ABSTRACT
Jewish deportation from Europe-indeed Lehman draws a parallel between de Man’s article on the Jews and contemporary literature and Hitler’s Mein Kampf (p. 238)—and in addition he asserts that de Man was a bigamist who callously rejected his wife and children, a swindler, an intellectual fraud who used deconstruction merely for self-serving reasons. Yet there is little or no convincing evidence to support these contentions, even though one finds some of them being increasingly repeated as if they were indisputable fact.1 Lehman’s case against de Man is a house of cards in which rhetoric takes the place of evidence and logical argument, an ironic state of affairs since Lehman’s general aim in the book is to attack deconstruction for elevating rhetoric over history, the subject, reason.
