It has now been ten years since a peculiar scandal first swept through those most hermetic precincts of literary criticism. On December 1, 1987, the New York Times reported the startling finding that deconstructionist luminary Paul de Man had, as a young man in occupied Belgium early in World War II, written scores of pro-Nazi articles for a collaborationist newspaper, one of which was blatantly anti-Semitic. De Man later emigrated to the United States, where he became an academic star with a seemingly unimpeachable reputation for honesty and rigor. Until his death in 1983, he remained almost totally silent about his wartime activities, occasionally engaging in obfuscatory deceptions whenever necessary. (His reputation was certainly not enhanced by further posthumous revelations that following the war he had engaged in shady business dealings that resulted in his father's bankruptcy, and had abandoned his wife and three children in Argentina only to engage in a bigamous second marriage once in the U.S.)

What made these revelations so extraordinary was the set of tantalizing questions and delicious ironies they offered to critics of deconstruction, a radically skeptical approach towards textual analysis that rejects the assumption that language can accurately represent ideas. Deconstructionists regard language as self-referential and ultimately self-defeating, and the jargon-filled academic papers that resulted from this insight were hardly intended as models of clarity. Supposing that language controls people rather than the other way around, the theory focuses on the likely infusion of dominant ideology into language rather than authors' supposed intent. Literary works are correspondingly put on the same level with all other "texts," regardless of aesthetic merit. Deconstructionist criticism was eventually extended over other fields of study, questioning, for example, the ideal of history as objective analysis rather than as ideology-strewn "narrative." Subordinating the status of history, De Man declared, "the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions."

So, beside the obvious question of whether de Man collaborated with the Nazis due to ideological conviction or simple careerist opportunism, broader questions inevitably arose concerning the value of his later ideas. While the young Paul de Man believed that literature served the makers of history, did his later reversal on this question reflect a willingness to escape the judgment of history by effectively silencing language, rendering irrelevant the "author," his "ideas," and his conscious "meaning"? Did deconstruction offer any ethical basis for the judgement that Naziism was evil, or could that statement itself be deconstructed to the point of nihilism? Given deconstruction's paralytic view of language, what accounted for de Man's own tone of Olympian authority? What could be said of his many disciples' supposedly keen critical faculties? And as the critic Jeffrey Mehlman pointed out, wasn't it odd that in both his early and later writings, de Man denounced "resistance" movements? In the first case, it was resistance to the "German revolution," as collaborators referred to Nazi aggression at the time. In the second, it was, as he titled one of his essays, "Resistance to Theory"—an unfalsifiable supposition, borrowed from psychoanalysis, that resistance to the hegemony of deconstructionist theory only serves to prove its overwhelming and compelling validity.

Whether critics were right to make sweeping conclusions about deconstructionist theory based on these alarming new biographical revelations was one thing, but it soon became clear that question had to take a back seat to deconstructionists' own reaction to the affair. As David Lehman chronicled in his account of the controversy, Signs of the Times, a surprising number of academic literary critics subjected de Man's early wartime writings, and the controversy in general, to deconstructionist analysis.

In Allegories of Reading, de Man had interpreted a passage from Rousseau's Confessions, in which the author describes having stolen a ribbon and blamed it on an innocent servant girl:

It 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 of the two possibilities is the right one. The indecision makes it possible to excuse the bleakest of crimes because, as a fiction, it escapes from the constraints of guilt and innocence.

To set the tone of discourse regarding de Man's collaboration, deconstructionist pioneer and longtime colleague Jacques Derrida evoked much the same argument in an article in Critical Inquiry, Spring 1988:

Unable to respond to the questions, to all the questions, I will ask myself instead whether responding is possible and what that would mean in such a situation. And I will risk in turn several questions prior to the definition of a responsibility. But is it not an act to assume in theory the concept of responsibility? One's own as well as the responsibility to which one believes one ought to summon others?

Aside from erasing the slate, Derrida also attempted to reverse the terms of debate:

As for the accused himself, he is dead. He is in ashes, he has neither the grounds, nor the means, still less the choice or the desire to respond. We are alone with ourselves. We carry his memory and his name in us. We especially carry ethico-political responsibilities for the future. Our actions with regards to what remains to us of de Man will also have the value of an example, whether we like it or not. To judge, to condemn the work or the man on the basis of what was a brief episode, to call for closing, that is to say, at least figuratively, for censuring or burning his books is to reproduce the exterminating gesture against which one accuses de Man of not having armed himself sooner with the necessary vigilance.

In criticizing a journalistic account of the controversy, Richard Rand, in "American Anti-Semitism," expanded greatly on Derrida's inversion:

In its ruminations on Paul de Man, The Nation has furnished this nation—as well as Germany, France, England and Switzerland—with a very neat, a very up-to-date piece of old-time "anti-Semitism." But the truly instructive thing about the exercise lies less in the perennial retail value of its bloodlust, than in the undeniable validity of its insight, and in the visionary correctness of its charge: for are not, indeed, Paul de Man and his deconstruction somehow overwhelmingly Jewish—as Jewish as anyone, perhaps, in our multi-national 1980s, can be?

"That Paul de Man, biographically speaking, was not himself Jewish, is nothing to the point," Rand continued. "From the sixteenth century onward, American anti-Semitism, along with other varieties, has been a discourse of bigotry displaced."

