Simon During
         After Death: Raymond Williams in the Modern Era
         Like all deaths, Raymond Williams' must touch most profoundly
            those who were closest to him; it belongs first to his private
            circle. But it also belongs to his fame: to those who have read his
            books, heard him speak in public, were taught by him, and, then, to
            those who have been taught by those he taught, and so on. Because
            Williams was so committed and important politically writing
            not just as an academic but as a leftist his death also
            enters public history. One can ask: does it mark the end of an era?
            Or, on the contrary, is it the sign of a beginning set in motion by
            the programs, the shifts of emphasis, he urged? Such questions are
            all the most insistent because the left, as a political force and
            as an idea, is so fragile today. Indeed, no other theme seems as
            urgent in thinking about Williams' life and work now; for, to
            put it rather glibly, it is no longer easy to tell left from right.
            If we regard "being on the left" as requiring the
            belief that state control of the economy and the ideological
            apparatus and the empowerment of the proletariat are steps demanded
            by the journey towards real, rather than illusory or formal,
            freedom, then who is still on the left? And if "being on the
            left" does not require such beliefs, if there is a left that
            is not statist, how does it differ from liberalism, from a
            Deleuzian or Foucauldian micro-politics or a mere insistence on
            "social justice"?2
             
            2. This is not to approach the question of what it means to be a
            "Marxist" (as against just "one the left")
            in cultural/literary studies. Historically, one of the clearest
            demarcations of Marxism within and from the left in general was its
            willingness to theorize and imagine revolution. The difficulties
            faced by Williams' work and career are very much those posed
            by a nonrevolutionary Marxism. (And, to anticipate, this
            problematic, strangely enough, also connects him to Maurice
            Blanchot.)
             
            Simon During is a lecturer in English at the University of
            Melbourne. His Foucault and Literature will appear in 1990, and he
            is currently working on a book entitled Literature without Culture
Shoshana Felman
         Paul de Man's Silence
         The responses to this discovery, in the press and elsewhere, seem
            to focus on the act of passing judgment, a judgment that reopens
            with some urgency the question of the ethical implications of de
            Man's work and, by extension, of the whole school of critical
            approach known as "deconstruction."
            The discourse of moral judgment takes as its target three distinct
            domains of apparent ethical misconduct:
            1. the collaborationist political activities themselves;
            2. de Man's apparent erasure of their memory his
            radical "forgetting" of his early past;
            3. the silence that de Man chose to keep about his past: the
            absence of public confession and public declaration of remorse.
            The question of ethics thus seems to be linked to the separate
            questions of the nature of political activities, of the nature of
            memory, and of the nature of silence. It is judged unethical, of
            course, to engage in acts that lent support to Germany's
            wartime position; but it is also judged unethical to forget; and
            unethical, furthermore, to keep silent in relation to the war and
            to the Holocaust. The silence is interpreted as a deliberate
            concealment, a suppression of accountability that can only mean a
            denial of responsibility on de Man's part.
             
            Shoshana Felman,the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of French and
            Comparative Literature at Yale University, is the author of The
            Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with Austin, or Seduction in Two
            Languages (1984), Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/
            Psychoanalysis(1985), and Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture:
            Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight(1987). She is also the
            editor of Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of
            Reading Otherwise (1982). She is currently working on a book
            entitled Testimony in History, Literature and Psychoanalysis.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
         Tide and Trust
         Many things are frightening in the process by which people identify
            against and resist oppressions. One of the worst is how easy it is
            for people to be made to feel, by some intervention from another,
            that their own identity and their standing from which to resist
            that oppression have been foreclosed or annihilated: their voices
            delegitimated, the authority of their grounding in an indispensable
            identity threatened with erasure. Anyone who has worked in feminist
            groups, for instance, knows the moment when a woman or group of
            women announce that they have sat silent through a discussion, not
            because they had nothing to say, but because they felt
            silenced,felt radically denegated by some act or speech or some
            perceived dynamic of the group. These announcements make shifty
            moments in the power relations of a group. They bring to the
            surface, by rupturing it, how far from impartial or inclusive is
            the normal, "neutral" decorum of conversational
            exchange, and how far from detached are the needs and dreads that
            people have invested in it. The fabric of trust that gives a
            nominally egalitarian texture to activist interactions is it
            is always shocking to have once more to learn a fragile one
            that a multitude of unacknowledged presumptions can suddenly leave
            gaping.
             
            Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is professor of English at Duke University.
            She is the author of Between Men: English Literature and Male
            Homosocial Desire and the forthcoming Epistemology of the
            Closet.Her most recent contribution to is
            "Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherley, Sterne,
            and Male Homosocial Desire" (December 1984).
David Van Leer
         Trust and Trade
         As presidential campaigns and "Saturday Night Live"
            have repeatedly demonstrated, debate is an uninteresting mode of
            communication, imitating dialogue without engaging in it. Formally
            it encourages infinite regress: my misreading of your misreading of
            my misreading of your misreading. Intellectually its conclusions
            are in some ways predetermined. In the short run, the winner is
            whoever speaks last; in the long run, whoever has the greater
            power. Rather than occasion or remark on further "shifty
            moments" (p. 745), then, I will try to review some general
            areas of contention suggested in my exchange with Eve Kosofsky
            Sedgwick.
            Although Sedgwick and I value the personal and the theoretical
            both, we disagree on the lines of intersection. I am struck by her
            initial situation of "Van Leer" in the ranks of those
            who feel silenced. The complaint might just as easily have been
            that he has entirely too much to say. Nor, if autobiography is
            really the issue, do I in any way regret the notoriety of
            Sedgwick's work? From what I take to be my point of view,
            Sedgwick's book has opened up for me a far more visible space
            in the academy than has my own. And I attribute to myself at least
            enough self-consciousness to recognize the disingenuousness of
            "feeling silenced" in .
             
            David Van Leer is associate professor of English and American
            literature at the University of California, Davis. The author of
            Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays (1986), he
            is currently examining the issue of contextualism in a book to be
            called The Queening of America
Jean-Marie Apostolidès
         On Paul de Man's War
         In 1982-83, I was preparing my volume on the Belgian cartoonist
            Hergé. During the Second World War, Hergé's comic strips
            appeared daily in the newspaper Le Soir.Since I wanted to analyze
            the influence of the rightist thought on Hergé and Tintin, I
            borrowed most of the copies of Le Soir available in this country
            through interlibrary loan. Examining the newspaper, I came across
            Paul de Man's articles, which were sometimes on the same page
            as the comic strips. I showed these articles to some colleagues
            related to or teaching at Harvard University. I specifically recall
            an afternoon with a colleague from Boston University whose
            specialty is the hunting of presumed French fascist intellectuals;
            we discussed together the possible bridges between de Man's
            contemporary thought (he was still alive at that time) and his
            former intellectual engagement during the Second World War.
            That is to say that, as far as I know, several people at Harvard
            and in the Boston area (where deconstruction and feminism were and
            continue to be a recurrent theme) were aware of de Man's
            former affiliation with rightist circles. One can ask why it took
            five more years for the "scandal" to appear: why this
            "sudden" revelation after several years of silence and
            dissimulation? Compared to the fact that Hergé had constantly been
            confronted with his political past, one can wonder how strongly
            Paul de Man's "secret" was kept.
             
            Jean-Marie Apostolidèsis professor of French at Stanford
            University. He is currently writing an essay on the anthropological
            reading of literature. His article "Molière and the Sociology
            of Exchange" appeared in the Spring 1988 issue of Critical
            Inquiry.
Marjorie Perloff
         Response to Jacques Derrida
         Derrida's quite uncharacteristic literalism is surprising: he
            takes de Man and Dosogne at their word,6 thus boxing himself into a
            peculiar corner. If indeed there was no censorship of de
            Man's articles written prior to August 1942, why is his
            "discourse … constantly split, disjointed, engaged in
            incessant conflicts"? If the young de Man could speak freely,
            why do "all the propositions [in his texts] carry within
            themselves a counterproposition" (p. 607)? If, on the other
            hand, as Denuit and others have made amply clear, there was in fact
            censorship all along, the Führerprinzipoperating from the day de
            Becker took over Le Soir,then we have to conclude that de Man is
            not telling the truth in his letter to Poggioli. Either way, the
            statement is compromised. As for the word Nazi,it is not at all
            surprising that de Man didn't use it in his texts for Le
            Soir.Hitler's strategy, at the time, was to try to convince
            the Belgians that annexation to Germany was no more than an
            inevitable return to the glorious German fatherland, the home of
            Culture, the Arts, Philosophy. Indeed, if the Nazis could be seen
            as simply equivalent to the Germans of tradition, the Belgians had
            nothing to fear!
             
