To the Editors:
Roger Kimball’s response to Professor Geoffrey Hartman’s shameful defense of Paul de Man deserves the thanks of all who believe that scholarship and learning bear particular, moral responsibility (“Geoffrey Hartman Reconstructs Paul de Man,” May 1988). Hartman’s article in The New Republic hardly merits the intellectually distinguished treatment Kimball gives it. For what is at stake for Hartman is Hartman’s own professional standing and also his credibility as a person of moral authority within the Jewish world, a role he has actively pursued in the recent past.

Pretending to face the fact that Paul de Man was an anti-Semite and a Nazi in Belgium in World War II, Hartman in fact evades it, explains it away, gives excuses for it, trivializes it, and above all, obfuscates it. Hartman uses every trick of the trade to shift attention away from a fact he wishes would go away: that his teacher, colleague, and friend hated Jews and was a Nazi.

De Man and Hartman are leading exponents of a literary theory called “deconstructiontsm,” which assigns to words “indeterminate meaning.” In simple language: things mean what you say they mean. When we see how Hartman manages to explain away de Man’s Nazism, we understand the moral bankruptcy of a literary theory that denies to language all integrity.

Only a literary theory that relativizes and “contextualizes” language out of all meaning can permit Hartman the self-serving, self-indulgent luxury of separating de Man’s thought from his life. No