1971, 165). For his critics such an assertion was a blatant attempt at self-abso-
lution for wartime collaboration: David Hirsch even claimed that de Man had
here expressed a ‘will to obliterate the past’ (Hirsch 1988, 333). Such readings,
14   G. JONES-KATZ

however, overlooked the fact that far from rejecting the past de Man’s essay was
addressing the painful contradictions that writers of literature – non-histori-
ans, that is to say – encountered between modernity and history. Early in it de
Man notably observed that writer’s struggles hide ‘behind rhetorical devices of
language that disguise and distort what the writer is actually saying’ (de Man
[1970] 1971, 152). One can surmise that in his own acts of writing de Man
continually – and agonizingly – discovered his gestures of radical self-innova-
tion to be illusory.
In a 1967 paper ‘Rousseau and the Transcendence of the Self ’, written after
de Man left Cornell for Johns Hopkins, he engaged with contemporary literary
criticism that focused on the topics of the self and the ‘living voice’ in Romantic
works; simultaneously he alluded to his habit of using writing as a Stoic spiritual
exercise that measured his present mode of thinking and being from his ‘origin’.
At one point, de Man stated:
Critical insight seems to occur at the moment when the consciousness of the
reader and that of the writer merge to become a single Self that transcends the
two empirical selves that confront each other. This encounter forces the reader
to leave behind his own everyday self, as it exists at this particular moment of
his history, to reestablish contact with the forgotten origin of this self, and to
gauge the degree of conformity he has maintained with this origin. (de Man
[1967] 1993, 31)
Some years later de Man almost publicly divulged his private mission, which
required him to repeatedly gauge his proximity to his ‘origin’. When he was
applying for the position of Professor of French and Comparative Literature at
Yale, his future colleague Harold Bloom later recollected: ‘Paul twice seemed to
want to say something to me, and before he had actually elucidated it he ceased’.
Bloom was ‘puzzled’ and assumed that de Man was troubled by some obscure
wrongdoing in the past, but de Man ‘never intimated that he had written any-
thing anti-Semitic. It was only retrospectively that I realized what he meant’
(quoted in Atlas 1988). Likely overwhelmed by the threat his disclosure might
pose, de Man merely turned further inward, continuing his habit of using his
writing for self-conversion.
When de Man’s 1973 essay ‘Semiology and Rhetoric’ first appeared it was
‘regarded by many as a courageous thrust at the violence of the American
intervention in Vietnam’ (Corngold 1994, 188). Yet this essay can also be read
as a Stoic attempt to achieve a ‘view from above’, a vision from which de Man
could determine the inescapable laws that governed the universe – or, rather, the
linguistic rules that ruled literature. He began his essay with a warning against
accepting the belief that ‘the fruits of ... ascetic concentration…at last’ allowed
one to move ‘towards’ the ‘non-verbal “outside” to which language refers,’ to
questions such as ‘the self, man, society’ (de Man 1973, 27). Rather than ‘confi-
dently devote ourselves to the foreign affairs, the external politics of literature,’
de Man counseled readers to concentrate on ‘de-constructive reading’ (de Man
 RETHINKING HISTORY   15