            6. See Culler, "Letter to the Editor," p. 4: "De
            Man ceased writing for Le Soir in the fall of 1942, when the Nazis
            extended censorship to the cultural section of the paper."
             
            Marjorie Perloff,professor of English and comparative literature at
            Stanford University, is the author of Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde,
            Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986). A collection of
            her recent essays, Of Canons and Contemporaries,is forthcoming.
Jonathan Culler
         "Paul de Man's War" and the Aesthetic Ideology
         While debates about the relations to fascism exhibited in de
            Man's newspaper articles will no doubt continue (although
            whatever interpretation one gives them, de Man is guilty of having
            written an anti-Semitic article and of working in the
            collaborationist press), the important question is what value his
            critical and theoretical writings have for us, the productivity of
            his critical and theoretical work for our thinking. The wartime
            writings give a new dimension to much of de Man's work in
            America, helping one to understand more plainly what is implied by
            his critique of the aesthetic ideology, as in late essays on Kleist
            and on Kant and Schiller. Walter Benjamin called fascism the
            introduction of aesthetics into politics. De Man's critique
            of the aesthetic ideology now resonates also as a critique of the
            fascist tendencies he had known.
             
            Jonathan Culler,Class of 1916 Professor of English and comparative
            literature at Cornell University, is the author of Framing the
            Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (1989).
W. Wolfgang Holdheim
         Jacques Derrida's Apologia
         The central theme of the prologue is the notion of responsibility,
            as well it might be, given the subject, Accordingly, those first
            seven pages swamp the reader with the word
            "responsibility" to the point where they could be
            described as "variations on the theme." Inundation,
            alas, is not elucidation, and all closer references to the notion
            remain impenetrability elliptic: Derrida possesses the unique art
            of combining extreme ellipsis with extreme verbosity. In fact these
            "variation" are more musical than analytic:
            "responsibility" comes close to being a Wagnerian
            leitmotiv. Like a characteristic melody, the word winds through the
            text in a constant sequence of appearances and temporary
            disappearances, ever expected, always ready to reemerge. Although
            there is no clear-cut line of argument, there does seem to be a
            general direction of development. The question of de Man's
            responsibility, which we might have thought to be crucial, is
            touched on only briefly and vaguely; we read much more about
            responsibility to de Man. Ours and Derrida's:
            "responsibility" is associated with
            "responding," which is increasingly read as
            Derrida's obligation to respond for de Man. From the outset,
            this emphasis evokes the danger of an apologia rather than the
            conscientious quest for truth that is demanded in the same breath.
            There are further suggestions of this nature when Derrida later (p.
            639) briefly returns to this subject and this style.
            "Responding for the other" is here connected with
            transference, allegory (standing for narrative), and
            prosopopeia that is, connected with two rhetorical categories
            and psychoanalytic one. To write about responsibility with so
            little reference to ethical categories is something of a tour de
            force.
             
            W. Wolfgang Holdheim,professor of comparative literature and
            romance studies and Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Liberal Studies
            at Cornell University, has published numerous articles on
            literature and literary theory as well as a number of books,
            including The Hermeneutic Mode (1984).
Jon Wiener
         The Responsibilities of Friendship: Jacques Derrida on Paul_de
            Man's Collaboration
         But of course Derrida's appeal to context and to authorial
            intention constitutes an abandonment of the deconstructive method.
            As Christopher Norris has written of de Man, "we read in
            defiance of his own repeated counsel" if we read his work
            "by asking what might have been the motives, political or
            otherwise, that led to his adopting the stance they
            exhibit."2
            Derrida emphasizes repeatedly that de Man's objectionable
            acts were committed almost half a century ago, when he was twenty-
            one and twenty-two years old. That's an important argument.
            But the moral problems de man poses do not end in 1942 when he
            stopped writing for Le Soir;a second and in some ways more serious
            moral problem recurs throughout his adult-life, during which de Man
            kept his youthful pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic writings a secret.
             
