Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) remains one of the most influential and yet least understood figures in the history of German thought and literature. His provocative style and relentless interrogation of the limits of language and writing have for centuries fascinated and frustrated thinkers ranging from Goethe and Hegel to Wittgenstein and Benjamin. In The Last Mas k Brian Alkire reapproaches Hamann through the lens of his final work Disrobing and Transfiguration (1786), revealing a writer attempting to understand, clarify, and defend the entire fable of his little authorship (which is also a mask), a project ultimately abandoned in exhaustion, ending his final manuscript with the words etc. I cant anymore A meticulous examination of the handwritten manuscripts reveals a number of previously unknown dimensions to Hamanns work, where theory and criticism become a form of theater and masqueradein a theory of the virtual and virtual theory, a term used in an unpublished manuscript fragment to describe his own method. The Last Mask moves with Hamann from philology to theory, uncovering a restless and brutally antagonistic skeptic who senses a Dionysian frenzy at the heart of philosophywith major implications for contemporary theories of power, desire, and virtuality.

Brian Alkire is a research fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Zurich, working on a project entitled Voices of Exhaustion: Form and Physiology in Kafka, Beckett, and Bernhard. He studied English, German, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, the University of Freiburg, and the Humboldt University of Berlin. In the spring of 2021, he will be joining the Department of German at New York University.