Complicity and Forgetting

There is no escaping the political, for culture itself is profoundly political. It is not merely a matter of the social versus the individual, of ideologies to be analyzed and criticized, of extra-textual determinants of the text to be delimited and defined. It is not even a question of evaluating literature and art according to political criteria. The political cannot be reduced to a category of intelligibility or to a principle of judgment. Prior to these, there is a politics already immanent to, and implicated within, the movement of writing itself. My starting point for this essay is an embarrassing and very specific question: what is the relationship between the young Paul De Man's intellectual and literary collaboration (at the very least) with the Nazi occupation of Belgium, and his mature intellectual work, produced long after the War, and which continues to have so massive a presence, and so profound an influence, in the American academy today? Many people-De Man's colleagues and students in particular-would like to avoid this question. They would not like to see their memories of Paul De Man, their regard for him as critic and teacher, tarnished by references to a shady and forgotten political past. They do not want to consider that such a model of intellectual lucidity, rigor, and insight was himself, at one point, touched by the most fatal blindness. They would like to see De Man's own work, at least, preserved from the ideological selfmystification, the loss of intentional control, the repetition of

Complicity · Forgetting · Linguistics · Political science · Historical and Literary Analyses · Law · Military, Security, and Education Studies · Philosophy · Psychology

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