Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Like all deaths, Raymond Williams’ must touch most profoundly those who were closest to him; it belongs first to his private circle. But it also belongs to his fame: to those who have read his books, heard him speak in public, were taught by him, and, then, to those who have been taught by those he taught, and so on. Because Williams was so committed and important politically—writing not just as an academic but as a leftist—his death also enters public history. One can ask: does it mark the end of an era? Or, on the contrary, is it the sign of a beginning set in motion by the programs, the shifts of emphasis, he urged? Such questions are all the most insistent because the left, as a political force and as an idea, is so fragile today. Indeed, no other theme seems as urgent in thinking about Williams’ life and work now; for, to put it rather glibly, it is no longer easy to tell left from right. If we regard “being on the left” as requiring the belief that state control of the economy and the ideological apparatus and the empowerment of the proletariat are steps demanded by the journey towards real, rather than illusory or formal, freedom, then who is still on the left? And if “being on the left” does not require such beliefs, if there is a left that is not statist, how does it differ from liberalism, from a Deleuzian or Foucauldian micro-politics or a mere insistence on “social justice”?2

2. This is not to approach the question of what it means to be a “Marxist” (as against just “one the left”) in cultural/literary studies. Historically, one of the clearest demarcations of Marxism within and from the left in general was its willingness to theorize and imagine revolution. The difficulties faced by Williams’ work and career are very much those posed by a nonrevolutionary Marxism. (And, to anticipate, this problematic, strangely enough, also connects him to Maurice Blanchot.)

See also: Simon During, Popular Culture on a Global Scale: A Challenge for Cultural Studies?

Simon During is a lecturer in English at the University of Melbourne. His Foucault and Literature will appear in 1990, and he is currently working on a book entitled Literature without Culture

The responses to this discovery, in the press and elsewhere, seem to focus on the act of passing judgment, a judgment that reopens with some urgency the question of the ethical implications of de Man’s work and, by extension, of the whole school of critical approach known as “deconstruction.”

The discourse of moral judgment takes as its target three distinct domains of apparent ethical misconduct:

1. the collaborationist political activities themselves;

2. de Man’s apparent erasure of their memory—his radical “forgetting” of his early past;

3. the silence that de Man chose to keep about his past: the absence of public confession and public declaration of remorse.

The question of ethics thus seems to be linked to the separate questions of the nature of political activities, of the nature of memory, and of the nature of silence. It is judged unethical, of course, to engage in acts that lent support to Germany’s wartime position; but it is also judged unethical to forget; and unethical, furthermore, to keep silent in relation to the war and to the Holocaust. The silence is interpreted as a deliberate concealment, a suppression of accountability that can only mean a denial of responsibility on de Man’s part.

See also: Shoshana Felman, Benjamin's Silence  ·  Zhang Longxi, Western Theory and Chinese Reality

Shoshana Felman, the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University, is the author of The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (1984), Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis (1985), and Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture: Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight (1987). She is also the editor of Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading—Otherwise (1982). She is currently working on a book entitled Testimony in History, Literature and Psychoanalysis.

Many things are frightening in the process by which people identify against and resist oppressions. One of the worst is how easy it is for people to be made to feel, by some intervention from another, that their own identity and their standing from which to resist that oppression have been foreclosed or annihilated: their voices delegitimated, the authority of their grounding in an indispensable identity threatened with erasure. Anyone who has worked in feminist groups, for instance, knows the moment when a woman or group of women announce that they have sat silent through a discussion, not because they had nothing to say, but because they felt silenced, felt radically denegated by some act or speech or some perceived dynamic of the group. These announcements make shifty moments in the power relations of a group. They bring to the surface, by rupturing it, how far from impartial or inclusive is the normal, “neutral” decorum of conversational exchange, and how far from detached are the needs and dreads that people have invested in it. The fabric of trust that gives a nominally egalitarian texture to activist interactions is—it is always shocking to have once more to learn—a fragile one that a multitude of unacknowledged presumptions can suddenly leave gaping.

See also: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Dialogue on Love  ·  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire and the forthcoming Epistemology of the Closet. Her most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherley, Sterne, and Male Homosocial Desire” (December 1984).

As presidential campaigns and “Saturday Night Live” have repeatedly demonstrated, debate is an uninteresting mode of communication, imitating dialogue without engaging in it. Formally it encourages infinite regress: my misreading of your misreading of my misreading of your misreading. Intellectually its conclusions are in some ways predetermined. In the short run, the winner is whoever speaks last; in the long run, whoever has the greater power. Rather than occasion or remark on further “shifty moments” (p. 745), then, I will try to review some general areas of contention suggested in my exchange with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Although Sedgwick and I value the personal and the theoretical both, we disagree on the lines of intersection. I am struck by her initial situation of “Van Leer” in the ranks of those who feel silenced. The complaint might just as easily have been that he has entirely too much to say. Nor, if autobiography is really the issue, do I in any way regret the notoriety of Sedgwick’s work? From what I take to be my point of view, Sedgwick’s book has opened up for me a far more visible space in the academy than has my own. And I attribute to myself at least enough self-consciousness to recognize the disingenuousness of “feeling silenced” in Critical Inquiry.

