ABSTRACT
I On December 1st, 1987 the New York Times ran a piece under the title “Yale Scholar’s Articles Found in Nazi Paper.” The scholar in question was Paul de Man, who had written these pieces during the early 1940s, before leaving Belgium for America. They were published in Le Soir, a newspaper of decidedly pro-Nazi sympathies, and contain many passages that can be read as endorsing what amounts to a collaborationist line. There is talk of the need to preserve national cultures against harmful cosmopolitan influences, and of German literature as a model for those other, less fortunate traditions that lack such an authentic national base. Their language often resorts to organicist metaphors, notions of cultural identity as rooted in the soil of a flourishing native literature. One could draw comparisons with a work like T.S.Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, where it is likewise argued that the vitality of “satellite” traditions (for de Man most crucially the French, Dutch, and Belgian) must depend on the continuing existence of a strong hegemonic center. But of course de Man was writing at a time and in a political situation where thoughts of this kind carried a far more ominous charge. It is hard, if not impossible to redeem these texts by looking for some occasional sign that they are not to be taken at face value. They are utterly remote from de Man’s more familiar writings, not only in their frequent naivety of utterance and sentiment, but also in the way that they uncritically endorse such mystified ideas as the organic relation between language, culture, and national destiny-ideas which he would later set out to deconstruct with such extreme sceptical rigor.
