The Double Life of Paul De Man

by Evelyn Barish

A landmark biography that reveals the secret past of one of the most influential academics of the twentieth century.

Over thirty years after his death in 1983, Paul de Man, a hugely charismatic intellectual who created with deconstruction an ideology so pervasive that it threatened to topple the very foundations of literature, remains a haunting and still largely unexamined figure. Deeply influential, de Man and his theory-driven philosophy were so dominant that his passing received front-page coverage, suggesting that a cult hero, if not intellectual rock star, had met an untimely end.

Yet in 1988, de Man's reputation was ruined when it was discovered that he had written an anti-Semitic article and worked for a collaborating Belgium newspaper during World War II. Who was he, really, and who had he been? No one knew. Still in shock, few of his followers wanted to find out. Once an admirer, although never a theorist, the biographer Evelyn Barish began her own investigation. Relying on years of original archival work and interviews with over two hundred of de Man's circle of friends and family, most of them now dead, Barish vividly re-creates this collaborationist world of occupied Belgian and France.

Born in 1919 to a rich but tragically unstable family, Paul de Man, a golden boy, was influenced by his uncle Henri de Man, a socialist turned Nazi collaborator who became the de facto Belgian prime minister. By the early 1940s, Paul, while seemingly only a reviewer for Nazi newspapers, was secretly rising in far more important jobs in Belgium's and France’s collaborationist regimes.

Postwar, barred from the university, de Man created a publishing house, but stole all its assets; then, facing jail, he fled to New York, abandoning his family (his opportunistic, anti-Semitic writing seemed the least of his crimes). Arriving penniless, he quickly rose again, befriending an entire generation of American writers in New York, including Dwight Macdonald, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Mary McCarthy. Barish sketches de Man's renowned careers at Bard and Yale, as well as the circumstances surrounding his loving—but bigamous—second marriage to former Bard student Patricia Kelley, who created the tranquillity he so lacked.

Juxtaposing this personal story to his meteoric rise through American academia, Barish traces the origins of the philosophical deconstructionism that he later created with Jacques Derrida, showing how de Man attracted followers with his attack on the hypocrisy of society that attempts to cover up the "essential alienation" of art from "the system." While focusing on the biographical facts, this commanding and psychologically probing biography reveals as much about human behavior and the cross-currents of twentieth-century intellectual thought as it does about the man who held an entire generation in his thrall.

Genres: Biography, Philosophy, History, Politics, Nonfiction

562 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 26, 2013

Reviews

[Ethan Wells · Rating 1 out of 5]

Biography as a genre remains caught within the tension of its name: for however much would-be biographers might pretend otherwise, it does not go without saying that life (bio-) and writing (-graphy) are entirely continuous with each other. No wonder the truthful recounting of another’s life proves, again and again, to be a peculiarly fraught endeavor. This is especially clear when the life being recounted happens to still live. To take just one example: the champion of freedom and democracy who is the heroine of Peter Popham’s 2013 The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma is hard to square with the woman who, a few years after Popham’s book first appeared, not only turned a blind eye to the Myanmar military’s genocidal campaign against the Rohingya in Rakhine State, but defended the military’s actions - which included massacres, gang-rapes, and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people - before the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The Suu Kyi of Popham’s book appears to share with this latter little more than her name - with the consequence that The Lady and the Peacock might very well read, today, more like a novel than the history it purports to be.

Yet are biographies of the dead any more reliable? Evelyn Barish’s The Double Life of Paul de Man certainly seems to think so, and at two different levels. Barish not only undertakes to write the biography of the late critic, reader and, it seems, all-around scoundrel Paul de Man, but what inspires her to write this biography in the first place is her hope that de Man’s life will shed light on his “difficult, even impossible to understand” (xvii) writings. “I (...) wondered,” she writes in the book’s epilogue, “if tracing the development of de Man’s early career in Belgium might yield insights that direct confrontation with his writings had not produced” (435). So: the unearthing, by means of interviews and significant archival work, of the hitherto largely unknown de Man - let’s call him de Man-the-Belgian - promises, for Barish, to shed light on the otherwise inaccessible de Man-the-writer. This only works, however, if the latter in some sense - but what sense precisely? - can be said to represent the former, such that his text can be read as secretly autobiographical. And while there are no doubt autobiographical insights to be mined, albeit problematically, from de Man’s text (or, for that matter, Barish’s), the precise relationship between the text and the life of the man nonetheless remains to be clarified - a topic about which, it should be noted, de Man had something to say even if Barish’s singular inability to read it is in part what motivates her turn towards the biographical in the first place.