            John Wiener is professor of history at the University of
            California, Irvine. His articles "Deconstructing de
            Man" and "Debating de Man" appeared in The
            Nation.
John Brenkman and Jules David Law
         Resetting the Agenda
         Jacques Derrida offers his recent commentary ("Like the Sound
            of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War,"
             14 [Spring 1988]: 590-652) on the early career of
            Paul de Man as an urgent intervention in a discussion he fears is
            going awry. The most pressing danger he sees in the recent
            revelations is that they have played into the hands of de
            Man's antagonists, who are now ready to denounce the whole of
            his career and even deconstruction itself. Against such
            indiscriminate critiques Derrida hurls the epithet: totalitarian.
            He is attempting to reseize the initiative in the discussion and to
            reset the terms of the debate. His agenda extends across
            historical, theoretical, and political questions.
            He wants to affirm that a radical, indeed absolute break separates
            the later from the earlier de Man. He also wants to show that the
            young de man, however firmly committed to fascist ideology and
            however much an accomplice of the Nazis occupying Belgium, at the
            same time regularly distanced himself from that ideology and even
            undermined its meanings. Moreover, Derrida boldly takes up the
            challenge that these revelations have cast on the intellectual
            movement he and de Man have shaped. Can deconstruction come to
            grips with the political and intellectual history of its own
            leading American proponent? And can deconstruction in the process
            make a distinctive contribution to the understanding of fascism and
            intellectuals' participation in it?
             
            John Brenkmanis associate professor of English at Northwestern
            University. He is the author of Culture and Domination (1987).
            Jules David Law is assistant professor of English at Northwestern
            University. He is currently working on a book-length study of the
            metaphors of surface, depth, and reflection in eighteenth- and
            nineteenth-century British prose.
Jacques Derrida
         Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments
         Those who have read me, in particular those who have read
            "Paul de Man's War," know very well that I would
            have quite easily accepted a genuine critique, the expression of an
            argued disagreement with my reading of de Man, with my evaluation
            (theoretical, moral, political) of these articles from 1940-42, and
            so on. After all, what I wrote on this subject was complicated
            enough, divided,tormented, most often hazarded as hypothesis, open
            enough to discussion, itselfdiscussing itself enough in advance (on
            every page, indeed within every sentence, and from the very first
            sentence) for me to be able to welcome questions, suggestions, and
            objections. Provided this was done so as to demonstrate and not to
            intimidate or inflict wounds, to help the analysis progress and not
            to score points, to read and to reason and not to pronounce
            massive, magical, and immediately executor verdicts. Five of the
            six "responses" that I reread last night are written,
            as one used to say, with a pen dipped in venom. Less against the de
            Man of 1940-42, perhaps, then against me (I who said things that
            were nevertheless judged by Culler "exceedingly severe"
            against de Man and who have nothing whatever to dowith everything
            that happened; I who, at the time, was rather on the side of the
            victims shall I dare to recall this once again and will they
            forgive me for doing so? struck by a numerous clauses that it
            will be necessary to talk about again). Less against me, in truth,
            than against "Deconstruction" (which at the time was at
            year minus twenty-five of its calendar! This suffices to shed light
            on this whole scene and its actual workings). How can the reader
            tell that these five "critical responses" are not
            "responses," critical texts or discussions, but rather
            the documents of a blinded compulsion? First of all, the fact that
            they are all monolithic.They take into account none of the
            complications of which my text, this is the very least one can say,
            is not at all sparing. They never seek to measure the possibility,
            the degree, or the form, as always happens in an honest discussion,
            of a partial agreement on this or that point. No, everything is
            rejected as a block; everything is a block and a block of hatred.
            Even when, here or there, someone makes a show of being moved by my
            sadness or my friendship for de Man, it is in order to get the
            better of me and suggest that I am inspired only by friendship,
            which will appear ridiculous to all those who have read me.
            Inspired by friendship means for those people misled by friendship.
            How foreign this experience must be to them!
             
            Jacques Derrida is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes
            Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) as well as professor at the
            University of California, Irvine, and visiting professor at the
            Graduate School of the City University of New York. His most recent
            publication in English is the collection Limited Inc (1988), which
            includes a new afterword, "Toward an Ethic of
            Discussion." Peggy Kamuf is professor of French at the
            University of Southern California. Her most recent book is
            Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (1988). She has
            also contributed essays to Reading de Man Reading(1989) and
            Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (1989), and is
            currently editing A Derrida Reader.
