On soul

One night in 1979 Derrida was listening to his son Pierre talking with Paul de Man; they were discussing musical instruments after a jazz concert in Chicago. Here is what Jackie recalls:

It was then I realized that Paul had never told me he was an experienced musician and that music had also been a practice with him. The word that let me know this was the word "âme" when, hearing Pierre, my son, and Paul speak with familiarity of the violin's or the bass's soul, I learned that the "soul" is the name one gives in French to the small and fragile piece of wood--always very exposed, very vulnerable--that is placed within the body of these instruments to support the bridge and assure the resonant communication of the two sounding boards.

Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (1989); this part trans. by Kevin Newmark

Always a piece on the fringe that attract Derrida's attraction. And generally speaking, soul resides on the edge of things, it seems!

De Man

Paul de Man also has his moments of bravado, soaring high into the stratosphere of stylistics. No less impressive, and probably with more dexterity, than Bloom is a passage such as:

The erasure or effacement is indeed the loss of a face, in French FIGURE. Rousseau no longer, or hardly (as the tracks are not all gone, but more than half erased), has a face. Like the protagonist in the Hardy story, he is disfigured, défiguré, defaced. And also as in the Hardy story, to be disfigured means primarily the loss of the eyes, turned to "stony orbs" or to empty holes. This trajectory from erased self-knowledge to disfiguration is the trajectory of The Triumph of Life.

"Shelley Disfigured" in Deconstruction & Criticism (1979)

Time to take up Shelley in earnest.