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“Poetry “[[Poetry]] does not impose, it exposes itself,” wrote [[Paul ]] Celan. Werner Hamacher’s investigations into crucial [[texts ]] of [[philosophical ]] and [[literary ]] [[modernity ]] show that Celan’s apothegm is also valid for the [[structure ]] of [[understanding ]] and for [[language ]] in general. In ''Premises'' Hamacher demonstrates that the promise of a [[subject ]] [[position ]] is not only unavoidable—and thus operates as a [[structural ]] imperative—but is also unattainable and therefore by [[necessity ]] open to possibilities [[other ]] than that defined as “position,” to redefinitions and unexpected transformations of the merely thetical act.

Proceeding along the lines of both philosophical argument and critical [[reading]], Hamacher presents the fullest account of the vast disruption in the theories and [[ethics ]] of positional and propositional acts—a disruption first exposed by Kant’s [[analysis ]] of the minimal requirements for [[linguistic ]] and [[practical ]] [[action]]. Focusing on the [[double ]] [[trait ]] of every premise—that it is promised but never attained—Hamacher analyzes nine decisive themes, topics, and texts of modernity: the hermeneutic circle in Schleiermacher and [[Heidegger]], the structure of [[ethical ]] commands in [[Kant]], Nietzsche’s genealogy of [[moral ]] [[terms ]] and his exploration of the aporias of singularity, the irony of reading in de Man, the parabasis of positing [[acts ]] in [[Fichte ]] and Schlegel, Kleist’s 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.

'''Werner Hamacher''' (1948–2017) was a German literary critic and theorist influenced by deconstructionby [[deconstruction]]. Hamacher studied philosophy, comparative literature and religious literature and [[religious]] studies at the Free [[University ]] of Berlin and the École Normale Supérieure ([[Paris]]), where he met and came to know Jacques [[Derrida]].<sup id="cite_ref-egs_1-0" class="reference"></sup> From 1998 to 2013 he was a Professor in the University of Frankfurt’s Institute for General and Comparative Literature (''Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft''), <sup id="cite_ref-2" class="reference"></sup>and since 2003 he was on the faculty of the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.<sup id="cite_ref-egs_1-1" class="reference"></sup>

He was previously Professor of [[German ]] and the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and taught for a [[number ]] of years at New York University. He was the [[author ]] of ''Pleroma—Dialectics and [[Hermeneutics ]] in [[Hegel]]'' and ''Premises: Essays on Philosophy from Kant to Celan'' and the editor of the series ''Meridian: Crossing [[Aesthetics]]'', published by Stanford University Press. He translated a selection of essays by Paul de Man into German.