Give the Word

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Give the Word

Responses to Werner Hamacher's "95 Theses on Philology"

Edited by Gerhard Richter and Ann Smock
 

Stages Series

432 pages
1 table, 8 indexes

Hardcover

June 2019

978-1-4962-0652-7

$75.00 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

June 2019

978-1-4962-1361-7

$75.00 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

June 2019

978-1-4962-1359-4

$75.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

Werner Hamacher’s witty and elliptical 95 Theses on Philology challenges the humanities—and particularly academic philology—that assume language to be a given entity rather than an event. In Give the Word eleven scholars of literature and philosophy (Susan Bernstein, Michèle Cohen-Halimi, Peter Fenves, Sean Gurd, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Jan Plug, Gerhard Richter, Avital Ronell, Thomas Schestag, Ann Smock, and Vincent van Gerven Oei) take up the challenge presented by Hamacher’s theses. At the close Hamacher responds to them in a spirited text that elaborates on the context of his 95 Theses and its rich theoretical and philosophical ramifications.

The 95 Theses, included in this volume, makes this collection a rich resource for the study and practice of “radical philology.” Hamacher’s philology interrupts and transforms, parting with tradition precisely in order to remain faithful to its radical but increasingly occluded core.

The contributors test Hamacher’s break with philology in a variety of ways, attempting a philological practice that does not take language as an object of knowledge, study, or even love. Thus, in responding to Hamacher’s Theses, the authors approach language that, because it can never be an object of any kind, awakens an unfamiliar desire. Taken together these essays problematize philological ontology in a movement toward radical reconceptualizations of labor, action, and historical time.
 

Author Bio

Gerhard Richter is a professor of German studies and comparative literature at Brown University. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Inheriting Walter Benjamin and Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics. Ann Smock is a professor emerita of French at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of two books, including What Is There to Say? (Nebraska, 2003), and has translated several others. An influential theorist, philosopher, and literary critic, Werner Hamacher (1948–2017) was a professor at the University of Frankfurt and founder of its Institute of General and Comparative Literary Studies.
 

Praise

“This is a stunningly original collection of essays—utterly engrossing and compelling. Probing, erudite, elegant, witty, these essays explore the concept of philology at once literally (literally “literally,” that is, to the letter, down to its smallest granules of articulation) and expansively, inviting us to rethink the fundamental categories of existence—language, translation, tradition, genealogy, history, sociability, love, kinship, in short, just about everything. Hamacher’s magnificent Theses could not find a more vibrant afterlife.”—Rebecca Comay, professor of philosophy and comparative literature at the University of Toronto
 

“Werner Hamacher’s 95 Theses on Philology proposes a new radical understanding of philology distinct from its dusty nineteenth-century conception. The eleven responses to his 95 Theses have provided him with an opportunity to comment extensively and in generous detail on the responses they provoked. Hamacher’s lengthy contribution is not only an extraordinary document of scholarly debate but also a superb piece in which he elaborates on the context of his Theses and on their rich theoretical and philosophical ramifications, thus also providing insight into the workings of his own thought.”—Rodolphe Gasché, Distinguished Professor and Eugenio Donato Chair of Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York

Table of Contents

95 Theses on Philology / 95 Thesen zur Philologie
Werner Hamacher, translated by Catharine Diehl
Introduction
Gerhard Richter and Ann Smock
Part 1. Balances1. Was heißt Lesen?—What Is Called Reading?
Gerhard Richter
2. Language-Such-That-It’s-Spoken
Michèle Cohen-Halimi, translated by Ann Smock
3. 48: [this space intentionally left blank]
Jan Plug
4. Catch a Wave: Sound, Poetry, Philology
Sean Gurd
Part 2. Times
5. Einmal ist Keinmal: On the 76th of Werner Hamacher’s 95 Theses for Philology
Ann Smock
6. Rereading tempus fugit
Thomas Schestag
7. Language on Pause: Hamacher’s Seconds of Celan and Daive
Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei
Part 3. Categories
8. The Right Not to Complain: A Philology of Kinship
Avital “Irony” Ronell
9. The Category of Philology
Peter Fenves
10. The Philía of Philology
Susan Bernstein
11. Defining the Indefinite
Daniel Heller-Roazen
Part 4. Responding to Responses
12. What Remains to Be Said: On Twelve and More Ways of Looking at Philology
Werner Hamacher, translated by Kristina Mendicino
Contributors
Index

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