Description
Book 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.
Trade Review"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. . . . With the gesture that is genuinely called post-structural . . . the book's act of freedom is freedom to read and write language
tout court."—Timothy Bahti, University of Michigan
Table of ContentsPremises; 1. Hermeneutic ellipses: writing the Hermeneutic circle in Schleiermacher; 2. The promise of interpretation: remarks on the Hermeneutic imperative in Kant and Nietzsche; 3. 'Disgregation of the Will': Nietzsche on the individual and individuality; 4. 'Lectio': de Man's imperative; 5. Position exposed: Friedrich Schlegel's poetological transposition of Fichte's absolute proposition; 6. The quaking of presentation: Kleist's 'Earthquake in Chile'; 7. The gesture in the name: on Benjamin and Kafka; 8. The second of inversion: movements of a figure through Celan's poetry; Sources; Index.
