Werner Hamacher’s book, edited by Daniel Tyradellis, has just been published: ‘Mutter Museum’ (english: Mother Museum).

‘One can only ever talk about the museum on the threshold of it.’

Werner Hamacher’s lecture ‘Exhibitions of the Mother. A Walk Through Various Museums’ is a key text for understanding the museum as a Western institution: It becomes legible as a place of materialised mourning for the loss of a reference that never existed. Virtually uncommented upon in Germany after its publication in 1995, the text met with both approval and criticism in France from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques Derrida. Hamacher then planned an expanded edition that responds to this criticism and goes far beyond it. In particular, his examination of Raphael’s ‘Sistine Madonna’ and Artaud’s ‘La Maladresse sexuelle de dieu’ points the way to an irreational marking that lends a novel and fundamental power to the unreservedness of the work and the museum in their interplay.