Premises: Essays on Philosophy from Kant to Celan

by Werner Hamacher, Peter Fenves

Overview

"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. "Subject position" is widely invoked today, yet Hamacher is the first to thoroughly investigate the premises for this invocation. He demonstrates that the promise of a subject position is not only unavoidable—and thus produces more and more fundamentalisms—but is also unattainable and therefore always open to innovation, revision, and unexpected transformation. In a book that is both philosophical and literary, Hamacher gives us the fullest account of the vast disruption in the very nature of our understanding that was first unleashed by Kant's critique of human subjectivity.

In light of the double nature of every premise—that it is promised but never attainable—Hamacher gives us 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 language in 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674700734
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1997
Pages:	396
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Werner Hamacher was Professor of German and the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. He was the author of Pleroma—Reading in Hegel and coeditor of the series Meridian.

Table of Contents

Premises

Hermeneutic Ellipses: Writing the Hermeneutic Circle in Schieiermacher

The Promise of Interpretation: Remarks on the Hermeneutic Imperative in Kant and Niezsche

"Disgregation of the Will": Nietzsche on the Individual and Individuality

"Lectio": de Man's Imperative

Position Exposed: Friedrich Schiegel's Poetological Transposition of Fichte's Absolute Proposition

The Quaking of Presentation: Kleist's "Earthquake in Chile"

The Gesture in the Name: On Benjamin and Kafka

The Second of Inversion: Movements of a Figure through Celan's Poetry

Sources

Index

Editorial Reviews

Any reader interested in the figures discussed in the individual essays, be they on Schleiermacher or Benjamin, will encounter an innovative interpretation of the authors in question that makes them interesting, new again, and makes one want to go and read them as if for the first time.

Rodolphe Gasché

Hamacher offers his view of hermeneutical understanding as a way to interpret literary texts and to expose how literary texts disrupt the modern idea of correspondence… Hamacher’s book is scholarly, insightful and interesting.

The European Legacy - Richard Findler

Any reader interested in the figures discussed in the individual essays, be they on Schleiermacher or Benjamin, will encounter an innovative interpretation of the authors in question that makes them interesting, new again, and makes one want to go and read them as if for the first time.

Rodolphe Gasché

Any reader interested in the figures discussed in the individual essays, be they on Schleiermacher or Benjamin, will encounter an innovative interpretation of the authors in question that makes them interesting, new again, and makes one want to go and read them as if for the first time.

Rodolphe Gasché