On the Brink
Philosophical Projections
Series Editor: Andrew Benjamin, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities, Kingston University, UK, and Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought, Monash University, Australia
Philosophical Projections represents the future of Modern European Philosophy. The series seeks to innovate by grounding the future in the work of the present, opening up the philosophical and allowing it to renew itself, while interrogating the continuity of the philosophical after the critique of metaphysics.
Titles in the Series
Foundations of the Everyday: Shock, Deferral, Repetition, Eran Dorfman
The Thought of Matter: Materialism, Conceptuality and the Transcendence of Immanence, Richard A. Lee
Nancy, Blanchot: A Serious Controversy, Leslie Hill
The Work of Forgetting: Or, How Can We Make the Future Possible?, Stéphane Symons
On the Brink: Language, Time, History, and Politics, Werner Hamacher, edited by Jan Plug
On the Brink
Language, Time, History, and Politics
Werner Hamacher
Edited by Jan Plug
London • New York
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This translation copyright © 2020 by Rowman & Littlefield International
Previously untranslated chapters © Werner Hamacher:
“Uncalled” appeared in Reading Ronell, copyright © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
“Working Through Working” appeared in Modernism/modernity, copyright © 1996 Johns Hopkins University Press
“Sketches toward a Lecture on Democracy,” copyright © 2005 theory@buffalo
“(The End of Art with the Mask)” appeared in Hegel after Derrida, copyright © 1998 Routledge
“Amphora” appeared as “Amphora (Extracts)” in Assemblage, copyright © 1993 MIT Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-78660-391-3
ISBN: PB 978-1-78660-392-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943793
ISBN 978-1-78660-391-3 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-78660-392-0 (pbk: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-78660-393-7 (electronic)
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 suggested a group of texts—all previously published, some already having appeared in English translation—that I would translate or edit under the tentative title Brinks: Time, History, Language, Politics. As we discussed the volume, its table of contents changed a good deal: one essay was 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, though much else was still in flux. We had promised each other to discuss the 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 of Hamacher’s always demanding thinking. In the process of working on the collection, still more has changed. One major essay has since been published in another volume and so has been omitted here.[1] Other pieces have also fallen out in the interest of the coherence of the volume, although they should without doubt appear elsewhere. It is my hope that they will.
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 remarkable and characteristic rigor. And what remains is the feeling of loss and absence left by Hamacher’s death. That absence registers not least in the fact that the volume is without a foreword or introduction by the author. It has become increasingly clear to me in working on the essays that a more recent word from Hamacher on his thinking of time, history, language, and politics would not only have offered an important note to the topic in the current historical and political context, but in so doing would also have shed light on the other essays and their situations.
I will make no attempt to fill the space and time of that absence. I simply wish to register it and to allow the essays that follow to speak for themselves, even—especially—when they speak of a language that cannot say what it means and mean what it says. In the place of an introduction from the author, 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’s singular ability to summarize an entire philosophical tradition—here from Plato to Kant—in a few sentences. The subsequent essays extend that thinking, beginning with Hegel and moving to the twentieth century, passing through meditations on forms and gestures of language. But whether the ostensible theme of a given essay is Kant’s thinking of time in terms of the representation of relation; the distinction—and confusion—between phenomenal 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 place of 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 language that rejects itself and the world even in asserting itself. Or whether it is 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 understanding of work that determines the ideology of National Socialism; or the radical rethinking of the very concept and possibility of democracy today—when “we are, it seems, numbed by democracy.” Whatever the topic, 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 essay verges dangerously upon falling into.