"Poetry no longer prevails, it is exposed," Paul Celan wrote in 1969. The studies compiled in Comprender, which were drawn from fundamental texts of philosophy and modern literature, host Celan's sentence regarding the conditions and possibilities of understanding, as well as the its limits and its beyond, in a process that is carried out in and with the language.
"Understanding wants to be understood", but as it always refers to a misunderstood person - otherwise, it would be a knowledge - it is only understood in its incomprehensibility: it opens and preserves its possibility. It is understood from the detraction, it could be said with Celan. If the putting of the subject has been one of the most recurrent themes in the philosophical tradition, Werner Hamacher shows that the promise of a position is inevitable and unattainable, therefore open to transformation from its setting.
Under the prism of this aporetic, Hamacher focuses on topics, topics and texts relevant to Modernity, from the structure of the imperatives in Kant, the genealogy of Nietzsche's moral and the aporias of the singularity, to the gesture of naming in Benjamin and Kafka, and the incisive caesura in Paul Celan. Philosophical and literary, this book is an original scriptural and conceptual investigation about the interruption within the understanding envisioned by Kant in his first Critique.