De Man’s wartime anti-Semitic article was a failed ironic resistance, not genuine prejudice.

Evidence

For the message of this “intervention” is the following: “you garden-variety anti-Semites and intellectuals (we will leave the lofty ‘religious’ anti-Semitism of the Third Reich out of it) in fact do your own cause a disservice. You have not understood that if ‘Jewish literature’ is as dangerous and virulent as you claim it is, it follows that Aryan literature does not amount to much, and in particular lacks the stamina to resist a Jewish culture which is supposed to be, under other canonical ‘anti-Semitic’ accounts, valueless. You would therefore under these circumstances be better advised to stop talking about the Jews altogether and to cultivate your own garden.” — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 567

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reading goal’s interest in periodizing irony and self-consciousness; also echoes the interest in how irony can be catastrophically misread.
• QUESTION: De Man’s irony was ‘disastrously misunderstood’ — is this an inherent failure mode of irony itself, relevant to the waning of affect?