Abstract

This text pays tribute to Werner Hamacher’s work. It contemplates Hamacher’s thought about language, especially his criticism of views that measure language according to its propositional and referential functions. Instead, Hamacher foregrounds the importance of language’s interruptions, strikes and disorders, in which language operates independently of anything but itself, thus revealing its innermost core. The text examines Hamacher’s “The Second Inversion,” “Afformative, Strike,” and “Other Pains.”