No, I'm not writing in any Nazi collaborationist journals in my country which has been occupied. I am ambitious, but I wouldn't go that far. But I read in the recent biography of de Man (on accident when trying to track down his phenomenological influences) that his doctoral dissertation was (so he claimed) entitled "Introduction to a Phenomenology of Aesthetic Consciousness" (this is in Barish 262). Of course, the diss was "interrupted," or maybe he never began it. But still - that's essentially what I'm doing, or what I want to do. And his MA thesis was "The Bergsonian Conception of Time in the Contemporary Novel" - also delicious, also creepily similar to my conceptual preoccupations.

I would really like to read the entirety of the biography - The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish - even though I've heard that it's a hatchet job. As a reader of Heidegger and Nietzsche I'm more than used to navigating challenging ideological waters, to say the least. The ethics of biography is even more contorted...but still, I'd prefer a blank telling to a condemning slant- let de Man's misdeeds (of which there were many) stand on their own. That should be enough.