Werner Hamacher (1948–2017) was one of Germany's most renowned philosophers and philologists, and the founder of the Institute for Comparative Literature at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. He is often associated with thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Giorgio Agamben. Werner Hamacher is considered the most significant poststructuralist philosopher to have written in German.

In addition, he is a formative author in American and German Germanistics and cultural philosophy. He is known for his widely recognized and insightful commentaries on the texts of Walter Benjamin, as well as his influential works on Kant, Hegel, Kleist, Celan, and others. Many of his articles have become classics and have been translated into several languages.

The book "Minima Philologica," which theoretically justifies the necessity of philology, consists of two parts: "95 Theses on Philology," expressed in the form of philosophical aphorisms and continuing the important tradition of Friedrich Schlegel and Theodor Adorno, and the essay "For Philology," in which the theoretical basis of philology is discussed in prose form, using Paul Celan's poem on the power of language as an example.