Werner Hamacher (1948–2017) was the founder and director of the Institute of General and Comparative Literature at the University of Frankfurt and Emmanuel Levinas Chair at the European Graduate School. His many publications include Pleroma: Reading in Hegel (1997), Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan (1999), Minima Philologica (2015), and Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin (2020).Jan Plug is professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.

This superb collection of hitherto uncollected (and partly untranslated) essays by Werner Hamacher entangles philosophical rigour and philological acuity in unsurpassed and uncompromising ways, by laying bare the abysmal character of linguistic experience, on the brink of which every single word remains exposed, as Friedrich Hölderlin reminds: Vom Abgrund nemlich haben / Wir angefangen: For from the abyss we / Have begun.

• 1. Ex Tempore: Time as Representation in Kant / 2. On Some Differences Between the History of Literary and the History of Phenomenal Events / 3. (The End of Art with the Mask) / 4. Contraductions / 5. Notes on Greeting / 6. Remarks on Complaint / 7. Uncalled: A Commentary on Kafka’s “The Test” / 8. Working Through Working / 9. Sketches Toward a Lecture on Democracy / 10. Amphora

Werner Hamacher (1948–2017) was the founder and director of the Institute of General and Comparative Literature at the University of Frankfurt and Emmanuel Levinas Chair at the European Graduate School. His many publications include Pleroma: Reading in Hegel (1997), Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan (1999), Minima Philologica (2015), and Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin (2020).Jan Plug is professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.

This superb collection of hitherto uncollected (and partly untranslated) essays by Werner Hamacher entangles philosophical rigour and philological acuity in unsurpassed and uncompromising ways, by laying bare the abysmal character of linguistic experience, on the brink of which every single word remains exposed, as Friedrich Hölderlin reminds: Vom Abgrund nemlich haben / Wir angefangen: For from the abyss we / Have begun.

• 1. Ex Tempore: Time as Representation in Kant / 2. On Some Differences Between the History of Literary and the History of Phenomenal Events / 3. (The End of Art with the Mask) / 4. Contraductions / 5. Notes on Greeting / 6. Remarks on Complaint / 7. Uncalled: A Commentary on Kafka’s “The Test” / 8. Working Through Working / 9. Sketches Toward a Lecture on Democracy / 10. Amphora