I.D.-ology

Abstract

The thesis examines how Kant, Derrida and Blanchot commonly investigate the epistemic limits attributable to the faculty of imagination, the comprehensibility of the notion of subjective singularity and the form necessarily taken by representations of temporality as associated concerns. Kant’s understanding of the rational approach to synthetic a priori truth as an indefinitely conducted decomposing synthesis, Derrida’s understanding of written truth as inherently soliciting deconstruction and Blanchot’s understanding of truth in fictive oeuvres as instigating désuvrement are explored as similar approaches to the relations between imagination, identity and narrative. To elucidate this comparison the thesis addresses: 1.) Kant’s definition of the epistemological function of the faculty of imagination, 2.) how imagination so defined informs judgments of ‘singularity,’ 3.) how such judgments schematize knowledge as bearing an irreducibly narrative dimension and 4.) how literature and philosophy act as formally divergent yet materially co-implicating means of relating objective truth to subjective insight.