Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man – Letters, 1968–1983

Paul de Man (1919-83) was the Sterling Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is the author of some of the most important works of literary theory and deconstruction including Blindness and Insight, Allegories of Reading, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, and Aesthetic Ideology. Patricia de Man is daughter of Paul and Patricia de Man. She undertook graduate work at Yale University and was a rare book librarian at the Yale Centre for British Art. She has taught at Yale and Bennington College and is now an independent scholar and translator. Martin McQuillan is a multi-award-winning filmmaker, journalist and writer. He is the editor of several texts by Paul de Man, including The Post-Romantic Predicament and The Paul de Man Notebooks. He teaches in the Sound/Image Cinema Lab at Falmouth University. Kevin Newmark teaches literature and literary theory at Boston College. Between 1978 and 1984, he was a graduate student at Yale University, where he studied with both Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. Marc Redfield is Florence Pirce Grant University Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Professor of German at Brown University. His most recent book is Shibboleth: Judges, Derrida, Celan (2021). He is completing a book titled Homeless Hospitality: Kant, Kafka, Lispector. Bruno Penteado is Assistant Professor of French at Texas Tech University. He has published on the intersections of continental philosophy and modern French literature Sonja Stojanovic is Associate Professor of French at Texas Tech University, USA. She is the author of Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely through Contemporary Fiction in French (2023).

The letters of Derrida and de Man are undramatic yet compelling, imaginatively intriguing and strangely moving. They provide a fresh and intimate perspective on an important period of postwar intellectual history. For anyone interested in the history of deconstruction or poststructuralism, or the work of Derrida and de Man, this volume will be indispensable.

• Series Editor’s PrefaceAcknowledgementsNotes on Editors and TranslatorsIntroduction: 'Ineffaceable Friendship'CorrespondenceAppendixNotes on LettersIndex