Still, if Barish, by her own admission, finds de Man’s theoretical writings inaccessible, how can she know whether de Man-the-Belgian serves as a reliable foothold allowing access to them? Her answer to this question seems to be to make this very inaccessibility the central matter to be explained. The “opacity” (406) of de Man’s writings was, in her telling, a deliberate attempt to blunt the “truth-telling power of language” (438) in order at once to obscure his past and to absolve himself of all responsibility for his own inexcusable conduct in it - conduct that ranged from working for collaboratist publications over the course of the German occupation of Belgium during World War II, to swindling investors in a company he set up and then leaving his father holding the bag as he fled to America a fugitive from justice, to bigamy and the Rousseauesque abandonment of his children by his first wife, and, finally, to lying about all of this, as well as about his pre-war educational achievements, as he successfully reinvented himself in the United States as a leading intellectual affiliated with some of the most prestigious institutions in the country, if not the world. Small wonder, Barish argues, that de Man embraced “existentialist thought” and its flight from history. “The permission to ‘flee forward,’ implicit in existentialist thought, not to escape the anguish of memory but to refuse to let it determine present action, would allow [de Man] to justify and accept what he had been and done” (369). In Barish's telling, de Man used existentialism as a springboard for his eventual leap into obscurantism in order to free himself from the chains of history - chains which, in his case, risked becoming all too literal if history ever caught up with him.

It is here, however, that Barish’s inability to read de Man - among, alas, all too many texts - begins to exact its cost. Did de Man in fact embrace “existentialist thought” - an amorphous construction that seems to include, for Barish, the works of such diverse writers as Bataille, Heidegger and Sartre? Most readers of Bataille would be pretty surprised to find him on this list. Leaving his text aside, and the fact that none of these writers can just be assumed to have produced a unified thought in the first place (one thinks, for example, of the enormous challenge Sartre’s literary production poses to his philosophical œuvre - an œuvre to which it cannot easily, or at all, be subsumed), there is still the awkward fact that what Sartre calls existentialism is specifically targeted by Heidegger as an example of precisely the metaphysics that Heidegger is trying to get underneath. “Existentialism,” writes Heidegger in his “Letter on Humanism” (1947),

says existence precedes essence. In this statement [Sartre] is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being.

The conflation of Heidegger and Sartre’s texts - never mind de Man’s! - under the heading “existentialist thought” does not, in short, withstand much scrutiny. Nor does Barish’s tendency, throughout the book, to simply assert identities or parallels without making any serious attempt to demonstrate the validity of these assertions. Referring to Richard Wolin’s claim that “the circumstantial aspects of Heidegger's thought, far from being . . . tangential, are . . . fundamental . . . to understanding his philosophy” (Wolin, as cited by Barish, 371. Barish’s ellipses), Barish goes on to add that “[t]his is undoubtedly equally true of his follower, Paul de Man.” Unlike Wolin, who at least makes some kind of argument, however unconvincing one finds it, over the course of multiple articles and, indeed, books, Barish merely asserts, on the strength of her authority alone, that what is (perhaps) true of Heidegger is “equally true of his follower.” That Heidegger’s complicity with the Nazis was of an entirely different order than de Man’s, and would thus leave very different marks on his text, and that de Man was, from his very first essays on Heidegger to his last mentions of him, in fact critical of him, in particular for failing to recognize the consequences of his own insights for the reading of poetry, is, for Barish, irrelevant. Yet by sweeping aside these demonstrable, if inconvenient, facts, Barish gives herself permission to do what she accuses de Man of having done, namely “to turn away from the merely ‘real’ past” (373) and the responsibilities born of it.

What’s worse for Barish, however, is that, in her rush to tie de Man to Heidegger, she ends up undermining the organizing assumption of her own book. “Heidegger's ideas,” she writes, “undoubtedly helped [de Man] escape responsibility of the kind that Philip Watts stresses in his critique of Derrida and thereby of de Man by implication" (373). The strained syntax, as well as her use of the word “undoubtedly” - the word is, throughout the book, a tell; nothing, it turns out, is more dubious than whatever Barish introduces by the word “undoubtedly” - are symptoms of some tension. For it is problematic, to say the very least, to claim that a critique of Derrida applies “by implication” to de Man, especially in a book that not only takes for granted some kind of mimetic relationship between life and writing but spends hundreds of pages trying to suggest that de Man’s theoretical writings were born of his own sordid past and his desire to repress it. Now, however, Derrida and de Man would seem to be saying the same thing - despite their very different pasts. Derrida, after all, was still a teenager in Algeria on the verge of being expelled from school for being Jewish when de Man, already a young father, made his most inexcusable political decisions, including writing the now notorious anti-Semitic article, “The Jews in Present-Day Literature.” In what sense de Man is implied by Derrida’s text, such that a critique of one can land on the other, is not only not obvious, its very possibility is devastating for Barish’s entire approach. If the person implied - or rather, given the predominant tenor of Barish’s book, implicated - by a text need not share an identity with the person feted, or disparaged, as its author, then whatever the relationship between the two may be, it’s not simply mimetic. Put otherwise, the writer that a text inevitably implies need not be reducible to any one life. Indeed, this writer need not ever to have seen the light of day.

