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“... Paul deMan was born in 1919 to a high-bourgeois Antwerp family, Flemish but sympathetic to French language and culture. He studied at the Free University of Brussels, where he wrote some pieces for student magazines. When the Germans occupied Belgium in 1940 he and his wife fled, but were turned back at the Spanish frontier and resumed life in Brussels ...”

“... can’t have known that he was sketching a theory of deconstruction as it was later elaborated by Paul deMan, and he was certainly hesitant enough about his proposition. But de Man’s suggestion, in Allegories of Reading, that ‘excuses not only accuse but they carry out the ...”

“... title ‘Yale Scholar’s Articles Found in Nazi Paper’. The scholar in question was the late Paul deMan, who had written these pieces during the early Forties before leaving Belgium for America. They were published in Le Soir, a newspaper of pro-Nazi sympathies, and contain many passages that can be read as ...”

“... Middlemarch. Marcel Raymond I read first in the English translation, published in 1950, of De Baudelaire au Surréalisme. It became immediately a precious book for me, both as an evidence of the power of poetry and as evidence of a power in criticism I had not before encountered. The reading of this book and then of Georges Poulet’s first volume of ...”

“... most and the first encounter must succeed; the writing need only offer a clue to the presence. Paul deMan said enough memorable things to be quoted like scripture by the susceptible, and one of the things he said was about quotation: Citer, c’est penser. It is fair to conclude that in his last years he was a ...”

“... The death of Paul deMan 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 ...”

“... work by Charles Mauron, Jean-Pierre Richard, Robert Greer Cohn, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Paul deMan, Leo Bersani, Malcolm Bowie and others. It might seem surprising, therefore, not to find a single full-length biography published between Henri Mondor’s 1941 Vie ...”

“... forged in America, even if the theory had to await Derrida; moreover, such émigré scholars as Paul deMan began to suggest that the problem did not rest exclusively with literary studies, whose practice was in advance of its theory, but also with philosophy, whose theory tended to avoid reflection on its own ...”

“... tells the story of a soldier who returns from the war, only to find his wife living with another man. His grandparents publish novels – ‘Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment’ – which they forbid him to read. He reads this one on the back of sheafs of paper he is using for his schoolwork. Once again, reading has the thrill of ...”

“... Just a few years ago, Derrida’s work was introduced into the American academy by Professor Paul deMan; it was then taken up by his students and colleagues; and for the past five years it has been at the centre of academic literary debate. Intellectual culture thrives upon debate. Although opponents of ...”

“... thanks largely to the posthumous revelations about the Belgian-American literary theorist Paul deMan. But what about the ordinary people of the Low Countries? Hugo Claus’s The Sorrow of Belgium, a novel first published in Holland in 1983, presents a world in which collaboration with the Nazis is made to seem ...”

“... had fallen into, Alice Kaplan finds herself using a French expression – ‘Il n’y avait pas de suite dans ses idées’; and, properly alerted by the intrusion of a gallicism into her English thought-stream, puzzles over the reason for it: ‘I wonder why I switch like that – why I suddenly need to think in French. It’s not like my grandmother’s ...”

“... way touch gets under the guard of consciousness in such stories as ‘You Touched Me’ and ‘The Man who Died’ (a happily blasphemous tale about the sexual awakening of Christ), but in his later poetry he elevated touch over thought and eccentrically concluded that ‘Once men touch one another, then the modern industrial form of machine civilisation will ...”

“... friends and (often) colleagues of his. They are, in addition to the five I have just mentioned, Paul deMan, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie Benoist, Edmond Jabès, Joseph Riddel, Michel Servière, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman and Emmanuel Levinas. Six of the pieces are published here in English for the first time. The ...”

“... irrepressible seducer; a critic of dogma who couldn’t bring himself to admit his own errors; a man who loathed tribalism but was so thin-skinned and so in need of adoration that he ended up leading his own academic tribe.Derrida’s ancestors were Sephardic Jews from Spain who fled to Algeria during the Inquisition; they spoke Ladino, Hebrew and ...”