Werner Hamacher

In this book, literary critic and political theorist Werner Hamacher shows how Hölderlin's late poetry develops and enacts a radical theory of meaning that culminates in a unique, unprecedented, and still revolutionary concept of revolution that begins with a groundbreaking understanding of language.

Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin

"Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself," wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamacher's investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celan's apothegm is also valid for the structure of understanding and for language in general. In Premises Hamacher demonstrates that the promise of a subject position is not only unavoidable--and thus operates as a structural imperative--but is also unattainable and therefore by necessity open to possibilities other than that defined as "position," to redefinitions and unexpected transformations of the merely thetical act. Proceeding along the lines of both philosophical argument and critical reading, Hamacher presents the fullest account of the vast disruption in the theories and ethics of positional and propositional acts--a disruption first exposed by Kant's analysis of the minimal requirements for linguistic and practical action. Focusing on the double trait of every premise--that it is promised but never attained--Hamacher analyzes nine decisive themes, topics, and texts of modernity: the hermeneutic circle in Schleiermacher and Heidegger, the structure of ethical commands in Kant, Nietzsche's genealogy of moral terms and his exploration of the aporias of singularity, the irony of reading in de Man, the parabasis of positing acts in Fichte and Schlegel, Kleist's disruption of narrative representation, the gesture of naming in Benjamin and Kafka, and the incisive caesura that Paul Celan inserts into temporal and linguistic reversals. There is no book that so fully brings the issues of both critical philosophy and critical literature into reach. Reviews "Werner Hamacher's Premises is the heir and successor to the most important theoretical and critical work done in American departments of comparative literature from the 1960s through the 1980s. Yet, Premises is no more a work of literary scholarship than one of philosophical submission to philosophy. With the gesture that is genuinely called post-structural, which is the suspicion and suspension of every code, the book's act of freedom is freedom to read and write language tout court." --Timothy Bahti, University of Michigan "Hamacher's project can be described as the retracing of the epistemological ground upon which the modern conception of the literary was erected. It is quite clear to me that there is nothing presently available to rival this book." --Wlad Godzich, University of Geneva

Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan

Premises

"The texts in Minima Philologica, "95 Theses on Philology" and "For--Philology," release philology from institutional fetters, reveal its affinity with the nature of language, and teach us how to practice it on the model of poetry. Poetry is first philology because language routinely moves beyond the categories applied to it. To practice philology is to desire (philein) this frightening excess of language"--

Minima Philologica

Tracing the genealogy and unfolding of Hegel's thought into his mature works, the author analyzes the violent transformations which Hegel's philosophy has uncovered and caused in the structure of philosophical terms and in the terms under which philosophy is possible.

—Reading in Hegel

Pleroma

Thomas Keenan

Neil Hertz

This collection of essays serves as a forum for a broad spectrum of responses to the war-time writing of Paul de Man, responses rarely in agreement and often sharply contradictory, differing in approach, affect, and style. Responses engages in reading de Man’s early articles, in articulating their multiple contexts, then and now, and in opening the limitations imposed by rubrics like “the case of Paul de Man” and “deconstruction politics.” Responses brings together the readings and commentaries of literary critics and historians from the United States and Europe, with their diverse strategies—historical, rhetorical, psychological, political. The primary aims of these essays are reading de Man’s texts, from 1940 to 1983, and assessing them in their political, ideological, and institutional fields. Responses also provides essential historical materials—letters, documents, personal recollections—on Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land, on the occupation of Belgium, and on the biography of Paul de Man. An appendix collects the recent reactions of newspapers in the United States and Europe (France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, and elsewhere) to the discovery of de Man’s wartime writings. Contributors include Yves Bonnefoy, Cynthia Chase, Else de Bens, Ortwin de Graef, Jacques Derrida, Rodolphe Gasche, Gerald Graff, Barbara Johnson, Jeffrey Mehlman, J. Hillis Miller, Edward Said, Marc Shell, Gayatri Spivak, and others. The collection appears under the auspices of the Oxford Literary Review, England’s leading theoretical journal for over a decade.

On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism

Responses

"Give the Word puts together Werner Hamacher's groundbreaking 95 Theses, a wide collection of never-before-published essays in response to individual theses, and Hamacher's own reaction to these scholars' study of his work"--

Give the Word: Responses to Werner Hamacher's "95 Theses on Philology"

Emmanuel Levinas Professor of Philosophy Werner Hamacher

This collection of essays serves as a forum for a broad spectrum of responses to the war-time writing of Paul de Man, responses rarely in agreement and often sharply contradictory, differing in approach, affect, and style. Responses engages in reading de Man's early articles, in articulating their multiple contexts, then and now, and in opening the limitations imposed by rubrics like “the case of Paul de Man” and “deconstruction politics." Responses brings together the readings and commentaries of literary critics and historians from the United States and Europe, with their diverse strategies—historical, rhetorical, psychological, political. The primary aims of these essays are reading de Man's texts, from 1940 to 1983, and assessing them in their political, ideological, and institutional fields. Responses also provides essential historical materials—letters, documents, personal recollections—on Le Soir and Het Vlaamsche Land, on the occupation of Belgium, and on the biography of Paul de Man. An appendix collects the recent reactions of newspapers in the United States and Europe (France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, and elsewhere) to the discovery of de Man's wartime writings. Contributors include Yves Bonnefoy, Cynthia Chase, Else de Bens, Ortwin de Graef, Jacques Derrida, Rodolphe Gasche, Gerald Graff, Barbara Johnson, Jeffrey Mehlman, J. Hillis Miller, Edward Said, Marc Shell, Gayatri Spivak, and others. The collection appears under the auspices of the Oxford Literary Review, England's leading theoretical journal for over a decade.

Gerhard Richter

Ann Smock

Werner Hamacher's witty and elliptical 95 Theses on Philology challenges the humanities--and particularly academic philology--that assume language to be a given entity rather than an event. In Give the Word eleven scholars of literature and philosophy (Susan Bernstein, Michèle Cohen-Halimi, Peter Fenves, Sean Gurd, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Jan Plug, Gerhard Richter, Avital Ronell, Thomas Schestag, Ann Smock, and Vincent van Gerven Oei) take up the challenge presented by Hamacher's theses. At the close Hamacher responds to them in a spirited text that elaborates on the context of his 95 Theses and its rich theoretical and philosophical ramifications. The 95 Theses, included in this volume, makes this collection a rich resource for the study and practice of "radical philology." Hamacher's philology interrupts and transforms, parting with tradition precisely in order to remain faithful to its radical but increasingly occluded core. The contributors test Hamacher's break with philology in a variety of ways, attempting a philological practice that does not take language as an object of knowledge, study, or even love. Thus, in responding to Hamacher's Theses, the authors approach language that, because it can never be an object of any kind, awakens an unfamiliar desire. Taken together these essays problematize philological ontology in a movement toward radical reconceptualizations of labor, action, and historical time.

Werner Hamacher

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