![]() ![]() Another is the fact that he produced these pieces under intense pressures of political and personal circumstance. One is that the articles have been mined for passages that show him up in the worst possible light, often by being juxtaposed with other items from Le Soir whose content bears no relation to anything that de Man wrote. But there are several points that should be made at once against the current chorus of blame. Though their existence remained a secret all those years, de Man would, I think, have acknowledged their discovery with the attitude scripta manent: that what is written is written and cannot be tactfully ignored, no matter how far his convictions had changed in the interim. These texts are utterly remote from de Man’s subsequent writings, not only in their crudity of utterance and sentiment, but also in the way that they uncritically endorse such mystified ideas as the organic relation between language, culture and national destiny, ideas which he would later ‘deconstruct’ with such extreme sceptical vigilance. But of course de Man was writing at a time and in a political situation where thoughts of this kind carried a far more dangerous charge. One could draw comparisons with a work like Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, where it is likewise argued that the vitality of ‘satellite’ traditions (for de Man, crucially, the French, Dutch and Belgian) must depend on the continuing existence of a strong hegemonic centre. Their language often resorts to organicist metaphors, notions of cultural identity as rooted in the soil of a flourishing native literature. There is talk of the need to preserve national cultures against harmful ‘cosmopolitan’ influences of the Jewish element in modern thought as a threat to this healthy condition and of German literature as a model for those other, less fortunate traditions that lack such a strong national base. They were published in Le Soir, a newspaper of pro-Nazi sympathies, and contain many passages that can be read as endorsing what amounts to a collaborationist line. The scholar in question was the late Paul de Man, who had written these pieces during the early Forties before leaving Belgium for America. ![]() On 1 December 1987 the New York Times ran a piece under the title ‘Yale Scholar’s Articles Found in Nazi Paper’.
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