Short-listed entry for The Incomprehensibility Prize (from The Times Literary Supplement)

J.C., TLS, November 14, 2014, p. 36:

The following entry in OUP [Oxford University Press]'s Literature: New and noteworthy titles catalogue is among the short-listed entries. It advertises Repetition and Identity by Catherine Pickstock, who proposes:

image from

that non-identical repetition involves analogy, rather than the Post-structuralist combination of univocity and equivocity, or of rationalism with scepticism. This proposal, which is happy for reality to make sense, involves, however, a subjective decision which is to be poetically performed. A wager is laid upon the possibility of a consistency which sustains the subject, in continuity with the elusive consistency of nature. This wager is played out in terms of a performative argument concerning the existential stances open to human beings. It is concluded that the individual sustains this quest within the context of an inter-sujective search for an [sic; see] historical consistence of culture. But can ethical consistency, and the harmonisation of this with an aesthetic surplus of an "elsewhere", invoked by the sign, be achieved without a religious gesture?