Search

This paper offers a circling around the interrelations of language and trauma, identity and forgiving through the figure and poems of Paul Celan. In this context, the circle itself becomes a cipher for the trauma of the Shoah and the (im)possibility of speaking or writing poetry after Auschwitz. Via Jenny Edkins, Giorgio Agamben, and Derrida, the poetic is interrogated as an ethical response to the political and social betrayal that is trauma; the subsequent effect of trauma on speaking and listening to testimony is then considered. Finally, the paper explores the poetic as a cipher for forgiving, distinct from moral forgiveness and guilt and equally separate from legal responsibility and debt. Celan's own suicide and one of his elegies are considered as final, literal ciphers in this perpetual and imperfect circling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes that a rich and nuanced understanding of the kinds of ruptures art might be capable of can be achieved through an analysis of Dennis Del Favero's video workTodtnauberg. This work is concerned with the meeting between the Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in the Todtnauberg Forest in 1967. Del Favero takes this actual historical event and carefully imagines what might have transpired between the two figures. Through beautifully rendered scenes we see and hear Celan's longing and his repeated appeals to Heidegger to explain (or apologise for) his allegiance with the Nazi regime. AsTodtnaubergunfolds its dramaturgy of rupture positions us to reflect upon the concepts of responsiveness and judgment as they pertain to Celan and Heidegger but also to reflect, more broadly, on the significance of the act of responding to the call of the other. This, I argue, is the work's gift to us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the philosophic and political potentials of lyric poetry through an archaeology of its ideological participation, situating a critical moment of the form's partial liberation in the poetry of Paul Celan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to examine how poetry, in the case of Paul Celan, created its own language after the Shoah. The thesis is that Paul Celan intentionally uses religious language to expose the object, but at the same time he desacralises it. This shift is revolutionary. In the main part of this article I analyse an exemplum of the use of language which is given in the poem, 'In the rivers'. This analysis is meant to show the mechanisms for creating a proper language. The conclusion is that Celan's poetry is founded upon the figure of a witness. This desacralised figure is poetic and ethical (but not substantial). What is more, the way this poetry is written puts it into the position of a witness as well as that of the reader. This is a social fact, so the point of view of the author traverses the sociology of both religion and that of literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between the historical materialism of Walter Benjamin and the poetics of Paul Celan, and claims that within Celan’s poetics, we find a form for thinking Benjamin’s Marxism beyond Benjamin. The driving force of Benjamin’s critique of historicism is the desire to free Marx’s ideas (class struggle, classless society, progress) from the empty time of progress. By attending to the “breathturns” at the heart of Celan’s, The Meridian, this article uncovers a poetic historiography grounded in Benjamin’s now-time. It is with this conception of history that Marx’s ideas can be reimagined as a historico-poetic materialism and reinvigorated with revolutionary force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]