Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

34 NOTHING MAT(T)ERS
But there is another “nothingness” born of language and war, and that is
neutrality; in my view, the essence of Derrida’s deconstruction strategy. From
negation to neutrality: i uomo e mobile. For there is the mask of the collaborator, the
indeterminateness of appearances, the arbitrary regime of signs… Paul de Man was
foremost amongst the Yale deconstructionist school and a key figure for Jacques
Derrida, Shoshana Felman, Barbara Johnson and others. In 1987, Ortwin de Graef, a
graduate student in Belgium, discovered over one hundred articles written by de
Man in 1941 and 1942 for a pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic newspaper. This news came just
as Derrida’s book on Heidegger and the “question” of his Nazism appeared, and
while Derrida (1987a) was deliberating on the evil genius of God at a seminar in
Toronto.
The responses to the revelations of Paul de Man’s wartime journalism should be
key texts for students of deconstruction who must evaluate its claims to be a
methodology against totalization and totalitarianism. In Response: On Paul de
Man’s Wartime Journalism, Werner Hamacher argues that de Man’s collaboration
was “not founded on pro-Nazi sympathies but rather on a realism to which force
appears as an authority that produces facts and justice” (1989, p. 454, italics in
original). Thus, the triumph of the will is that it forces reality into existence. Nothing
but force creates. Reality is the force of circumstance; nothing outside it matters. Is
deconstruction nothing but a stage where everything but consequences are produced
Being, events and ethics are forced, all evidence is circumstantial, all charges
unsubstantiated: no material witnesses.
Some defenders of de Man claim his fascist allegiance reflected momentary
ambition rather than deep commitment—excusing him as a collaborating
opportunist, rather than a “real” fascist. Shoshana Felman uses the same excuse as
Rousseau, whose maid (Marion) was fired when he blamed her for a theft he had
committed: de Man was not really denouncing the Jews, he was trying to save
himself (1989, p. 723). National Socialism evoked his nostalgia for his mother;
promising a “renewed relation to the mother tongue, beyond the loss marked by the
mother’s suicide” (1989, p. 710; italics in original). It’s his mother’s fault. Other
justifications argue that his practice and interest was literary rather than political—an
argument which completely occludes the social relations which mediate textual
production. 8 In “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within A Shell: Paul de Man’s
War,” Derrida muses that he will now perhaps have to say “what responding and
taking a responsibility can mean” (1988, p. 592, italics in original). Yet “Like the
Sound of the Sea” is an exercise in justification through the indeterminacy of guilt
and the conceit of evasiveness. He emphasizes that de Man was a “very young
journalist”—and journalists write in haste, and what he wrote “almost half a century
ago” “during less than two years will be read more intensely than the theoretician,
the thinker, the writer, the professor, the author of great books that he was during
forty years” (1988, p. 591).
8. Dorothy Smith’s (1990) Marxist and feminist analysis of discursive production and practices
indicates these relations, in contrast to Foucault’s autonomous and autogenerative discursive
practices and Derrida’s repetition of traces and erasures.