In
Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition (2004), Hamilton offers a broad investigation of
Pindar, the archaic Greek lyric poet, and his long reception history in European literature and scholarship, addressing a variety of pressing issues, including the recovery and appropriation of classical texts, problems of translation, representations of lyric authenticity, and the possibility or impossibility of a continuous literary tradition. The poetics of obscurity that comes to be articulated across the centuries suggests that taking Pindar to be an incomprehensible poet may not simply be the result of an insufficient or false reading, but rather may serve as a wholly adequate judgment.
Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language (2008) grapples with Romantic figurations of the mad musician, which challenge the limits of representation and thereby instigate a profound crisis in language. Special attention is given to the decidedly autobiographical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where musical experience and mental disturbance disrupt the expression of referential thought, illuminating the irreducible aspects of the self before language can work them back into a discursive system. A philological approach motivates
Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care (2013),which examines the discursive versatility and semantic vagueness of the term
security both in current and historical usage. Hamilton explores the fundamental ambiguity of this word, which denotes the removal of "concern" or "care" and therefore implies a condition that is either carefree or careless. Spanning texts from ancient Greek poetry to Roman Stoicism, from
Augustine and
Luther to
Machiavelli and
Hobbes, from
Kant and
Nietzsche to
Heidegger and
Carl Schmitt, the study analyzes formulations of security that involve both safety and negligence, confidence and complacency, certitude and ignorance. The philological attention to a single term drives two subsequent studies,
On Complacency (
Über die Selbstgefälligkeit, 2021) and
Complacency: Classics and its Displacement in Higher Education (2022). Both works compare the superiority of the classical curriculum in prior centuries with the current hegemony of mathematics and the sciences—how qualitative methods of teaching and research relate to the quantitative positivism of big data, statistical reasoning, and presumably neutral abstraction, which risk dismissing humanist subjectivity and legitimizing self-sufficiency. Throughout, emphasis is placed on a persistent
paronomasia that relates the Latin verb for pleasing (
placere) to adjectives describing flatness (e.g., Greek
plax, plakos and
platys, Latin
planus). The governing metaphor implies that pleasing experiences are akin to traversing a flattened area without bumps or disruptions. Complacency thus points to the pleasant delusion that one proceeds through a two-dimensional realm where disturbances are ignored or dismissed. A central text is the satirical novel
Flatland (1884) by
Edwin Abbott Abbott.
Philology of the Flesh (2018) reflects on the poetic implications and ramifications of the incarnational metaphor, whereby the Word is said to become flesh. By pressing the notion of philology as "love" (
philia) for the "word" (
logos), Hamilton's readings investigate the breadth, depth, and limits of verbal styles that are irreducible to mere information. While a philologist of the body might understand words as corporeal vessels of core meaning, the philologist of the flesh, by focusing on the carnal qualities of language, resists taking words as mere containers. Textual analyses include readings of
Lorenzo Valla,
Johann Georg Hamann and Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Franz Kafka,
Emily Dickinson and
Paul Celan. In
France/Kafka: An Author in Theory (2023), Hamilton recounts how a German writer of Jewish descent in Prague came to serve as an urgent obsession in the literary and intellectual capital of Paris, how a writer of relative obscurity, one who barely published during his all-too-brief lifetime, emerged within years after his death to be hailed as a central figure in the European literary canon. Accordingly, what has come to be known as French Theory is shown to have drawn fundamental impetus from Kafka's texts, from
existentialism to
post-structuralism. In a crucial sense, Kafka turns out to be the spiritual godfather of the theoretical models that continue to shape our reading practices. Hamilton returns to classical reception theory in
Without Within: Parenthetic Interferences in Reception History (2025), which employs the figure of the parenthesis as a paradigm for broaching fresh lines of inquiry into the roles of classical antiquity in modernity, with particular focus on postwar Germany. As the double prefixes of the term reveal, a parenthetic statement is simultaneously situated outside (
para) and inside (
en), too marginal to be incorporated into the main discourse yet too important to eliminate, dismissible but not dismissed. Parenthetic interferences thus challenge the tenets of strict historicism, which keeps antiquity at a distance, and aestheticism, which indulges in the continued presence of the past. As a parenthesis the past and present subsist as a part of each other by remaining apart from each other. == Books ==