Rc\>iecos

Paul de Man, Deconstruction, and Nazism

Review by Alan Milchman, Queens College, CUNY

Paul de Man, Wartime Journalism, 1939-1943, edited by Werner

Hamacher, Neil Hertz, Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1988)
Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism, edited by Werner
Hamacher, Neil Hertz, Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1989)

In 1987, a young Belgian scholar engaged in research on the career of

the noted Belgian-born Yale literary critic Paul de Man, who had
died in 1983, discovered a number of articles written by the young de
Man in 1941-1942 which had appeared in two collaborationist
newspapers published with the permission of the Nazi authorities
in occupied Belgium. Thus began the Paul de Man affair, in which
one of America's foremost literary critics stands accused not simply
of having been a Nazi sympathizer in his youth, but of developing
a mode of analyzing literary texts—deconstruction—that is itself
inextricably bound to a fascist Weltanschauung. The Paul de Man
affair is closely linked to /'affaire Heidegger, provoked by the
publication in 1987 of Victor Farias's Heidegger et le Nazisme (now
available in English translation), in which the thought of
Germany's foremost twentieth-century Denker is said to be
integrally bound to the worldview of National Socialism. In each
case an assault is mounted against the work of a major thinker on
the grounds that his thought is a screen behind which lurks the
ideology of Nazism. While such charges cannot be taken lightly
and must be treated with the utmost seriousness, it seems to me that
in addition to a renewed inquiry into the Weltanschauung within
which a body of work is embedded (whether it be that of Paul de
Man or Martin Heidegger), a no less thorough investigation into the
worldview from which such accusations emanate is also in order.
Only in that way will it be possible to appreciate the real—albeit
hidden—stakes of a controversy that has embroiled the contempo
rary cultural and political scene.
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Wartime Journalism, 1939-1943 gathers together the more than 200

articles, reviews, and notes published by Paul de Man in three
collaborationist publications between 1941 and 1943 (Le Soir, Het
Vlamische Land, and Bibliographie Dechenne), the bulk of which
appeared in French and are not accompanied by English trans
lations, the rest, which were published in Dutch, accompanied by
translations. In addition, this volume also includes ten articles
written before the German invasion of Belgium in May 1940 (in
several cases even before the outbreak of the Second World War in
September 1939), and which appeared in the publications of the
student socialist Cercle "Le Libre-Examen" to which de Man
belonged. Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism brings
together more than three dozen contributions by opponents and sup
porters of de Man, thereby constituting the single most important
dossier on the Paul de Man affair.

The Weltanschauung underlying de Man's wartime writings is an

amalgam of several elements: a belief in the decadence of Western
civilization, a thoroughgoing critique of bourgeois individualism
(both of which were already present in the articles written by de
Man while in the Cercle "Le Libre-Examen"), a critique of
"Americanism" as the technicization of the world, the rejection of
an overemphasis on reason and intellect in favor of an emphasis on
intuition, and a commitment to "un ordre fortement centralise et
discipline" (Wartime Journalism, p. 187). On the basis of this
Weltanschauung, the young Paul de Man devoted himself to liter
ary and cultural-political commentary in the collaborationist
press. Among the more odious positions articulated in his articles
was a belief in a spiritual regeneration of a German-dominated
Europe, in the complementariness of the Hitlerian and the German
soul, and an overt antisemitism (the leitmotif of two articles—"The
Jews in Contemporary Literature," Le Soir, March 4, 1941, and "A
View on Contemporary German Fiction," Het Vlamische Land,
August 20, 1942—in which the Jews are seen as an alien, debasing,
and corrupting influence on European culture).

John Brenkman's essay in Responses constitutes the most damning

indictment of the young de Man as a representative of Nazi ideol
ogy. According to Brenkman, within the ideological matrix of
collaborationism it is necessary to distinguish between "survival
collaboration," in which the objective was the survival of one's
country as an independent entity within a Europe controlled for the

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foreseeable future by Germany, and "German victory collabora

tion," in which the objective was the triumph of Nazism. For
Brenkman, Paul de Man must be situated in the latter camp.

