A tribute to extraordinary scholar and Meridian series editor, Werner Hamacher.
It was with the heaviest of hearts that Stanford University Press learned of the death of Meridian series editor Werner Hamacher this past month. Professor at the University of Frankfurt, and founder of its Institute of General and Comparative Literary Studies, which he also directed, Hamacher was also the Emmanuel Levinas Chair and Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at The European Graduate School.
SUP’s collaboration with Werner Hamacher dates back to 1991, when he and series co-founder David Wellbery (who served as co-editor until 2000) reached out to former Stanford editor Helen Tartar with the idea of forming a book series that would be a forum for work in literary and aesthetic theory, particularly that being done in France, Germany, and the United States. The series name was meant to pay homage to Paul Celan and his influential poetological statement of the same name, which was eventually published in a prizewinning translation in the series itself; but it equally referenced the editors’ desire to cross geographical meridians, to privilege internationality, and to foster work that remapped connections between disciplines, institutions, and national traditions.
Werner’s acumen as a series editors was unparalleled.
The Meridian series went on to become one of the most prestigious and respected book series in the humanities, publishing numerous luminaries in English translation as well as Anglophone thinkers from around the world. Intentionally, and generously, the work of younger, as yet unknown figures was featured alongside and in conversation with books by Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Niklas Lühmann, Maurice Blanchot, Bernard Steigler, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben. As Wellbery has put it, “The only criterion was a commitment to the seriousness of literature and art.” To date, 122 books have appeared in print and there are more on the way. Indeed, it is a source of some sadness that Werner will not be here to see some of the forthcoming projects he endorsed.
Werner’s acumen as a series editors was unparalleled. Indeed, he stood out as the most discriminating series editor a press could ask for. He often tormented himself over his rigorous standards and his inability to give certain things a pass, but such meticulousness is what made his series stand out and his opinion so valuable. Humanities editor Emily-Jane Cohen, who worked with him for over a decade, has singled Werner out as a series editor who read every word of what appeared in his series. Not surprisingly, then, a sign of approval and engagement from him, and of course, welcome into the Meridian series, has always seemed to be especially meaningful for the authors Werner helped to foster and showcase. And then, of course, there is his own work, some of which was also featured in Meridian. Werner’s areas of interest included philology, law, and politics, and student of Derrida that he was, he was particularly known for his deconstructive readings, of which Pleroma, his book on Hegel, is a prime example.
In the last weeks, a range of biographies and eulogies have appeared across the web, and from a variety of corners. Having taught for many years in the United States as well, Werner left behind a number of American colleagues and students. Those wishing to know more about this extraordinary scholar and his important contributions may wish to refer to obituaries that appeared in venues attesting to his impact, including, in Germany, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Jean-Luc Nancy published a touching tribute in French in Diacritik. For its part, SUP has collected some comments from some of the Meridian authors closest to Werner, which we are posting below. We are grateful to them for having shared these thoughts, and most of all, we are grateful to Werner for all the years he devoted to us and to the Meridian series, which left a lasting mark and which figures so importantly in the scholarly landscape.
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“Who, in his wake, will have Werner Hamacher’s ability to invent and yoke concepts not only for the love of theory, but above all, to illuminate an author’s work, an obscure page, or a verse in an unexpected flash? And how can we forget the exigent gesture of his prose, in which rigor and imagination, philology and philosophy, seem almost to merge? We all owe him a debt, though the importance of his work has yet to be fully determined.”
—GIORGIO AGAMBEN, author of Homo Sacer
“Two generations of Germanists and Comp Lit scholars forged themselves in the furnace of Werner Hamacher’s seminars in Baltimore and later in Frankfurt. There was something about that transatlantic fire that wanted to be very pure. In a word, Hamacher was uncompromising. He played deconstruction’s super-ego, never missed a chance to say ‘no’ to certain interpretations and to certain kinds of thinking. He even developed a critical rhetoric of the no, the not, nothing, and the ‘a-,’ out of singular readings of Hegel, Hölderlin, Benjamin, and Celan. There was also something infernal about those seminars—deconstructing the canon, renouncing the prevailing understanding, calling understanding itself into question. For some, Hamacher will always live in their intellectual conscience. At the decisive moment, he wrinkles his brow and says, as he once did to me, ‘You need more obstacles.’”
—PAUL NORTH, Yale University, author of The Yield
“I am proud to have been a part of [the Meridian series] and am grateful to Werner Hamacher for those many years of collaboration.
—DAVID WELLBERY, University of Chicago, Meridian series co-founder, and author of The Specular Moment
“When I first entered into Werner’s seminar at Hopkins, I realized that, despite four years in college and two in graduate school, this was the first time I ever encountered a teacher—someone whose voice in the classroom was completely absorbed in the rhythms of argumentation. This voice, rigorous yet kindly, has been with me ever since. And as long as I am able to read and listen, it will continue to be my companion.”
—PETER FENVES, Northwestern University, author of The Messianic Reduction
“Werner Hamacher: the works associated with that authorial name are a thinking with and thinking against, as they open up our modes of knowing and not knowing; a call to and response to...; what he named both the ‘act of searching itself’ and a ‘catastrophe of questioning.’ It is impossible to overestimate the daring and almost carefree exuberance of his written performances and the astonishment and wonder they create for the reader. The writings of Werner Hamacher have long served as something of a touchstone for students of literature and philosophy. While he taught in the United States they traveled hundreds of miles to hear him speak and sit in his classes. When he returned to Germany, a new generation of extraordinary students crossed the ocean for that privilege. Those of us who knew him long and knew him well came to value his remarkable capacity for friendship and his amazing generosity. There are no words…”
—CAROL JACOBS, Yale University, author of Skirting the Ethical
“Werner Hamacher’s work has been an utterly uncompromising initiation into questioning in reading and in thinking: questioning ‘that does not end with a question mark,’ as he once wrote, that does not claim to know what the answer is or pretend to be it itself, and that, holding out a space for what is unsaid, makes learning—another learning—possible.”
—DANIEL HELLER-ROAZEN, Princeton University, translator of Homo Sacer, Potentialities, and The End of the Poem
“After Werner Hamacher’s much too early death, few writers seem to say more about his preoccupations than Friedrich Hölderlin. Not known for his puns, Hölderlin allowed himself one in his meditation on communion, ‘Brod und Wein’ (“Bread and Wine’), which reads differently after Werner’s demise. In the fourth stanza, Hölderlin apostrophizes Vater Äther!, ‘Father Aether!,’ and then, four lines later, speaks of Vater! heiter!, ‘Father! Joyful!’ The difference at play is the very one wrought by the poem: that of aspiration, signaling life and marked by the letter that German speakers pronounce ha. As few others, Werner knew how to breathe life into texts—he was, if another wordplay may be permitted, quite literally, ein Ha-macher, an “H-maker.” Henceforth Werner’s own texts will need to be addressed with the same blissful—unswerving and unending—scrutiny he devoted to those of others. Saddened by his death, I am certain he would like nothing more than that we, his readers, cultivate Hölderlin’s joyfulness.”
—ARIS FIORETOS, Södertörn University, author of The Gray Book
“Werner Hamacher: Transcending without transcendence. This is the movement he has imparted to us. Thanks to the Meridian series, we can continue to read in his wake.”
—SUSAN BERNSTEIN, Brown University, author of Housing Problems
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