One of the origins of philological thinking in Werner Hamacher’s oeuvre is without a doubt the work of his teacher Paul de Man. In his short text “The Return to Philology,” de Man allies the persistence of close reading and philological techniques in literary departments with the advent of post-structuralism. They share a program of developing the question “whether aesthetic values can be compatible with the linguistic structures that make up the entities from which these values are derived.”¹ Philology here would match the deconstructive techniques that consider reading first an act of developing poetic and rhetorical figures before turning…