In the face of such an accusation, the essays by de Man's friends and

fellow deconstructionists, Jacques Derrida and Samuel Weber, lapse
at times into outright apologetics. Perhaps because as deconstruc
tionists their preoccupation is with the text to the detriment of its
sociopolitical context, Derrida and Weber provide multifaceted
readings of a number of de Man's wartime articles, but generally
fail to grapple with the Weltanschauung in which they were
grounded. Moreover, each of them minimizes the extent to which
their friend succumbed to the lure of Nazi ideology: Derrida by
speculating that the critique of vulgar antisemitism in "The Jews in
Contemporary Literature" might be read as a critique of anti
semitism tout court; Weber by his conclusion that of the 200 articles
written for the collaborationist press, this latter was "the one truly
deplorable article signed by Paul de Man" (Responses, p. 415).

What then is the actual relationship of Paul de Man's youthful

Weltanschauung to Nazi ideology? It seems to me that the world
view of the young de Man challenged that of Nazism at four
critical points. First, de Man defended an aesthetic nationalism, in
which culture or art was conceived of as the veritable basis of the
nation, in contrast to the racialism and biologism of the Nazis.
Second, de Man believed in a "complementary nationalism," in
which the "national virtues" of each country would be cultivated,
even as a "mingling of cultural values" occurred on a European scale.
Such a vision was in glaring contrast to the pan-Germanism of the
Nazis. Third, de Man was a spokesman for a Belgicist politics, in
which the independence of Belgium was asserted as a counter
weight to domination by France or Germany, thereby preserving the
unique cultural values embodied in Flanders—all this in opposition
to the Nazi project for the Anschluss of Flanders to Germany and
even the incorporation of Wallonia into the Third Reich. Fourth,
de Man defended the autonomy, indeed independence, of art as a
domain separate from politics, subject to its own evolutionary laws,
in contrast to the Nazi vision of art as a political instrument in
which aesthetic values are replaced by biological ones. Linked to
this issue was de Man's intransigent defense of aesthetic modernism
against the Nazi insistence on the decadence of modern art.

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While the Weltanschauung of the young de Man cannot be reduced

to that of Nazism, it is necessary to account for those factors that
facilitated his shameful submission at key points to the politics of
collaboration with the Nazi occupation. Werner Hamacher
addresses just this question in his essay in Responses. According to
Hamacher, collaboration was imposed by what de Man himself
described as an imperieuse realite, by the force of facts; the Nazi
victory, raised to the status of the verdict of History, permitted no
other realistic course of action. Such an acceptance of the Diktat of
history, together with his belief in the decadence of the bourgeois
world, and not any commitment to Nazism, may be the key to de
Man's behavior at that critical juncture.

Stanley Corngold and Jeffrey Mehlman, in their essays in

Responses, make the case for a continuity between what they see as
the Nazism of the wartime writings and the work of the mature de
Man, in particular his deconstructionist writings. For Corngold, the
critical point is that, "Early and late, de Man has no stake what
soever in the survival of persons—figurative or authorial" (p. 82).
For Mehlman, the link between the early and late de Man is "a
scorn for the values of liberal—or individualist—humanism" (pp.
328-329). Yet, as J. Hillis Miller—de Man's friend and fellow
deconstructionist—convincingly shows, the concern of the wartime
writings with the uniqueness of each national culture, the belief in
the independent development of literature according to its own
laws, is the object of a powerful and unrelenting critique by de Man
the deconstructionist, for whom such views constitute an example of
"aesthetic ideology" (p. 337). Moreover, whereas the wartime
journalism is based on a series of absolutes and foundational truths
(nation, art), deconstruction unequivocably rejects such absolutes as
examples of totalizing and totalitarian thinking. Indeed, decon
struction is conceived by its practitioners as a critique of ideology,
an exposure of the mechanisms (rhetorical, linguistic, etc.) by
which ideologies—including the one defended by the young de
Man—are constructed on the bases of absolutes. It appears that
whatever the shortcomings are of deconstruction as an Ideologie
kritik (its exclusive focus on the text, its scorn for sociohistorical
context), it nonetheless represents not a continuity but a repudiation
of the Weltanschauung of Paul de Man's wartime writings.

