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Singularities: on a motif in Derrida and Romantic thought (Kant's aesthetics, Rousseau's autobiography).(Jacques Derrida, Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau)(Critical essay)

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From: Studies in Romanticism
Date: 20070101
Author:Balfour, Ian

let thy tongue tang with arguments of state; put thyself into the trick of singularity ...--Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

CAN ONE WRITE OR THINK WHAT IS ONE AND ONLY ONE, WHAT IS MERELY single or singular. One might say that Derrida s thinking has tirelessly engaged the idea and the actualities of difference and 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 ...