The Double Life of Paul De Man

A landmark biography that reveals the secret past of one of the most influential academics of the twentieth century. Over thirty years after his death in 1983 Paul de Man a hugely charismatic intellectual who created with deconstruction an ideology so pervasive that it threatened to topple the very foundations of literature remains a haunting and still largely unexamined figure. Deeply influential de Man and his theory-driven philosophy were so dominant that his passing received front-page coverage suggesting that a cult hero if not intellectual rock star had met an untimely end. Yet in 1988 de Mans reputation was ruined when it was discovered that he had written an anti-Semitic article and worked for a collaborating Belgium newspaper during World War II. Who was he really and who had he been? No one knew. Still in shock few of his followers wanted to find out. Once an admirer although never a theorist the biographer Evelyn Barish began her own investigation. Relying on years of original archival work and interviews with over two hundred of de Mans circle of friends and family most of them now dead Barish vividly re-creates this collaborationist world of occupied Belgian and France. Born in 1919 to a rich but tragically unstable family Paul de Man a golden boy was influenced by his uncle Henri de Man a socialist turned Nazi collaborator who became the de facto Belgian prime minister. By the early 1940s Paul while seemingly only a reviewer for Nazi newspapers was secretly rising in far more important jobs in Belgiums and Frances collaborationist regimes. Postwar barred from the university de Man created a publishing house but stole all its assets; then facing jail he fled to New York abandoning his family (his opportunistic anti-Semitic writing seemed the least of his crimes). Arriving penniless he quickly rose again befriending an entire generation of American writers in New York including Dwight Macdonald Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy. Barish sketches de Mans renowned careers at Bard and Yale as well as the circumstances surrounding his lovingbut bigamoussecond marriage to former Bard student Patricia Kelley who created the tranquillity he so lacked. Juxtaposing this personal story to his meteoric rise through American academia Barish traces the origins of the philosophical deconstructionism that he later created with Jacques Derrida showing how de Man attracted followers with his attack on the hypocrisy of society that attempts to cover up the "essential alienation" of art from "the system." While focusing on the biographical facts this commanding and psychologically probing biography reveals as much about human behavior and the cross-currents of twentieth-century intellectual thought as it does about the man who held an entire generation in his thrall. 8 pages of photographs