MERIDIAN

Cros; Aesthetics
Werner Hamacher
& David E. Wellbcry
Eiton
Translated by
Andrea Tarnowski
Stanfrd
Utliumit
Slfird
Cliria
1999
POETRY AS
EXPERIENCE
Philippe Lacote-Labarthe
Prlr &p"irlu
w:originaUy published in French in [986
undN the title /.pir rlnmr tplirlc
CI986 by Chrinian Sourgois Editeur.
iis{nee for the U:lOsltion W provided by Ihe
FRnch Minislry ofCullUR.
\
99<)4:45
SInford UnivenilY Pr=
Stanford,Cdifornia
Chm by [he Ird of Trsll'
of {he Ltland Stanford Junior Univcrsiry
Primed in thc United States orAmerica
1!Pdata a]]>ar al Ihe end of {he book
Contents
A Not 01 Citriol W
rART I: TWO rOEIS BY PAUL CELAN
PART II: REMEMBERING DATES 39
,
Catasuophc 4'
, Praycr 7'

3
Sublime 87

4
Hagiography 9'

5
The Powcr of Naming 95
6 Pain 98
7 Ecstasy '0'
8 Vertigo '0
4

9
Blindness 006
viii
10 Lird
11 Sky
2 The Unforgivable
Not
Wrks Ciud
COllums
.0
7
I
"7
A Note on Citation
The abbnviation GW designatcs Paul Celan's Gnmmrlu Werke;
SW designates Friedrich Holdcrlin's Si mrIhe Wkt.
l
POETRY AS
EXPERIENCE
PART ONE
Two Poem, by Pall Celn
Expand an!
No. BUI accompany an imo )ur own uniq
ue
place ofno Ipe. And Myursrfra.
M
Oi
n
e MeridianM'
Here are rwo poems by Paul Cclan:
TOSINGEN, JANNER
Zur Biindheil uber
redete Augen.
Ihre-"ein
Rtsel ist Rein
entsprungene--, ihre
Erinnerung W
schwimmende Holdcrlimurme. mowen
umschwirn.
Besuche enrunkener Schreiner bi
diccn
tauchenden Wonen:
Kame.
kame ein Mensch.
kame ein Mensch zur Welt, hcUlc, mit
dem Lichtban der
Patriarchen: cr durrle.
sprach er von dieser
Zit, er
dUfre
J
4
7i/1 /Onl b Pm" Cll Two Pom b Palll u"m ,
/lur lallen und lallen. die in d Buch
immcr-, immer- WCD Namen nahms auf
zuzu. vor dem mcinen?_
(l\lIakh. Pallaksch.")
die in dies Buch
gricbenc Zdlc von
TOBINGEN. JANUARY
ciner Hofnung. hellle,
: cines Denkcndcn
Eyt' (alked into
kommendc
bJindncss.
Won
Their-an enigma is
im Herren,
,he purely
Waldwasen, uncingecbnct.
originated" -, their
Orchis und Orchis, dn:eln,
memory of
HolderJin towers aRoot, circled Krudes, spater, im Fahren,
by whirring gulls.
dcudich,
Visits of drowned joiners \O
def uns fhrt. def Mensch,
,h=
der's mil anhof[,
submerging words:
die halb-
Should,
bechrinencn Knilppcl-
should a man,
pfde im Hochnoor,
should a man come into the world, today, with
Feuchu.
the shining br orlhe
patriarchs: he could.
vie!.
if he spoke of this
time. he
TODTNAUBERG
could Aica, eyebright. the
only babble and babble drah frm the well with the
over, over starred die above it,
aginagain.
in the
rPaJlaksh. Pallaksh.f)l hut,
TOI)TNAUBERG
the line
-whose name did the book
Arnika, Augentrost, der
rt-istcr before mine?-
Trunk aus dem Brunnen mit cem
the line inscribed
Stcrwlirfd drauf,
in that book about
in der
a hope, today,
Hii\(e,
of a thinking man's
6 7iN) Por b Palll Crln
cOIning
word
in the heart.
woodland sward, unlevelled.
orchid and orchid, singe,
1 sluf. 1;lcr, da
in pasing,
he who drives Q- the man,
who listens in,
the half-
trodden wretched
tracks through the high moors,
dampness,
much,J
These (wo poems are well known; each of them has been trans
lated into French al leasr rwice. The frst, which is part of rhe Nir
mandrou collection (1963), was initially nanslated by Andr du
Bouchel (appearing in L'pIimm7. and (hen in S, published
by Mercure de France in 1971) before fguring in the compbe edi
tion of L FMd pmomu, edited by Martine Broda (Le Nouveau
Commerce, 1979). The second, issued on its own in 1968 and then
republished in Lkbrwan
g
in July '970, two or three momhs afer
Cclan's death, was translated by Jean Daive as early as 1970. and
Ihen. several years laler. by Andre du Bouchel (Pohln d PatI
C/l. Clivages, 1978). Olher published versions of these poems
may exisI.4
II is obvious thai the titles of both are places: Tlibingen, Todt
nauberg. The poems seem, in each case, 10 conunemorare a visit.
Btl[ it is also obvious that these place names can additionally, even
primarily, be names of people. Whatever trope we use, the indica
tions, the qUOIations, the allusions are all perfl'tly clear; and ill any
Clse, we already know that Tibingn is Holderlin, and 10cll
!lauberg. Heidegger. I don', imagine jt would be very useful
stress the reasons that prompt us today (hm.each poem includes
Two Pomu b Pall CrulI 7
the word) co associate the two poems. For (veryone who is, as we
say, "concerned abom our rimesn and "mindful of hismry" (Euro
pean history), the two names, HQlderlin and Hcidcgger, are now
indissolubly linked. They ice to..: h. autakc i our era
(dimr uit). A world age-perhaps rhe world's old age-is ap
proaching its end. for we are reaching a completion, closing the
circle of what the philosophical West has called, since Grecian
times and in multiple ways. "knowledge." Thai is, uclml. What has
nOI been deployed. what has been forgonen or rejccred in ,he
midst of this complelion-and no doubt from the very begin
ning-must now clear ilScif a palh a possible future. Let us agree
to say that this perrains, as Heidegger says himself. to the "task of
thought." Such Ihought musl re-inaugurate hislOry. reopen the
possibility of a world, and pave the way for the improbable, un-
I
foreseeable advent of a god. Only this might "savc" us. For this
lask, U (again, ucme), and in art. poetry, are perhaps able to pro
vide some signs. At least, that is ,he hope, fragile. tenuous, and
meager as i, is.
While it may nOt be useful ro mes , it is no doubt helpful al
lest 10 remark the following:
1. ch thinkng ofry, i.s ntially German.
It is not exclusively y but since the end of the eighlttnth century,
Germans have brougt it a dimension never attained before or else
where; one reason for this. among others, is that the question of
the relation between Modern and Ancient, and of the possibility
of uniqueness or identity for a whole people. has never been so
much a qlmion as il has been in Germany. That is, fr,1 and fore
most. a queslion for the "nationn -the people-and I the lan
guage, a latecomer to the world aner the sumptuous, "ren