1973, 27, 32). To perform such a ‘de-constructive reading’, de Man turned to

a selection from Proust’s Swann’s Way which ‘describes the young Marcel …
hiding in the closed space of his room in order to read’. At first, Proust appeared
to achieve a ‘perfect synthesis’ between the ‘properties of coolness, darkness,
repose, silence, imagination and totality’ that governed Marcel’s chamber and
‘the heat, the light, the activity, the sounds, the senses and the fragmentation
that govern the outside’. This fusion of binaries ’render[ed] the presence of
Summer in the room more complete than the actual experience of Summer in
the outside world could have done’ (de Man 1973, 31). Yet, de Man’s Proust in
fact undid this synthesis - Marcel’s cool repose in his room ‘“supported, like
the quiet of a motionless hand in the middle of a running brook, the shock and
the motion of a _torrent of activity_’” (de Man 1973, 31, emphasis added). For
de Man, Proust ‘thus surreptitiously smuggled … [h]eat’ – a property of the
outside – into the ‘passage from a cold source’. By affirming and denying that
Marcel was inside or outside his room, that his room was cold or hot, that his
room’s fictional Summer was more real than the actual Summer outdoors, de
Man’s Proust closed ‘the ring of antithetical properties’ and allowed ‘for their
exchange and substitution’ (de Man 1973, 31). de Man’s Proust in other words
performed what was popularly known as deconstruction.
de Man intensified his ascetic concentration on the text itself in his essay’s
conclusion. He wrote:
The deconstruction is not something we have added to the text but it constituted
the text in the first place. A literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the
authority of its own rhetorical mode and by reading the text as we did, we were
only trying to come closer to being as rigorous a reader as the author had to be
in order to write the sentence in the first place. (de Man 1973, 32)
By undergoing ‘deconstruction’ regardless of the reader’s, de Man’s, and, of
course, Proust’s context, the ‘text’ thus advanced de Man’s private authenticat-
ing project – it eradicated de Man’s subjectivity in order to reflect on the laws
that governed literature, thereby helping him ensure he (never) committed his
youthful collaborationist mistake of submitting literature to ‘foreign affairs’. In
his final sentence, de Man in fact seems to allude to how his internalization of
the universal laws that ruled literature transformed his mode of thinking and
being: ‘Literature as well as criticism — the difference between them being
delusive — are condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and,
consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and
modifies himself ’ (de Man 1973, 33).
By the late 1970s, de Man and his Yale colleagues Harold Bloom, Geoffrey
Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller collectively achieved a high profile as the Yale
School of Deconstruction, in large measure because of their 1979 joint publi-
cation (with Jacques Derrida) Deconstruction and Criticism. In his contribution
‘Shelley Disfigured’, de Man offered what initially appears to be a quite fanciful
speculation on the meaning of English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Triumph
16   G. JONES-KATZ

of Life and his poem’s relationship to Romanticism. Once again, de Man’s essay
is best understood in the context of his inner directed authenticating project, in
this case as a meditation on the tensions between remembering and forgetting.
de Man argued that Shelley’s relationship to Romanticism was ‘dramatized
in the poem, most explicitly and at greatest length in the encounter between
the narrator and the figure designated by the proper name Rousseau, who
has himself much to say about his own predecessors’ (de Man 1979 [1984],
95). However, de Man claimed, ‘Rousseau’s self-narrated history provides no
answer to his true identity’ but instead staged questions that not only ‘dram-
atize[d] the failure to satisfy a desire for self-knowledge’ but also produced ‘a
metamorphosis in which [Rousseau’s] brain, the center of his consciousness, is
transformed’ (de Man [1979] 1984, 97–99). de Man’s Rousseau – in the manner
of de Man himself – pursued self-knowledge via questions about his identity
that he always failed to answer and that always altered his consciousness. And,
for de Man, this journey from a ceaselessly erased self-knowledge to ceaseless
metamorphosis – a purely linguistic process de Man called ‘disfiguration’ – was
the very meaning of Shelley’s The Triumph of Life and its link to Romanticism
(de Man [1979] 1984, 100, 123).
That was not all – it is indeed revealing that de Man, in his closing paragraph,
proposed that the poem’s path of disfiguration was non-linear:
The Triumph of Life warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought or text,
ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows
or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of
death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence. (de Man [1979] 1984, 122)
While critics have read de Man’s conclusion as outright destructive – Daniel
T. O’Hara argued in 1985 that ‘Shelley Disfigured’ ‘enshrine[d] nihilism as the
principle of critical activity’ (O’Hara 1985, 233, 234) – de Man’s final decree
could be profitably read as an exhortation to himself to ascetically concentrate
on the act of reading, an act that de Man equated with disfiguration: ‘Reading
as disfiguration, to the very extent that it resists historicism, turns out to be
historically more reliable than the products of historical archeology’ (de Man
[1979] 1984, 123).
By 1980 de Man’s renown in American literary-critical circles had increased
dramatically – not only were his writings extensively cited but his graduate
students had also begun to staff more and more of the most prestigious posts
in the United States. At this point there must have been a number of opportune
moments for him to address in public the silent logic governing his life and
work. Yet de Man’s confession was never to come and after news broke of his
collaboration in 1987 his friends and colleagues were stunned and confused.
In 1990 Derrida reflected on his close friend’s silence: ‘I don’t know why he
didn’t tell me anything […] I don’t have any answer, I don’t know, I have only
hypotheses’ (Peeters 2012, 398). For many, the fact that de Man never ‘publicly
 RETHINKING HISTORY   17

