Double real

At the beginning of her new Repetition and Identity: The Literary Agenda , Catherine Pickstock lays out her Kierkegaardian agenda: “To say that every thing, every res, only exists when it has already been (nonidentically) repeated is to say that all beings flow unpredictably forwards in serpentine lines which bear and receive new disclosures, and yet sustain, refine, and extend consistent identities. Because the transition from rest to motion, as from potential to act, and from unity to variety, is not itself exhausted (as Kierkegaard after Plato advised) by these alternatives, it would seem to have the character of a fictional doubling of reality” (xii). That doubling is not a move from the real to the unreal; the doubling in fiction is the structure of reality.

This is the reason Pickstock argues that literature must join history and ontology in any encompassing philosophical agenda: “”it is an imperative that literature, besides history, assist in making philosophical argument, since the doubling of reality as fiction is, as we shall see, problematically, a fundamental aspect of reality itsel£ The ensuing temptation is (as for modernism) to reduce fiction either to reality or subjective fantasy, or, alternatively (as for postmodernism), to vaporize reality in favour of a universal reign of fiction, which, in turn, becomes a skittish or whimsical game, as devoid of the comic (whose irony is anchored to the real) as it is of the tragic.”