The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish

In most contests between a biographer and his subject -- and contests they often come to seem -- it is difficult to not find yourself rooting for the subject.
Joseph Epstein, "Joe DiMaggio", in Essays in Biography (Axion Press,2012).

Evelyn Barish, in The Double Life of Paul de Man (W.W. Norton, 2014), takes such a prosecutorial approach to her subject that one starts to have sympathy for him.  de Man is not talked much about today and since it has been some time since I was in graduate school I can't be sure, but I think the theory of deconstruction, the approach of de Man and Jacques Derrida, may have run its course. Barish, however, ends her biography in 1960 (de Man's influence came later, and he died in 1983), unwilling to deal with a theoretical approach that she admits she does not understand.  What she does seem to be attempting is to relate de Man's idea of the close reading of the text to his own constant re-invention and the cover-up of his past.

After de Man's death it was discovered that he had been a journalistic collaborator in Belgium during the Nazi occupation, with one particularly anti-Semitic piece.  Later he mismanaged a publishing company and fled to the U.S. just ahead of the law; in the U.S. he worked as a stockboy, became friends with Dwight MacDonald and Mary McCarthy, taught at Bard, became a graduate student at Harvard.  He was helped considerably by his charm and his European accent and married a Bard student, even though de Man already had a family that he had sent to South America.  Perhaps understandably, Barish always puts the most negative interpretation on everything.  No one ever thought de Man a Nazi sympathizer, though undoubtedly he was quite an opportunist.  Barish even attacks de Man for working at Berlitz and General Electric while still a graduate student, though many of us who have been graduate students know how difficult it is to survive on a small stipend, even if one does not have, as de Man did, a wife and children.  And de Man's slowness in finishing his dissertation is not all that unusual.

Do de Man's collaboration, financial misdeeds and other bad behavior invalidate his theories?  Does Heidegger's relationship to the Nazis invalidate his?  What about the influence of Heidegger on de Man?  These are not easy questions to answer.  Many of de Man's students attest to his abilities as a teacher, though Barish thinks they were often conned by de Man's impenetrability.  Barish has produced a great deal of useful research about de Man's life and about writers and academics in the fifties, but what elements of de Man's theories, if any, will last?