...actualities difference would not the most different of differences, as it were, be that which is only one? Not nothing, not two or three, and not anything else. Only one.

In Derrida's writing on thinkers and writers of the Romantic era--broadly conceived, that is, as an historical period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries rather than as movement typified by the most "Romantic" of thinkers, poets, and artists--the matter of what is singular is particularly resonant, notably in his readings of Kant and Rousseau. (1) In what follows I try to tease out what is at stake in the problematic of singularity, principally by considering certain aspects of Rousseau, in the Confessions, and Kant, in The Critique of Judgment, with attention to how Derrida addresses Rousseau in Of Grammatology as well as in the long essay "Typewriter Ribbon" and how he analyzes Kant in the "Parergon" essay, all of them works on the subject of the subject. (I follow a tangent or two not so explicitly treated by Derrida or addressed in detailed fashion, though I would like to think that even those remarks are in the spirit of Derrida and indeed my own thinking in these matters is likely more massively indebted to him than I know.)

The singular is in some sense a decidedly unphilosophical topic. Does not philosophy move in the realm of the general and the universal, the domain of logic and what is susceptible to logic, the universe of thought that is by definition or in principle able to be formulated in language and made available to all in that medium? To be sure, philosophy has to come to terms with particulars but does it not tend to operate in a mode that resolves those particulars, as in the natural sciences, into some higher or more inclusive category or class? The sheer particular or the sheer singular, if there is such a thing, could be said to be that which most successfully resists philosophical discourse--and it resists philosophy in part because it is resistant to language, period.

The fate of the singular in the history of Western philosophy surely took a significant turn when, almost all of a sudden, in Descartes, a certain philosophy turned things on their head or turned things "to" the head, one might say, shifting from the object to the subject as its starting point and its ground, in the formulation of the cogito ergo sum. (2) Descartes' path of thought, his meth-odos, led back to and then out again from the thinking subject, an itinerary recounted, not incidentally, in the strikingly autobiographical account that is The Discourse on Method. (3) And when Locke subsequently undertook to investigate the workings of the human understanding, he advocated nothing other than turning into oneself, examining in painstaking fashion what went on in one's "own breast." Empiricism, then, began at home in the solitude of the single self, the new source, in Locke and his progeny, of property and the proper. (4) Thus the so-called Copernican revolution of Kant's critical philosophy--dedicated not just to knowing but to examining the conditions of knowing and their very possibility in the human subject--had actually begun to "revolve" before him, even if Kant's protocols were more radical than his great predecessors and with him the "revolution" would be complete. So the challenge for this phase of philosophy--and we have not simply left this "phase" behind in the past--was to construct, beginning with "the subject," consequential frameworks of knowledge and thought that would have a purchase on the objective, the truth, and what could be shared, in principle, by everyone, by every one.

Let us begin by considering how singularity figures in Derrida's most general characterization of the project of the Critique of Judgment and its mechanisms:

The third Critique is not just one critique among others. Its specific object has the form of a certain type of judgment--the reflective judgment--which works (on) the example in a very singular way. The distinction between reflective and determinant judgment, a distinction that is both familiar and obscure, watches over all the internal divisions of the book. I recall it in its poorest generality. The faculty of judgment in general allows one to think the particular as contained under the general (rule, principle, law). When the generality is given first, the operation of judgment subsumes and determines the particular. It is determinant (bestimmend), it specifies, narrows down, comprehends, tightens. In the contrary hypothesis, the reflective judgment (reflektierend) has only the particular at its disposal and must climb back up to, return toward generality: the example (this is what matters to us here) is here given prior to the law and, in its very uniqueness as example, allows one to discover. Common scientific or logical discourse proceeds by determinant judgments, and the example follows in order to determine or, with a pedagogical intention, to illustrate. In art and in life, where one must, according to Kant, proceed to reflective judgments and assume (by analogy with art: we shall come to this rule further on) a finality the concept of which we do not have, the example precedes. There follows a singular historicity and (counting the simulacrum-time) a certain (regulated, relative) ficture [sic] of the theoretical ... (51, 59-60; Derrida's emphases) (5)

