Hamacher studied philosophy, comparative literature and religious studies at the Free University of Berlin and the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), where he met and came to know Jacques Derrida.
[1] From 1998 to 2013 he was a Professor in the University of Frankfurt's Institute for General and Comparative Literature (Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft),[2] and since 2003 he was on the faculty of the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
[1] He was previously Professor of German and the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and taught for a number of years at New York University.
He was the author of Pleroma—Dialectics and Hermeneutics in Hegel and Premises: Essays on Philosophy from Kant to Celan and the editor of the series Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics, published by Stanford University Press.
He translated a selection of essays by Paul de Man into German.