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Editor’s Foreword

In the fall of 2015, I approached Werner Hamacher about the possibility of pulling some of his essays together into a book-length manuscript. He suggested a group of texts—all previously published, some already having appeared in English translation—that I would translate or edit under the tentative title Brinks: Time, History, Language, Politics. As we discussed the volume, its table of contents changed a good deal: one essay was substituted for another, a new one was added, some were dropped. By the time of Hamacher’s death in 2017, the final list of titles seemed largely finalized, though much else was still in flux. We had promised each other to discuss the title—namely, the possibility of On the Brink—and the order in which the essays would appear, as well as their grouping into sections. And then there was the matter of the translation itself, the many questions I anticipated having about particular words, phrases—even punctuation—to say nothing of Hamacher’s always demanding thinking. In the process of working on the collection, still more has changed. One major essay has since been published in another volume and so has been omitted here.^[1] Other pieces have also fallen out in the interest of the coherence of the volume, although they should without doubt appear elsewhere. It is my hope that they will.

What remains are ten essays on topics ranging from Kant’s thinking of time to a sketch for a theory of democracy, all marked by Hamacher’s remarkable and characteristic rigor. And what remains is the feeling of loss and absence left by Hamacher’s death. That absence registers not least in the fact that the volume is without a foreword or introduction by the author. It has become increasingly clear to me in working on the essays that a more recent word from Hamacher on his thinking of time, history, language, and politics would not only have offered an important note to the topic in the current historical and political context, but in so doing would also have shed light on the other essays and their situations.

I will make no attempt to fill the space and time of that absence. I simply wish to register it and to allow the essays that follow to speak for themselves, even—especially—when they speak of a language that cannot say what it means and mean what it says. In the place of an introduction from the author, the opening paragraph of the first essay, “Ex Tempore,” will serve as the point of entry. That paragraph, after all, is in many ways emblematic of Hamacher’s singular ability to summarize an entire philosophical tradition—here from Plato to Kant—in a few sentences. The subsequent essays extend that thinking, beginning with Hegel and moving to the twentieth century, passing through meditations on forms and gestures of language. But whether the ostensible theme of a given essay is Kant’s thinking of time in terms of the representation of relation; the distinction—and confusion—between phenomenal and literary events in Hegel and Aristotle, in particular; or, with Hegel again, the declaration of the “end” of art in irony. Whether it is the place of the noncognitive elements of language in translation; how greeting, as a figure for language as such, at once opens a space for the approach of another and denies that approach; or complaint or lament as a form of language that rejects itself and the world even in asserting itself. Or whether it is the call to serve and to work, as in Kafka, a call that cannot properly be answered, for there is no work, at least that does not undo itself; the understanding of work that determines the ideology of National Socialism; or the radical rethinking of the very concept and possibility of democracy today—when “we are, it seems, numbed by democracy.” Whatever the topic, always at play in these essays is the “brink”—the edge of a high place, say, a cliff; the bank, as of a river; the threshold of danger; or the point of onset for something.^[2]

The topic of each essay, then, is always also to be found in what that essay verges dangerously upon falling into. Better, it is the brink “itself”—if there is one—that (non-)place or time before, between, or beyond time, the very verging upon. . . . Or better still, this is not the topic or thesis of these essays, what they are about or on, which would reduce the brink to a theme or intention. Rather, like Hebel’s Zundelfrieder, of whom Hamacher writes with obvious relish in “Contraductions,” the essays in this volume don’t much care for the boundaries of time, language, history, politics, except in pushing them to their limits and transgressing them. They speak one language (Polish, the language of time, say), while speaking another (German, the language of politics), and they even take language to the point where one can no longer be certain that it is one or the other that they are speaking or speaking of.

