Dieter Mersch
Was sich zeigt: Materialität,Präsenz,Ereignis.
Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2002. First edition. 3770536223 457 pages.
Softcover volume, measuring approximately 6.25" x 9.25", displays very light shelfwear. Binding is sound. Pages are clean and bright.
"Against the claim to universality of text, writing and discourse, Mersch identifies something unreadable in the symbolic. This illegibility concerns, on the one hand, the materiality of the signs themselves, the necessity of their sensual embodiment; on the other hand, their performative moment, the "event" of their creation.
This genuine double structure, which chronically prevents the readability of the signs, is developed in particular from the pair of terms "saying" and "showing": what is shown cannot be said and vice versa. In this way, “showing oneself” becomes a key concept of phenomenology and aesthesis on the one hand and semiology and hermeneutics on the other.
This basic idea is systematically carried out through a critical examination of the most important positions in sign, language and text theory: from Cassirer, Wittgenstein, Goodman and Peirce to Saussure and Derrida."