Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man by David Lehman

David Lehman's book is an excellent companion to Evelyn Barish's biography of Paul de Man (see my post of Sept. 2).  It intelligently analyzes deconstruction and the responses to the revelations of de Man's pro-Nazi journalism.  Lehman's book was published in 1992 (Simon and Schuster) and his prediction has already come to pass:  "It is only a matter of time before deconstruction is routinely used -- as its older cousin existentialism has steadily been used -- as the squiggle of fancy French mustard on the hot dog of a banal observation."

Lehman cuts through the jargon of deconstruction and lists ten of its propositions:

Between the signifier and the signified falls the shadow.
Writing precedes speech.
Words speak us.
All the world's a text.
The author is dead.
Presence is absence.
History is bunk.
Goodbye to aesthetics.
Language, not knowledge, is power.
What you see is never what you get.

Lehman's provides details and examples for those of us who have not read much of Derrida, de Man, et al.

In my opinion deconstruction has produced some useful analysis and criticism (see my January post about the Cahiers du Cinema article on Young Mr. Lincoln), before it became a prisoner of its own theories and jargon.

I think my own interest in de Man was piqued by his ability to re-invent himself, something many of us have tried to do, though with less success and less to atone for.  Lehman writes, "In the debate precipitated by the sudden rash of disclosures about de Man's early life, one can see the truth in the old adage that the ferocity of academic politics varies inversely with the material stakes involved." (remember the journal Lingua Franca?) In this debate the deconstructionists did not distinguish themselves, Derrida and others going out of their way to exonerate de Man and ridicule his critics. Lehman fascinatingly finds three "unconscious treatments of Paul de Man's predicament in America":
1. Orson Welles's 1946 movie, The Stranger, in which Welles plays a Nazi war criminal who becomes a teacher in Connecticut.
2. Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where Lehman identifies de Man with Marlow, for whom all of Europe went into his making.
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, whose eponymous character, like de Man, "sprang from his Platonic conception of himself."

Deconstruction still has holdouts in academia, but reached a dead end sooner than it may have otherwise, with the exposure of de Man's past.  We have moved on to "gender" and "ethnic" studies, which analyze texts on the basis of patriarchy and power.








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