Nowhere is this more the case than in the final text, a meditation reminiscent in its form of Hamacher’s work on philology that takes up questions that preoccupy the other essays in the collection—directly, at least—with but a single mention of time. And yet this text, too, is equally dedicated to, is equally on the brink of, those questions. Indeed, that one mention of time brings it into proximity with place and with the question of relation itself: “It is not only the structure of time that, as Derrida has shown, depends on this With, hama; it is also the structure of place that depends on it” (chapter 10 of this volume). It is not only the structure of time, which is to say that it is also the structure of time that depends on the With. And so here, where Hamacher speaks above all of space and place, these too depend not only on the “With,” but also are with—in the parallel construction of the sentence are with not only each but also with time in that time and place depend on the particular relation that is being-with, which conditions their being-with each other.

But this With is not a localized one: it is the placing of place, and the granting of space, for it is only by virtue of this With, the medium both of discretion and of cohesion, that a place is given. The boundary lies with the boundary—and thus with that which marks the difference between, and the unity of, both boundaries, opens up the place. With is thus not a determination of place, a possible answer to the question of where something is; it is the granting of place, and it does not posit it at or together with a place but opens up the place as with and as at. The Together-With of things is a Together-With of their being Together-With with their being Without-Each Other. Place is the With of the With With the Without, the With without With of all bodies—and thus what relates them to each other and what keeps them apart, their relation; place carries them and brings them apart and together, a double carrier of the double boundary, an amphora. (chapter 10 of this volume)

This is perhaps the brink that occupies all the essays in this volume, the “amphora . . . not as a body,” and no doubt not as any of the other terms the subtitle circumscribes—history, politics, or even time or language. And “not even simply as a boundary, but as the outermost boundary of the inner wall of a container whose circumference is equal to that of the thing it contains, which is tied to it and yet detached from it” (chapter 10 of this volume). Though the “boundary” is perhaps pushed even further to its outermost limits, since it is not a matter of a container or thing, no matter how fully put into question, but rather of a history and politics, and time and language, that are always with . . . that clear paths, open the possibility for . . . that are always on the brink.

Hamacher takes us there, to that brink. To that dangerous place where we might fall. And where something is about to begin, always about to. And he refuses to avert his gaze or to step back.

The essays collected here appeared in journals on various themes, were given as talks on various occasions, and have sometimes been reprinted, sometimes, as I have noted above, in translation. It has been my privilege to learn from those remarkable translations. I have edited them lightly for consistency while trying to respect the singularity of the essay’s language and occasion—as I have tried, similarly, to do in my own translation of the previously untranslated essays. To speak, once again, of the task of the translator would not be adequate here; it would be better, perhaps, to speak of the honor.

I am grateful to Werner Hamacher for the opportunity to work on the volume and for his example. To Andrew Benjamin, Frankie Mace, and Sarah Campbell for their steadfast support. To Tobias Nagl for an eye-opening suggestion. And to Pascal Michelberger for his many helpful clarifications.

The previously untranslated texts are translated here with permission of the author and Shinu Sara Ottenburger. “(The End of Art with the Mask)” (chapter 3) appeared in Stuart Barnett, ed., Hegel after Derrida (London: Routledge, 1998), 105–30. “Uncalled” (chapter 7) appeared in Reading Ronell, edited by Diane Davis and copyright 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois and is used with permission of the University of Illinois Press. Chapter 8, “Working Through Working,” trans. Matthew Hartman, Modernism/modernity 3, no. 1 (1996): 23–56, copyright 1996 by Johns Hopkins University Press, is printed with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. “Sketches toward a Lecture on Democracy” (chapter 9) originally appeared in theory@buffalo 10 (2005): 9–53 and is reproduced with permission of the journal. “Amphora” (chapter 10) appeared as “Amphora (Extracts)” in Assemblage 20 (1993): 40–41 and is reproduced with permission from MIT Press.

—Jan Plug

Notes

1.

“Parousia, Stone-Walls,” in Two Studies of Friedrich Hölderlin, ed. Peter Fenves and Julia Ng (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020).

2.

“Brink,” in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed. (Merriam Webster, 2019).