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

creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not entail, for the literary life of the West,
deplorable consequences. The latter would lose, in all, a few personalities of mediocre value and
would continue, as in the past, to develop according to its great evolutive laws.'7
The full extent of his embarrassment, his hauntedness, his 'guilty conscience' will ever be
unknown to us, though the majority of commentators discern a fundamental unease in his later
work, the question being whether this unease results from a genuine trial of conscience, or an
anxiety test his historical secret betray itself. The 'exhilaration of renewal' is amply evident in the
princely meditations he produced on language and literature from the 1950s up to his death in
1984. Whether, though, 'such a change actually took place', or whether he is 'just restating, in a
slightly different mode, earlier and unresolved obsessions' is the central question that has been
debated with such urgency throughout the literary establishment in its journalistic and academic
media.
Without wishing to add to, to neutralise or to exploit the ethical and moral questions raised by the
texts of this early Paul de Man, we might note how the response to his wartime writings, both in
their prosecutory and mitigatory manifestations, disinter many of the loci of traditional authorcentred
criticism. Six cardinal intersections of author and text appear and reappear throughout
this debate.
1. Intention. Did the young de Man mean what he said? Did he say what he meant? Are the
intentions expressed in his early articles carried through to join the intentions of his later work?
Broadly speaking, those who take the view that de Man is culpable in the extreme would answer
'yes' to these questions, those who defend would say 'no', that it was the work of a young man
borne along by a historical tide whose savage shores he could never have foreseen. On both
sides—that of a largely anti-intentionalist deconstruction on the one hand, and a pro-intentionalist
contextualism on the other—it is assumed that what he meant matters, that what he meant
means something to us, and that his later work is governed by good or bad intentions in respect
of these collaborationist articles.
2. Author-ity. As far as this debate is concerned, the fact that de Man became an authority within
literary theory and a certain philosophy of language means that it matters what he said, wherever
and whatever, at whatever stage of adult development, and in whatever circumstances. It is this
authority that commends these texts so urgently to our attention over and above the countless
other, more relentless and rabid collaborationist journalism of the time. Also the fact that de Man,
like Heidegger, was a philosopher-author inclines many commentators to view his association
with National Socialist ideology as having more pernicious ramifications than that of other nondiscursive
cultural figures such as musicians, chess grandmasters and so on. 3. Biography. The
importance of biographical contexts to this debate goes without saying. That he was young (in his
early twenties) when he wrote for Le Soir, that he had a child and its mother to support, that he
was nephew and intellectual ward to Henri de Man (a socialist minister in the Belgian government
and thereafter a collaborator), that Paul de Man was not a member of the Nazi party (and, for the
prosecution, that he was not a member of any resistance organisation), that de Man was hitherto
in politics, in conversation, in society, a man in whom not the slightest traces of anti-Semitism or
totalitarian politics could be discerned—countless biographical factors such as these are
privileged whether offered up in exonerative or incriminatory contexts.
4. Accountability. That de Man must be held to account for what he had written is accepted by all
parties to this controversy. On this issue, theory seems to abandon or suspend the idea that the
author is a mere fiction or trace of language, for if authorship were indeed a textual illusion, there
would be no charge to answer beyond that of reminding the world that in the reality of text 'Paul
de Man' signs and signifies nothing. The fact is that his fellow theorists have defended de Man as
a person and often with considerable dignity and passion. So much in itself confirms that, firstly,
the signature 'Paul de Man' is something greatly in excess of a textual effect and secondly, his
signature ties de Man ethically and existentially to the texts he has written.
5. Oeuvre. The existence of a de Manian corpus is not for a minute called into question within this
debate. The three main categories of response to the wartime writings are: the interpretation of
the entire oeuvre as some form of continuation of the sentiments expressed in this early work, a
reading that sees the Le Soir articles as the expression of the mature de Manian philosophy in
statu nascendi; the interpretation of the post-war de Manian work as an attempt to redress and
retract the ideology reflected in his wartime journalism and the dissociation of the wartime writings