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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, make...
"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 f...
This collection of essays by one of the foremost figures in contemporary theory takes as its theme the edge or limit between language, time, history, and politics. These are essays that are all on the brink, the very extreme at which one can no longer define where one is located, neither on the cliff, say, nor over the edge. To be on the brink is to take up that extreme limit, the point of contamination or indetermination where language, time, history, and politics all converge upon one another. On the Brink begins with a consideration of Kant’s treatment of time as representation and of Hegel’s treatment of the writing of history and the end of art, all while taking up other key figures...
Minima Philologica brings together two essays by Werner Hamacher that are meant to revitalize philology as a practice beyond its restriction to the restoration of linguistic data and their meanings. In these two texts, “95 Theses on Philology” and “For—Philology,” Hamacher propounds a notion of generalized philology that is equivalent to the real production of linguistic utterances, and indeed utterances not limited to predicative or even discursive statements. Philology, in speaking for language where no clear and distinct language is given, exhibits and exposes the structure of language in general. The first text, “95 Theses on Philology,” challenges academic philology as wel...
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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.
This volume addresses from different perspectives the key questions posed by the moment and thereby elucidates the connection between social theory, philosophy, literary theory and history that are opened by the moment.
Not an autobiography in the customary sense, Benjamin's recollection of his childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin's West End at the turn of the century is translated into English for the first time in book form.
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 r...
Sixty years ago, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, an exiled Jew deprived of her German citizenship, observed that before people can enjoy any of the "inalienable" Rights of Man-before there can be any specific rights to education, work, voting, and so on-there must first be such a thing as "the right to have rights". The concept received little attention at the time, but in our age of mass deportations, Muslim bans, refugee crises, and extra-state war, the phrase has become the centre of a crucial and lively debate. Here five leading thinkers from varied disciplines-including history, law, politics, and literary studies-discuss the critical basis of rights and the meaning of radical democratic politics today.