UNITED STATES
Mennonite Life
Peter Dula
ISSUE 2014, VOL. 68
In 1970, Geoffrey Hartman, a young professor of literature, brought his friend Paul de Man to join him in the English department at Yale. In the ensuing years, the two of them became close colleagues in the American reception of Jacques Derrida for whom, in 1975, they arranged a recurring visiting appointment. The three became close friends and together changed the way American professors and students thought about literature. But they couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds. At the age of nine, Hartman had been in Kindertransport, the program that evacuated Jewish children from Germany to England in 1939. He didn’t see his mother again for 6 years. Derrida had to leave his school in Algiers when the quota for Jewish students was reduced and Algerian Jews lost their citizenship. De Man, it turns out, was a crassly opportunistic Nazi collaborator who wrote a series of anti-Semitic articles in the Belgian press in the ‘40s1. What does it mean that these three, with such different histories, could agree on so much about literature and philosophy?
Reading the reviews of Evelyn Barish’s new book on de Man2, I couldn’t help but think of John Howard Yoder. As de Man’s students and colleagues have struggled to come to grips with his Nazi past, so Mennonite theologians and others are now, finally, trying to learn how to think about Yoder’s violence against women. We all owe Barb Graber and Ruth Krall a great deal for refusing to let us (by which I mean myself and other Mennonite theologians who write about and teach Yoder) continue to ignore the facts of Yoder’s violence. Graber asked us to do something specific: Welcome, encourage and make efforts to include analysis of the astoundingly ironic disconnect between Yoder’s orthodoxy and his severe lack of orthopraxy.3 In what follows, thanks to Mennonite Life, I take up that invitation. I begin with de Man’s case not to imply that such a task is impossible, but to acknowledge how complex it can be. All ideas are products of a social location. But, as the de Man story shows, how they are so, is an incredibly complex question. There is no straight line of determination between life and work; there are countless crooked and tangled threads. In what follows I try to identify and follow one thread in Yoder.
While I am a theologian, deeply indebted to the work of Yoder, my teaching responsibilities tend to be for EMU’s Religious Studies curriculum. So aside from an essay in our introductory Christian ethics course and an essay in an anthropology of religion course, I have only taught Yoder at length in one class, a topics seminar on political theology in the Fall of 2011. That seminar spent one class period (out of four on Yoder) talking about Yoder’s sexual violence and if and how we should relate that to his work.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.