Premises
Subtitle: Essays on Philosophy from Kant to Celan
Contributors: Peter Fenves (Translator)
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: January 1, 1997
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 393
ISBN-13: 9780674700734
Subjects: Western philosophy, from c 1900 -; Theory Of Literature; Literature; Semiotics & Theory; Philosophy; Philosophy, Modern, in literature; Aesthetics; History & Surveys - Modern; Philosophy / Aesthetics; Aesthetics, Modern; General; Criticism; Philosophy, Modern, in literat
Description: "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. "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 Kant's critique of human subjectivity.