ABSTRACT
Remarking on the professional pressures to compose a series of occasional papers rather than concentrate on one focused project, Wlad Godzich has recently argued that at least in the case of the late Paul de Man, the results were surprisingly positive. “Whereas some scholars live in a tragic mode, the disjunction between what they consider their proper intellectual pursuits and the demands made upon them by their profession, Paul de Man had come to think of this disjunction as the relation between the contingency of the historical and the necessity of coherent thought, with the former imposing a salutary heterogeneity upon the latter’s inevitable drift toward single-minded totalization.”1