nt"
display of European Latinity. German has never ceased aSplTlIl

,
on pretense of its Slrange similarity to Greek (lhe "language of Ori
gin"), to the unique relation it has believcd it could establish to
everything most authentic.l1y Greek about Greece.
2. Paul Ccian (Ancel) was born in C1erowit1. i3ukovina, of
German Jewish parents. Whatever the fle of Bukovina in the years
thai marked the end of Celan's adolescence (he was born in
8
1;0 JomI b Paul Cebm
1920)-il was, sliccessively. annexed by the U.S.S.R. in 1940, oc
cupied by Gerrnany and Romania in 1941, and reconquered by the
Red ArlllY in 194J-Celan was not jUst at the extreme fringes of
Milu/l'rp; he w of German binh, born into that language. In
a I#C :md understandably forgonen sense, his nationa/r was Ger
man. This did nOl in any way preclude his having a completely dif
fcrclH origin, or ro be morc precise, a completcly diferent herimgc.
Thus, his language always remained that of the Other, an Other
I
language without an "odler language," previously rather than Jal-
crally acquirf, against which to measure itself. All OIher languages
were necessarily lateral for Celan; he w a gre:l. translator.
3 Paul Celan knew, as everything he wrote attets (and frst and
foremost, his acceptance of German as his working language), that
today (lmue) it is with Germany that we muS( claril things.5 Not
only because Celan sufred as the victim of Germany's "Hellenic,"
"Hyperborean" utopia, bur because he knew it was impossible LL
elude the question that the mopia's atrocity had transformed into
an answer, a "solution. He embodied an eXlreme, eterally insol.
uble paradox in Germany as one of the f people, almost the only
person, to have borne witness to the truth of the question that re.
mains. as ever: (Bur) who arc we (still, IOday, lutte)?
4 The extermination gave rise, in irs impossible possibility, in
irs immense and intolerable banality, to the postAuschwir era (in
Adorno's sense). Celan said: "Death is a master who comes from
Germany. It is the impossible possibility, the immense and intol.
crable banality of our time, of this time (diNe Zit). It is always
easy I mock distress," bm we are irs contemporaries; we arc at
the endpoint of what Nom, ratio and Logos, still today ("elite) the
I
fralllcwork for what we are, cannot have filed to show: that mm.
de

