Premises Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan

Free Download Werner Hamacher, "Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan "
English | ISBN: 0804736200 | 1999 | 405 pages | PDF | 17 MB
"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.