Paul de Man

His mother Madeleine's first pregnancy with her oldest son Hendrik ("Rik," b. 1915) coincided with the intense German bombings of World War I and strained her physical and mental health.

The stillbirth of a daughter two years later pushed her into intermittent but lifelong suicidal depression.

She was psychologically fragile and had to be watched.

The family walked on eggshells and "Bob" de Man found solace with other women.

In contrast to Rik, who was backward and a failure in school, Paul dealt with his difficult home life by becoming a brilliant student and accomplished athlete.

He was enrolled in the Dutch-speaking cohort of boys admitted to the prestigious and highly competitive Royal Athenaeum of Antwerp.

There, he followed his father's career path in choosing to study science and engineering, consistently receiving top marks in all subjects and graduating at the top of his class.

He took no courses in literature or philosophy but developed a strong extracurricular interest in both as well as in religious mysticism.

Paul de Man (December 6, 1919 – December 21, 1983), born Paul Adolph Michel Deman, was a Belgian-born literary critic and literary theorist.

He was known particularly for his importation of German and French philosophical approaches into Anglo-American literary studies and critical theory.

Along with Jacques Derrida, he was part of an influential critical movement that went beyond traditional interpretation of literary texts to reflect on the epistemological difficulties inherent in any textual, literary, or critical activity.

This approach aroused considerable opposition, which de Man attributed to "resistance" inherent in the difficult enterprise of literary interpretation itself.

After his death, de Man became a subject of further controversy when his history of writing pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish propaganda for the wartime edition of Le Soir, a major Belgian newspaper during German occupation, came to light.

He began his teaching career in the United States at Bard College where he taught French literature.

In 1936, his brother Rik de Man was killed at the age of 21 when his bicycle was struck by a train at a railroad crossing.

The following year, it was Paul, then seventeen, who discovered the body of their mother, who had hanged herself a month before the anniversary of Rik's death.

That fall Paul enrolled in the Free University of Brussels.

He wrote for student magazines and continued to take courses in science and engineering.

For stability he turned to his uncle Henri as a patron and surrogate emotional father, later on several occasions telling people Henri was his real father and his real father was his uncle.

He fathered a son with Romanian-born Anaïde Baraghian, the wife of his good friend, Gilbert Jaeger.

De Man, Baraghian and Jaeger fled to the south of France near the Spanish border when the Nazis occupied Belgium in 1940.

Henri, who by then was a self-avowed fascist, welcomed the Nazi invaders, whom he saw as essential for instituting his brand of socialism.

For a year, Henri de Man was appointed as de facto puppet Prime Minister of Belgium under the Nazis.

They lived in a ménage à trois until August 1942, when Baraghian left her husband.

Paul married her in 1944, and the couple had two more sons together.

He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1960, then taught at Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Zurich.

He joined the faculty in French and Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he was considered part of the Yale School of Deconstruction.

At the time of his death from cancer, he was Sterling Professor of the Humanities and chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale.

De Man oversaw the dissertations of Gayatri Spivak (at Cornell), Barbara Johnson (at Yale), Samuel Weber (at Cornell), and many other noted scholars.

After his death, a researcher uncovered some two hundred previously unknown articles which de Man had written in his early twenties for Belgian collaborationist newspapers during World War II, some of them implicitly and two explicitly anti-Semitic.

These, in combination with revelations about his domestic life and financial history, caused a scandal and provoked a reconsideration of his life and work.

Paul de Man was born to a family of artisans of nineteenth-century Belgium and by the time of his birth, his family was prominent among the new bourgeoisie in Antwerp.

He was the son of Robert de Man, a manufacturer and Magdalena de Braey.

His maternal great-grandfather was the noted Flemish poet Jan Van Beers, and the family spoke French at home.

His uncle Henri de Man (Dutch: Hendrik) was a famous socialist theorist and politician, who became a Nazi-collaborator during World War II.

He played an important part in the decisions made by De Man during the Nazi occupation of Belgium.

Paul's father, Robert ("Bob") de Man, was a moderately successful businessman whose firm manufactured X-ray equipment.

De Man's father and his mother, Madeleine, who were first cousins, married over the family's opposition.

The marriage proved unhappy.

De Man's early life was difficult and shadowed by tragedy.