In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Machinal Effects:Derrida With and Without de Man1
  • Andrzej Warminski

Toward the end of "Acts"—the third and what would have been the last lecture and the last chapter of Derrida's Mémoires, for Paul de Man, if it had not been for the necessity of adding "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War" in a revised edition of 1988—Derrida quotes passages from two letters de Man wrote to him in 1970 and 1971 before and after the publication in Poétique of de Man's "The Rhetoric of Blindness: Derrida as Reader of Rousseau."2 De Man's first letter is itself a reply to a letter that Derrida wrote to de Man in responding to the critique of his (Derrida's) reading of Rousseau in Grammatologie. In the excerpt Derrida quotes, de Man refuses to be put off by what he calls Derrida's "kindness" (gentillesse) and emphasizes the areas of disagreement or at least divergence: "The other day was neither the time nor the place to speak again of Rousseau [pour reparler de Rousseau] and I do not know if you have any reason to return to the question. Your supposed 'agreement' [accord] [This is a word I must have written in my letter] can only be kindness, for if you object to what I say about metaphor, you must, as it should be, object to everything." And a bit later in the excerpt, de Man adds: "I do not yet know why you keep refusing Rousseau the value of radicality which you attribute to Mallarmé and no doubt to Nietzsche; I believe that it is for hermeneutic rather than historical reasons, but I am probably wrong" (M 129, 127).3 After the essay appeared in Poétique, Derrida must have thanked de Man once again, he says, and he gets in reply another letter from Zürich (dated the 4th of January 1971). In the extract Derrida quotes, de Man qualifies a bit his disagreement with [End Page 1072] Derrida, but he also attempts to correct whatever Derrida had said in his letter about de Man's critique. We don't have access to Derrida's letter—it's not in the de Man archive at UCI—but it clearly did more than just offer renewed thanks for de Man's critique! I quote—Derrida's quoting de Man—at a bit more length:

There is no disagreement between us about the basis of your thinking but a certain divergence in our way of nuancing and situating Rousseau. This divergence is important to me for the notions that I had come to about the question of writing before having the benefit of your thinking came to me above all from Rousseau (and from Hölderlin). . . . The desire to exempt Rousseau (as you say) at all costs from blindness is therefore, for me, a gesture of fidelity to my own itinerary. Rousseau has led me to a certain understanding which, due allowance being made, seems to me near to that with which you have had the force to begin. As the Essai sur l'origine des langues is one of the texts upon which I have been relying for such a long time, I must have put a certain stubbornness into my defense of the relative insight which I have benefitted from. This having been said, I did not wish to exempt Rousseau from blindness but only wished to show that, on the specific question of the rhetoricity of his writing, he was not blinded. This is what gives to his text the particular status that we would both agree, I believe, to call "literary." That this insight is accompanied by a perhaps more redoubtable blindness—and which could be, for example, madness—I didn't feel obliged to say in this text, but I would talk about it in regard to the Dialogues and especially in regard to Émile, which seems to me one of the most demented texts there is.

(M 130, 127-28)

In the second excerpt from this letter, de Man makes some additional remarks on the areas of their agreement and...

pdf

Share