ABSTRACT
In an earlier chapter (‘The most interesting thing in the world’), I suggested that ‘good’ literary criticism always involves a certain inhabiting of the literary. This critical inhabiting entails an attempt to sign or countersign, attest to or vouch for what is distinctive and provoking about the literary text that is being read. If the literary work is an act (and this is a consistent affirmation in Derrida’s writings), so too is the work of literary criticism. As Derrida puts it: ‘“Good” literary criticism, the only worthwhile kind, implies an act, a literary signature or counter-signature, an inventive experience of language, in language, an inscription of the act of reading in the field of the text that is read’ (TSICL 52). It is a matter of the singular. In the following pages I will focus on the importance of the notion of the singular in Derrida’s work, in an attempt to clarify a cluster of related issues: the signature, the idiom, autobiography and the secret.
