Love's Cross in La Porte etroite

Can a student speak of Paul de Man in a personal way that would still be intelligible? Would it make any sense to describe his reaction to these pages? His own reminiscences about Gide, his mock frustration over Gide's power in description and weakness in analysis (If you've ever been to the Graubunden or to Normandy, it's all over, you can never forget LImmoraliste-it's a terrible thing). It is difficult to know what to say, in a public place, about de Man the teacher, who himself said, is not primarily an intersubjective relationship between people (Yale French Studies, No. 63). Either one quotes the teacher and forgets the man, or one recalls de Man and thus forgets the teacher. It is not so much a question of remembering which is the appropriate emphasis, or accent, here as it is of remembering what is necessarily forgotten whenever we remember. One more (only slightly distorted) quotation: We do not what we love but we love in the hope of confirming the illusion that there was indeed anyone there to recall (Diacritics, Winter, 1981). The following essay, written well before de Man's death, is an attempt at recalling the teacher. But what of the much sorer loss of the man? Isn't that the loss de Man was already reminding us we would never understand, or recover, precisely because teaching is not an intersubjective relationship between people

Art · French Literature and Criticism · Historical and Literary Analyses · Historical and Literary Studies · Geology