Such a possibility, of course, sinks Barish’s entire project. Or at least, the stated impetus of this project, namely, to gain insight into de Man’s writings via a better understanding of his life. It sinks this project because what always remains to be demonstrated is precisely how the particular life can be taken as a figure for the writings - a question that cannot be answered solely from the side, as it were, of “life” but requires a rigorous attempt to … read … de Man’s text. One would be within one’s rights, however, to wonder if the real impetus of Barish’s project isn’t something far less commendable: to dig up dirt on de Man in the hopes of burying him once and for all. How else to understand the aspersions Barish so casually disperses throughout the book without offering a shred of evidence, such as when she claims, in her discussion of de Man’s relationship with his children by his first wife, that “he had come to hate their existence” (207)? What kind of evidence could there possibly be for this claim? No third-party could legitimately testify to de Man's private feelings, and a first-person confession, even if it existed, could hardly be considered gospel in light of not only Barish's attempts to undermine de Man's credibility at every turn but de Man's own writings on the enormously problematic status of confessions. Or again, consider how, not satisfied with the all too real scandals of de Man’s life, Barish tries to invent entirely new ones. She takes de Man to task, for example, for the unusual fact that he had tenure at both Yale and the University of Zurich, and claims that this “double-dipping with respect to tenure” ended up “short-changing (...) students on two continents” (439). While such “short-changing” dovetails nicely with her depiction of de Man as a swindler, there nonetheless remains the awkward fact that “he had gained the secret approval of the deans of both universities, who agreed to lop off a few weeks at each end of the semester” (425). Barish tries to blunt the exonerating power of this admission not only by the nefariousness smuggled in via the word “secret” but by going so far as to claim that lopping off a few weeks of the term was tantamount to “torturing (...) the academic calendar itself” (425). The unspeakable brutality suffered by the calendar aside, one might wonder what Barish means by “secret.” After all, what kind of secret was it if the appropriate parties at both universities were aware of it? De Man’s students and colleagues might not have been fully informed; but are stipulations in the contracts between universities and individual professors generally common knowledge? De Man’s absence, in any case, was presumably announced on his courses’ syllabi, if not in the course catalog, so it was hardly kept from them. And even if it was, the brighter ones probably picked up on the fact that de Man was absent for part of the term - it is, after all, not like a ringer was brought in to cover for him. The truly exceptional ones might even have figured out that he had permission and wasn’t just hoping nobody would notice. So who precisely this secret was in fact a secret from remains … a secret - because Barish never tells us. One cannot help but wonder why she felt compelled to discuss this “primary crime against professional ethics” (xxi) not just once, but on three separate occasions, and in a footnote (489, n.10) to boot - unless, that is, it is not so much a matter of professional ethics as professional envy.

Towards the end of her book, Barish sums up the “insights” she gained into de Man’s writings from her foray into his life. “This,” she writes, “ (...) was, metaphorically speaking, the matrix of Paul de Man’s ‘philosophy of language,’

which began with contemporary existential ideas and went on not only to hold that communication was impossible but to assert eventually that speech among human beings, alienated as we are and living on the brink of the abîme, the abyss of nothingness, was no more to the point or useful than a picture of a waterfall; it was a mere representation, not a source of power. His premise was that words (in which we store and recapture memories) are innately unstable and that the language of whatever we have written - political or personal, abstract or confessional - is merely a representation whose unreliable ‘meanings’ are always ‘slippery’ and subject to ‘hermeneutic suspicion,’ to be distrusted and taken apart in a process that demonstrates their inevitable self-contradiction (437).

