Sean Burke The Death and Return of the Author : Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.

De Man's life has now been scrutinised, and the picture that emerges is of an extraordinarily
complex and contradictory individual. 3 A man of great modesty and kindness who was also
capable of considerable duplicity in both his private and public lives, de Man could at the same
time show sincere sympathy to the plight of individual Jews in occupied Belgium, and pen articles
condemning Jewish literature as a decadence the West could well do without. De Man's post-war
reconstruction of himself also unfolds according to similar patterns of moral ambivalence. On the
one hand, he was an unimpeachable teacher and academic colleague, on the other, a de facto
bigamist who maintained fundamentally dishonest dealings with his wartime and post-wartime
families. Like most figures who have led a double life, Paul de Man's biography opens to sharply
contrasting interpretations.
These enigmas are deepened still further by the theoretical positions he took up on authorship.
Perhaps ironically, perhaps deliberately, de Man had always denied that the writer's life in any
way bore upon the interpretation of his or her work. In the first phase of his career as a literary
theorist, de Man had adopted a rigorous phenomenological picture of authorship whereby the self
was entirely emptied of any biographical content in the constitution of a transcendental
subjectivity with no personal history or empirical concerns. Latterly, as a deconstructionist, he had
rejected author-centred criticism in a different mode, affirming that there is no stable subject of
writing in any guise, be it transcendental or empirical. In both phases of his career, the
biographical subject is entirely eliminated: an author's personality and life history disappear
irretrievably in the textual machine.
Not surprisingly, since his Le Soir articles have come to light, many commentators have seen
factors beyond those of textual epistemology urging this flight from the self. De Man's denial of
biography, his ideas of autobiography as de-facement, have come to be seen not as disinterested
theoretical statements, but as sinister and meticulous acts of self-protection, by which he sought
to (a)void his historical self. The attempt to efface and deface the writer in his theoretical prose is
seen as a way of detaching the Paul de Man of Yale who wrote Blindness and Insight and
Allegories of Misreading from the Paul de Man of occupied Belgium who also put his name to a
number of collaborationist articles. Such an interpretation allies itself with de Man's textualisation
of history in general, with the always rash and now infamous opinions he issued in the essay
'Literary History and Literary Modernity': 'the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts
but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.' 4
The Le Soir articles have now put into play their own history, and the retrospective selfexamination'
de Man professes foreign to his nature has been practised on his behalf. What de
Man might mercifully forget', his legacy will ceaselessly and mercilessly recall in order to make
sense of this early moment in his career, to argue its pertinence to his work as a whole, and to
determine whether his subsequent career as a literary theorist is to be read in patterns of
independence, further culpability or expiation. For some, the wartime writings are to be
interpreted as virtually complicitous with the deconstruction he and others have practised. A
movement, so the argument runs, which avoids the subjective and the ethical has no defences
against lapsing into totalitarian habits of thought, and at least one commentator has gone so far
as to argue that the complex work of deconstruction serves to veil an implicitly National Socialist
ethos.5 For others—mainly, but by no means exclusively, luminaries of the deconstructive
movement—the wartime writings are seen as a lamentable aberration in de Man's thought, one
which his subsequent work did its best, on an implicit level, to retract and rectify. Others still offer
no mitigation for the wartime writings but stop short of extending their judgement to cover de
Man's work as conceptual theoretician and philosopher of language.6
In the epigraph which opens this prologue (in many ways also an epitaph, lines written in the year
of his death—1983—and possibly in the knowledge of cancer) de Man anticipates all the terms by
which this debate has been conducted. Ostensibly he is reflecting on the volume of essays dating
from the mid-1950s which have been collected as Blindness and Insight. If we read this passage
against its biographical background, however, and take these statements as a secreted reflection
on his Le Soir articles, de Man cuts a sinister figure indeed—a puppeteer putting in place all the
strings of his legacy, an executor to his own dark codicil. The 'certain scenes' by which he is
haunted may well be the harrowing footage we have of the holocaust, or they may be textual
scenes, 'phrases' such as: 'one sees that a solution of the Jewish problem that would aim at the