Jacques Derrida offers his recent commentary on the early career of Paul de Man as an urgent intervention in a discussion he fears is going awry. The most pressing danger he sees in the recent revelations is that they have played into the hands of de Man’s antagonists, who are now ready to denounce the whole of his career and even deconstruction itself. Against such indiscriminate critiques Derrida hurls the epithet: totalitarian. He is attempting to reseize the initiative in the (...) discussion and to reset the terms of the debate. His agenda extends across historical, theoretical, and political questions.He wants to affirm that a radical, indeed absolute break separates the later from the earlier de Man. He also wants to show that the young de man, however firmly committed to fascist ideology and however much an accomplice of the Nazis occupying Belgium, at the same time regularly distanced himself from that ideology and even undermined its meanings. Moreover, Derrida boldly takes up the challenge that these revelations have cast on the intellectual movement he and de Man have shaped. Can deconstruction come to grips with the political and intellectual history of its own leading American proponent? And can deconstruction in the process make a distinctive contribution to the understanding of fascism and intellectuals’ participation in it? John Brenkman is associate professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Culture and Domination . Jules David Law is assistant professor of English at Northwestern University. He is currently working on a book-length study of the metaphors of surface, depth, and reflection in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British prose. (shrink)

Major psychoanalytic thinkers from Freud to Ricoeur to Lacan considered the Oedipus complex the key to explaining the human psyche and human sexuality, even culture itself. But, in fact, they were merely theorizing males. In this title, originally published in 1993, the author reassesses the benchmark concepts of Freudian thought, building on feminist criticisms of psychoanalysis and the new history of sexuality. The psychoanalytic questions become political questions: How do the norms of heterosexuality and masculinity themselves emerge within modern society (...) and culture? How do the institutions of compulsory heterosexuality and modern patriarchy shape identity and desire? What make heterosexuality compulsory in our society? Brenkman argues that the larger social world is part and parcel of the Oedipus complex. He challenges psychoanalysis to reinvent its cultural project, as a therapeutics and an ethics, by recovering the moral-political dimension in its approach to family, sexuality and gender. Straight Male Modern casts a new light on psychoanalysis’s contribution to modern life, revealing the richness of the Freudian tradition’s encounter with modern politics and culture, and the poverty of its response. (shrink)