is th

frst thing to COUnt on, and elimination the surest Illeans
of Identification. Today, everywhere, against this black but "en.
lightened" background, remaining reality is disappearing in the
mire of a "globalized" world. Nothing, not even the most obvious
phenomena, not even the purest, most wrenching love, can escape
this era's hadow: a cancer of the subject, whether in the e
o or in
the masses. To deny this on pretext of avoiding the pull of pathos is
Tw Pomu b Pall Own 9
{O behave like a sleepwalker. To transform il into pathos, so as 10
be able "stiW produce art (sentiment, elc,), is unacceptable,
I want to ask the most brmal question possible, at the risk of
being obnoxious: Was Celan able to situate nOI himself, but HJ
visvis "it"? Was poetry still able to? If so, which poetry, and
what, in fact, of poetry? Mine is a distant way (distant now by
many degrees, heavily layered over the very man who frst asked)
of repeating Holderlin's qucstion: Wozu Dic/ur?What for, indeed?
Here is how the | poems I believe carry all the weight of this
qucstion have been translated into French:
TQ8INGIN, JANVIER
(Andr du Bldm)
A c&:itt meme
mues, pupilles.
Lurenigme cd:,
qui et pur
jaiUisscmem'-, leur
mcmoir( de
[ours Holdcrlin nageanl, d'un battcmem dc moucms
serties.
Visite de menuisiers engloutis par
Iclle
parole plongcam:
S'il venail,
venait un homme,
homme venai! au monde, aujourd'hui avec
dae et barbc des
patriarchcs: il lui fudrail,
d(nil parler de Idle
cpoque, il lui fllIdrait
habiller uniquemem, babi]]er
lOujours CI lOujours ba
biller iller.
CPalhksch. Pallaksch.)
10 7iI Pom by PIU! Cll
("""fili' Br
Dl" )TUX >Ule parole
avcugles.
Lcur-"nigme
ce qUi nalt
de source pur -, leur
souvenir de
tours Holderlin nage:, tournoyces
de mouencs.
Visile de menuisiers noyes
'<0
mots qui plongem:
S'il venair,
venail un homme,
venait un homme au monde, aujourd'hui, avec
la barbe de dane
de patri:uches: il dcvrait,
s'il par/ail de ce
temps, i/
devrit
yer seulemem, begayer
lOutoUloujours
begayer.
rPallaksch. Pallaksch.)
TODTNAU8ERG
(tl" Diw)
Arnika, cenlaur, b
boisson du puits avec, au-dCius,
J'aslrc-dt,
dans [I
rl'fuge,
ecrite dans Ie livre
Iud nOIll>onait-iJ
aV31\l Ie mien?).
Tw Pom b IlII Ckm
ocrile dans ce livre
la ligne,
aujourd'hui, d'une amme:
de qui pcnsc
parole 1 venir
au coeur,
de la mousse des bois, non aplanie,
orchis el orchis, dairscm,
de la verdeur, plus lard, en voy.ge,
distincte,
qui nous conduit, I'homme,
qui, a cda. lend l'oTeille,
les chemins
de rondins 1 demi
parcourus dans la fange,
de I'humide,
Irb.
(And" du &ul)
Aik, luminet, cene
gr& du puits au
cube Ctoilc plus haUl du d,
dans la
hutte.
la, dans un livre
I noms, de qui, rdeves
avant Ie mien?-
[a, dans un [i\'re,
lignes qui inscrivem
une .itemI, aujourd'hui,
de qui m&itera (a
venir, U~
ecssamment venir)
un mOl
du coeur
"
7il Poms b Paul Clll
humus dcs bois, jamais aplani,
orchis, orchis,
uOiquc,
eho5 crue, plus tare, chcmin fisant,
claire.
qui nous voitura.
!'homme.
lui-mcme! son 6:omc,
lmoitie
fraye Ie layon de rondins
11-ham dans Ie marai s.
hunlide,
oui.
(At the end of Andre du Bouchet's slim volume, we read the fol
lowing note: U'Todtnauberg' was translated using the initial version
of the poem, dated 'Frankfurt am Main, 1 August t967.' From a
word-for-word translation suggeted by Paul Cdan. I have kept the
French 'qui nous voi(Ura' fr 'der uns fr.' A.d.B.")
I am not juxt<posing these translations here in order t comparc
or comment on them. h is not my intention t "critique" them. At
mOSt, I think it necessary I remark that what we might caU the
"Mallarmean" style of Andre du Bouchet's translations, their efete
or precious qU<lity, does not do justice to the lapidary hardness.
the abruptness of language as handled by Clan. Or rather, the lan
guage that held him, ran through him. Especially in his late work,
prosody and symax do violence to language: they chop. dislocate,
truncate or Cut it. Something in this certainly bears comparison to
what oecurs in Holderlin's last, "paratactic" efforts, as Adorno calls
them: condensation and juxtaposition. a strangling of language.
Bu no lexicdl "refnement," or very little; even when he Opts for a
sort of "surreal" handling of metaphor or "image," he docs not de
pari from essentially simple, naked language. For example. the
"such (tt/) used twice as a demonstrative in the "Mallarrnean"
Tw Poms b Pnul Olll '3
translation of "Tiibingen, January" is a turn of phrase totally for
eign to Cclan's style. Even mot( so the "A cecite mcme I mue,
pupillcs" ("To blindness itself I moved, pupils") that begins the
same poem in what is indcro the most obscure way possible. But I
do not wish 10 reopen the polemic initiated a decade or so ago by
Mcschonnic.1
No, though I rl these translations. and though I will even. in
rum, try my hand at translating. I do not wish M play at compar
ison-a game of limited interest. Nor do I cite them as an obliga
tory preamble to commentary I give the translations only so we
can sec where we stand. I believe these poems to be completely un
translatable, including within their own language, and indeed, for
this reason, invulnerable to commentary They eone-qescape
interpretation; they forbid it. One could even say they arc written
to forbid it. This is why the sole question carrying them, as it car
ried all Celan's poetry, is that of meaning, the possibility of mean
ing. A transcendelltai question. one might say, which docs to some
extent inscribe Celan in H6lderlin's lineage or wake: that of "po
etry's pt
"
(without, of course, the lest concession to any sort of
"formalism"). And a question that inevitably takes away, as Hei
dcger found with both H61derlin and T, all frms of her me
neutic power, even at one rcmove: for example. envisioning U "her
meneutics of hermeneutics." For in any , sooner or later one
fnds oneelf back at "wanting to say nothing," which exccO (or
flls shorr of) aU "wanring to say." all illtenrion of signifing, since
it is always C3ught in advance in an archetypal double bind of the
UDon't read me" SOrt; in this instance. something like, "Don't be
lieve in meaning anymore." Since Rimbaud's time. let's say, this has
always amounred to saying mBelieve m, don't believe in meaning
anymore," which at once raiscs and demotes. pathetically, risibly,
or fraudulently, the "I" that thus projects itself to (and from) the
function of incarnating meaning.
The question I ask mysclf is indeed that of the subject, that can
cer of the subject, both the ego's and the masses'. Because it is frst
the question of whoever today Umae) might speak a language other
than the subjl't's, and ancst or rcspond to the unprecedented ig-
'4
Tua P(ms b PIlI l Clal
1 naminy thal the "age of the subjed' rendered irself-and re
mains-guilty of At least since Schlegel and Hegel, it is also, in
dissocialJy. Ihe question of the lyric: is lyric a "subjective" genre?
In SUIll, it is the question of the banished singularity of the subject
or. wh:u amounts to the same thing, the queslion of idiom, of
"pure idiom," if that can exisr. Is it possible, and necessary. to
wrench oneself ou( of rhe language of the age? To say what? Or
rather, to speak what?
Such a question, as you perceive-and here I am barely shifting
angles-is no diferent from that of rhe relation bet\ecn "poetry
and thought," Dicitm und Dekm, a question indeed specifcally
asked in German. What is a work of poetry rhat, forswearing the
repetition of the disastrous, deadly, already-said, makes itself ab
solutely sjngular What should we think of poetry (or what of
thought is lef in poetry) that must refuse, sometimes with great
V
stubbornness, I signif? Or, simply, what is a poem whose "cod
ing" is such that it foils in advance all attempts to decipher it?
I have been asking myself this question, which I gram is nai"ve,
for a long time, and especially since reading Peter Szondi's analysis
of"Ou liegst . . . , the poem on Berlin written in 1967 and pub
lished in ScmPlrt in 1971; it is, along with rwo essays by B!anchot
and by Uvinas published in 1972 in the Rue d bell kt ("Le
demier a parler" and "De I'etre a l' aurre"9), among the very few il
luminating commentaries on Celan. But whereas Blanchot's and
l.inas's readings remain "gnomic," to recall Adorno's objl'rion ro
Hcideggds imerprctation ofHoldcriinlO-that is, they found their
arguments on phrases lifed from Cclan's poems (his verse contains
many such isolatable bits, as does all "thinking poetry")-Szondi's
analysis is (Q my knowledge the only oneil t completely decipher
a poem, down to its most resistant opacities, because jt is the only
one to know what "material" gave rise to rhe work: dle circum
stances remembered, the places traveled to, the words exchanged,
the sights glimpsed or contemplated, and so on. Szondi SCOuts OUI
the least allusion, the slightest evocation. The result is a translation
in which almost nothing is left over; almost, because we must still
explain, beyond Szondi's delight at having been present in the right
Tw POnl b Paul etln
1
place at the right time, a poetry based on the ex
ploitation of such
"singularity," and thus (i.e., in this respect) forever inaccessible t
those who did not initially witness what the poetry transformed
into a very laconic "Story" or a very allusive "evoction."
The question I have called that of idiom is therefore more ex
actly that of singularity. We must avoid confusing this with an
other, relatively secondary or derivative question, that of the "read
able" and me "unreadable." My question asks nm JUSt about the
"text," bm about the singular txperimce coming inro writing; it
asks if, being singular, experience can be written, or if from the mo- \
ment of writing its very singulari

