Legacies of Paul de Man

Introduction: Legacies of Paul de Man

Introduction: Legacies of Paul de Man Marc Redfield An inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing. ‘‘One must’’ means one must filter, sift, criticize, one must sort out different possibles that inhabit the same injunction. And inhabit it in a contradictory fashion around a secret. If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. —jacques derrida, Specters of Marx More than twenty years after his death, Paul de Man remains a haunting presence in the American academy. His name has retained its affective charge even as the context in which it first became nationally known has receded into the past, becoming as distant as disco music or the Ford or Carter administrations. The acrid debates about deconstruction and the ‘‘Yale School’’ and the bitter, high-profile purgings of junior faculty ranks at places like Yale and Princeton may now seem part of another world. And in certain ways it would no doubt be fair to say that the winds of controversy have calmed, and that de Man’s legacy has become part of everyday academic life. His students, and the students of his students, hold teaching positions throughout the North American university system; they publish books and articles and contribute to volumes like the present one, and in the usual run of things they are rewarded in the usual minute ways for doing so: the c.v. grows a little longer; the annual report heftier. ‘‘Deconstruction ’’ now figures in countless introductions-to-theory as an option on the menu (usually placed, in pseudochronological fashion, behind several fresher offerings—‘‘New Historicism,’’ ‘‘Cultural Studies,’’ ‘‘Gender Studies,’’ and so on). In these and other ways, the ‘‘university of excellence ’’ (to recall Bill Readings’s memorable phrase for our contemporary 1 2 Legacies of Paul de Man academic bureaucracy) may seem successfully to have absorbed and routinized the de Man phenomenon.1 Yet symptoms of a persistent malaise are not hard to find. The temperature of a discussion can still rise precipitately when de Man’s name appears . Deserving scholars still sometimes suffer for being too closely linked to de Manian theory—particularly if they are young and untenured, and have the temerity to demonstrate interest in something that is supposed to have been consigned to the lumber-room of the past. At such moments we are reminded that deconstruction (and above all ‘‘de Manian deconstruction’’) is not really, or at least not entirely, an innocent subspecialty like any other. It is one thing to ‘‘do’’ narratology or reader-response criticism or even Marxist criticism, and another to ‘‘do’’ deconstruction: in this case, and arguably only in this case, the academy retains an interest in pronouncing a body of thought dead. De Man stands for a ‘‘theory’’ that again and again must be discovered to have died of natural causes, a victim of time, history, and its own internal inadequacies. Like the literal body of the theorist, it was once alive; now it is not; it should have the decency to rest quietly in its tomb. Yet at the same time—and this is where things get complicated and interesting—even the most negative reactions to de Man often display a remarkable degree of fascination with the phobic object. At the 2003 MLA convention a special session titled ‘‘Is Now the Time for Paul de Man?’’ played to a packed auditorium: packed no doubt to some extent—but only to some extent—because Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was one of the speakers. An uneasy charisma still radiates from the figure of ‘‘Paul de Man.’’ Who else could possibly have inspired such a panel title? Of what other dead professor could it be implied that his ‘‘time’’ is in question; that his presence, if summoned, might be out of joint with our ‘‘now’’? At once melodramatic and timid, cautious and reckless, the interrogative composing this panel title relays the half-confessed ambivalence felt by a profession toward a figure who seems at once irremediably part of, yet also somehow at odds with, ordinary institutional life. That the ‘‘now’’ of de Man is a question, the question of a legacy somehow out of synch with its, or our, ‘‘time,’’ is suggested by the strangely extended work of remembrance he...