Paul de Man (; Dutch: [də mɑn]; December 6, 1919 – December 21, 1983), born Paul Adolph Michel Deman, was a Belgian-born American literary critic and literary theorist. He was known particularly for his importation of German and French philosophical approaches into Anglo-American literary studies and critical theory. Along with Jacques Derrida, he was part of an influential critical movement that went beyond traditional interpretation of literary texts to reflect on the epistemological difficulties inherent in any textual, literary, or critical activity. This approach aroused considerable opposition, which de Man attributed to "resistance" inherent in the difficult enterprise of literary interpretation itself.
After his death, de Man became a subject of further controversy when his history of writing pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish propaganda for the wartime edition of Le Soir, a major Belgian newspaper during German occupation, came to light.
Paul de Man was born to a family of artisans of nineteenth-century Belgium and by the time of his birth, his family was prominent among the new bourgeoisie in Antwerp. He was the son of Robert de Man, a manufacturer and Magdalena de Braey. His maternal great-grandfather was the noted Flemish poet Jan Van Beers, and the family spoke French at home. His uncle Henri de Man (Dutch: Hendrik) was a famous socialist theorist and politician, who became a Nazi-collaborator during World War II. He played an important part in the decisions made by De Man during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. Paul's father, Robert ("Bob") de Man, was a moderately successful businessman whose firm manufactured X-ray equipment. De Man's father and his mother, Madeleine, who were first cousins, married over the family's opposition. The marriage proved unhappy.
De Man's early life was difficult and shadowed by tragedy. His mother Madeleine's first pregnancy with her oldest son Hendrik ("Rik," b. 1915) coincided with the intense German bombings of World War I and strained her physical and mental health. The stillbirth of a daughter two years later pushed her into intermittent but lifelong suicidal depression. She was psychologically fragile and had to be watched. The family walked on eggshells and "Bob" de Man found solace with other women. In contrast to Rik, who was backward and a failure in school, Paul dealt with his difficult home life by becoming a brilliant student and accomplished athlete. He was enrolled in the Dutch-speaking cohort of boys admitted to the prestigious and highly competitive Royal Athenaeum of Antwerp. There, he followed his father's career path in choosing to study science and engineering, consistently receiving top marks in all subjects and graduating at the top of his class. He took no courses in literature or philosophy but developed a strong extracurricular interest in both as well as in religious mysticism. In 1936, his brother Rik de Man was killed at the age of 21 when his bicycle was struck by a train at a railroad crossing. The following year, it was Paul, then seventeen, who discovered the body of their mother, who had hanged herself a month before the anniversary of Rik's death.
That fall Paul enrolled in the Free University of Brussels. He wrote for student magazines and continued to take courses in science and engineering. For stability he turned to his uncle Henri as a patron and surrogate emotional father, later on several occasions telling people Henri was his real father and his real father was his uncle. He fathered a son with Romanian-born Anaïde Baraghian, the wife of his good friend, Gilbert Jaeger. They lived in a ménage à trois until August 1942, when Baraghian left her husband. Paul married her in 1944, and the couple had two more sons together.
De Man, Baraghian and Jaeger fled to the south of France near the Spanish border when the Nazis occupied Belgium in 1940. Henri, who by then was a self-avowed fascist, welcomed the Nazi invaders, whom he saw as essential for instituting his brand of socialism. For a year, Henri de Man was appointed as de facto puppet Prime Minister of Belgium under the Nazis. Some believed that he used his influence to secure his nephew a position as an occasional cultural critic for Le Soir, the influential Belgian French-language newspaper. After contributing an essay, "The Jews in Present-Day Literature", to Le Soir volé's notorious antisemitic attack of March 4, 1941, de Man became its official book reviewer and a cultural critic. Later he contributed to the Flemish daily Het Vlaamsche Land; both publications were vehemently antisemitic when under Nazi control. As a cultural critic, de Man would contribute hundreds of articles and reviews to these publications. His writings supported the Germanic ideology and the triumph of Germany in the war, while never referring directly to Hitler himself.
Holding three different jobs, de Man became very highly paid, but he lost all three between November 1942 and April 1943, failures that resulted from a combination of losing a coup he had launched against one employer and his own incompetence as a businessman at another. After this, de Man went into hiding; the Belgian Resistance had now begun assassinating prominent Belgian pro-Nazis. He had lost his protection in late 1942, when Henri, mistrusted by his collaborators on the right and himself marked for death as a traitor by the Belgian Resistance, went into exile.
De Man spent the rest of the war in seclusion reading American and French literature and philosophy and organizing a translation into Dutch of Moby Dick by Herman Melville, which he published in 1945. He would be interrogated by prosecutor Roger Vinçotte, but not charged after the war. Henri de Man was tried and convicted in absentia for treason; he died in Switzerland in 1953, after crashing his car into an oncoming train, an accident that was almost certainly a suicide.
In 1948, de Man left Belgium and emigrated to New York City. He had fled as an exile to avoid what became two trials for criminal and financial misdeeds (thefts of money from investors in a publishing company he ran) for which he was convicted in absentia to five years of imprisonment and heavy fines. Baraghian sailed with their three young sons to Argentina, where her parents had recently immigrated. De Man found work stocking books at the Doubleday Bookstore at New York City's Grand Central Station. From there he wrote to his friend Georges Bataille, a French philosopher, and through him, he met Dwight Macdonald, a key figure on the New York intellectual and literary scene. At Macdonald's apartment, de Man met the celebrated novelist Mary McCarthy. McCarthy recommended de Man to her friend Artine Artinian, a professor of French at Bard College, as a temporary replacement while Artinian spent the academic year 1949–50 in France as a Fulbright fellow.
De Man was to teach Mr. Artinian's courses, advise Mr. Artinian's advisees, and move into Mr. Artinian's house. By December , de Man had married one of the advisees, a French major named Patricia Kelley, and when the first Mrs. de Man turned up with their three young boys, Hendrik, Robert, and Marc, in the spring of 1950, Patricia de Man [sic] was pregnant.
De Man persuaded the devastated Baraghian to accept a sum of money, agree to a divorce, and return to Argentina. She, however, surprised him when she left the eldest boy with him, while he surprised her when his first check proved worthless. The boy was raised by Kelley's parents while she took the younger ones back to Argentina with a promise of child support that de Man was never to honor.
A heavily fictionalized account of this period of de Man's life is the basis of Henri Thomas's 1964 novel Le Parjure (The Perjurer). His life also provides the basis for Bernhard Schlink's 2006 novel, translated as "Homecoming". De Man married Kelley a first time in June 1950, but did not tell her that he had not actually gotten a divorce and that the marriage was bigamous. They underwent a second marriage ceremony in August 1960, when his divorce from Baraghian was finalized, and later had a third ceremony in Ithaca. In addition to their son, Michael, born while the couple was at Bard College, they had a daughter, Patsy. The couple remained together until de Man's death, aged 64, in New Haven, Connecticut.