Premises: Essays on Philosophy from Kant to Celan ISBN-13: 9780674700734

ISBN-13: 9780674700734

Binding: Hardcover

Author: Hamacher, Werner

Details: “Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself,” wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamachers investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celans 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 Kants 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, Nietzsches 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, Kleists 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.

Release Date: 01-01-1997

Package Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches

Languages: English

Features:

• Used Book in Good Condition

Number Of Pages: 400