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Jeffrey Mehlman's Genealogies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France recapitulates not only a decade of essays, but to some extent Mehlman's considerable scholarly career. With its new introduction, previously unpublished essays, and anthologization of published ones, Genealogies not only returns to those topics Mehlman has engaged elsewhere (autobiography, history, psychoanalysis, literary politics, French anti-Semitism), it brings them into dialogue and into debate with one another.
The collection also includes substantial and important readings of such relatively minor figures as Paul Morand, Benoist-Méchin, and Charles Mauron, among many others. Mehlman's willingness to consider—indeed his insistence upon considering—minor, forgotten, even infamous authors and texts in order to enrich and agitate our sense of literary history is perhaps his work's greatest strength. More often than not, such marginalia are held to reveal an ugly truth about the more canonical element with which they are juxtaposed. In that sense, Mehlman's method, despite its psychoanalytic and New Historicist elements, represents a sort of deconstruction of “deconstruction in the age of academic respectibility,” demonstrating the necessity and internality of what, according to Mehlman, deconstructive discourse has treated as accidental and external—namely, the personal and political sins of its practicioners and intellectual forefathers.
As a sort of return to the Blanchot affair, its theorization, and its politics, Mehlman's book is a polemical but complex source of considerable contemporary significance. Mehlman frequently reminds us of his historically important role in this, “the first of several [controversies] I was to be involved in” (6). His role in “the de Man affair” was less central but no less vigilent, particulary when it came to Derrida's responses to these scandals. Mehlman seems to ironize his own vehemence when