Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan

Rating:
Summary: "Understanding is in want of understanding"
Review: The paradoxical aim of hermeneutical reading, according to critics of Gadamer and his school, is the liquidation of reading, finalized in the act of understanding. Against this orthodoxy, Werner Hamacher, in his compelling volume of essays, advances a hermeneutics marked by the irreducible and undecidable presence of reading. Understanding, for Hamacher, never escapes the exposure to non-comprehension in which it originates; reading stages this performative encounter with the other of understanding, in a pre-thetic, irreferential register. Premises, published nearly ten years ago, remains the most serious and accomplished work of German philosophy since Adorno's book on aesthetics. As a model of scrupulous and refined reading of modernism's most difficult texts, its influence upon literary scholarship has been, in an age adverse to theory, unforgiveably slight. Comprised of new and well-crafted translations of previously scattered papers, this volume cannot be recommended highly enough.