Werner Hamacher - Quotes

Werner 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. Such work, principally the achievement of Paul de Man's and Jacques Derrida's texts and teaching, both introduced the serious reading of philosophy into American literary scholarship and pursued the problems of literature within the reading of philosophy.
Bahti, Timothy.

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.
Gasché Rodolph.

Hammacher's project can be described as the retracing of the epistemological ground upon wich the modern conception of the literary was erected. It is quite clear to me that there is nothing presently available to rival this book.
Godzich, Wlad.

What no one knows can confront no one under the illusion of the whole.
Hamacher, Werner.

The futurity of language, its inherent promising capacity, is the ground-but a ground with no solidity whatever—for all present and past experiences, meanings, and figures which could communicate themselves in it.
Hamacher, Werner.

In these places, reading no longer blinks at an image but rather is itself a disruptive moment of an image in which it is exposed to its non-being. It is the moment, not lasting, of awakening. Now.
Hamacher, Werner.

How can the future bear witness to itself? And how, as the future, can it attest to its futurity? How is it possible that the sheer possibility (under whose aspect alone actuality exists at all) does not appear as a void of the actual but rather as the way of its arrival — as a path of actualisation remaining open to other arrivals?
Hamacher, Werner.

For the classical Greek authors of political theory, it was inconceivable that anyone outside of the polis could be a human. A human could be human only in a society, and this society could only be one that was both permanently established and internally consistent—that is, it could only be a constitutional and thus political society. The resulting definition, that the human is essentially a political being, became problematic with the expansion of a religion that did not conceive itself as a political theocracy or as a religion of political virtues and observances—but rather defined itself as being disinterested, indifferent, and structurally neutral with regard to social and political matters.
Hamacher, Werner.

And even before the reading becomes what it already is, even before it enters the dialectical circle of cognition, even before the active consciousness grasps itself at work there, this reading is still not yet what it already is.
Hamacher, Werner.

The reading - that of the 'last philosophy' more decisively perhaps than any other - must commence from not yet in the unity of the not yet and the already present: at a remove from that unity of arche and telos which would constitute the finally successful reading itself as identical with the system of the absolute self-consciousness.
Hamacher, Werner.

Many years ago — it might already be twenty — Max Horkheimer recommended a little experiment during a television interview. He suggested reading newspapers a few weeks or months after their publication. With this he bent over to pick up a stack of rather gray papers that lay next to his chair. I cannot recall his comments on this piece of advice. But one can imagine that the effect he had in mind was supposed to be both philosophical and political. Indeed, the effect of this small postponement on the reader, on his perception of time and on his attitude to news and published opinion, should be considerable. The reader of these old papers will notice that the imperatives, attractions and threats heralded in them reveal themselves as such only to the degree that they no longer directly affect him. The judgments that the newspapers imposed on him at another time can now be dismissed as hectic presumptions. In the future he will no longer so easily obey the regulations of the newspapers and their time… Horkheimer's is a piece of political advice that looks forward to the suspension of coercion and to its transformation for another way of life.
Hamacher, Werner.

For the very possibility that something will show itself as something - whether the apophantic or hermeneutic mode of the "as" - is already "circular," since something can show itself only to a Dasein and therein understands one of its own possibilities and thus understands itself in anticipation of itself.
Hamacher, Werner.

The dilemma of interpretation that arises in the case of the last philosophy is an inversion of the hermeneutic circle.
Hamacher, Werner, Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (Translators). Pleroma : reading in Hegel. Stanford University Press. 1998. 304 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0804721831.

The dialectical-hermeneutical circle, not so much the aporia for the speculative process itself as the very form of its self-presentation, can be recognized as a dilemma for the dialectic too only if we ask the question: what defines the transition between the totality of the last philosophy and what comes afterwards in such a way that this synthesis exercises its power even over what seems implicitly to escape its sway?
Hamacher, Werner, Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (Translators). Pleroma : reading in Hegel. Stanford University Press. 1998. 304 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0804721831.

Since in relating to its object it is related to its own structure, the act of reading culminates in self-reflection and thereby becomes itself another variant of the theory of absolute self-consciousness.
Hamacher, Werner, Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis (Translators). Pleroma : reading in Hegel. Stanford University Press. 1998. 304 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0804721831.

Understanding is in want of understanding.
Hamacher, Werner and Peter Fenves (Translator). Premises : essays on philosophy and literature from Kant to Celan. Harvard University Press. 1996. Hardcover, 393 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674700732.

Whether one defines understanding as an occurrence, a process, an act, it is never a relation between two already given, immobile entities that somehow remain untouched by this relation, rather, it is a relation in which each term constitutes itself in the first place...
Hamacher, Werner and Peter Fenves (Translator). Premises : essays on philosophy and literature from Kant to Celan. Harvard University Press. 1996. Hardcover, 393 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674700732.

To understand means "to be able," "to have capacity," "to take something upon itself," "to be in charge of it." The proposition concerning understanding thus means, in its third version, that understanding requires the ability to be performed.
Hamacher, Werner and Peter Fenves (Translator). Premises : essays on philosophy and literature from Kant to Celan. Harvard University Press. 1996. Hardcover, 393 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674700732.

Heidegger's analysis of the problem and metaproblem of understanding, being-ahead-of-oneself, projection, and Dasein becomes explosive at the very moment it reaches the locus classicus of hermeneutics and its question concerning the premises of understanding: the moment, that is, it sets out to analyze the whole.
Hamacher, Werner and Peter Fenves (Translator). Premises : essays on philosophy and literature from Kant to Celan. Harvard University Press. 1996. Hardcover, 393 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674700732.

Understanding - since it mean being able - must be structured as the non-understanding of the understanding of itself.
Hamacher, Werner and Peter Fenves (Translator). Premises : essays on philosophy and literature from Kant to Celan. Harvard University Press. 1996. Hardcover, 393 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674700732.

Tradition proceeds in principle from an historically invariant analogy between the objects and subjects of understanding.
Hamacher, Werner and Peter Fenves (Translator). Premises : essays on philosophy and literature from Kant to Celan. Harvard University Press. 1996. Hardcover, 393 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0674700732.