Legacies of Paul de Man

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

Thinking Singularity with Immanuel Kant and Paul de Man: Aesthetics, Epistemology, History, and Politics Arkady Plotnitsky Proceeding from Immanuel Kant’s third Critique, The Critique of Judgment , and Paul de Man’s reading of Kant, this essay will discuss certain specific concepts, first, of singularity, and, second, of the relationship between the individual and the collective, based on this concept of singularity . While emerging from Kant’s analysis of aesthetics, this conceptuality entails a radical form of epistemology and, correlatively, a radical form of historicity. This conceptual and epistemological configuration, however, also translates into a political concept of community or, as I shall call it here, ‘‘parliamentarity.’’ The genealogy of the conceptuality and epistemology in question may itself be in part political, insofar as the actual practice of politics may have served, deliberately or not, as one of the models of this epistemology. On the other hand, Kant’s analysis of the aesthetic expressly offers a model for this conceptuality and epistemology, cognition in general, or historicity, and establishes the aesthetic (in his sense) as the condition of possibility of their emergence and functioning in contexts other than the aesthetic.1 As a result, aesthetics, epistemology, history, and politics become interconnected , and each becomes in turn conceptually refigured through these interconnections. Indeed, the interpenetration among these determinations is irreducible: once we enter any of the domains thus designated, we 129 130 Arkady Plotnitsky can bypass others only provisionally or conditionally, but not in principle. One might say that each corresponding situation involves a ‘‘detour’’ through others as part of its emergence. Furthermore, these interconnections inevitably, and ultimately uncontainably, extend to other determinations , such as ethical, or new definitions and denominations, proliferating within a given domain, for example, to different varieties and subspecies of the aesthetic. This field, however, involves not only conjunctions and interactions, but also disjunctions and heterogeneities, and cannot be seen as fully uni- fiable or containable by means of a synthesis, dialectical or other. As such, it is governed in part by an epistemology analogous (although not identical ) to the epistemology of singularity and of the relationships between the individual and the collective to be considered here. As de Man’s reading of both Kant and Hegel makes apparent, such disjunctions often appear at the very point of an attempted synthesis. According to de Man: ‘‘We would have to conclude that Hegel’s philosophy, which, like his Aesthetics, is a philosophy of history (and of aesthetics) as well as a history of philosophy (and of aesthetics)—and the Hegelian corpus indeed contains texts that bear these two symmetrical titles—is in fact an allegory of the disjunction between philosophy and history.’’2 An argument of this type would apply to Kant’s philosophy as well, just as many key points (including those to be discussed here) of de Man’s reading of Kant to Hegel’s.3 Kantian or, conversely, Hegelian, specificity remains, of course, important. My main concern here, however, is a certain fundamental underlying problematic set into operation by Kant’s philosophy, especially in the third Critique, and brought out by de Man’s reading of Kant. Singularity, Universality, and Freedom in the Judgment of Taste I take as my point of departure paragraph 5 of the third Critique, in ‘‘Analytic of the Beautiful,’’ where Kant distinguishes between ‘‘the agreeable or merely likable [das Angenehme], the beautiful [das Schone], and the good [das Gute].’’4 The section immediately precedes and leads to Kant’s ‘‘Explication of the Beautiful,’’ as ‘‘inferred from the First Moment,’’ that of ‘‘a Judgment of Taste, As to Its Quality,’’ which extends from Kant’s ‘‘definition of taste’’ as ‘‘the ability to judge the beautiful.’’5 ‘‘Taste,’’ Kant infers, ‘‘is the ability to judge an object, or a way of presenting it, by means of liking or disliking devoid of all interest. The object of such a liking is called beautiful.’’6 These are familiar commonplaces of the third Critique. Or 131 Thinking Singularity with Kant and de Man rather, these statements are made into commonplaces by abstracting them from the arguments from which they are inferred as conclusions and thus depriving them of their complexity and their essentially un-commonplacelike and even (philosophically) idiosyncratic character. They can only be given an adequate reading if the richness of the conceptual and textual fabric of Kant’s elaborations is brought to bear on Kant...