Table of Contents

Premises Hermeneutic Ellipses: Writing the Hermeneutic Circle in Schieiermacher The Promise of Interpretation: Remarks on the Hermeneutic Imperative in Kant and Niezsche "Disgregation of the Will": Nietzsche on the Individual and Individuality "Lectio": de Man's Imperative Position Exposed: Friedrich Schiegel's Poetological Transposition of Fichte's Absolute Proposition The Quaking of Presentation: Kleist's "Earthquake in Chile" The Gesture in the Name: On Benjamin and Kafka The Second of Inversion: Movements of a Figure through Celan's Poetry Sources Index

About the Author

Werner Hamacher was Professor of German and the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. He was the author of Pleroma—Reading in Hegel and coeditor of the series Meridian.

Reviews

Hamacher offers his view of hermeneutical understanding as a way to interpret literary texts and to expose how literary texts disrupt the modern idea of correspondence… Hamacher’s book is scholarly, insightful and interesting.
*The European Legacy*

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, State University of New York at Buffalo*