ABSTRACT
Derrida’s monograph on the poet Francis Ponge is an investigation of the relation between thing and signature. The signature, for Derrida, combines the paradoxical qualities of uniqueness and iterability, and of signification in the non-significant (one’s name has no meaning). In the history of philosophy, the non-conceptual uniqueness of each individual thing is generally placed outside thought. This leads Derrida to say that the question of thing and signature can produce a “new scientific understanding” of fetishism, particularly in Freud and Marx. To deepen what Derrida means, and to integrate it with the previous chapter, the chapter deals with the role of Heidegger on transcendental imagination in Derrida’s thought, and then analyzes why Kant himself uses an analogy to the signature in relation to the transcendental imagination. Because these questions inevitably return to questions of space and time, the chapter brings in Derrida’s thinking on this question, and then returns to his analysis of fetishism in Freud and Marx.
