Thinking Singularity with Immanuel Kant and Paul de Man:
Aesthetics, Epistemology, History and Politics

Notes

¹ Rodolphe Gasché, in his The Idea of Form: Reading Kant's Aesthetics. Interestingly invokes the idea of the "pre-cognitive" in context.
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² Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology. (This work will thereafter be cited as AI).
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³ Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment. (This work will thereafter be cited as CJ).
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⁴ I translate Wohlgefallen as "feeling of liking," imperfectly but, I think, less inaccurately than Pluhar's "liking."
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⁵ Jacques Derrida's "Parergon" and "Economimesis" come to mind as possible exceptions, but they do not strictly offer readings of the beautiful either.
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⁶ One could also speak of the proto-cognitive or, along the lines of Gasché's discussion in The Idea of Form, of pre-cognitive processes involved in this model. The epistemological model to be developed in this article and a reading of Kant it implies are, however, different from Gasché's scheme, in part by virtue of bringing Kant and de Man together. It is peculiar that Gasché does not discuss de Man's work, which he discusses at length in his excellent The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man to bear on his reading of Kant. But then, Gasché's reading of de Man, too, diverges from the one to be offered here. Gasché, however, rightly relates all three of Kant's Critiques through the epistemological problematic of the third Critique, which de Man does as well, along the lines of (nonclassical) allegorical epistemology, as discussed here.
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⁷ One can formulate a parallel proposition for the sublime, although in the case of the sublime according to Kant there would be no corresponding object.
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⁸ I refer, in particular, to his discussions in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, and The Differend: Phrases in Dispute although the problematic persists throughout his work on postmodernity. Lyotard juxtaposes Kant and Hegel in this context, in my view, not altogether justifiably. By contrast, de Man cogently relates Kant and Hegel along these lines, without, however, equating them.
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⁹ A possibly nonclassical view of the ultimate constitution of nature, such as that found in quantum theory, would not change this status of the body, since it is still thinkable, even if not knowable, in these nonclassical terms—unless we consider the body as a quantum system and thus make it nonclassically unthinkable at the ultimate level. In this case, Kant's requirements are still fulfilled at different levels of theory, insofar as concerns the logical structure of our arguments differently or our practical justifications for such arguments, including specifically that for the possibility or necessity of nonclassicality. In a different register, de Man, via his reading of Kant, approaches the nonclassical epistemology of the body and, interactively, language, by dismembering or disfiguring both. For the discussion of the nonclassical epistemology of quantum theory, I permit myself to refer to Arkady Plotnitsky, The Knowable and the Unknowable: Nonclassical Theory, Modern Science, and the "Two Cultures" and, in the context of de Man, "Algebra and Allegory: Nonclassical Epistemology, Quantum Theory and the Work of Paul de Man."
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¹⁰ See, for example, Sigmund Freud, "The Unconscious," General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology and Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
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¹¹ The epistemology becomes classical once such exclusion takes place. This difficulty is one of Derrida's main concerns in "Economimesis."
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¹² This edition omits the first passage just cited, which is found in Georges Bataille, "Conférences sur le Non-Savoir."
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¹³ On the relationships between this type of (nonclassical) epistemological situation and Heidegger's concept of Being [Sein], on the one hand, and Derrida's own epistemology, on the other, see Derrida's analysis in Of Grammatology, and Margins of Philosophy.
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¹⁴ This concept of singularity has affinities (although is not equivalent) to that of Gilles Deleuze, introduced by him at the outset of Difference and Repetition and pursued throughout his work. He contrasts the "singular," as that which outside law (physical, moral, or other) and, thus, outside the general, and is subject to "repetition" in his special sense of the term, to the "particular," which is part of the general and subject to law. This scheme, including Deleuze's concept of repetition, could be related to de Man's argument to be discussed here (also via Hegel and, on repetition, Kierkegaard). Deleuze comes closest to the present conception of singularity in his analysis of a kind of phenomenology of monadological perceptions in Leibniz in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.
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¹⁵ As I have indicated, one can also encounter situations that are mixed, that is, organized partly classically and partly nonclassically, and the present analysis could be easily adjusted to accommodate such mixed cases.
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¹⁶ Under these conditions the very category of consensus becomes problematic. Although differently from the way in which Lyotard argues the case in his debate with Jürgen Habermas, from this perspective, too, the post-Enlightenment ideas and ideals of democracy and consensus may be in conflict rather than, as Habermas wants to argue, in accord with each other.
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¹⁷ De Man's reading of Hegel proceeds along similar lines rather than, as is more common, strictly along the lines of a continuous model of history.
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¹⁸ For this and related or similar reasons, "event" becomes a crucial concept in recent theoretical discussion in and following de Man, Deleuze, and Derrida.
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¹⁹ Both de Man's and Derrida's readings of, and exchanges on, Rousseau involve these problematics as well.
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²⁰ The original passage occurs in Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters. (Translation is modified by de Man).
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²¹ Cf. also de Man's reading of Keats's The Fall of Hyperion in "The Resistance to Theory," The Resistance to Theory.
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²² It is difficult to be certain given the complexities of the concept and the very signifier of "correspondence" in de Man. Cf. Andrzej Warminski's analysis of de Man's reading of Baudelaire's "Correspondances" in "As Poets Do It," in Cohen, et al, Material Events, cited earlier. It would also be instructive to follow de Man's earlier approach to "correspondences" of that type in "The Rhetoric of Temporality."
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²³ Cf. also de Man's analysis of Nietzsche and Rousseau in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust and in "The Epistemology of Metaphor."
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²⁴ Derrida closes with this passage his analysis of the third Critique in "Parergon" (The Truth in Painting 147).
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²⁵ The sublime, though, is not infinite either, only almost infinite, as Derrida notes in the same section, "The Colossal," in "Parergon" (The Truth in Painting, 119-47).
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