and exhaustively confessed appear[ed] to be just as reprehensible as the crimes

that should have formed the substance of such a confession’ (De Graef 1989, 51).
These are all understandable reactions, but they overlook that de Man
explained the predicament of his (non)confession in one of his wildest essays,
his 1977 ‘The Purloined Ribbon’. There de Man counterintuitively argued that
Rousseau’s Confessions, in which Rousseau offered a narrative of the experi-
ences that shaped his personality and ideas, was ‘not primarily a confessional
text’. ‘To confess’, de Man wrote, ‘is to overcome guilt and shame in the name
of truth’ (de Man [1977] 1979, 279). But, de Man claimed, Rousseau ‘cannot
limit himself to the mere statement of what ‘really’ happened’, especially when
confessing his atrocious action – his framing of Marion, a young girl working
in the house, for his (Rousseau’s) theft of a ribbon. Instead, de Man argued,
Rousseau’s confession also ‘has to excuse’ himself of his crime (de Man [1977]
1979, 279, 280). Tellingly, as Ortwin de Graef has noted, de Man – who was of
course fluent in French – added a negation to Rousseau’s sentences explaining
his goal in the Confessions. Rousseau wrote that he ‘would not fulfill the purpose
of [the Confessions] if [he] did not reveal my inner sentiments as well …, and if
[he] did fear to excuse [himself] by means of what conforms to the truth’; yet
de Man rendered this as he ‘would not fulfill the purpose of [the Confessions]
if [he] did not reveal my inner sentiments as well …, and if [he] did not fear to
excuse [himself] by means of what conforms to the truth’. Whereas Rousseau
asserted that to realize the aim of the Confessions the confessor should not fear
to excuse himself, de Man’s Rousseau claimed that in fact the confessor should
fear to excuse himself (De Graef 1989, 61; de Man [1977] 1979, 280).
de Man’s dubious translation of Rousseau’s phrase makes sense when situ-
ated within the frame of de Man’s inner-directed project. Like his Rousseau, de
Man feared that confession of his youthful errors would excuse him and thus
alleviate his guilt and shame. ‘The only thing’, de Man wrote, ‘one has to fear
from the excuse is that it will indeed exculpate the confessor, thus making the
confession (and the confessional text) redundant as it originates’ (de Man [1977]
1979, 280). de Man also suggested – in a sentence used as a supreme example
during the 1987–1988 de Man affair of his ‘moral idiocy’ (quoted in De Graef
1989, 65) – that confession would excuse guilt because any discourse always
introduces the possibility of not corresponding to empirical truth:
[I]t is always possible to face up to any experience (to excuse any guilt), because
the experience always exists simultaneously as fictional discourse and as empirical
event and it is never possible to decide which one of the two possibilities is the
right one. (de Man [1977] 1979, 293)
de Man’s veiled confession of his refusal to confess could be read as evidence of
his commitment to keep his past errors ‘at hand’, as an unrepresented presence.
Instead of straightforward revelation, which de Man seems to have believed
would have lightened the weight of his responsibility, he preferred the work of
18   G. JONES-KATZ

