Derrida and the exemplarity of literature

Jacques Derrida's scattered remarks on the ambiguous role examples play in the passage between the universal and the singular revolve around an often‐neglected point: any attempt to theorise exemplarity will itself be subject to the law it seeks to account for. This oversight limits scholarship on the subject, but may be amended by returning to the loci classici on exemplarity in Derrida's Glas, La vérité en peinture, Passions, and elsewhere. Moreover, in three texts published in the 1980s: La loi du genre, Préjugés and Psyché, Derrida emphasises how literature is particularly given to ‘remark’ its own status as literature and as such provides a privileged example of the problem of exemplarity. Another example in which exemplarity is in general singularly implicated is deconstruction itself.