Parting Ways: With Werner Hamacher

Abstract

Parting Ways:With Werner Hamacher Kevin Newmark (bio) GIVE THE WORD: RESPONSES TO WERNER HAMACHER'S 95 THESES ON PHILOLOGY EDITED BY ANN SMOCK AND GERARD RICHTER University of Nebraska Press, 2019 Wer spricht, wer sich ausmacht, wer seinen Namen, seinen Ort, sein Wort vermisst, der entmisst sich, verliert seinen Ort an der Verortung, sein Wort an die Entwortung und (ist) entwo —Werner Hamacher, "Amphora" The prominent place accorded to philology by Werner Hamacher is remarkable for a number of reasons. Among the most eye-catching would doubtless concern the way that, for him, philology can be assigned no place; it is only by virtue of philology taking place that the world becomes a place in the first place. "Philology is not a part of this world," Hamacher writes in the eighty-ninth of his 95 Theses on Philology, "it is the movement of the world itself: it is the coming into the world of the world" (Smock and Richter, liii).1 Such an affirmation would not be the most predictable one to derive from the canonical concept and practice of philology. If philology today seems mostly antiquated, that is because we have lost touch with what, through a return to philology, the same name might have been—and still be—able to point toward. Philology as we know it has succeeded in becoming rigorous enough as a historical and hermeneutical discipline to have made us forget what a philology of the term philology might otherwise be able to disclose. And it would be toward allowing such an other [End Page 172] philology to emerge from the crusty layers of philology that Hamacher devotes his 95 Theses. For, if philology names a certain attentiveness to language, and if language consists first of all in those acts that open a "place" in which names can begin to function as names, then a particular kind of attentiveness—call it philia—to language (call it "philialogy") could by the same token bring about an attentiveness to the way the world will have become whatever we think is meant by that term, the world, only through the philological fact of its having been so named. One of the innumerable merits of Hamacher's Theses is to have been able to generate from this situation sufficient attentiveness among scholars of philology, literature, and philosophy for another publication to have resulted from it: Give the Word: Responses to Werner Hamacher's 95 Theses on Philology. In many respects, Give the Word is a peculiar volume. It is composed of a third reprinting of Hamacher's 95 Theses on Philology, this time in both English translation and German, followed by a short introduction by coeditors Ann Smock and Gerhard Richter, which leads to the Responses to the Theses written by eleven scholars, most (but not all) of whom are affiliated with U.S. universities. Following these eleven Responses—anywhere between six and nearly forty pages in length—there is another text by Werner Hamacher, "What Remains to Be Said," which responds at surprising length to the preceding essays on his Theses. As the editors point out in their introduction, extracts from the Theses first appeared in English translation as part of a 2010 special issue of PMLA, "Literary Criticism for the Twenty-First Century" (Hamacher 2010b, 4).2 "As the beginning of a response" to that publication, the editors specify, they organized two panels at the 2013 MLA Convention in Boston and then followed up on that first initiative by compiling the volume of texts that now appear in Give the Word. It is worth noting, however, that Hamacher died in July of 2017, two years before publication of the volume. Something of a disjunction, if not a dissonance, is produced as soon as one notices that Hamacher's Response to all the other Responses now has, or has been given, "the last word" in a way that could not have been registered at the time he wrote the essay "What Remains to Be Said" in 2016. In the interval between Hamacher's writing "What Remains to Be Said" and its publication in Give the Word, lies an event—Hamacher's death—that from now on cannot...