The relation between Derrida and de Man has always been difficult to assess. De Man, as opposed to Derrida, was initially (before Allegories of Reading) described as contributing to a “New New Criticism” by Rodolphe  Gasché, who suggested that deconstruction in the US  forgot its own broader philosophical and even political import (consider J. Hillis Miller and Jonathan Culler). On the other hand, Gasché and others (more recently Martin Hägglund) assimilated Derrida to a somewhat more conventional understanding of philosophy.  If a “New New Critical” notion of linguistic ambiguity would neutralize competing forces in a text and render it apolitical, what about the more philosophical-historical approach that many scholars have taken to Derrida? How do the competing–and also collaborating–forces in these two thinkers relate to the political, and what implications does an understanding of this dynamic have for contemporary criticism that would carry a political charge?  What are the political implications of the tension between a focus on a specific textual dimension (de Man) and Derrida’s approach to the "general text" as bound up in a broader reading of the history of philosophy? How, together and apart, do these two thinkers and their understandings of reading relate to the promises and broken promises of the political?

Paper topics may include:

—Derrida and de Man on Rousseau 

—Derrida’s account of de Man’s “materiality without materiality,” the persistence of reference in de Man, and/or de Man’s focus on the letter and aesthetic ideology. 


—Derrida’s later work (hospitality, for example) and de Man 
 

 

—de Man’s wartime writing writings and Derrida’s responses to those texts



—Derrida’s close readings

—students of both de Man and Derrida like Spivak, Butler, Barbara Johnson, and Carol Jacobs

–the renewed attention to philology and the political by Werner Hamacher, Peter Fenves, Thomas Schestag

—Derrida’s "undecidability," de Man's  "literariness," and conventional notions of textual ambiguity

—any essay that explores these questions of textual specificity vs. conceptual historical context, and the political, with or without de Man or Derrida!