y
.
is not forever lost an b

rne
away in one way or anmher, at onglll or en rome to destination,
by the very fct of language. This could be due to language's im
possible intransitivity, or to the desire for meaning, for universal
ity, that animates voices divided by the constraint of a language
that is itself, in turn, only one of many. Is there, can there be, a sin
gular experience? A silent eperience, absolutely untouched by lan
guage, unprompted by even the most slightly articulated discourse?
If impossibly, we can say "yes," if singularity exists or subsists de
spite all odds (and beyond all empirical considerations, the pres
ence of a witness such as Peter Szondi, for example, or of someone
else who knows), can language possibly take on its burden? And
would idiom sufce for the purpose-idiom of course different
from the fcile "crypting" or refusal to reveal one's point so terri
bly endemic to the "modern"? These questions pose neither the
problem of solipsism nor that of autism, but very probably that of
solitude, which Celan experienced ro what we must justly call the
utmOSI degree.
I reread "Tubingen, January" (a poem with an old-fshioned
date, Jimr for 1a1llar, as if in allusion to Holderlin's disconcert
ing manner of dating poems during his "mad period); I reread it
as I read it, as I understand it, as I rhus cannot but translate it.
This efort is pardy unnecessary because of Martine Broda's beau
tiful French translation, which to my mind can hardly be im
proved upon, and from which I will at least borrow the unsurpas-
\
16
TlO Poms b Pmt! C111
sable phr.uc whccled with gulls" rtour I noy de moucues"),12
But I cannol help translating here. So I rerum, with emendations,
to rendering I 311empled a few years ago while working on
Holdcrlin:
TOBINCEN, JANVIER
Su un Rot d'tloquence
avcugle, Jt yeux.
Uur-une
cnigme et Je
pur jaillt -, [cur
mcmoircde
tours Holdcrlin nacm, IOUf
noy&!s de moucttes.
Visitcs de menuisiers submerges sous
CC$
paroles plongeam:
Viendrait,
viendrait un homme
vicndrait un homme au monde, aujourd'hui. avec
la barbc de [umiere des Pauiarches: il n'aurait.
pBrlefitil de 1
temps, il
n'aurai!
qu'a bCgaycr. bCgayer
sans sans
53O5,
(Pllah. Pah.)
TOlINCEN, JANUARY
Iknl'th a Row of eloquence
blinded. the eyes.
Thcir-an
cnigma is the
pure Sprung forth-, their
memory of
Tw Pomu b Paul C"m
Holderlin lowers swimming,
wheeled with gulls.
Joiners' visits submerged bent:th
""
diviOg words:
If there came
if mere are a man
if there came a man inlO Ihe world toby, wi,h
the beard oflighl of Ihe
Patriarchs: he would nero only.
ifhe spoke of Ihis
time, he would need only
\O sIller, stulter
withom, wilhoUi
wilhoUl case.
("Pallaksh. Paliaksh.)1
17
What te few, barely phrased phrases say. in their extenuated.
infrm discourse, stuttering on the edge of silence or the incom
prehensible (gibberish, idiomatic language: gPallaksh"), is not a
"Story"; they do nor recount anYlhing. and most certainly not a
visit to the Hilltr in Tubingen, They undoubtedly mean
something; a "message," as it were, is delivered. They present, in
any y an intelligible unerance: if a man, a Jewish man-a Sage,
a Prophet, or one of the RightCOUS, "with I the beard of light of I
the Pauiarchs,"-wamed today to speak fonh about the age as
Holderlin did in his time. he would be condemned IM stammer, in
the manner, let tS say, of Beckett's "mcraphysical tramps." He
would sink into aphasia (or "pure idiom"), as we are told Holderlin
did; in any case, Holderlin's "madness" came to defne the aphasic
myrh:
MNEMOSVNE (II)
Ein Zcichcn sind wir. deutungslos
Schmeros sind wir und habcn fst
Die Sprachc in der Fremde vcrlorcn.'
18
7il Poems b Palll uln
, \ sign YC :e. meaningles
Painless YC :He and ha\c nerly
Lsl our language in foreign place.
More pre<iscly, we might say that to speak the age, it would be
enough :or such a ra
,
" to Stammer-s{Uncr; the age belongs 10
fmmcnng, to stuncnng. Or rather, stuncring is th. only "lan
guage" o
,
r the age. The end of meaning-hiccuping, hailing.
YCt {his message comes second in the poem; it is a liulc like the
"lesson" or the "moral" of a classic fble; itS presence makes cxplicil,
wilhin though slightly detached from the poem (see the colon 31
the end of the second stanza), what rhe poem says before-what it
: says (la poem. It is a translation. The idiomatic poem contains its
own translation. which is a justification of the idiomalic. Or UL
least, we can formulate it this way; the problem then becomes
knowing what it explicitly translates.
I propose to cll what it translates "experience," provided that we
both
.
undcmand the word in its strict sense-the Latin r-priri, a

ro

lng through dangcr-and especially that wc avoid associating

II wuh what is "lived," the stuf of anecdotes. Erlmmg, thcn,
rather than Erkbni J.
I
) I say "expericncc" because what the poem
"springs forth" from herc-thc mcmory of bedazzlement, which is
also the pure dizzines of mcmory-is precisely that which did not
take place, did not happen or occur during the singular event that
the

m relates to without relating: the visit, after so many oth

ers since thc joiner Zimmcr's time, to the tOwcr on the Neckar
"
:
hee Holderlin Iivcd without living for thc last thirry-six years of
hIS IIfc-half of his lifc. A visit in memory of that expericnce,
which is also in the non-form of pure non-event.
I shall try to explain. What the poem indicates and shows what
it moves toward, is irs source. A poem is always "en route,

"un
derway," as 'he Meridian" recalls. 16 The path the poem S'eks to
?
pen up here IS that of its own source. And making its way thus to
ItS own SO(
!
fCe, it seeks t reach thc general sourcc of poetry. It says,
tl

