← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

“de Man’s second wife, Patricia, admits being puzzled by his habit of staring into the mirror, not just for a few minutes, but for hours.”

Tom Bartlett’s review of a big new biography of liar, thief, bigamist, and fascist symp Paul de Man brings back memories, for UD, of her time in his classroom when he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.

The truth about him wasn’t yet known, and indeed UD had been instructed to find him a demigod.

She recalls her puzzlement, watching him lecture about the language of Yeats and Rilke, at this haughty reptilian man, scarcely aware of the students sitting behind him as he trailed his chalk from one language group to another on the blackboard.

The New York Times limned the grieving after his death, and UD again said huh? “In a profession full of fakeness, he was real,” mourned one of his followers. And UD thought Well yeah real but really nasty. She didn’t know why he felt so removed from human emotion, from any authentic human setting… She figured it was snobbery, that his real life, his warmth, lay somewhere (his home institution?) but had been put on ice while he was in Hyde Park…

… de Man was … a convicted criminal. In 1951 a judge in Belgium sentenced de Man in absentia (he had fled to the United States by then) to six years in prison for theft and fraud related to Hermès, the publication house he created and ran. De Man had looted the funds of the company to cover his own lavish expenses. In one case, Barish writes, de Man engaged in a “deliberate swindle” of a family friend, fooling him into making a loan that was never repaid. All told, more than a million Belgian francs disappeared — and, before he could face creditors and courts, so did de Man.

His conduct in his personal life was similarly irresponsible. The most heart-wrenching example is the abandonment of his three young sons from his first marriage (a marriage he didn’t end before marrying a second time, adding bigamy to his résumé). He did not support or even see the boys — even refusing to take a phone call from one of his sons years later.

Harold Bloom despised de Man’s “serene linguistic nihilism,” and UD was I suppose privileged to witness that nihilism – that confidence game, really – in action in a classroom in Chicago in 1979.

But why did this repellant man, this obvious fraudster, capture Yale? The author of the biography speculates:

“Most of the time we don’t know what we’re doing. When someone comes along and seems to have it right or to be very clear and very intelligent and immensely seductive, intellectually and personally, we say ‘Right, let’s go that way.'”

This can’t be quite right. Yalies are hardly know-nothings. And de Man was as seductive as … Rush Limbaugh. Joseph McCarthy. Huey Long. Ted Cruz. He was just like those guys. Not at all physically attractive, and immediately identifiable as an easily irritated narcissist. But – also like those guys – de Man was excitingly wildly himself, a big old nasty old way out there unto the breach POS.

I think intellectuals as much as anti-intellectuals are susceptible to serene – which is to say, sociopathically rockhard-confident – nihilism. Bloom called it for the bullshit it was, but a lot of other people fell for its brass balls come and get me coppers Nietzscheanism.

***********************

UD finds it intriguing that today’s nihilists – the group of people in this country everyone’s calling nihilists – are the Ted Cruz-run tea partiers, and that their party shares de Man’s abiding impulse: secession. As his biography makes clear, de Man was always running away – from countries, marriages, crimes, children, and of course meaning. The impulse de Man embodied and appealed to was toward withdrawal from a messy world full of all sorts of incorrect people and the embrace of a pure cult of just a few correct people. Yale was the cult of de Man.

[A]lthough we were all supposed to act shocked and appalled when a Confederate flag showed up in front of the White House during a [recent] Tea Party protest …, nobody actually was.

de Man’s Yale was the functional equivalent of Tod Palin’s Alaska – a fantasy island just for us.

The Paul de Man story should remind us that anti-democratic dreams, and the dreams of unreason, are perennial, and widely shared.

[Y]ou can’t just kill someone’s revolutionary nihilism. The Ted Cruz “filibuster” is a great example: it served no actual legislative purpose, and at the end of his idiotically long speech, Cruz ended up voting yes on the very bill he was trying to kill. That’s zombie politics, and the problem with zombies is that — being dead already — they’re incredibly hard to kill.

The point here is that the zombie army, a/k/a the Tea Party, is a movement, not a person — and it’s an aggressively anti-logical movement, at that. You can’t negotiate with a zombie — and neither can you wheel out some kind of clever syllogism which will convince a group of revolutionary nihilists that it’s a bad idea to get into a fight if you’re reasonably convinced that you’re going to lose it.

Felix Salmon is right. In the case of serene political nihilism, we can only do what people have been doing with de Man. We can only unmask it.

Margaret Soltan, October 21, 2013 8:15AM
Posted in: democracy, professors

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=41649

3 Responses to ““de Man’s second wife, Patricia, admits being puzzled by his habit of staring into the mirror, not just for a few minutes, but for hours.””

  1. Robert Mathiesen Says:

    My step-grandfather had worked in a carnival in his youth, back in the years right after 1900, and knew a lot about the art of the con. He would say that a highly educated person is the easiest mark to con. They think they’re so smart they can’t be fooled. My 40-odd years as a professor thoroughly convinced me that the old man was right.

    (The hardest mark to con is the poor street-savvy kid. He knows all too well that he can be conned, so he’s always wary.)

  2. dmf Says:

    now if someone could only decode the ‘charms’ of Lacan for me, no wonder that guy was the king of “lack” what a freakshow…
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31iQQTPY-kA

  3. Tenured Radical Says:

    When I was an undergraduate at Yale in the 1970s, Paul de Man had a short affair with one of my friends, who was in one of his classes, and then dumped her in a really mean way. This was not as appalling an act as it was to become in the next decade. I remember being affected by the cruelty of his behavior, not the fact of it, and found his work fraudulent after that.

Comment on this Entry

Latest UD posts at IHE

Archives

Categories