IMPOSSIBILITY, FREE
Premises:
Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan.
By Werner Hamacher.
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. This was part of what became loosely known as post-structuralism, but it was more specifically the dismantling, by rhetorical reading, of the formalistically rhetorical divide between philosophy and literature. Hamacher's book (which includes sections dating from the late 1970s) continues this work, mostly by reference to modern German philosophy and literature. In the face of the wholesale selling-off of the German intellectual tradition by current "German Studies" and the shallowing of philosophically-informed literary theory by the conversion of comparative literature into cultural studies, Premises brings to mind Brecht's 1941 comment on Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History": "one thinks with horror of how small the number is of those who are ready even to misunderstand something like this."
Hamacher's nine long chapters are symmetrically arranged,
the first four on German philosophy, the last four on German literature, and
the central and transitional one on de Man's work . . . Like the example of de
Man, who effectively was always educating his readers in how to read his
readings of Rousseau, of Wordsworth, of Proust, Hammacher's Premises performs the exemplary pedagogic function of teaching its
readers to read what is standing before their eyes-if also de-stancing and
distancing itself-as, face to face, they engage the figures of the literary
text-and this includes Premises. And at this juncture, like the work of
Derrida, Premises becomes as one-if differentially
so-with the highest, the most "outstanding" acts of writing it reads and rewrites. Writing, it. "What no one knows can confront no one under the illusion of the
whole," Hamacher writes apropos of a Nietzsche passage on Wagner. This applies to all of Hamacher's topics in Premises-understanding, hermeneutics,
presentation, figures-but it especially applies to "philosophy," to "literature,"
and to their naming and misnaming, their understanding and non-understanding,
whether in their "individuality" as wholes or their "whole" combination of
individual impartments. Individual and
whole, equally-because "self"-differentially-impossible, Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature is (the) writing-it re-presents-freely.