n, or tfle

to say. the "springing forth" of the poem in its possi
bility. that IS. in its "enigma." "An enigma is the pure sprung
Two Poems b Pnul Celnn 19
forth;"17 so speaks thc frst verse to the founh stall. of the hymn
"The Rhine," which in a way is the source here. Holderlin adds:
"Even I The song may hardly revcal it." But if thc poem says or
trics to say the source in this manncr. it says it as inaccessible. or
in any ! uree "even [by] thc song," because in place of the
sourcc, and in a way which is itself enigmatic. there is dirincss, the
instant of blindness or bedazzlcmcnt before the sparkling waters of
the Neckar. the fragmenting glitter. the image of the visirors swal
lowed up. Or because thefC is also the stark reminder [hat precisely
il this piu, it was revealed 10 so many visitors that the sourcc {of
the poem, the song} had dried up. And that prt'Viously it had in
deed becn an enigma that sprang forth.
Dizziness can come upon one; it does not simply occur. oT
rather, in it. nothing occurs. II is the pure suspension of occur
rence; a caesura or a syncope. This is what "drawing a blank
means. \hat is suspended, arrested, tipping suddenly into strange
ness, is the presencc of the present (rhe being-present of the pre
sent). And what then occurs without occurring (for it is by defni
tion what cannot occur) is-without being-nothingness, [he
"nothing of being" (ne-em. Dizz.iness is an rperimcof nothing
ness, of what is. as Heidcgger says, "properly" non-occurrence,
nothingnes. Nothing in it is "lived," as in all experience, becuse
all experience is the experience of nothingness: the experience 0[;
diuiness herc, as much as the anguish Heideger describes, or as
much as laughter in Bataillc. Or the lightning recognition of love.
A much as all the infnitely paradoxical. "impossible" cxperiences
of death, of disappearance in the prtllI. How poignant and dif
cult to think that Cclan chose his own death (the most fnite inf
nite choice), throwing himself into the waters of the Seine.
1 say this again in another way: there is no "poetic cxperience"
in the sense of a "lived moment" or a poctic "state." If such a thing
exists, or thinks it does-for after all it is the power, or impotence,
of lirerarur t believe and make others believe this-it cannot give
rise to a poem. To a story, yes. or to discourse, whether in verse or
prose. To "literature." perhaps, at least in the sense we understand
it IOday. But not to a poem. A poem has nothing to recount, foth-
'0
Tiw /001 b Pnul CI1
ing to say; what it r.CQums and says is that from which it wrenches
away as a poem. If we speak of "poetic emotion," we must think
o
r
its cognale imoi,I8 whose etymolog indictes the absence or de
priv:uion of strength. "A une passante" is nor rhe nostalgic story of
an cncoumer, bUi the entreary that arises from collapse, the pure
echo of such an imoi, a song or a prayer. Benjamin hardly dared
S1Y. though he ke pcrfcrly well, that this is perhaps (2nd I strss
the "pcrhaps") what ProUSt did not undcrsrand in understanding
Baudelaire, and probably also what rhe overly nostalgic Baudelaire
sometimes did not understand in understanding himself (though
he did write the prose poems, which redeem all).I'
BUI the poem's "wamingnot.lo.say" does not want not 10 say.
A poem wams to say; indeed, it is norhing but pure wanting-to
say. But pure wanting-to-say norhing, nmhingness, that against
which and through which there is presence, what is. And because
norhingness is inaccessible wanting, rhe poem's wanting col
lapses as such (a poem is always involunrary, like anguish, love, and
even self-chosen death); then nothing Jeu itself be said, the thing
iuelf, and leu itself be said in and by [he man who goes to it de
spire himself, receives it as whar cannot be received, and submiu
10 it. He accepts it. trembling rhat it should refuse; such a strange,
Aeering, elusive "being" as me meaning of what is.
In the end, if [here is no such thing as "poedc experience" it is
simply because experience marks the absence of what is "lived."
This is why, stricdy speaking, we can talk of a poetic niUIU, as
suming existence is what ar rimes PUtS hol in life, rending it to
PUt us beide ourselves. It is also why, given thai existence is furtive
- and disconrinuous, poems are rare and nC rily brief, even when
they expand to rry to stay the loss or deny the evanescence of what
compelled them into being. Further. rhis is why there is nothing
necessarily grandiose about the poetic, and why it is generally
wrong to confuse poerry with celebration; one can find, in rhe
most extreme triviality. in insignifcance, perhaps even in frivolity
(where Mallarme occasionally lost himself), pure, never-pure
strangeness: the gi of not bing or pTsem ofllolhingcomparable to
the linle tOken olle describes. saying: "h' s nothing." Indeed. it is
Tto Poems b Palll C"II
"
never nothing, it is nothh; it can as well be pitiable or tOtally
without grandeur, terrifying or overwhelmingly joyous.
We are tOld that when Holderlin went "mad," he constantly
repeated, "Nothing is happening to me, nothing is happening
to me."
The dizzines of existence is what the poem "Tubingen, January"
says. It says it inasmuch as it says itsel as a poem. inasmuch as it
says what arose from, or remains of. the non-occurred in rhe singu
lar event it commemorates. "In_occurrence" is what wrenches the
'
event from its singularity, so that at the height of singularity. singu
larity itself vanishes and saying suddenly appears-the poem is pos
sible. SingbarT Rm: a singable remainder, as Celan says elsewhere.2
This is why the poem commemorates. hs experience is an expe
ricnce of memory. The poem speaks of Eri1"ertmg, but also se
cretly calls upon the Andmkm of Holderlin's poem on Bordeaux,
