Minima Philologica
Minima Philologica
WERNER HAMACHER
CATHARINE DIEHL
JASON GROVES
Copyright Date: 2015
Published by: Fordham University Press
Pages: 176
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130h9jr
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Book Info
Minima Philologica
Book Description:

Minima Philologica brings together two essays by Werner Hamacher that are meant to revitalize philology as a practice beyond its restriction to the restoration of linguistic data and their meanings. In these two texts, "95 Theses on Philology" and "For-Philology," Hamacher propounds a notion of generalized philology that is equivalent to the real production of linguistic utterances, and indeed utterances not limited to predicative or even discursive statements. Philology, in speaking for language where no clear and distinct language is given, exhibits and exposes the structure of language in general. The first text, "95 Theses on Philology," challenges academic philology as well as other disciplines across the humanities and sciences that "use" language, assuming it to be a given entity and not an event. The theses develop what Hamacher calls the "idea of philology" by describing the constitution of its objects, its relation to knowledge, its suspension of consciousness, and its freedom for what remains always still to be said. In "For-Philology," both speaking and writing, Hamacher argues, follow, discursively and non-discursively, the desire for language. Desire-philia-is the insatiable affect that drives the movement between utterances toward the next and the one after that. Desiring language-logos-means to respond to an alien utterance that precedes you, ignorant about where the path will lead, accepting loss and uncertainty, thinking in and through language and the lack of it, exceeding, returning, responding to others, cutting into and off what is to be said. In arguing this, Hamacher responds, directly or obliquely, to other philological thinkers such as Plato and Schlegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger, as well as to poets such as Rene Char, Francis Ponge, Paul Celan, and Friedrich Holderlin. Taken together, the essays of Minima Philologica constitute a manifesto for a new understanding of linguistic existence that breaks new ways of attending to language and those who live by it.

eISBN: 978-0-8232-6538-1
Subjects: Language & Literature
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-viii)
  3. PART I: NINETY-FIVE THESES ON PHILOLOGY
    PART I: NINETY-FIVE THESES ON PHILOLOGY (pp. 1-106)

    The elements of language explicate one another. They speak for that which still remains to be said within that which is said; they speak as philological additions to one another. Language is archiphilology.

    The elements of language explicate one another: they offer additions to what has hitherto been said, speak for one another as witnesses, as advocates, and as translators that open that which has been said onto that which is to be said: the elements of language relate to one another as languages. There is not one language but a multiplicity; not a stable multiplicity but only a perpetual...

  4. PART II: FOR—PHILOLOGY
    PART II: FOR—PHILOLOGY (pp. 107-156)

    There is an antiphilological affect. More and more among the human sciences, philology is seen as a petty, narrow, elitist, and in extreme cases hostile enterprise of specialists who presume to practice as a profession what any literate person does naturally. This affect—hostility toward concentrated attention to language, words, pauses—turns into defensiveness and often to disdain across a wide public, and the affect is also shared by many philologists, fueled as it is by energies closely related to those of philology. For philology, no matter how entrenched in the academy, is not a discipline. It is not only...

  5. NOTES
    NOTES (pp. 157-162)
  6. Back Matter
    Back Matter (pp. 163-164)
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