Legacies of Paul de Man

Notes

n o t e s introduction: legacies of paul de man Marc Redfield 1. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 2. I refer here to ‘‘The Lesson of Paul de Man,’’ Yale French Studies 69 (1985), and to the public debates in 1988–89 about de Man’s collaborationist journalism: for these last, see above all Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,’’ Critical Inquiry 14:3 (1988): 530–652, and subsequent debate, Critical Inquiry, 15:4 (1989): 765–73; see also Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Tom Keenan, eds., Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). For the texts under dispute, see Paul de Man, Wartime Journalism, 1939–1943 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988). 3. Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2002), esp. pp. 97–161. 4. Ibid., p. 105. 5. I refer here to Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (New York and London: Routledge, 1988); Luc Herman, Kris Humbeeck, and Geert Lernout, eds., (Dis)continuities: Essays on Paul de Man, Postmodern Studies, 2 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989); Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich, eds., Reading de Man Reading (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Diacritics 20:3 (1990); Ortwin de Graef, Serenity in Crisis: A Preface to Paul de Man, 1939–1960 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), and idem, Titanic Light: Paul de Man’s Post-Romanticism, 1960– 1969 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski, eds., Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Martin McQuillan, Paul de Man, Critical Thinkers Series (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). I know of two European essay collections devoted to de Man (in addition to (Dis)continuities, which I included above because all of its essays are in English): a special issue of Colloquium Helveticum 11–12 (1990) (the essays, stemming from a colloquium at the University of 193 194 Notes to Pages 4–5 Zurich, are in German and English); and Karl Heinz Bohrer, ed. Äesthetik und Rhetorik: Lektüren zu Paul de Man (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993) (these essays are of course in German). An impressive if not utterly complete bibliography of de Man is available electronically: see Eddie Yeghiayan’s magnificent ‘‘Paul de Man bibliography’’ online at http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/⬃scctr/Wellek/ deman/. 6. Rodolphe Gasché, The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man (Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 269. 7. Cathy Caruth edited special issues of the psychoanalytic journal American Imago on trauma in 1991; these were republished as a book, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Caruth has offered her own extended reflections on this topic in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). For Felman’s important work on trauma and the Holocaust, see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature , Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). 8. For my discussions of de Man, see my Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 1–40, and The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 5–9, 95–124. John Guillory deserves credit for making this point forcefully in the opening pages of his chapter on de Man in Cultural Capital: see John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 178–79. I discuss Guillory’s book in my contribution to this volume. 9. For an example of the habit (which goes back to the late 1970s) of pairing Derrida with de Man and abjecting the latter, see Jeffrey T. Nealon, ‘‘The Discipline of Deconstruction.’’ PMLA 107:5 (1992): 266–79. 10. Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Michaels’s mishearing and misrepresentation of deconstruction is so severe that Derridean and de Manian theses are turned into their opposite: what de Man calls ‘‘materiality’’ is treated as what de Man called ‘‘phenomenality.’’ The misreading of Derrida is particularly stark, given the relatively systematic character of Derrida’s thought in comparison with de Man’s, and the relative accessibility of the arguments about iterability and difference in much-discussed and much-taught texts such as ‘‘Signature...