David Van Leer is associate professor of English and American literature at the University of California, Davis. The author of Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays (1986), he is currently examining the issue of contextualism in a book to be called The Queening of America

In 1982-83, I was preparing my volume on the Belgian cartoonist Hergé. During the Second World War, Hergé’s comic strips appeared daily in the newspaper Le Soir. Since I wanted to analyze the influence of the rightist thought on Hergé and Tintin, I borrowed most of the copies of Le Soir available in this country through interlibrary loan. Examining the newspaper, I came across Paul de Man’s articles, which were sometimes on the same page as the comic strips. I showed these articles to some colleagues related to or teaching at Harvard University. I specifically recall an afternoon with a colleague from Boston University whose specialty is the hunting of presumed French fascist intellectuals; we discussed together the possible bridges between de Man’s contemporary thought (he was still alive at that time) and his former intellectual engagement during the Second World War.

That is to say that, as far as I know, several people at Harvard and in the Boston area (where deconstruction and feminism were and continue to be a recurrent theme) were aware of de Man’s former affiliation with rightist circles. One can ask why it took five more years for the “scandal” to appear: why this “sudden” revelation after several years of silence and dissimulation? Compared to the fact that Hergé had constantly been confronted with his political past, one can wonder how strongly Paul de Man’s “secret” was kept.

Jean-Marie Apostolidès is professor of French at Stanford University. He is currently writing an essay on the anthropological reading of literature. His article “Molière and the Sociology of Exchange” appeared in the Spring 1988 issue of Critical Inquiry.

Derrida’s quite uncharacteristic literalism is surprising: he takes de Man and Dosogne at their word,6 thus boxing himself into a peculiar corner. If indeed there was no censorship of de Man’s articles written prior to August 1942, why is his “discourse … constantly split, disjointed, engaged in incessant conflicts”? If the young de Man could speak freely, why do “all the propositions [in his texts] carry within themselves a counterproposition” (p. 607)? If, on the other hand, as Denuit and others have made amply clear, there was in fact censorship all along, the Führerprinzip operating from the day de Becker took over Le Soir, then we have to conclude that de Man is not telling the truth in his letter to Poggioli. Either way, the statement is compromised. As for the word Nazi, it is not at all surprising that de Man didn’t use it in his texts for Le Soir. Hitler’s strategy, at the time, was to try to convince the Belgians that annexation to Germany was no more than an inevitable return to the glorious German fatherland, the home of Culture, the Arts, Philosophy. Indeed, if the Nazis could be seen as simply equivalent to the Germans of tradition, the Belgians had nothing to fear!

6. See Culler, “Letter to the Editor,” p. 4: “De Man ceased writing for Le Soir in the fall of 1942, when the Nazis extended censorship to the cultural section of the paper.”

Marjorie Perloff, professor of English and comparative literature at Stanford University, is the author of Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986). A collection of her recent essays, Of Canons and Contemporaries, is forthcoming.

While debates about the relations to fascism exhibited in de Man’s newspaper articles will no doubt continue (although whatever interpretation one gives them, de Man is guilty of having written an anti-Semitic article and of working in the collaborationist press), the important question is what value his critical and theoretical writings have for us, the productivity of his critical and theoretical work for our thinking. The wartime writings give a new dimension to much of de Man’s work in America, helping one to understand more plainly what is implied by his critique of the aesthetic ideology, as in late essays on Kleist and on Kant and Schiller. Walter Benjamin called fascism the introduction of aesthetics into politics. De Man’s critique of the aesthetic ideology now resonates also as a critique of the fascist tendencies he had known.

Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and comparative literature at Cornell University, is the author of Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (1989).

The central theme of the prologue is the notion of responsibility, as well it might be, given the subject, Accordingly, those first seven pages swamp the reader with the word “responsibility” to the point where they could be described as “variations on the theme.” Inundation, alas, is not elucidation, and all closer references to the notion remain impenetrability elliptic: Derrida possesses the unique art of combining extreme ellipsis with extreme verbosity. In fact these “variation” are more musical than analytic: “responsibility” comes close to being a Wagnerian leitmotiv. Like a characteristic melody, the word winds through the text in a constant sequence of appearances and temporary disappearances, ever expected, always ready to reemerge. Although there is no clear-cut line of argument, there does seem to be a general direction of development. The question of de Man’s responsibility, which we might have thought to be crucial, is touched on only briefly and vaguely; we read much more about responsibility to de Man. Ours and Derrida’s: “responsibility” is associated with “responding,” which is increasingly read as Derrida’s obligation to respond for de Man. From the outset, this emphasis evokes the danger of an apologia rather than the conscientious quest for truth that is demanded in the same breath. There are further suggestions of this nature when Derrida later (p. 639) briefly returns to this subject and this style. “Responding for the other” is here connected with transference, allegory (standing for narrative), and prosopopeia—that is, connected with two rhetorical categories and psychoanalytic one. To write about responsibility with so little reference to ethical categories is something of a tour de force.

