ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I apply the ideas from Derrida's deconstructive project that I fleshed out in Chapter 2.2 to Kant's account of reflective judgment and to contemporary debates about exemplarity. First, I distinguish the epistemological account of exemplarity from the moral one, arguing that the former is more widely applicable. Next, utilizing our deconstructive approach to exemplarity, especially the fact that any clear division between a singular example and a universal exemplar is, in the end, illusory, I demonstrate that this différance structure of example-exemplars is already present in Kant's aesthetic theory. Taste and genius, it transpires, are two aspects of the same doubled faculty. In other words, the product of taste and genius is an example-exemplar of sensus communis. In contemporary debates, sensus communis is reinterpreted as the faculty that promotes singularities into exemplars: something, that is, that becomes an exemplar if it follows sensus communis. I argue, by contrast, that sensus communis should be understood as a result of the free play of our cognitive faculties. Put simply, sensus communis is not a specialized sense but rather a regulative principle. These considerations lead me to a Hegelian account of subjective free play. Sensus communis, however, is not solely a result of this free play, since an exemplar can also be fostered by social processes.
