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Abstract
This essay explores Werner Hamacher’s suggestion that the realm of “philology” lies epékeina tes ousías. I suggest that for him “philology” is concerned with what, according to Plato, generates meaning without itself being generated, and that in his work this “beyond being” is often mediated in terms of caesura. After a brief engagement with a conversation of sorts between Hamacher and Jacques Derrida, in which the view of his “philology” as mostly derivative of Derrida’s work is rejected, the essay returns to Hamacher’s discussion of caesura as what constitutes the very possibility of language. The final section focuses on Hamacher’s engagement with Walter Benjamin and Paul Celan and his suggestion that Dichtung (poetry) is the first philology. The essay concludes by arguing that Hamacher’s philology opens up new ways of thinking about thinking, as well as about the relationship between literature and philosophy.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
I would like to thank my anonymous peer-reviewers for their help in improving my work. Thanks are also due to Matías Bascuñán, Andrew Benjamin, Ilit Ferber, Mauricio Gonzalez, Ronald Mendoza de Jesús, Joe Palmer, Adam Lipszyc, and Nassima Sahraoui for their generosity in discussing the issues raised in this paper with me over the years. The bulk of this article was written, in a haze of anticipation and nerves, for a London Graduate School workshop held in London in September 2014, which would also mark the beginning of an acquaintance with Werner Hamacher which was as important for me as it was unfortunately brief. The final revisions, made in the six months that have passed since his death, were written in sorrow and, most importantly, in gratitude. It is in this spirit that I respectfully dedicate this article to him.
1 Hamacher, “WASEN” 41 (my trans.).
2 Annas 245.
3 Plato, Republic 203.
4 Ibid.
5 Rosen 262.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Annas 256–57, 257.
10 Plato, Phaedo 273.
11 Plato, Republic 302–03.
12 Ibid. 78.
13 Annas 256.
14 “Poieo,” Entry 1, A Greek–English Lexicon Compiled by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1843).
15 Earlier this year (2018) Philosophy Today has, for example, published a special issue on Hamacher, including pieces by Andrew Benjamin, Ilit Ferber, Julia Ng, Juliane Prade-Weiss, and Caroline Sauter. See Philosophy Today 62.1 (2018).
16 Hart Nibbrig.
17 Bulucz.
18 Ibid.
19 Meyer.
20 Another example of this tendency can be found in Julia Ng’s “Now, Hamacher.” In the “Reinschrift” of “Now: History,” a talk that Hamacher gave at Goldsmith’s in October 2015 (translated with the help of Ng),
[he] had inserted, in significantly smaller but bright red and underlined typeface, the exact date, month, year and time of day at which he presumably stopped writing. Sometimes the time stamp follows an entire section of the text, sometimes just a single sentence. At certain points of the text one time stamp is immediately followed by another. All are exact to the minute. (1019–20)
21 Hart Nibbrig.
22 Hamacher, “Ninety-Five Theses” 9.
23 In “Inexhaustibility at the Outset,” Andrew Benjamin argues that, for Hamacher, epékeina tes ousías marks “an ontological irreducibilty – anoriginality – that is there at the outset. The outset is therefore this site of ontological irreducibility. Thinking philology is thinking precisely this anoriginal presence” (1003). More remains to be said on whether the subtle differences between our readings speak to a more fundamental disagreement.
24 Derrida, Specters 125.
25 Hamacher, “Lingua Amissa” 168.
26 Ibid.
27 Derrida, “Marx & Sons” 224–25.
28 Ibid. 224.
29 Ibid.
30 Derrida, The Post Card 136.
31 Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike” 121–22.
32 Ibid. 128.
33 Ibid. 112.
34 Ibid. 128.
35 Ibid.
36 Hamacher, Premises 13.
37 Hamacher, “Ninety-Five Theses” 53.
38 Ibid. 52, 54.
39 Heller-Roazen 23.
40 Hamacher, “Lingua Amissa” 173.
41 Ibid. 189.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid. 188.
44 Hamacher, “Intensive Languages” 486.
45 See ibid. 491.
46 Ibid. 493–94.
47 Hamacher, “Lingua Amissa” 188–89.
48 Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other 21.