First things first, then, when it comes to the aesthetic in Kant's Critique of Judgment, a critique which is not, Derrida underscores, "one among others," not just any critique. It emerges, in this general account of generality and particularity ("I recall it in its poorest generality"), that this will be a singular critique not least because singularity will turn out to be the very structure of the aesthetic and in such a way as potentially to disallow the importation of a pre-existing conceptual framework appropriate to realms outside of the aesthetic. As if to emphasize hyperbolically the situation of the singular in reflective judgment, Derrida refers to it working (on) the example "in a very singular way." A thing or a situation should either be singular or not but here reflective judgment's relation to the classical status of the example (itself always in some sense singular and not) is said to be "very singular" [tres singuliere], an impossible but strangely apt formulation. In the discourse of particularity and generality in the natural sciences, at least, the particular is always, in principle, resolved into some "higher" genus or species that includes any number of examples, each of which, in principle, has exactly the same status. Yet this latter sort of example obtains in a world in which one can know the law, rule, or principle to which the example relates: a single crustacean (to take one of Kant's unexpected examples of the beautiful) can belong, unproblematically, to its larger class of crustaceans, all of which are, at a certain level of abstraction, indifferently alike, with all non-pertinent differences obliterated or suspended. One factor that makes the third Critique singular, so very singular, is that it is by no means self-evident that one can simply translate a conceptual schema appropriate to understanding nature, that of logical judgments (as in The Critique of Pure Reason) to a realm of purely singular feelings. It is a question of the conceptual schema doing justice to the matters at hand, even if those "matters" are feelings.

What might authorize Derrida's otherwise illogical formulation, "very singular," is that if Kant is correct--and even if not "correct," we should take seriously what he posits--aesthetic experience entails the experience of something singular whose possibly pertinent larger group is not given, certainly not given in advance. It is, in the first instance, only singular and the relation to a larger genus or species is, at least momentarily, an open question. Such is the structure of reflective judgment and all aesthetic judgments (of the beautiful, the sublime) are of this order. In aesthetic judgment then, for Kant, there is a certain temporal and "conceptual" priority to the example, to the single, singular judgment. "The example precedes," as Derrida stresses. And prior to the aesthetic judgment proper, there is something even more singular, if that expression can be allowed: the feeling that prompts the judgment. For prior to the priority of the aesthetic judgment lies the sheer feeling of the beautiful or the sublime or any other aesthetic experience. The judgment takes place, as it were, silently but it is "less silent" than feeling itself. Feeling is non- or pre-linguistic, in the sense that one can have any number of feelings that are not accompanied by a use of language. (6) This is the case even if our feelings are also or in part formed and informed discursively. The feeling of aesthetic experience does not--or not yet--take the form of language.

Philosophy has almost always had its problems with feelings. With the determination, in Plato, of philosophy as the discourse of logos, feeling poses something of a threat, an unruly, irrational or a-rational force resistant to its being mastered by its supposed counterpart or opposite: reason. True, even some of the most "rationalistic" of thinkers give feeling its due, such as Descartes, with his attention to the "passions" of the soul or Hume, even though few would go so far as he in describing reason as the "slave of the passions," much less in thinking that such a dynamic were somehow a proper state of affairs. (7) And if Hegel could maintain that "nothing great was ever accomplished without passion," (8) that dictum seems not nearly as characteristic of his thought than the far more often quoted slogan, "the rational is the real." Feelings resist philosophy, even if, in the wake of the development of psychoanalysis and psychology, one can sometimes discern a "logic" in those feelings, that is, even if they, in some sense, make "sense." Feelings are generally thought...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.

Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication name or publication date.

About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company analysis or best practices in managing your organization, Goliath can help you meet your business needs.

Our extensive business information databases empower business professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible, authoritative information they need to support their business goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting, company research or defining management best practices - Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.