Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man

by David Lehman

Book Overview

Signs Of The Times: Deconstruction And The Fall Of Paul De Man, by Lehman, David This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671682393
• ISBN13: 9780671682392
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Poseidon Press
• Length: 318 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

First-Rate Literary Reportage

In a first-rate piece of literary reportage, David Lehman chronicles the movement known as "deconstructionism" within the larger movement in the humanities known as "critical theory." With more empathy for his subjects than this reviewer can muster, Lehman shows how hubris, greed, parochialism, and elitism led to an "emperor's new clothes" community in which a former Nazi collaborator could become idolized by a generation of impressionable academic lefties. A must-have addition to all prospective academics who want to retain...if not their souls, may we at least say their individual identities?

A Genuine Classic That Never Should Have Left Print

"Signs of the Times" is one of those very rare books that can actually change your life by altering your consciousness about perception and reality. It's a fascinating, riveting and funny account of how Yale University deconstruction guru Paul De Man was exposed after his death as an anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator in Belgium during World War II. It does something unusual and extremely valuable: it turns the tables on the professional cynics of academic theory, by subjecting them to the same rigorous skepticism that they assume they alone are worthy to wield. Lehman's wonderful defense of objectivity, historical truth, and ideological non-dogmatism is one of the most entertaining, exhilarating books I've ever read. After reading it I would never again take at face value the relativistic blitherings of university "experts." Lehman's book does something wonderful: it assumes that a common, decently educated reader and citizen can come to know truths about life. What a fabulous, unique concept for contemporary intellectual life!

Insights into the world of academia

This is the story of an intellectual movement built on a foundation of sand. Deconstructionism is yet another literary movement that accompanied the rise of feminist, ethnic, Marxist and liberation literature, movements that swept the academic world. It is dangerous in its implications and startling in its conclusions. Its founder, Paul de Man, taught literature at Yale. He hid a dirty secret for forty years: He assisted the Nazis in their occupation of France. In deconstructionist fashion, the response to this news was that the Jews themselves were to blame and he was the victim. Deconstructionists claim that the subject cannot be defined - it is a theory or method or even structure. But among gthe disturbing elements are: History is bunk (so we can't believe or learn anything), words control us (not the other way around), the critic is of more importance than the subject, absence is presence and most importantly, language, not knowledge, is true power.The term itself derives from a call for the destruction of ontolgy, the study of the nature of being. A close look at the advocates of deconstructionism reveals a fascist undertone throughout. Not only was de Man a one-time supporter but so was Vladimir Sokolov (Yale), Heidegger (Germany), Blanchot (France) and Man's number one disciple, Jacque Derrida, the Algerian Frenchman. Derrida has defended de Man (as well as the others) arguing, in deconstructionist terms, that everything is theory yet nothing can be defined - even terms like good and bad. The fact that this group identified with the far Left is indicative of the totalitarian nature of both movements. The description of the politicalization of academia should be required reading for every tax payer or parent of a prospective college student. This is an important, well-written brilliant study of a tragic event in our nation's history. It should serve as a warning.

clear, comprehensive, & mostly convincing--unlike De Man

Why is this book out of print? It should be taught in universities as a classic work on 20th century literary criticism and "theory". Its take on the posthumous Paul De Man scandal is clear, comprehensive, and mostly convincing. De Man, a dead deconstrutionist, was revealed to have been a cad in his public and private lives. Lehman demonstrates how the equivoque and equivoation that are central to deconstrutionism allowed De Man to rationalize his past as a Nazi collaborator, as a liar to USA immigration and to influential American intellectuals in the 1950s, and as a shuffler off of responsibilities to his first wife and family, all as mere textual details that didn't need addressing in his later career as a very respected American literary critic and academic. I disliked De Man's mandarin literary criticism even before I knew he was involved in deconstructionism--I thought his insistence on universal textual equivocation, universal lack of definitive textual commitment, and universal textual self-referentiality was part of the conservative, literature-has-no-social-bearing school of literary criticism which dominated the academy in the 1950s, and remained vital though not unchallenged there in the 1960s and early 70s. I dock Lehman's book one star for his too indiscriminately lumping De Man and deconstrutionism with other, more socially involved movements in academic thought that Lehmann also happens to dislike.