49 Ibid. 67.
50 Ibid. 67–68.
51 Ibid. 93.
52 Hamacher, Premises 13.
53 Derrida, Marges 63; see Heller-Roazen 27.
54 Ibid. 28.
55 Hamacher, Premises 13–14.
56 See Heller-Roazen 37.
57 Hamacher, Premises 10.
58 Hamacher, “Fragen und keine” 204.
59 Hamacher, Premises 199.
60 Ibid. 218; idem, Entfernes Verstehen 190.
61 Hamacher, “Lingua Amissa” 169.
62 Heller-Roazen 25.
63 Hamacher, Premises 330.
64 Hamacher, “Intensive Languages” 541.
65 Hamacher, “Ninety-Five Theses” 60.
66 Hamacher, Premises 219. See also:
As finite, language is never already constituted but is always in the process of its constitution; it is language always only as promised [Sprache ist sie immer nur als versprochene]. But since its promise [ihr Versprechen] can never be fulfilled by itself as promised, this promise, which is also the suspension of language, brackets itself – language – and confesses, since it is “effective” despite its endless suspension, despite its impossibility, that it is a failed linguistic performance, a parapraxis, lapsus linguae. (Ibid.; Entfernes Verstehen 191)
67 See
Müßte die Sprache des Fragens, die sie herbeiführt, müsste sie nicht, ist sie elliptisch, eine verletze Sprache sein; eine Sprache der Auslassung; eine Auslassung der Sprache; eine Sprache, die die Sprache auslässt; die – in jedem Sinn, aus jedem Sinn – ausgelassene Sprache. (Hamacher, “Fragen und keine” 196)
68 Ferber 1006.
69 Hamacher, “Für – die Philologie” 14.
70 Hamacher, Premises 345.
71 See “Prolepsis is thus less the founding principle of every possible experience than the proposition [Satz] – the leap [Sprung] – in which alone a basis for experience emerges, without however ever being fixed as availably given or as produced” (Hamacher, “Intensive Languages” 514).
72 Ibid. 530.
73 Ibid.
74 Goethe 207.
75 Walter Benjamin 340–41.
76 Hamacher, “Fragen und keine” 205.
77 Hamacher, “Ninety-Five Theses” 47.
78 Kant 153.
79 McLaughlin 4, xii.
80 Plato, Phaedo 273.
81 Celan, The Meridian 8.
82 Celan, Der Meridian 8.
83 Celan, The Meridian 8.
84 Hamacher, Premises 348.
85 Compare with
Würde das Nichts der Sprache nicht angenommen und vernommen, so wäre ihre Inversion in Sein unmöglich. Diese Möglichkeit der Unmöglichkeit ihrer eigenen Existenz tut sich in Celans Gedicht allein im Gedankenstrich vor dem doch auf, im Aussetzen der tropischen Sprache, in der stummen Verzögerung des Nehmens und Vernehmens. Mit diesem graphischen Innehalten – Celan hat für einen ähnlichen Augenblick später das Wort Verhoffen gefunden – öffnet sich im poetischen Sprechen eine Lücke, die zu schließen nicht in der Macht der Inversionslogik steht, ein Abstand, der nicht in Nähe, eine Differenz, die nicht in Einheit, ein stummer Ort, der nicht in den Topos eines sprechenden Bildes verwandelt werden kann. Es ist dies der Ort einer Abwesenheit, der noch für jene Abwesenheit unerreichbar bleiben muß, die sich in unsre, in die Gegenwart unserer Sprache verwandeln könnte. (Hamacher, Entferntes Verstehen 334)
86 I thank Ronald Mendoza de Jesús for drawing my attention to this ulterior meaning of verhoffen.
87 Hamacher, “Für – die Philologie” 34.