W. Wolfgang Holdheim, professor of comparative literature and romance studies and Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Liberal Studies at Cornell University, has published numerous articles on literature and literary theory as well as a number of books, including The Hermeneutic Mode (1984).

But of course Derrida’s appeal to context and to authorial intention constitutes an abandonment of the deconstructive method. As Christopher Norris has written of de Man, “we read in defiance of his own repeated counsel” if we read his work “by asking what might have been the motives, political or otherwise, that led to his adopting the stance they exhibit.”2

Derrida emphasizes repeatedly that de Man’s objectionable acts were committed almost half a century ago, when he was twenty-one and twenty-two years old. That’s an important argument. But the moral problems de man poses do not end in 1942 when he stopped writing for Le Soir; a second and in some ways more serious moral problem recurs throughout his adult-life, during which de Man kept his youthful pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic writings a secret.

John Wiener is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. His articles “Deconstructing de Man” and “Debating de Man” appeared in The Nation.

Jacques Derrida offers his recent commentary (“Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” Critical Inquiry 14 [Spring 1988]: 590-652) on the early career of Paul de Man as an urgent intervention in a discussion he fears is going awry. The most pressing danger he sees in the recent revelations is that they have played into the hands of de Man’s antagonists, who are now ready to denounce the whole of his career and even deconstruction itself. Against such indiscriminate critiques Derrida hurls the epithet: totalitarian. He is attempting to reseize the initiative in the discussion and to reset the terms of the debate. His agenda extends across historical, theoretical, and political questions.

He wants to affirm that a radical, indeed absolute break separates the later from the earlier de Man. He also wants to show that the young de man, however firmly committed to fascist ideology and however much an accomplice of the Nazis occupying Belgium, at the same time regularly distanced himself from that ideology and even undermined its meanings. Moreover, Derrida boldly takes up the challenge that these revelations have cast on the intellectual movement he and de Man have shaped. Can deconstruction come to grips with the political and intellectual history of its own leading American proponent? And can deconstruction in the process make a distinctive contribution to the understanding of fascism and intellectuals’ participation in it?

John Brenkman is associate professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Culture and Domination (1987). Jules David Law is assistant professor of English at Northwestern University. He is currently working on a book-length study of the metaphors of surface, depth, and reflection in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British prose.

Those who have read me, in particular those who have read “Paul de Man’s War,” know very well that I would have quite easily accepted a genuine critique, the expression of an argued disagreement with my reading of de Man, with my evaluation (theoretical, moral, political) of these articles from 1940-42, and so on. After all, what I wrote on this subject was complicated enough, divided, tormented, most often hazarded as hypothesis, open enough to discussion, itself discussing itself enough in advance (on every page, indeed within every sentence, and from the very first sentence) for me to be able to welcome questions, suggestions, and objections. Provided this was done so as to demonstrate and not to intimidate or inflict wounds, to help the analysis progress and not to score points, to read and to reason and not to pronounce massive, magical, and immediately executor verdicts. Five of the six “responses” that I reread last night are written, as one used to say, with a pen dipped in venom. Less against the de Man of 1940-42, perhaps, then against me (I who said things that were nevertheless judged by Culler “exceedingly severe” against de Man and who have nothing whatever to do with everything that happened; I who, at the time, was rather on the side of the victims—shall I dare to recall this once again and will they forgive me for doing so?—struck by a numerous clauses that it will be necessary to talk about again). Less against me, in truth, than against “Deconstruction” (which at the time was at year minus twenty-five of its calendar! This suffices to shed light on this whole scene and its actual workings). How can the reader tell that these five “critical responses” are not “responses,” critical texts or discussions, but rather the documents of a blinded compulsion? First of all, the fact that they are all monolithic. They take into account none of the complications of which my text, this is the very least one can say, is not at all sparing. They never seek to measure the possibility, the degree, or the form, as always happens in an honest discussion, of a partial agreement on this or that point. No, everything is rejected as a block; everything is a block and a block of hatred. Even when, here or there, someone makes a show of being moved by my sadness or my friendship for de Man, it is in order to get the better of me and suggest that I am inspired only by friendship, which will appear ridiculous to all those who have read me. Inspired by friendship means for those people misled by friendship. How foreign this experience must be to them!

Jacques Derrida is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) as well as professor at the University of California, Irvine, and visiting professor at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. His most recent publication in English is the collection Limited Inc (1988), which includes a new afterword, “Toward an Ethic of Discussion.” Peggy Kamuf is professor of French at the University of Southern California. Her most recent book is Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (1988). She has also contributed essays to Reading de Man Reading (1989) and Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism (1989), and is currently editing A Derrida Reader.