The Double Life of Paul de Man

Paul de Man (1919–83), a Belgian journalist who had worked for the Nazis, found himself in May 1948 in New York working in a bookshop. He made influential friends, including Mary McCarthy, took a job at Bard College, entered graduate school at Harvard (although he lacked an undergraduate degree), took a job at Cornell, and won a chair in literature at Yale. With Jacques Derrida, he became known as the inventor of "deconstruction." The intellectual world shuddered when de Man's wartime journalism first emerged. Now Barish (English, CUNY Graduate Ctr., Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy) reports a history of criminal financial fraud in Belgium and raises deeply troubling questions about the American academic world. She even speculates about Harvard doctoral examinations. De Man came from a Europe weary from two world wars, where it seemed to some that history could not be made to make sense and that the great narratives like those of the believers in progress were finished. Some, such as de Man, decided that the best understanding of language undermined claims to universal moral truth and that the Platonic eternal form of the good was the ultimate delusion.