Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan: Essays on Philosophy from Kant to Celan - Hardcover

Hamacher, Werner

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674700732 ISBN 13: 9780674700734

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1997

Synopsis

"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.

About this title

Review:

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.--Richard Findler "The European Legacy "

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, State University of New York at Buffalo

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0674700732
• ISBN 13: 9780674700734
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 396