Every one of these statements is demonstrably incorrect. For de Man, we do not live on the brink of the abyss of nothingness - which would, finally, be reassuring; the whole problem, rather, is that “nothingness” cuts through everything in every direction leaving nothing and nobody unscathed, including whoever or whatever “we” think we are. Nor does he claim that communication is simply impossible; rather it is unreliable because it is always possible for it to be interrupted or misunderstood (as Barish’s book amply demonstrates) which, ironically enough, makes such misunderstandings or interruptions the condition of possibility of “successful” communication. Nowhere, however, is Barish’s refusal to read more indefensible than in the claim that, for de Man, language “was a mere representation, not a source of power.” For not only does this not jibe with Barish’s own depiction of de Man as a sweet talker whose unusual awareness of the power of words allowed him to swindle or otherwise deceive everyone from his childhood nurse to the intellectual giants of Yale and Harvard, it flies in the face of what is arguably one of the cruxes of de Man’s work, namely, the relationship between the cognitive (or representational) function of language and the performative, which is where language turns historical precisely because it is “a source of power.” That Barish misses this, that she treats the performative in de Man as if it were simply a question of de Man’s theatrical, to her eyes, performances, suggests that the laborious archival research she tackled in order to write this book was undertaken not to supplement a “direct confrontation with his writings” but to avoid it. And as is always the case in these instances, the accusation she levels against de Man in fact rebounds upon her. For it is not de Man who thinks language is “mere representation” but Barish herself. It is because she understands language to be “mere representation” that she can claim that words are where “we store and recapture memories;” it is, moreover, this mimetic understanding of language that allows her to treat the opacity of de Man’s writings as the reflection of the darkness of the man. And it is, finally, because she does not consider these writings to be “sources of power” - deeds in their own right - that she treats them as if they were not part of the life she recounts - indeed the very part that makes this life noteworthy enough to recount in the first place. Sure, she ends the book with a call for someone else to situate “De Man’s theories about his ‘linguistic philosophy’ (...) in the context of his life” (435) - but after 400+ pages of pretending to do precisely that, the call rings hollow and seems to be issued in bad faith.

Barish’s book is not without merit, and more serious scholars will surely benefit from the archival work that she has begun. But the most enduring merit of The Double Life of Paul de Man may well be this, to once more remind us that, however much we might prefer otherwise, there are, it turns out, no shortcuts for the work of reading.

[Shrike58 · Rating 4 out of 5]

While one might wonder if the author is troweling on the negativity too much in regards to the life of the once-renowned intellectual, at a certain point the mind begins to boggle at the glittering but dishonest life that the subject of this book led before becoming a settled professor. Most damning is not De Man's collaborationist past, as due to the accidents of family and class it was the logical political stance to take. No, the utter pit of betrayal for De Man would have been his post-war activities as a publisher, which appear to have been wholly a confidence scheme from the start, and which severely damaged his family and led to his exile from Belgium one step ahead of the hand of the authorities.

From there the story told is one of De Man's cobbling together his persona of the austere & inscrutable thinker, largely when at the end of available options and having no place left to fly. One can only speculate then on the worth of theories coming from an individual who seems to have betrayed just about every personal and professional confidence in their life before that point. About the only thing that explains (if not excuses) this series of dubious adventures is the whiff of mental illness that hung over De Man's family. I respond to all this rather strongly in as much as there used to be someone very important in my life who also seems on the verge of losing a glittering career and desirable life due to mental illness; while I regard this as a tragedy I also care more about the people who they have hurt.

As for whether there is anything to be salvaged from the academic contributions of De Man, while Barish is reluctant to give the man any benefit of the doubt she suggests in her epilog that his skepticism about language and meaning was liberating to a generation desiring racial and gender liberation and who were seeking weapons against cant and prejudice. The difference is that these people fighting for the recognition of their humanity redeemed De Man's thought through a conviction and commitment that De Man displayed little of in the first half of his adult life; one suspects that Barish finds this to be insufficient recompense for what were at least major systemic errors in judgement.

The one thing that gives me some pause is, as has been suggested elsewhere, that the author seems to have a major issue with De Man (they were colleagues at one point), as if being angry over having been taken in by the man's undoubted charisma. I could have also passed on some of the neo-Freudian imagery Barish deploys at some points in the book.

Originally written: August 19, 2014.

[Jake Fuchs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Readers who know more about de Man's life than I do have found errors in Barish's bio, which contains much awkward writing. Often some person of importance is mentioned briefly in the middle of a long paragraph and then becomes the subject of a new paragraph several, sometimes many, pages on, and the reader is left adrift.

But this book is still very much worth reading by anyone interested not solely in de Man but in 1930s Europe or 1950s academe in America or several other subjects. There are hundreds of characters and she may be pardoned for failing to introduce each one with care. No one that I know about has questioned what Barish presents as the truth concerning activities as a collaborator and his record as a white-collar crook. I feel that she is fair to him.

[Weronika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dałabym 6 za okładkę, ale nie można...

[D.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was an undergraduate student at Bard there were a certain few professors who taught the style of their former colleague Paul De Man. As a group they seemed the most cultured and affected of the faculty, and I think of them as willing victims of what some now call an affinity crime: Paul de Man was their best mirrored reflection.

Deconstruction is necessary to prevent the living from idolizing the works of the dead, and it is fitting and proper that Ms Barish has, by a resolute resort to fact and memory, rendered this man down from idol to sham.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating