In the early 1970s, a group of scholars with the late Peter Szondi at its center formed at the small, newly founded institute for comparative literary studies in Berlin. Together, they adopted the thinking of deconstruction, which had only recently made its way to Germany from Paris and the United States. Werner Hamacher was not only one of them, but quickly became a figurehead of this way of thinking. His 1976 dissertation "pleroma - on the concept of reading in Hegel" shows how independently and originally he appropriates it. Quite self-confidently, he published it in 1978 with an altered subtitle as a kind of gigantic introduction to an edition of Hegel's texts. Now, this text, an extraordinary feat of philosophical scholarship, is for the first time available as a single edition, enhanced by accompanying documents, in the series "Klostermann Rote Reihe".