and the GedichtniJ where Holderlin found Mnemosyne's reso
nance. The poem w not born in the momell! of the HjlTlin
l visit. Properly speaking, it was not born in any momell!. Nor
only because dizziness or bedazzlement by defnition never consti
rutes a moment. bur bu what brings on the dizziness and re
calls me waters of rhe Neckar is not those waters. bm another river:
Ihe Holderlinian river itself. A double meaning here: frSt (he river.
or rivers. that Holderlin sings (the Rhine, the Ister. the source of
me Danube, etc.), and then (he river of Holderlin's poetry. Or, as
I've said. (he "Rood of eloquence."
In "Tubingen, January." the eyes are not in fct blinded; no be
dazzlement rakes place. They are Zltr BlindJuit jbau, per
suaded to blindness. BlIt to translate jb"tdm by "persuade," or
"convince," does not convey the full sense of iibr and all it con
tains as a signifier of overfow. To be jiber"d/-1 take this on
Michel DeulSch's authority-is simply "to be mken in," "run cir
dcs around," overwhelmed by a tide of eloquence. Less "taken for
a ride" than "submerged," "drowned," or, mOSt accurately, "to be
had." The eyes-the eyes (hat see Holderlin's rower, the waters of
the Neckar, the wheeling gulls-arc blinded by a Rood of words
21
Two /oml b Paul Cln
or eloquence; the eyes are taken in, and the memory of the river
poem Thc Rhine" reclls and calls forth the memory of the dizzi.
ness. the engulfng bedazzlemenr: ilia! is, as with all "involuntary
memory. the memory of "what was neither purposely nor con.
sciously 'lived' by the subject," as Benjamin pcrfecdy demon
strated for Baudelaire using Freud's argument against Ikrgson.21
Thus dizziness here indicates the in-occurrence of which mem
ory-and nO( merely recollection-is the paradoxical restitution.
The dizziness is memory because all real memory is vcniginous,
ofering the very atopia of existence, what takes plact without tak
ing place; giving a gif that forces the poem into thanking. into ec
stasy. This is why the poem is obliged into thoughl: "To think and
thank," says the Bremen speech, "dkm Iwd dankm, have the
same root in our language. If we follow it [0 gdmkm, i"gdmk
si1, A"denktn and A"daebt we enter the semantic felds of mem.
ory and devotion. "
2
1
Thus, "TUbingen, January" docs nO[ say any S(3te of the psyche,
any lived experience of the subject, any ErIb1is. Nor is it-this
follows logically-a celebration of Holderlin (it comes closer to
saying how Holderlin disappoints). It is defnitely nor a "senti.
mental" poem, whether in Schiller's or the common sense. The
poem says "drowning" in Holderlin's verse. It says it as its "possi.
bility," a possibility infinitely and interminably paradoxical, be.
cause it is the possibility of the poem inasmuch as, possible-im.
possible. it says, if not the pure impossibility, then at lcast the scant
possibility of poetry.
Here. according to standard procedure, I should begin my com.
mentary. Bm I have said I will refrain-nO[ [0 reject commentary
in and of itself, but b'use such commentary, which in any case
would be impossible t complete, would require fu (00 much in
the present context. Among other things. one would have to read
" The Rhine," retur generally [0 the H6lderlinian thematics of the
river./dcmi_god. and ask what links Ihe entirety of such themacics
10 the possibility of poetry (a), the opening of a sacred space (and
the expectation of a god), the appropriation of the own (and the
T Pom b Paul Clll
2J
birth of a homeland). This would not only require raking Heideg
gerian commentary into account-both the one Cclan knew and
the one of which he n(S rily ignorant;
2
J one would srill have
10 measure, and measure accurately, the myrh this commentary
created of H6lderiin, t Dieht t Diehhmg for thought and p
erry wirhin and ourside Germany. The orraordinary magnitude of
his task, the immeasurable occurrence he hoped for from poetry,
reduced him to silence, t babbling and stunering, subject to thai
harshest constraint of in-occurrence. Subject to its law.
I L only mention al this as the underpinning of Celan's poem;
but also, I mUSt immediately add, as that from which, against all
odds, it lifs away, succeeds in lifting. For in the end there is a
poem; in Ihe end there is art, as "The Meridian" says, borrowing a
theme fom Buchner: Aeh. die K,UlJt!
That is why I will limit mysclfhere to examining this "success. "
I will ask only this simple question-the question, as i t were, of
the silgbarer Rm, the singable residue: what saves this poem from
wre in, and the wreckage of, poetry? How does it happen that
.
in poetry, am of poetry, all is not lost, that a possibility of articu
lating something still remains. if only in stuttering, if only in an
incomprehensible and incommunicable language, an idiolect or id
iom? (The whole poem, insofar as it suca:eds in springing back
from poetic engulfng, is drawn as ifby magnet to the double "Pal
laksch," which, in parenthe, punctuate il defnitively, and punc
mates it thus on Holderlin's ruined words: in this y a "Swabian"
Greek which evinced, for those who witnessed his reclusion, what
Schelling called the "dilapidation of his mind," and which, along
wirh rhe thirtyodd poems saved from this period, attests-no
matter how we might propose, like Bertaux, alt possible empirical
decipherings-to the drying up of the poetic source and idiomatic
babbling. Nor that this prohibirs the poems from remaining po
ems. Such, precisely, is the enigma.)
-
A moment ago I said "the wreckage in and of poetry." To be en
gulfed in a food of poetry means [har poetry irself sinks, drowns,
that its own overfow dries in it irs very possibility-a source sub
1illO Poems b Piul Celll
merged in ,he flood ,hat it brought forth itself, as Holderlin tOo
perhaps w:lOrcd to say when he spoke of the rivers (hat Aow back
d I
.