J. Hillis Miller also evoked historically loaded imagery when he characterized "the violence of the reaction in the United States and in Europe to the discovery of Paul de Man's writings of 1941-42" as "a new moment in the collaboration between the university and the mass media." Miller included as "collaborators" in this enterprise the New York Times, the Nation, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the Manchester Guardian, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Strangely enough, journalists were denounced for occasional reporting errors, which was ironic given that deconstructionist theory anticipates all manner of distortion as an inevitable component of such "narrative" accounts.

Shoshana Felman, a colleague of de Man's at Yale's comparative literature department, dwelled heavily on de Man's silence about his wartime activities, asserting that "History as Holocaust is mutely omnipresent in the theoretical endeavor of de Man's mature work." De Man kept silent "not (as some would have it) as a cover-up or a dissimulation of the past, but as an ongoing active transformation of the very act of bearing witness." Felman quotes from the writings of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, who declared that the "true witnesses" of the Holocaust were those victims who "have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute." (Felman apparently overlooked the fact that de Man was anything but a concentration camp survivor himself, and that when he did break silence it was only to coyly suggest that he had been active in the Belgian resistance movement!) In Felman's view, "de Man's entire writing effort is a silent trace of the reality of an event whose very historicity, borne out by the author's own catastrophic experience, has occurred precisely as the event of a preclusion—the event of the impossibility—of its own witnessing."

Many of the responses to de Man's wartime writings seemed themselves impervious to interpretation, such as Andrzej Warminski's "Terrible Reading (preceded by 'Epigraphs')":

A certain self-immolating self-reflection—a self-ironization—takes place here as ... de Man's [words] about Montherlant say one thing and mean another. But ironies do not end here—indeed irony, once it begins (and it has already begun), never just ends, at least not just here. No matter how self-immolating it may be, the act of self-reflection always leaves remainders, traces, ashes—a reste or a restance du texte, as Derrida might put it, that resists the totalization of any oblivion, that insures a certain memory or every forgetting, even "the most total." ... The only memory for those remainders is the same journalistic "memory" of the present, the one that "remembers" only the present and hence has neither the past nor future (and hence does not happen, is not an event, is not historical)—or only the past and the future of total oblivion.

S. Heidi Krueger, in "Opting to Know: On the Wartime Journalism of Paul de Man," went so far as to ascribe subversive intent to de Man, based on his rejection, at the start of his most infamous essay, of the sort of "vulgar anti-Semitism" that characterized much of the shrill propaganda that appeared in the same newspaper.

Although one can argue that the irony of "The Jews in Contemporary Literature" misfires, it is difficult, reading the article as a whole and in the context of the articles with which it appears, to read it as other than a calculated (and parodistic) fore-grounding of the premises and applications of "vulgar anti-Semitism" evidenced in the other essays on the page. The tone, moreover, is one of detached mockery throughout the sections dealing with the Jews, and the object of the mockery is clearly not the Jews but rather the anti-Semites. Even the attribution of the view that the Jews have had disproportionate influence of "occidental" literature to the Jews themselves reads, in this context, less as the all too familiar strategy of blaming the victim, than as tweaking the noses of the "vulgar anti-Semites," showing them that their own most vehemently pronounced positions are those of the scapegoats they wish to expel....

I would submit that what is wrong with "The Jews in Contemporary Literature" is not that it is, in the first instance, anti-Semitic, but rather that if we read it in isolation, it is almost impossible to tell where it stands with regard to the situation of the Jews.

Rather than accept this statement at face value, it would be useful to return to the concluding paragraph of de Man's article, from March 4, 1941, that sets forth his seemingly more genteel anti-Semitism. A clear reading of the opening rejection of "vulgar anti-Semitism" reveals it as a common rhetorical device to distinguish the author's seemingly more reasonable viewpoint. It's also useful to remember that Hitler himself, in Mein Kampf, used the same device when criticizing a more limited variety of "religious" anti-Semitism he took issue with.

One realizes, therefore, that to consider contemporary literature as an isolated phenomenon, created by the particular mentality of the 1920s, is absurd. Likewise, the Jews cannot pretend to be its creators, nor even to have exercised a preponderant influence over its evolution. On any close examination, their influence would appear to have extraordinarily little importance, since one might have expected that—given the specific characteristics of the Jewish mind—the latter would have played a more brilliant role in such artistic production. Their cerebralness, their capacity to assimilate doctrines while maintaining a cold detachment from them, would seem to be very precious qualities for the work of lucid analysis that the novel requires. But in spite of that, Jewish writers have always remained in the second rank and, to speak only of France, writers on the order of André Maurois, Francis de Croisset, Henri Duvernois, Henri Bernstein, Tristan Bernard, Julien Benda, and so on, are not among the most important figures, and especially not among those who have had some directive influence on literary genres. The statement is, moreover, comforting for Western intellectuals. That they have been able to safeguard themselves from Jewish influence in a domain as culturally representative as literature proves their vitality. We could not have much hope for the future of our civilization if it had let itself be invaded, without resistance, by a foreign force. In keeping its originality and its character intact, despite Semitic interference in all aspects of European life, our civilization has shown that its fundamental nature is healthy. What's more, one can thus see that a solution to the Jewish problem that would lead to the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not have, from the point of view of the West, regrettable consequences. It would lose, in all, some personalities of mediocre worth and would continue, as in the past, to develop according to its higher laws of evolution.

As David Lehman wryly observed, the republication of de Man's wartime columns in the same volume as their academic interpretations (in a volume titled Responses) only served to expose the latter's fallacious pretensions, effectively deconstructing the deconstuctors.

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