I’m also struck by the extremely reductive and sweeping generalisations being made about theory. Criticism of the same would be more worthwhile if it didn’t come from such an anti-intellectual space.
New revelations about Paul de Man, from a biography by Evelyn Barish, are leading many to insist that the details of his life, which appear to be increasingly murky, negate the very value of critical theory. Deconstruction itself ought to be called into question, it seems. The Chronicle article quotes Barish, “The people that love de Man and continue to support him fundamentally say that there is no necessary connection between what a person does or says in his or her private life and what his or her ideas are…I’m not of that position.”
I often refer to myself as the bastard child of queer theory and deconstruction, and that’s meant to signal my feelings about both, feelings which range from ambivalence to a much stronger critique of the institutional conservatism that both have managed to breed – contrary to the aura of radicalism in which each has been wrapped.
I’m not the wide-eyed admirer of critical theory that I used to be, but I’m also bemused by the backlash of anti-intellectual criticism that has now descended upon de Man’s conflicted legacy. I’m also struck by the extremely reductive and sweeping generalisations being made about theory. Criticism of the same would be more worthwhile if it didn’t come from such an anti-intellectual space. Instead, as evident in Barish’s words in the article, many are taking this occasion to celebrate close reading and historical research as the opposite of theory, and dismissing theory as lazy.
In making connections between de Man’s life and deconstruction more generally, the most popular threads seem to run thus: Aha, de Man was a narcissist and often recklessly harmed the interests of others, and so all of deconstruction can now be laid to rest because it too is narcissistic and destructive.
Really?
Perhaps we might then also dismiss a lot of old-fashioned literary criticism or what many are now fetishising as solid archival research (and I’ll point out that a lot of excellent theory can be and is in fact built on solid research) on the basis of people’s lives?
De Man will remain a problem for years, and no one should deny the force of or havoc caused by his anti-semitism (which we’ve known about for years), or the fact that he appears to have willfully caused harm to people.
But will we also remember that a lot of critics and scholars who rage against theory in any form, who spend hours and months in archives were and are also sexist, racist, white men (and women and sometimes or often people of colour) who hate even the idea of teaching anything outside their beloved canons? That what is often positioned, in a slipshod way, as the opposite of critical theory (such as archival or historical work) can be in itself part of a darkly conservative tradition of intellectual work? Unlike what’s implied by Barish here, a reverence for facts (and facts are always disputable) alone doesn’t automatically make for great or even good work. As for the charge that Paul de Man surrounded himself with acolytes: Are we seriously going to pretend that this was somehow unique to him and not common amongst several “Great Teachers” we’ve revered over the centuries?
I’m struck by the numerous references to his bigamy (which bothers me much less than his anti-semitism, frankly). Are we all going to forget that several of the professors we took classes with, white, sport-jacketed, men who railed against theory, were able to build their careers because they had wives who stayed home and tended to the kitchen and child-rearing? Drawing connections between de Man’s anti-semitism and his intellectual work is much more intellectually honest than the charges of bigamy, the uproar around which smacks of little more than a lot of bourgeois moralising (and proves what a lot of us have known about the bourgeois origins and state of the university).
If you’re going to dismiss an entire school of thought with little more than the excuse that one man’s life proved how nasty he was, you might want to look a lot more closely at the lives of people who teach in a university system that’s still struggling to even recognise that people of colour and women are worth the same as white men. I have no problem with a smackdown of theory, but it needs to be on more solid ground than the details of de Man’s life.
In other words, I’m looking forward to a response to an institutional and intellectual scandal that isn’t mired in petty anti-intellectualism and sweeping generalisations.
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“Magnifying Glass” by winnond, freedigitalphotos.net