Programmatology: deconstruction, canonicity, antisemitism

Abstract This article addresses the question of antisemitism and the canon of theory by revisiting the controversy that erupted in late 1987 following the (re)discovery that the deconstructive theorist Paul de Man had written articles, some overtly antisemitic, for Belgian collaborationist publications during World War II. In particular, the article offers an interpretation of Jacques Derrida's anguished 1988 commentary, “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War.” Derrida's readings of both de Man's 1941 text “Les Juifs dan la littérature actuelle” and of the media furor surrounding de Man demonstrate how mutually reinforcing yet also mutually undermining logics of purity—absolute homogeneity and absolute heterogeneity—structure not only the aesthetic ideology of Nazism, but also the aesthetic ideology of de Man's detractors. Tracking this curious symmetry across what should be a radical political opposition allows us to understand better that the attempted decanonization of Paul de Man during the wartime journalism scandal is really about a reaction to a problem intrinsic to the very category “literature” and those institutions which canonize it.