While Jeffrey Mehlman's insistence on the scorn for liberal

humanism common both to de Man's wartime writings and to

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deconstruction cannot in my opinion establish a continuity between

de Man's purported youthful Nazism and his later work, it
nevertheless may be the key to the real link between the two
phases in the development of the de Manian oeuvre. Moreover, this
undoubted rejection of liberal humanism by both the young and the
mature de Man may be the key to understanding the present hue and
cry against the literary critic.

Both phases of de Man's thought are characterized by a rejection of

the foundational absolute that underlies modernity as a civiliza
tional complex: the project of Enlightenment, to use the words of
Jurgen Habermas, with its bases in humanism and individualism. In
his wartime journalism, de Man opposes the absolute of individual
ism with another absolute: the nation, conceived of as an "art
nation." The mature de Man, de Man the deconstructionist, fleeing
from the political implications of his choice of absolutes in 1941
1943, confronted the absolute of the Enlightenment project not with
another absolute, but with a rejection of all absolutes. For the
mature de Man, a Weltanschauung based on the absolute of indi
vidualism was no less an example of totalitarian thinking than one
based on the absolute of the nation. Each had to be exposed by a
rigorous critique of ideology.

It is precisely this revelation of the ideological bases of liberalism,

this assault on its claims to truth by de Manian deconstruction
(despite its severe limitations, in my opinion), that accounts for the
alacrity with which liberal critics seized on the discovery of de
Man's collaborationist writings so as to remove the threat repre
sented by deconstruction. As in Vaffaire Heidegger, the accusation
of Nazism has proven to be an effective rhetorical device with
which to eliminate the threat posed by a discourse that challenges
one's foundational absolute. The false linkage of Marxism and
Stalinism has temporarily removed one philosophical challenge to
liberalism and its absolute; the effort to reduce Heidegger's
thought to Nazism and the accusation that deconstruction is based
on a fascist Weltanschauung is a bold step to eliminate the other
philosophical challenge to liberalism's renewed pretentions to a
monopoly of intellectual discourse.

A careful reading of the two works under review will afford a real
insight into the formation of what Czeslaw Milosz termed the
"captive mind," in this case not of the intellectual ensnared by

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Stalinism, but rather of one whose rejection of the bourgeois world

led him into collaboration with Nazism. Perhaps more signifi
cantly, however, the de Man affair will be increasingly seen as an
important battle in the effort of the project of Enlightenment, with
its roots in the Cartesian proposition that humans are the "masters
and possessors of nature," to eliminate any challenge to its own
totalizing discourse.

Jay W. Baird, To Die For Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon

(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990)

Review by Scott D. Denham, Davidson College

"Stalwart SA-Man Gunned Down in Cold Blood by Murderous

Communist Bandit." Or was it like this? "Nazi Pimp Snuffed Out
by Rival in Underworld Battle for Turf and Girls." Actually the
facts of the case made no difference, for once Josef Goebbels saw his
opportunity to make a martyr for the Movement, what he chose to
serve up for the public soon became the only true story of Horst
Wessel. For Goebbels, the educated bourgeois activist and idealist,
fraternity life and playing soldiers with the Bismarckbund just did
not seem enough to save Germany from the degenerating influences
of parliamentary democracy, the outrages of the Versailles Diktat,
or the evil machinations of "Jewish-Bolshevism." "The NSDAP on
the other hand was political awakening. They had an ideology,"
said Wessel, who joined the SA and worked for the Nazi party in
one of Berlin's proletarian communist strongholds, holding meet
ings, selling newspapers, and, especially, cracking skulls. Wessel
felt that the place of the real German idealist was in the streets,
"where the SA is protecting German culture. . . . Every beer hall
brawl is a step forward for German culture; the head of every SA
man bashed in by the communists is another victory for the people,
for the Reich, for the house of German culture." But things turned
sour and he got shot.

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