Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan

Abstract

Language," for Hamacher, is the name of this movement. Not necessary, possible, or even impossible, language, for Hamacher, is instead what lets the necessary, the possible and the impossible be what they are, while sheltering their possibility to be other than themselves. Developing a constellation of concepts drawn from Meister Eckhart and Heidegger, Hamacher here conceives of the most fundamental activity of End Page 35 language as "releasement Gel zenheit," "abandonment Gelassenheit," "letting Lassen," and "letting-be Seinlassen." In Hamacher's work, however, these concepts undergo a profound mutation. Here it is not the soul or even Being, but rather language itself that abandons and is abandoned: language releases itself, letting itself first be "itself"-and hence, as we have seen, always more and less than any "self"-in this very releasement. What is ultimately at issue in Hamacher's texts is this "letting-be . . . of language Seinlassen der Sprache" P 223; EV 196: the movement by which language, before it can even be called "language," allows its "self" to be. If language is deictic, constative, or performative, Hamacher argues, it must already have opened a field in which deixis, constation and performance may take place; if these operations of language, furthermore, are to be more than unrepeatable faits accomplis, then language must continue, at every moment, to hold this field open. see http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/v029/29.3heller-roazen.html from hegel after derrida Hegel's notorious declaration of the end of the art is subjected to an intricate reading by Werner Hamacher. "Art ends with irony, but in this ending art is also to complete itself and in this become art for the very first time" (105). In "Religion in the Form of Art," Hegel says art culminates in comedy, and Hamacher argues that it is only in comedy, where the subject realizes itself in the mask, that "self-consciousness shows itself as 'absolute essence"' (117). Rather than take on representational form, consciousness knows these externalized forms to be masks, something to be played with. Comedy is the spectacle of the disintegration of substance and the substantial subject. The end of art in comedy is the experience of art as the death of art, a death that preserves art as cenotaph. Ultimately, art, self-consciousness, Absolute Knowledge take hold of themselves in an end that never ends, an end that is the deconstitution of speculative ontology. from roazen article above: It is at this limit point that Hamacher's work acquires its true significance as an attempt to consider that dimension in language that cannot be exhausted by the Aristotelian model of predication assertion. What is that element, Hamacher asks, in which language does not speak "one thing concerning another thing," ti kata tinos, in which language does not speak things at all and therefore, according to the traditional determination of speech, does not "speak"? It is this dimension that, throughout Hamacher's texts, is always at issue: "what withdraws from language," in Hamacher's words, and "what remains of language after meaning is withdrawn from it" P 329-30; EV 316. A decisive displacement of not only the apophantic but also the semiological, rhetorical, and hermeneutic theories of language is implied here. For the study of what exceeds meaning and what, in the movement of this excess, is left of language cannot be a study of the semantic and referential operations of language, whether these operations are understood in terms of signs or figures and the mechanics of their organization; nor can it, by that token, have the form of a consideration of the comprehension of language and the structures by which such a comprehension is, or is not, reached. This is why Hamacher's texts, which contain some of the richest contemporary readings of figural and poetic language, cannot be adequately grasped as studies in literary criticism or rhetorical language; this is, moreover, why Hamacher's texts, which propose a singular reinterpretation of hermeneutics and what is at issue in it, are not, strictly speaking, works of hermeneutic theory. Their philosophical and theoretical significance lies elsewhere. If "language itself," however, as Hamacher writes, "is nothing other than a promise," then neither Austin's nor de Man's accounts suffices to characterize the particular nature and structure of the promise. If "language itself" is "given as a promise," then the promise cannot be adequately conceived as a particular type of a speech act, for such types, as forms of particular linguistic utterances, already presuppose language and therefore cannot themselves define it. The same must also be said of de Man's concept of the promise, which, in defining the promise as a contradiction between the performative and constative functions of language, is meaningful only within the context of an already established linguistic code and on the basis of the existence of language. "Nothing would be more erroneous," Hamacher writes, than to speak here of a "performative contradiction." Contradictions arise only within an already established linguistic system of rules and therefore only where language has already established itself as an instrument at one's disposal, with which particular operations, each one regulated by certain conventions, could be performed: they are contra-dictions. P 128-29, trans. modified; EV 98