IOwar I lClr source.

JEK 1
. . . Der scheinet aber fsl
Rlikwi m zu gehen und
Ich mein, er mussc kommen
Von Osten.
Viek' ware
Zu sagen davon.
Umsonst nichl gchn
1m Trokllcn die Strome. Aber wie? Ein Zeichcn braucht es . .
. . . Yet almosl this rh'er seems
To Irdvd backards and
I think it must come from
The East.
Much Culd
Be said about this . . . .
Not for nothing rivers Row
Through dry land. But how? A sign i needed . . .
4J
What poetry sinks into, what drowns poelry, is an eloquence.
But we must make no mistake about eloquence; a "saying tOO
much" is of course at issue, but the "tOO much" docs not mean
only abundance or overabundance ("overfow"); it means, also. or
first, excess ("saying too much about something"). II is nOt the
word that divulges a secret, but rather, the one (hat transgresses an
interdict.
I n Hfilderlinian thcmatics, such a word is mainly tragic, the
word of dbnmm; for example, Antigone vying and identifing
with the divine. II is the word of infnile desire, desire of the in-f
nite and of the One-and-all; it is the word of furor and fusion, so
native and natural to rhe Greeks, those men of the E1sr possessed
by the divine. that all the formal rigor and sobriey of their an was
Two Poml b Paul Celll 2
required to "purif" and contain it; only thus could they avoid
burning themselves with "heaven's fre," or dizily losing
themselves
in enrhusiasm. Hflderlin's defnition of[ragedy:
The presentation of Ihe lragic reslS primarily on the rrcmcndous
(ds UT -how the god and man mate and how nalural force
and man's innermost boundlessly unite in wrath-conceiving of it
self; }ru|on the boundless union purifying itself thrugh boundles
sepadon . .
Btl[ according to a logic I cannOi derail here, it is precisely [his
word that Westerners, Hesperians-rhat is, frst of all, Germans
must find, or rediscover. They who arc naturally sober, or, as
Holderlin says of Oedipus. the hero with a Western destiny, natu
rally it"oi, lacking a god, without furor or desire, "wandering be
nearh {he unthinkable." They mUSt rediscover this word, the "sa
cred pathos." even at rhe risk of sinking, of leuing themselves go.
Even at the risk of losing their innate "clarity of presentation
( Dantellrl
g
)," their sense of proportion-of "neglecting the na
tive," as the Greeks did in the opposite direction when they insti
tuted the "empire of art."2S This was Holderlin's fiue abroad, in
France. in Greece, according to the myth he himself had forged of
his existence (and of the West'S fate): "I can say what [hey say of
heroes: I have been struck by Apollo." It was the fate of Oedipus,
blind for having "'an eye tOO many." Both were struck in the ex
tremity oftheir eloquence, in their sacred word ("May the sacred
be my word!"), their "too infnite" interpretation of the oracle or
divine signs. In lheir "madness."
Madness is, indeed. the absence of artistic production. In [urn
ing away from madness. the Greeks lost Ihemselves in works, in
artistic virtuosif)'. If they undergo the trial of madness, Westerers
or moderns risk [he inability to accede to work, to artistic sobriety;
and yet in this sobriety resides that which is their own. Proportion
is thus needed, as Holderlin's poems ceaselessly repeat because
Hfldcriin, pressed by madness, knew his poems drew their fragile
possibility from this source. Limits arc needed: rhe law. The accep
tance, even [he aggravation. of finitude. What Holderlin calls loy-
I
liuo Pom b Pall Ckl
airy. And frst. loyalry to [he God's "categorical turning away," (
his wilhdrawal, that is, his very obviousness in eternal in
appear-mce, the pure appearance of nothing.
IN ITEBUCHER 8LAUE
. . . S lange die Freundlichkeit noch B Herzen, die Reine, dauert,
missel nicht unglilklich der Mensch sich mil der Gonhell. lSI un
bekannt Gon? 1st er off enbar wie der Himmd? diesa glaub' ich eher.
Des Menschen Maass iSI's. Voll Verdicnsl, doch dichterisch, wohnet
der Mensch auf dieser Erde.
IN LOVELV BLUENESS
. . . A long as kindliness, which is pure, remains in his heart not
unhappily a man may compare himself with the divinity. Is God un
known? Is He manifest as the sky? This rather I believe. It is Ihe mea
sure of man. Full of acquirements, but poetically, man dwdls on this
earlh.N
The poem that precedes "Tilbingen, January" in the Ninnmu
rse collection, and whose motif gives the collection it's tide, is
called "Psalm":
PSALM
Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm,
niemand bespricht unser St2ub.
Niemand.
Celobt seist du, Niemand.
Oir zulieb wollen
wit blilhn.
Dir
cntgegen.
Ein Nichts
waren wir. sind wir, werden
wit bleihen, blilhend:
die Nichlh die
Nicrnandsrose.
Two Pom by Paul Clal
Mit
dem Grifdseclenhdl,
dem Staubfden himmdswils(,
der Krone rot
yom PurpuroTt. das wir sangen
tiber, 0 tiber
dem Dor.
PSALM
No one moulds us again out of earth 2nd day.
no one conjures our dust.
No one.
Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall fower.
Towards
you.
A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, fowering:
the nothing, the
no one's rose.
Wt our pistil soul-bright,
with our stamen heven-ravaged.
our coro1l2 r
with the crimson word which we sang
over, 0 over
the Ihorn
'7
A one of [hose who have undergone the trial of dlmNlf and
risked being engulfed. a one of the heroes and (ncar) demi-gods
of Hesperia. "The Rhine" names Rousseau: the Rousseau of the
R/rjJ, we suppose, in a pure poem of contained fooding clo
quence, of ttm drowning in emhusiasm. The poem inaugurates
modern lyricism.
7ilo Potms b Plul Ctlllll
@gg 1I1"
. . . Halbgotter denk'ich jent
Und kcnnen muss ich die Teuer,
\cil of ihr Leben so
Die schnende Brust mir beweget.
Wemabr, wie, RoU u, dir,
Unilberwindlich die Seele
Die starkausdauernde ward,
Und sicherer Sinn
Und slisse Gab- "u horen,
Zu reden so, dass er aus heiliger Flille
Wie der Weingort, torig gortlich
Und gesenlos sie die Sprache der Reinesten gibt
Versrandlich den Guten, aber mit Recht
Die Achtungsloscn mil Blindheil schlagt
Die clllwcihcnden Knechte, wie nenn ieh dcn Fremdcn?
TilE RHINE
. . . Of demigods now I lhink
And I must know these dear ones
Because of len ,hcir lives
Movc me and fll me with longing.
But he whose soul, like yours,
Rousseau, ever strong and patielll,
Ime invincible,
Endowed with sleadfs, purpose
And a SWc1 gif of hearing.
Of speaking, %that from holy profion
Like the winegod foolishly, divinely
And lawlCly he gives it away.
The language of Ihe purest, comprehensible to the good,
But rightly strikes with blindness the irreverent,
The profning rabble, what shall I call tll! manger?J!
Rousseau, the " Sage," the "noble spirit-to whose tomb, says one
of Holdcrlin's earliest poems, "the child hurries . . . seized by a great
shiver"-irercedcs; he the frst of his era who understood how
to grasp a "sign," the sign from Greece, land of Dionysus: the di.
lvo Poml by Plul Cellll '9
vine(
,
s) sign'. It was therefore he who opened up the possibility of
poetry. that is. its prophtticpossibiliry. The ode entitled "Rousseau"
says so thus:
Und Strahlen aus der schonern Zeit. E
Hab-n die Boten dein Hen gefunden.
Vernommen hal du sie, vers!;nden die Sprche der
Fremdlinge,
Gedeutet ihre Sede! Oem Sehnenden war
Der Wink genug, und Winke sind
Von Allers her die Spr:che der Goner.
Und wunderbar, als halle von Anl-ginn
Des Menschen Geist das Werden und Wirken al ,
Des Lbcns alte Weise schon crfhren
Kenm er im crsten Zcichen Vollcndelcs schon,
Und fiegt, der kuhne GeiSt, wie Adler den
Gewillern, weissagend seinen
Kommenden Gonern, vor:us.
The radiance of a b-ner age. The
Heralds who looked for your heart have found it.
You've herd and comphended the slr:ngers' tongue,
Inlerpted Iheir soul! For the yearning man
The him sufced, bu in hinlS from
Time immemorial the gods have spoken.
