and mortality are thus not premises for deductive reasoning. Lastly, these traits cannot be described like givens; the conditions of evil just mentioned therefore do not result from a metabasis beginning with what can be described.

Kierkegaard can help one undo entanglements, knitted by a long tradition, that tie evil to the singular, namely, to individuation, and thus to one single condition of evil. But in order to descry the originary dissension that destroys from within any simply normative positing, an analytic is needed that informs everyday knowledge with a historical topology.

On impossible normative simplicity

I will conclude with a few brief reminders so as to schematize this analytic such as we have cast it in accordance with different languages. First, singulars and singularities follow phenomenologically from singularization (from the pull of mortality); then as originary, singularization works on theticism in its very dynamic and deprives us once and for all of a simple appellate authority; and then, recognizing the singular as irreducible to the particular and hence to subsumption—a recognition that was oblique under the hegemonies depending on how they arrived at their limits where they are dirempted today and that was anguished or jubilant—in no way means that one can somehow escape from under norms that are posited as sovereign and deposed beforehand by their singular extraction. And lastly, there is no evil for which one has to posit some simple and encompassing meaning (this is the very attraction of natality), but the formula “the ultimate is simple” kills; it poses as if singularization were not. With these reminders, the first underscores the future, the next a certain anarchy, the third the tragic double bind persisting in every historical arrangement, and the last the tragic hubris of normative theses.

“Develop your singularities,” one was told not long ago in Paris as well as in California. What followed and what follows, analytically, is “respect singularities.” What was not said and what nevertheless requires philosophy if its task is to render explicit the knowledge of conditions: From where does such an imperative come? What makes it possible, convincing? Therefore, no time was lost in Frankfurt to retort: “In the name of what? Spell out your valid arguments.” But in the name, in the values, and in the subjective (or intersubjective) authority upon which critical theoreticians end up falling back, topology recognizes so many productions with which theticism gratifies us.¹⁰ Just as any other thetic referent, the one invoked in the name of consensus through discursive rationality, or through communicative action, can be posited only at the cost of denying the foreignness of the singular reference. This reference enters into constitutive strategies that are entirely different from subjectivist ones. They can be detected, provided one ceases maximizing self-consciousness, including one in the form of a universal pragmatics. Now, to reach an origin other than a posited and positive one, there is not a great many choices of method. One needs to try to go back to what one has always known, even if poorly: my singularization to come.

Polymorphous singularities are constituted,¹¹ and monomorphous theses get destituted, not, to be sure, by time “as such.” That would amount to declaring yet again a magnitude rather than to gleaning a trait. Only the expropriating withdrawal toward