On the brink : language, time, history, and politics

244 Pages·2020·21.891 MB·English

by  Werner Hamacher, Jan Plug (editor)

On the Brink
Philosophical Projections
SeriesEditor:AndrewBenjamin,DistinguishedProfessorofPhilosophyandtheHuman-
ities,KingstonUniversity,UK,andProfessorofPhilosophyandJewishThought,Monash
University,Australia
Philosophical Projections represents the future of Modern European Philosophy. The
seriesseekstoinnovatebygroundingthefutureintheworkofthepresent,openingupthe
philosophical and allowing it to renew itself, while interrogating the continuity of the
philosophicalafterthecritiqueofmetaphysics.
TitlesintheSeries
FoundationsoftheEveryday:Shock,Deferral,Repetition,EranDorfman
TheThoughtofMatter:Materialism,ConceptualityandtheTranscendenceofImma-
nence,RichardA.Lee
Nancy,Blanchot:ASeriousControversy,LeslieHill
TheWorkofForgetting:Or,HowCanWeMaketheFuturePossible?,StéphaneSymons
OntheBrink:Language,Time,History,andPolitics,WernerHamacher,editedbyJan
Plug
On the Brink
Language, Time, History, and Politics
Werner Hamacher
Edited by Jan Plug
London•NewYork
PublishedbyRowman&LittlefieldInternational,Ltd.
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Thistranslationcopyright©2020byRowman&LittlefieldInternational
Previouslyuntranslatedchapters©WernerHamacher:
“Uncalled”appearedinReadingRonell,copyright©2009bytheBoardofTrusteesofthe
UniversityofIllinois
“WorkingThroughWorking”appearedinModernism/modernity,copyright©1996Johns
HopkinsUniversityPress
“SketchestowardaLectureonDemocracy,”copyright©2005theory@buffalo
“(TheEndofArtwiththeMask)”appearedinHegelafterDerrida,copyright©1998
Routledge
“Amphora”appearedas“Amphora(Extracts)”inAssemblage,copyright©1993MIT
Press
Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereproducedinanyformorbyany
electronicormechanicalmeans,includinginformationstorageandretrievalsystems,
withoutwrittenpermissionfromthepublisher,exceptbyareviewerwhomayquote
passagesinareview.
BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationInformation
AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary
ISBN:HB978-1-78660-391-3
ISBN:PB978-1-78660-392-0
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationDataIsAvailable
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2020943793
ISBN978-1-78660-391-3(cloth:alk.paper)
ISBN978-1-78660-392-0(pbk:alk.paper)
ISBN978-1-78660-393-7(electronic)
TMThepaperusedinthispublicationmeetstheminimumrequirementsofAmerican
NationalStandardforInformationSciencesPermanenceofPaperforPrintedLibrary
Materials,ANSI/NISOZ39.48-1992.
Contents
Editor’sForeword vii
I:Time,History,Art:KantandHegel
1 ExTempore:TimeasRepresentationinKant 3
2 OnSomeDifferencesbetweentheHistoryofLiteraryandthe
HistoryofPhenomenalEvents 29
3 (TheEndofArtwiththeMask) 43
II:GesturesofLanguage
4 Contraductions 73
5 NotesonGreeting 91
6 RemarksonComplaint 107
III:Sketches:Work,Democracy
7 Uncalled:ACommentaryonKafka’s“TheTest” 129
8 WorkingThroughWorking 147
9 SketchestowardaLectureonDemocracy 183
IV:Afterword
10 Amphora 219
Index 229
v

