Chance certainties

One does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.

—Nietzsche

Philosphers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

—Anon.

Werner Hamacher cites the first of these aphorisms (it comes from The Gay Science) in a footnote to the opening essay of Premises, entitled, not inappositely, “Premises.” Surely as basic a premise for this collection as any. This thought is confirmed when Hamacher some pages later hazards a definition of his titular term: “‘Premise’ no longer means ground and presupposition but Aussetzung: ex-position, exposure, interruption, abandonment. In its premises language misses itself and thus misses its understanding. Only what goes astray and foregoes itself is promised in language” (19). A Derridian or deconstructive premise, one might say. It will be worth our while to tease out that relation in some detail as we proceed. ¹ For at stake in this dense, challenging, and, in the best sense of the term, serious book, is the fate of a certain moment in the history of theory (not only literary theory, although that has been one prominent arena where this history has played itself out over more than three decades) which, for better and for worse, came to be known under these twin signs.

Hamacher’s book has appeared at a time when deconstruction would seem not to be on the agenda in the same way it was, say, in the late seventies and early eighties, despite the fact that many of the principals who participated in the theory revolution remain alive and massively productive—Derrrida himself writes with greater fluidity than ever, if not in quite the same idiom that produced the landmark texts from De la grammatologie to Glas. The reasons for this transformation in the fortunes of deconstruction are probably not far to seek. ² As an event, coming when it does and with the imprimatur of one of the venerable institutions of North American academic publishing, the question that Premises immediately poses (or, as Hamacher himself would have it, “exposes”) is: what is the status of deconstruction at the fin de siècle in the anglophone (primarily the US) academy? How does such a book seek to intervene in a conjuncture unreceptive to, indeed manifestly hostile towards the procedures and protocols of such a hermeneutics as Hamacher practices? On what premises could such a project base itself and hope to receive a fair hearing in the court of intellectual inquiry?

One is tempted at this point simply to quote once again the definition cited above, in particular the key terms offered as possible English equivalents of the German Aussetzung (an etymon of Voraussetzung, simply as “premise”): ex-position, exposure, interruption, abandonment. Of these, the last is surely the most provocative, but let us concentrate on the two in the middle. Premises bring to light that which had been hidden; they stop the flow of familiar discourse, compelling one to re-think what was held to be certain or at least uncontroversial. Premises are Brechtian alienation-effects; they make it impossible for us to proceed in the ordinary way. They are the means by which we (might begin to) change the world (and pace Marx, from the position of the philosopher). They commence, as Hamacher tirelessly repeats in this introductory essay, in an act of non-understanding: “Understanding is in want of understanding” proclaims this text’s opening, lapidary sentence. Nothing in what follows thereafter will go back on this premise; it will be extended, refined, fleshed out in cogent, careful readings of a wide range of texts from Schleiermacher, Kant, and Nietzsche, to de Man, Kafka, Benjamin, and Celan. Manifestly, we shall have acquired a better understanding of the full implications of this paradox once we have finished, but will understanding be left any less wanting for this effort? Yes and no.

As a philosophical (which is to say rhetorical) premise the sentence will remain just...