When details of the literary critic Paul de Man's anti-Semitic wartime journalism surfaced in the 1980s, enemies of deconstruction in the academy claimed that the always-controversial style of thought tended inherently towards nihilism in its tight focus on the paradoxes of language and in its relative indifference to truth claims. More recently, ‘speculative realists’ in philosophy have lambasted deconstruction and critical theory more generally with neglecting the reality of the physical world as it exists outside language and human comprehension. But (...) what if Paul de Man's own engagements with Kant and the European philosophical tradition in the latter years of his life reveal a side of deconstruction that was as concerned with the intransigence of the material world as it was with the paradoxes of language? In this article, I take the measure of recent debates in Continental philosophy around realism and language, with the aim of bringing to light a less visible side of de Man's philosophical poetics, one that has nonetheless been pursued by scholars critically concerned with the precisely philosophical resonances of de Man's bracing theories of language and materiality. (shrink)

. The survival of truth after Derrida. Cultural Values: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 127-134.

The republication of David Bloor's Knowledge and Social Imagery is evidence of the continuing interest and importance of the work but also provides the clearest evidence of the shortcomings of the enterprise. The new Afterword of Bloor's second edition addresses criticisms of the Strong Programme, but the theses which Bloor now defends are substantially weaker claims than the iconoclastic tenets of the original manifesto. Moreover, in a related strategy, Bloor asserts that criticisms made since 1975 have given him no reason (...) to modify the original text, but there are judicious alterations which are revealing. These unacknowledged alterations are documented here. Bloor's Strong Programme was founded on the diametrical opposition between his causal sociological approach and the allegedly a?causal rationalist, psychologist or ?teleological? approach. However, once it was shown that the teleological position is not the straw?man he represented it to be, Bloor's diametrical opposition left him no retreat. Just as Bloor weakens the original claims of the Strong Programme to make them appear compatible with cognitive science, so he eradicates the suggestion that the opposing teleological position was ever as absurd as he had portrayed it. The common rationale of these independent tactics leaves little question about their purpose ? and their futility. (shrink)

Through an account of Derrida's late text on Paul de Man, ‘“Le Parjure”, Perhaps’, as a deliberately indiscrete confession, this essay considers the wider question of secrecy. It examines an unsuspected institutional history of deconstruction while suggesting a role for secrecy as the necessary condition of any critical reading. Along with De Man, the essay finally revisits the claim for ‘the radical secrecy of fiction’ as a basic structure of phenomena.