Abstract

This dissertation brings together readings drawn from very different cultural contexts around the concept of the singular or univocal--a force of absolute individuation beyond the relative, the specific, and the equivocal. The singular exceeds comparison. It acts without criteria, and exists in the absence of others. It generates the medium of its own environment, on the model of a creator-God. The singular is always immediate to itself, but can be written as mythical, rational, or sublime. Familiar examples include the divine substance thought by Spinoza, and the sovereignty variously asserted by Hobbes, Rousseau and Schmitt. The singular replaces the interpretation or representation of reality with participation in its production or creation. All of the writers considered here are governed by the literal imperative--to provide direct, immediate access to the real. My Introduction explores several historical variants of this imperative, drawn from the diverse contexts appropriate to the writers concerned. In each case, though to varying degrees, the singular is written as redemption from the given or habitual world of specific interests, as the refusal of relations with others, even when it is explicitly motivated--as for Deleuze, Glissant, Sarduy and Johnson--by an interest in 'difference' or 'the other.' For obvious reasons, this interest is particularly explosive in the postcolonial domain. ;Deleuze provides what is perhaps the most inventive recent philosophy of the singular as such, a univocal plane of immanence governed by one all-creative desire. Sarraute explores the folds of a universal psychic material whose reality eludes a specifically personal experience. Johnson's fiction journeys towards Oedipal and racial reconciliation through a mystical 'fusion' beyond all forms of discrimination. Dib and Glissant both begin writing in order to restore a specific subjective agency to a dispossessed community . But Glissant later affirms the dissolution of this subjectivity within an explicitly Deleuzian field of pure metamorphosis, while Dib's increasingly mystical fiction approaches the silent singularity of the One beyond being. In strongly Deleuzian style, Sarduy's major works incant a singular field of radically fluid contingency, a wholly virtual, eventually imperceptible creation; his last novels, however, confronting disorientation and disease, retreat to a subtly specific position. My conclusion develops a concept of the specific subject that is neither specified on the one hand nor -singularizing on the other--a subject sustained as the performance of its relations with others