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What no one knows can confront no one under the illusion of the whole.
Werner Hamacher
The futurity of language, its inherent promising capacity, is the ground-but a ground with no solidity whatever—for all present and past experiences, meanings, and figures which could communicate themselves in it.
Werner Hamacher
In these places, reading no longer blinks at an image but rather is itself a disruptive moment of an image in which it is exposed to its non-being. It is the moment, not lasting, of awakening. Now.
Werner Hamacher
How can the future bear witness to itself? And how, as the future, can it attest to its futurity? How is it possible that the sheer possibility (under whose aspect alone actuality exists at all) does not appear as a void of the actual but rather as the way of its arrival — as a path of actualisation remaining open to other arrivals?
Werner Hamacher
For the classical Greek authors of political theory, it was inconceivable that anyone outside of the polis could be a human. A human could be human only in a society, and this society could only be one that was both permanently established and internally consistent—that is, it could only be a constitutional and thus political society. The resulting definition, that the human is essentially a political being, became problematic with the expansion of a religion that did not conceive itself as a political theocracy or as a religion of political virtues and observances—but rather defined itself as being disinterested, indifferent, and structurally neutral with regard to social and political matters.
Werner Hamacher
Many years ago — it might already be twenty — Max Horkheimer recommended a little experiment during a television interview. He suggested reading newspapers a few weeks or months after their publication. With this he bent over to pick up a stack of rather gray papers that lay next to his chair. I cannot recall his comments on this piece of advice. But one can imagine that the effect he had in mind was supposed to be both philosophical and political. Indeed, the effect of this small postponement on the reader, on his perception of time and on his attitude to news and published opinion, should be considerable. The reader of these old papers will notice that the imperatives, attractions and threats heralded in them reveal themselves as such only to the degree that they no longer directly affect him. The judgments that the newspapers imposed on him at another time can now be dismissed as hectic presumptions. In the future he will no longer so easily obey the regulations of the newspapers and their time… Horkheimer's is a piece of political advice that looks forward to the suspension of coercion and to its transformation for another way of life.
Werner Hamacher
Werner Hamacher's Premises is the heir and successor to the most important theoretical and critical work done in American departments of comparative literature from the 1960s through the 1980s. Such work, principally the achievement of Paul de Man's and Jacques Derrida's texts and teaching, both introduced the serious reading of philosophy into American literary scholarship and pursued the problems of literature within the reading of philosophy.
Timothy Bahti
Any reader interested in the figures discussed in the individual essays, be they on Schleiermacher or Benjamin, will encounter an innovative interpretation of the authors in question that makes them interesting, new again, and makes one want to go and read them as if for the first time.
Rodolphe Gasché
Hammacher's project can be described as the retracing of the epistemological ground upon wich the modern conception of the literary was erected. It is quite clear to me that there is nothing presently available to rival this book.
Wlad Godzich
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; "Werner Hamacher lecturing at EGS in Saas-Fee — Summer 2005")
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