Teichman makes a series of historical
observations-all of them alarmingly
wrong. De Man was not a Nazi col–
laborator. De Man wrote literary
reviews for a collaborationist periodi–
cal in 1940, three of which contained
anti-Semitism. To call his submissions
Nazi collaboration is to bl ur historical
distinctions between people who pas–
sively continued their business under
occupation and those who actively
assisted in Nazi endeavors. To say that
de Man had "plenty to hide" is to
make him sound like the latter, instead
of like a misguided or cowardly twen–
ty-year-old caught up in fascist ideas
of European culture, like hundreds of
other intellectuals at that time.
Finally, to attribute
any
influence to
de Man when he arrived in the U.S. in
1947 is absurd. Al though he flirted
with New York literary circles in the
fifties, de Man was largely unknown
in intellectual and academic groups
until the mid-sixties. He was a
Harvard graduate student until 1960
and did not begin publishing his
influential essays until 1966.
"The notion that objective
knowledge is impossible everywhere
(and especially in ethics) was con–
sciously or unconsciously adopted by
de Man as a smokescreen for his early
life as an anti-Semi te, a smokescreen
enthusiastically taken up by his sup–
porters in the
U.
S. and France." This
assertion is silly.
It
makes de Man into
a major epistemologist who had
votaries here and abroad who cooper–
ated in the cover-up. But the only
people who took de Man seriously as
an epistemologist-that is, as a
thinker about knowledge, truth, and
objectivity-were his own compara–
tive literature students at Yale and
other philosophical dilettantes. For
any serious thinker, de Man's occa–
sional statements about cogni tion and
interpretation amounted to watered–
down Nietzsche, interpreted through
Heidegger.
Besides, de Man never said that
objective knowledge is "impossible
everywhere." He was too cagy to
COlmnlt himself
to
an assertion so
crass as that one, or to say anything
about relativism. Instead, de Man
talked about interpretation, and the
distortions that language inevi tably
submits interpretation to. That propo–
sition may be just as untenable as the
former, but it does refine de Man's
ideas, makes them more than just
crude negations of objectivi ty.
It
also
points to the only significant line of
thought de Man pursued, that of a
theory of figurative language-a the–
ory that has absolutely nothing to do
with his fascist youth.
To call all of this a "smoke–
screen" for his
Le Soh
labors, then , is
wrongheaded.
If
de Man wanted to
hide his past, he could have found eas–
ier ways than concocting a philosophy
of relativism.
In
any case, the philoso–
phy was not his. All of de Man's
epistemological ideas were derivative,
and many of the people he derived
them from had nothing to do with
European fascism (Derrida is an
Algerian Jew born in 1930). Peopl e in
the States who embraced them
embraced Nietzsche, Heidegger,
Freud, Lacan, and Derrida as well.
This wasn't de Man's smokescreen–
it was German phenomenology and
French poststructuralism. (Who
Teichman has in mind when she refers
to de Man's French supporters is
beyond me.)
