The Double Life of Paul De Man
*Starred Review* When Mary McCarthy recommended the young Paul de Man for a position at Bard College in 1949, she characterized him as intelligent, cultivated, modest, and straightforward. In this stunning biography, Barish exposes a man who devoted his remarkable intelligence and cultural knowledge to constructing a reputation so deviously deceptive that it completely fooled McCarthy and many others. With its posthumous 1988 discovery, an anti-Semitic wartime article by de Man scandalized the academic world. Barish probes beyond that article, adducing evidence that de Man served as an executive in Nazi publishing, then exploited his postwar circumstances to embezzle from his own company, violate immigration laws, falsify his academic record, contract a bigamous marriage, and abandon his children. In the indictment Barish proffers, de Man also bent, even flouted, the policies of the prestigious universities where he made his degree. Readers will marvel at how successfully de Man hid his misdeeds behind the luminous persona of a brilliant critical theorist, repeatedly using the plausibility of past lies to leverage yet larger new prevarications. Barish indeed raises unsettling questions about the self-serving congruence between de Man’s egregious duplicity and his influential literary theory of deconstruction, premised on radical skepticism about the very possibility of truth. An astonishing exposé. --Bryce Christensen