Abstract

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” ? If, on the other hand, as Denuit and others have made amply clear, there was in fact censorship all along, the Führerprinzip operating 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 . A collection of her recent essays, Of Canons and Contemporaries, is forthcoming