Editor’s Foreword
In the fall of 2015, I approached Werner Hamacher about the possibility of
pulling some of his essays together into a book-length manuscript. He sug-
gested a group of texts—all previously published, some already having ap-
peared in English translation—that I would translate or edit under the tenta-
tive title Brinks: Time, History, Language, Politics. As we discussed the
volume,itstableofcontentschangedagooddeal:oneessaywas substituted
for another, a new one was added, some were dropped. By the time of
Hamacher’s death in 2017, the final list of titles seemed largely finalized,
thoughmuchelsewasstillinflux.Wehadpromisedeachothertodiscussthe
title—namely, the possibility of On the Brink—and the order in which the
essays would appear, as well as their grouping into sections. And then there
was the matter of the translation itself, the many questions I anticipated
having about particular words, phrases—even punctuation—to say nothing
ofHamacher’salwaysdemandingthinking.Intheprocessofworkingonthe
collection,stillmorehaschanged.Onemajoressayhassincebeenpublished
in another volume and so has been omitted here.1 Other pieces have also
fallenoutintheinterestofthecoherenceofthevolume,althoughtheyshould
withoutdoubtappearelsewhere.Itismyhopethattheywill.
What remains are ten essays on topics ranging from Kant’s thinking of
time to a sketch for a theory of democracy, all marked by Hamacher’s re-
markableandcharacteristicrigor.Andwhatremainsisthefeelingoflossand
absenceleftbyHamacher’sdeath.Thatabsenceregistersnotleastinthefact
that the volume is without a foreword or introduction by the author. It has
becomeincreasinglycleartomeinworkingontheessaysthatamorerecent
wordfromHamacheronhisthinking of time,history,language, andpolitics
would not only have offered an important note to the topic in the current
vii
viii Editor’sForeword
historicalandpoliticalcontext,butinsodoingwouldalsohaveshedlighton
theotheressaysandtheirsituations.
Iwillmakenoattempttofillthespaceandtimeofthatabsence.Isimply
wishtoregisteritandtoallowtheessaysthatfollowtospeakforthemselves,
even—especially—when they speak of a language that cannot say what it
meansandmeanwhatitsays.Intheplaceofanintroductionfromtheauthor,
the opening paragraph of the first essay, “Ex Tempore,” will serve as the
point of entry. That paragraph, after all, is in many ways emblematic of
Hamacher’ssingularabilitytosummarizeanentirephilosophicaltradition—
here from Plato to Kant—in a few sentences. The subsequent essays extend
that thinking, beginning with Hegel and moving to the twentieth century,
passingthroughmeditationsonformsandgesturesoflanguage.Butwhether
the ostensible theme of a given essay is Kant’s thinking of time in terms of
therepresentationofrelation;thedistinction—andconfusion—betweenphe-
nomenal and literary events in Hegel and Aristotle, in particular; or, with
Hegel again, the declaration of the “end” of art in irony. Whether it is the
placeof the noncognitive elements of language in translation; how greeting,
as a figure for language as such, at once opens a space for the approach of
another and denies that approach; or complaint or lament as a form of lan-
guagethatrejectsitselfandtheworldeveninassertingitself.Orwhetheritis
the call to serve and to work, as in Kafka, a call that cannot properly be
answered, for there is no work, at least that does not undo itself; the under-
standing of work that determines the ideology of National Socialism; or the
radical rethinking of the very concept and possibility of democracy today—
when“weare,itseems,numbedbydemocracy.”Whateverthetopic,always
at play in these essays is the “brink”—the edge of a high place, say, a cliff;
the bank, as of a river; the threshold of danger; or the point of onset for
something.2
The topic of each essay, then, is always also to be found in what that
essayvergesdangerouslyuponfallinginto.Better,itisthebrink “itself”—if
there is one—that (non-)place or time before, between, or beyond time, the
very verging upon. . . . Or better still, this is not the topic or thesis of these
essays, what they are about or on, which would reduce the brink to a theme
or intention. Rather, like Hebel’s Zundelfrieder, of whom Hamacher writes
with obvious relish in “Contraductions,” the essays in this volume don’t
much care for the boundaries of time, language, history, politics, except in
pushing them to their limits and transgressing them. They speak one lan-
guage (Polish, the language of time, say), while speaking another (German,
thelanguageofpolitics),andtheyeventakelanguagetothepointwhereone
can no longer be certain that it is one or the other that they are speaking or
speakingof.
Nowhereisthismorethecasethaninthefinaltext,ameditationreminis-
centinitsformofHamacher’sworkonphilologythattakesupquestionsthat