Synopses & Reviews
In 2014, the first three volumes of Heidegger’s
Black Notebooks—the personal and philosophical notebooks that he kept during the war years
—were published in Germany. These notebooks provide the first textual evidence of anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s philosophy, not simply in passing remarks, but as incorporated into his philosophical and political thinking itself. In
Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, Peter Trawny, the editor of those notebooks, offers the first evaluation of Heidegger’s philosophical project in light of the
Black Notebooks.
While Heidegger’s affiliation with National Socialism is well known, the anti-Semitic dimension of that engagement could not be fully told until now. Trawny traces Heidegger’s development of a grand “narrative” of the history of being, the “being-historical thinking” at the center of Heidegger’s work after Being and Time. Two of the protagonists of this narrative are well known to Heidegger’s readers: the Greeks and the Germans. The world-historical antagonist of this narrative, however, has remained hitherto undisclosed: the Jews, or, more specifically, “world Judaism.” As Trawny shows, world Judaism emerges as a racialized, destructive, and technological threat to the German homeland, indeed, to any homeland whatsoever. Trawny pinpoints recurrent, anti-Semitic themes in the Notebooks, including Heidegger’s adoption of crude cultural stereotypes, his assigning of racial reasons to philosophical decisions (even undermining his Jewish teacher, Edmund Husserl), his endorsement of a Jewish “world conspiracy,” and his first published remarks on the extermination camps and gas chambers (under the troubling aegis of a Jewish “self-annihilation”). Trawny concludes with a thoughtful meditation on how Heidegger’s achievements might still be valued despite these horrifying facets. Unflinching and systematic, this is one of the most important assessments of one of the most important philosophers in our history.
Review
"In this stunning biography...readers will marvel at how successfully de Man hid his misdeeds behind the luminous persona of a brilliant critical theorist, repeatedly using the plausibility of past lies to leverage yet larger new prevarications...An astonishing exposé." New York Times Book Review
Review
"Evelyn Barish's revelatory and compulsively readable biography proves that Paul de Man, once considered America's foremost literary theorist, had been an active Nazi collaborator in Belgium during the war and was also a convicted embezzler, a bigamist, and a narcissist who stared at himself in the mirror for hours…Barish's gripping book is everything de Man's writing is not; it sticks to real facts gained through painstaking research, facts that disperse nebulous theorizing like a nail puncturing a balloon." Booklist, starred review
Review
"A rigorously researched probe into a life of systematic duplicity and into the mystery of a strangely flawed, charismatic personality. Evelyn Barish's book is in no sense a polemic; her accounting of Paul de Man's character and career is evenhanded in its judgments and cumulatively devastating." David S. Reynolds, author of < em=""> Walt Whitman's America < m=""> and < em=""> Beneath the American Renaissance < m="">
Review
"Evelyn Barish tells us exactly why Paul de Man, a pioneer of Theory, should have favoured notions about the impossibility of an objective narrative or a fixed personality. Viewed objectively, the narrative of his own life was the story of a cheat and a liar; and he made up his personality as he went along. Yet he fooled one high-level American college after another into treating him as a genius. This is one of the most daunting portraits of a literary charlatan since A.J.A. Symons wrote the life of Baron Corvo." Bryce Christensen Booklist, starred review
Review
"Evelyn Barish's necessary, illuminating, and unstoppably addictive biography goads us to ask whether the success of charm and genuine brilliance ought eventually to override one's revulsion at systematic deceit. And beyond this: was de Man's acclaimed theory cut to fit the machinations of the man? And further still: how can an entire generation of the professoriat have fallen into unthinking adulation of a brazen rascal?" Clive James, author of Cultural Amnesia
Review
"A page-turner, is a brilliant piece of writing--dispassionate in its analysis, moving in its vision of a tortured man." Cynthia Ozick, author of Foreign Bodies
Review
"A riveting biography of master confidence man Paul de Man (1919-1983), manipulator of the facts and influential literary instructor--a character both preposterous and irresistible.... An extraordinary story of a complex personality presented with a wise dose of irony and respect." Diane Jacobs, author of Dear Abigail: The Intimate Lives and Revolutionary Ideas of Abigail Adams and Her Two Remarkable Sister
Review
"Evelyn Barish's profoundly researched and vividly written biography of Paul de Man is stunning. It tells us much about ourselves, our contradictory culture, and that mysterious flight from facts into the distractions of deconstruction. Everybody interested in our ongoing political divides
Review
" revives the man and his fall. This time, we get a story of the professor not just as a young collaborator, but as a scheming careerist, an embezzler and forger who fled Belgium in order to avoid prison, a bigamist who abandoned his first three children, a deadbeat who left many rents and hotel bills unpaid, a liar who wormed his way into Harvard by falsifying records, a cynic who used people shamelessly... Compelling... Picaresque." Susan Rubin Suleiman
Synopsis
An explosive biography, decades in the making, reveals the secret past of the academic who held an entire generation in his thrall.
Synopsis
Thirty years after his death in 1983, Yale University professor Paul de Man remains a haunting figure. The Nazi collaborator and chameleon-like intellectual created with Deconstruction a literary movement so pervasive that it threatened to topple the very foundation of literature and history itself. The revelation in 1988 that de Man had written a collaborationist and anti-Semitic article led to his intellectual downfall, yet biographer Evelyn Barish apprehended that nothing appeared to contextualize the life he assiduously sought to conceal. Relying on archival research and hundreds of interviews, Barish evokes figures such as Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Jacques Derrida. Reexamining de Man’s life, particularly in prewar Europe and his reincarnation in postwar America, she reveals, among other things, his embezzlement schemes, his lack of an undergraduate degree, and his bigamous marriage. The life of the man who despised narrative, particularly biography, finally is revealed in depth in this searching portrait of Paul de Man and his era. 8 pages of photographs
Synopsis
A landmark biography that reveals the secret past of one of the most influential academics of the twentieth century.
Synopsis
Over thirty years after his death in 1983, Paul de Man, a hugely charismatic intellectual who created with deconstruction an ideology so pervasive that it threatened to topple the very foundations of literature, remains a haunting and still largely unexamined figure. Deeply influential, de Man and his theory-driven philosophy were so dominant that his passing received front-page coverage, suggesting that a cult hero, if not intellectual rock star, had met an untimely end.
About the Author
Peter Trawny is professor of philosophy and founder and director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal in Germany. He is the author of many books and editor of Martin Heidegger’s
Black Notebooks.
Andrew J. Mitchell is associate professor of philosophy at Emory University and the author of
The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger.