"As Angelika Rauch argues in The Hieroglyph of Tradition, we need to become aware of the fact that tradition is not dissociable from the processes of self-consciousness that involve our capacity to situate ourselves in a world that includes a rich legacy of predecessors and precedents.".

"Rauch makes the case that reading is an activity within which we encounter something foreign to ourselves, namely, tradition in its otherness and that it is in this encounter that we enter into a dialogue with predecessors and past achievements that have the capacity to transform us. This book will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical theory, literary study, history, and cultural study."--BOOK JACKET.