Paul de Man’s Proverbs of Hell

Geoffrey Hartman

The death of Paul de Man at the age of 64 deprives us of a literary critic whose influence, already immense in the United States and on the Continent, was beginning to be received in England. This influence is not linked to a large body of published work. De Man’s career started late. His studies in philosophy at the University of Brussels were interrupted by the war; after the war, he emigrated to America, taught at Bard, participated in Harvard’s Society of Fellows, took his PhD only in 1959 (his thesis on Mallarmé and Yeats still awaits full publication), and served as a teacher at Cornell, Johns Hopkins and the University of Zurich before settling at Yale in 1970. And although his earliest essays appeared in French during the 1950s (especially in Critique), they were not well-known until the Minnesota edition of Blindness and Insight (1983) incorporated some of them. Blindness and Insight was his first collection, published in 1971; a second major book, Allegories of Reading, appeared in 1980.[*]

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[*] The 1983 Blindness and Insight, reviewed by Christopher Norris in LRB, Vol. 6, No 1, is available from Methuen at £7. 50. Allegories of Reading is published by Yale at £24. 50 and £7. 95.

[†] ‘Hegel on the Sublime’ in Displacement: Derrida and After, edited by Mark Krupnick, Indiana University Press (1983).