The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the later Gadamer (The Frontiers of Theory)

This polemical book reveals the basic tenets of what may be called a 'poetics of singularity' in Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and the strange late essays of Hans Georg Gadamer.At issue is the at first simple, even familiar, idea that literary or poetic 'meaning' cannot be stated in terms other than its own, that a text strives towards the status of being an example, if of anything, only of itself, sole witness of what it alone projects. This issue opens a series of powerful questions concerning basic features of Western thought - about the nature of understanding, on Kierkegaard's 'singular individual' that is yet each human life in its exceptionality, of the uniqueness of historical testimony, the nature of community. The Poetics of Singularity forms an ethically compelling alternative to the currently dominant cultural/social studies paradigm in literary criticism, a neo-Darwinian understanding of art and life which is sometimes only a disguised version of American nationali "This polemical book reveals the basic tenets of what may be called a 'poetics of singularity' in Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and the strange late essays of Hans Georg Gadamer." "At issue is the at first simple, even familiar, idea that literary or poetic 'meaning' cannot be stated in terms other than its own, that a text strives towards the status of being an example, if of anything, only of itself, sole witness of what it alone projects. This issue opens a series of powerful questions concerning basic features of Western thought - about the nature of understanding, about Kierkegaard's 'singular individual' that is yet each human life in its exceptionally, the uniqueness of historical testimony, and the nature of community. The Poetics of Singularity forms an ethically compelling alternative to the currently dominant cultural/social studies paradigm in literary criticism, a neo-Darwinian understanding of art and life which is sometimes only a disguised version of American nationalism."--Jacket

This book reveals the basic tenets of what may be called a "poetics of singularity" in Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and the strange late essays of Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Clark explores a series of powerful questions concerning basic features of Western thought: the nature of understanding, Kierkegaard's "singular individual," the uniqueness of historical testimony, and the nature of community.

Features of Poetics of Singularity:• Identifies a forceful tradition of twentieth-century poetics -- which differs from received ideas of deconstruction• Makes available in English previously untranslated material by Heidegger and Gadamer and discusses relatively unknown texts by Blanchot and recent work by Derrida

Edinburgh University Press

In this study Timothy Clark focuses on the ways in which Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, among others, distinguish the poetic from literature more generally In this polemical book Timothy Clark focuses on the ways in which Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot and Hans-Georg Gadamer distinguish the poetic from literature more generally.