Singularities: Extremes of Theory in the Twentieth Century (review)

Thomas Pepper’s Singularities: Extremes of Theory in the Twentieth Century is a collection of essays about the literature and philosophy of modernity. On the surface, the book might seem like an example of the kind of comparative analysis that is today fashionably referred to as unfashionably philosophical. With chapters on Adorno, Derrida, de Man, Blanchot, and Celan, Pepper treats a group of authors who need little introduction. For scholars outside the relevant theoretical scene, this sort of study tends to be regarded as an in-house product, written for the converted in the interest of celebrating shared views. For those already initiated into the appropriate critical idiom, such a work is apt to provoke competitive impulses that leave the author little chance to prove that he is sufficiently in-the-know. On these counts, Singularities is uncommonly stoic in refusing to take refuge in the standard tricks and tropes of the scholarly fields in which it moves. Not content to couch his conclusions in the rhetoric of necessity and impossibility to which so many post-structuralist projects defer when they need to produce a punch line, Pepper takes as his target the very “pretense of objectivity” to which such projects aspire (xii). Viewed in this light, many of the most vigorous efforts to schematize and formalize questions of intention, exemplarity, or historical experience prove to have oversimplified, if not outright evaded, the subjective dimensions of the problems with which they are concerned. Singularities thus distinguishes itself not by its treatment of the dilemmas that arise when an unfaltering respect for the universality of conceptual systems collides with a profound concern for the autonomy and specificity of individual texts, but by its unwillingness to strive for a semblance of mastery over the complications and constraints it designates as unmasterable.

Pepper is not the first to have confronted the peculiar forms of indirection that plague efforts to develop a discourse about the a-thetic. His innovation lies rather in his decision to approach the non-thematic from the horizon of the thematic itself, specifically, by considering the relationship between “the reasons for the choice of a particular text or passage for reading” and the reading which follows (2). The question informs Pepper’s analyses throughout, from his account of the empirical and textual relations between Szondi and Celan to his descriptions of Derrida’s dream of a hyper-Heideggerian corpus and de Man’s reading of Proust on reading. While this line of discussion is one of the most provocative dimensions of this book, it is important to see that it exists in a close but ultimately uncertain relation with another topos, a topos that manifests itself in the vocabulary of positing and occurrence that appears with each characterization of textual “singularity.” At moments, Pepper speaks of events and the regressions therefrom—a trauma “followed hard upon by the outbreak of the conceptual or the theoretical” (118). In other instances, he writes of the “fall into the thematic” that accompanies any speech act (240). By and large, it is clear that these “figures” (for lack of a better word) are to be understood in contrast to a variety of semantic, temporal, or logical sequences, and one can without exaggeration single out the meditation on grammar in the chapter on Heidegger as one of the most original treatments we have of the structuring force of speech acts. Still, it would have been helpful to hear more about the relations between terms like event and act. By focusing on the ways in which his argument relies on concepts of structure, syntax, and code, Pepper might have been able to formulate the collisions of poetic and hermeneutic imperatives in their most general terms, thereby considerably expanding our understanding of the positional power of language.

Singularities, then, is only partly successful in its efforts to avoid defaulting to a theoretical determinism which takes the irreducible objectivity of modality for granted. More than once, the book lapses into a wryly allegorical prose...