private conversion with and in his writing; so, to the dismay of his friends and
colleagues a decade later, he remained silent.
In late 1983, de Man died from complications arising from cancer. The per-
sonal reflections offered at his 1984 memorial service suggest that his friends
and colleagues sensed the effects of his authenticating project. French poet Yves
Bonnefoy intuited that de Man used his writings to describe and transform his
way of thinking and being:
[de Man’s] manner of marking, cruelly, gently, the underlying limitations of a
method or the insufficiencies of a reading, was not distancing himself from the
essential, it was practicing, again with this brief and somehow distant laughter
which he also turned against himself, an unexpected kind of negative theology.
(Bonnefoy 1985, 328)
Recalling the last time he saw de Man at a colloquium, Bonnefoy also conjured
up the spiritual dimension of de Man’s reading technique:
I had listened to Paul, in the colloquium,…present his critical thought, but as if
at a distance, as if he were in another world than those discussions or that room:
he seemed so withdrawn in the analysis of a few words of a poem of Baudelaire
that he did not follow them to the limit of their meaning, dreaming this meaning,
one might have said, so well that I thought that he spoke there of himself, that
he spoke to himself. ‘I am two distinct beings,’ he said to me, more or less, upon
leaving the lecture. (Bonnefoy 1985, 328)
Prior to the 1987 revelations Bonnefoy was eerily attuned to de Man’s inner
mission and the unresolved tension between his metanoic transformation of his
way of thinking and being and epistrophic return to the origin of his present.
de Man’s last writings also further advanced his divided conversion. In his
introduction to The Rhetoric of Romanticism, de Man expressed his misgivings
about the editor’s arrangement of his essays because this arrangement suggested
a dialectical pattern rather than what de Man saw as division and nonlinearity:
Laid out diachronically in a roughly chronological sequence, [the essays] do not
evolve in a manner that easily allows for dialectical progression or, ultimately, for
historical totalization. Rather, it seems that they always start again from scratch
and that their conclusions fail to add up to anything. (de Man 1984, viii)
Yet, despite de Man’s Stoic commitment to his authenticating project, he
remained occasionally unable to control when his unrepresented past exerted
unwanted pressure on his present. In the 1983 introduction to his republished
Blindness and Insight de Man wrote:
I am not given to retrospective self-examination and mercifully forget what I
have written with the same alacrity I forget bad movies—although, as with bad
movies, certain scenes or phrases return at times to embarrass and haunt me like
a guilty conscience. (de Man 1983, xii)
However, notwithstanding his hesitations and disavowals, in a 1983 inter-
view de Man alluded to his belief that he had indeed achieved a relative success
in converting to his ‘real’ manner of thinking and being:
 RETHINKING HISTORY   19

I don’t think I ever was away from [political and ideological] problems, they
were always uppermost in my mind…I have the feeling I have achieved some
control over technical problems of language, specifically problems of rhetoric,
of the relation between tropes and performatives…I feel now some control of a
vocabulary and of a conceptual apparatus that can handle that. It was in working
on Rousseau that I felt I was able to progress from purely linguistic analysis to
questions which are really already of a political and ideological nature. So that
now I feel to do it a little more openly, though in a very different way than what
generally passes as ‘critique of ideology.’ (Rosso 1986, 121)
Here, de Man – albeit obliquely – disclosed his authenticating project, his mis-
sion to keep his errors ‘uppermost in [his] mind’ while he honed his interpre-
tive techniques and theoretical apparatus in order to never (again) commit
his wartime errors of submitting literature to historical and social experience.
His last essays trace his conversion as well. In ‘Kant and Schiller’, de Man cited
a passage from a novel by Joseph Goebbels to point out how a ‘grievous mis-
reading of [Friedrich] Schiller’s aesthetic state’ led to the aestheticization of
politics (de Man 1983, 155). After the 1987 discovery of his wartime writings,
de Man’s friends and colleagues often pointed to these late essays as offering
‘the best strategies to analyze and to destroy the “aestheticizing of politics” that
is nazism’ (Herman, Humbeeck, and Lernout 1989, 14). But what de Man’s
friends, colleagues, and even his enemies have overlooked is not only that de
Man’s last writings were extensions of his life-long habit of using his essays as
Stoic spiritual exercises, but also that his last essays circuitously returned to his
‘real’ mode of thinking and being, which refused to yield literature to historical
or political causes. When situated in the context of his authenticating project,
de Man’s last essays circled back to his origin. And while he went to the grave
with this secret, the tale of de Man’s ‘authenticity’ remains legible – and audi-
ble – in his writings.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
The research for this essay was supported in part by the Belgian American Educational
Foundation.

Notes on contributor
Gregory Jones-Katz is a lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.
His work has appeared in the Boston Review, Derrida Today, Intellectual History Review,
and Raritan: A Quarterly Review. Jones-Katz’s book on the history of deconstruction
in America is under contract with the University of Chicago Press.
20   G. JONES-KATZ

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22   G. JONES-KATZ

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