The Pardon of the Disaster

“What else is there to say?”

Jeffrey Mehlman’s The Legacies of Anti-semitism in France (1983) and his subsequent essay “Pour Saint-Beuve”(1996) are works of accusation. Emerging in the aftermath of a cultural crisis in which Paul de Man’s articles for Le Soir and Martin Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism apparently left in jeopardy the claims of deconstruction, Mehlman’s works (like several others, by Steven Ungar and Michael Holland in particular) scrutinize Maurice Blanchot’s wartime journalism. Blanchot, as Mehlman writes in “Pour Saint-Beuve,” “was about fifteen years Paul de Man’s senior, [and] had a job during the war not all that different from the one Paul de Man had accepted with Le Soir in Brussels” (215). The implication of this analogy is clear. While de Man’s articles for Le Soir have been recognized to be juvenilia – influenced by family attachments as much as political attachments, even they have prompted a re-evaluation of de Man’s intellectual project, a critique of his teaching style, and in most cases condemnation of his choice to avoid publicly claiming his responsibility for these articles.2 Should we not, Mehlman implies, put Blanchot to the same test? Blanchot wrote the articles under consideration not as a nineteen-year-old, but as an adult in his 30s, and for this reason, if for no other, he must be recognized as the law would recognize him: a guilty adult subject. But what would such a guilt imply? What kind of outcome do these accusations serve?