And marvellous, as though from the very frs!
The human mind had known all ihat grows and moves,
Foreknown life's melody and rhylhm,
In scd grains he can mcasuthe full.grown plant;
And Aies, bold spiri!. fies as the eagles do
Ahead of thunderstorms, preceding
Gods, his own gods, to announcc their coming.Jl
Such is eloquence: rhe "prophetic tone," or what Holderlin also
calls "eccentric enthusiasm, (another name for "sacred padlos").
[ n rhe :riIe of disrrcssn and the "world's night," between, H Hei
30
T Pon by POII CrI
deggcr says. Ihc 'no morc' of gods who have Red and the 'not yet'
of ,he god to come," the possibility of poetry, and with it that of a
world. is ecstasy. And risk; one may be bested, may sink or "[Ouch
001(0111," as Nietzsche says, "by way of ,he truth," Since the ffh
MPromcnadc," whose place in (he exact center of the RnritJ was
determined by Rousseau's death, water has been precisely the
"reveric" of the dizziness that comes, nm from ,he subject's cxaha
lion, as rhe reductive inrcrprcradon of lyricism always maintains,
but from its loss. or rather from the "forgetting of the self." 'The
Meridian" again: "Whoever has art before his eyes and on his
mind . . . has forgoncn himself A produces a disrance from the I.
Art demands here a certain disrance, a certain path, in a certain
dircction. "3}
Here, among all possible cxamples, are the last twO stanzas of
Rimbaud's poem "Mcmoire," on nostalgia and desire, hich opens
with "L'eau clairc; comme Ie sci des larmes d'cnfance, I L'assaut au
soleil des blancheurs des corps de femmes" ("Clear water; like the
salt of childhood tears; I The assault on the sun by the whiteness
of women's bodies"):
Jouet de eel oeil d'eau morne, je n'y puis prendre,
6 c:mOl immobile! oh! bras trOp coum! nj !'une
ni !'auue feur: ni la jaune qui m'imporrune,
l; ni la bleue, amie I'eu eouleur de ccndre.
Ah! la poudre de saules qu'une aile soue!
L roses de IU des longtemps devortts!
Mon nOI, (oujour fixe; ec sa chaine tirtt
Au fond de cet ocil d'eau sans bords,-a queUe boue?
Toy of this sad eye of water, I cnnot pluck,
o mOlionle.s boat! 0 arms 100 shorl, either Ihis
Or the other fower; neilher the yellow one which bothers me
There, nor chI friendly blue one in the ash-colored water.
Ali! dust of the willows shaken by a wing!
The roses of the reeds devoured long ago!
My boat still stationary, and its chain caught
[n the bottom of this rimless t:ye of water-in what mud?.M
Tw Pom b Pltl Celll 3'
Bm Cclan's dizziness has a completdy diferent meaning, if only
because it is diuiness at the sight of the diuiness JUSt dcscribed
a diuiness MM second d as it were. But that docs not mean it is
lesser, or simulated.
Celan, like Oedipus-the blind man, the "poor stranger" in
Greece-is aks. This cerinly docs not mean "atheist"; "Pris b
to you, no one" is a true prayer. Oedipus-but Oedipus withom
the slightet hope of remming to Colonus, of the Eumenides's sa
cred wood, of a cl originating elsewhere, among tht bushe or in
the et, 1 respond ro the prayer and grant it. To signal "all is
done," the sin (without sin) is expiated, the sufering is drawing to a
close, persecurion can no longer take plact. For Celan, an exile, per
secution without possible remission-and whll persecution,
compared to that of the royal phlrmlkos. It was unforgettable and
indelible; Auschwin, the purely uunthinkable," had ushered in for
all time a "'time of distress" that no hope of a god could still buttres.
The time of distress is the time-now our history-of what
Holderlin also clled pain (both Schmrz and Lei), the word
that through both "In Lovely Blueness" and modern lyricism,
from Baudelaire to Tr and Mandelstam. Pain, which is nOt ex
acdy sufering, afcts and {ouches man's "hean"; it is what is most
intimate i n him; the extreme interior where, in his almost absolute
singulariry (his ab-solutcnes), man-and nOf the subject-is pure
wai[ingfor-an-other; he is hope of a dialogue, of a way out of soli
tude. I again cite 'The Meridian":
But I think-+ . . I think that il has always belonged to the expecta
tions of the poem in precisely this manner to speak in the cause of the
strange-no, I L no longer use this word-in precisely this manner
to speak in til M of GN O,llr-who knows, perhaps in the use
of a wholly O,I"".
This "who knows." at which I see I have arrived, is the only thing I
can add-on my own, here, ((>ay-to the old expectations.
Perhaps, [ must now say to myself-and 3t this point I am making
use of a well-known term-perhaps it is now possible to conceive a
meeting of this wholly Other" and an OIher" which is not fu re
moved, which is very near.
J'
Two Poems b Prm! Cell
The poem tarries. SlOpS Ucatch a scent-like a crealUre when coo
frontL- wilh slich thoughrs.
No one sayhow long the pause in breath-the thought and the
slOpping 10 catch the sccm-will iasl. . . .
The poem is alone. h is alone and underway. Whoever writes it
Illust remain in ilS company.
But doesn't the pocm, for prisly thai rason, this point panic
ipatc in an encounter-in tN mJlu o/an ncoulur?
The poem wanlS 10 reach the Other, it needs the Other. it ncto a
vis vis. h se:rches it oU[ and addrsit.
It becomes dialogue-it is often despairing dialogue.
From that place, that solirude-pain-CeI:m speaks. It is the
same soiilUde and pain that Holderlin felt ill the end, when he
had succumbed to the excess of eloquence and been submerged,
reduced to silence, by sacred pathos. "TiibingeJ, January" is a
poem [0 this pain and solitude because it is the poem o/this pain
and ofthis solitude; that of always being thrown back from the di
alogue one had thought possible and then, in withdrawal, "hud
dling," as Heidegger says of Holderlin, no longer able to speak;
sluttering, swallowed up in idiom. Or flling silent. In a world
with nothing and W onno authorize or even "guarantee" the least
dialogue, the slightest relation to another, however or whoever he
may be, how to wrench away from aphasia, from silence? The
poem, says Celan, once again in "The Meridian," "today . . .
shows a strong inclination tOwards falling silent . . . . It takes its
position . . . al the edge of itself; in order 10 be able 10 exisl, it
without interruption calls and fetches itself from its now-no
longer back imo its as-always. ".
The question of poelry's possibility-and Celan never asked
another-is the question of the possibility of such a wrenching.
The queslion of rhe possibility of going Ol 0/tu ul This also
means, as "The Meridian" again recalls, going "outside the hu
man," in the sense, for example (but is this still JUSt olucxample?)
Ihat rhe (fnite) transcendence of Dlril in the experience of
nothingness, in ek-sistence, is a going outside the human: "Here
we have stepped beyond human nature, gone outwards, and en-
Two Poml b Pili" C11l JJ
tered a mysterious realm, yet one turned towards thai which is
human.".]
It would be an understatement to say Celan had read Heidcg
ger. Cdan's poetry goe beyond even an unreserved r."Cognilion of
Heidegger; I think one can assen that it is, in its entirety, a dia
logue with Heidegger's thought. And essenrially with the part of
this thought that was a dialogue with Holderlin's poetry. Without
Heideg r's commemary on Holderlin, "Tiibingen, January" would
have been impossible; such a poem could simply never have been
written. And it would certainly remain incomprehensible if one did
not detect in it a mpon to this commenmry. Indl. cd, the dizziness
on the edge of Holderlinian pathos is JUSt as much dizziness vis-a
vis its amplifcation by Heidegger; vis-a-vis the brliiin which Hei
dcgger persisted, whatever his sense of "sobriety" in other matters.
A belief, not only in the possibility that Ihe word Holdcrlin "kept
in reserve" might still be heard (by Germany, by us), but also, and
perhaps especially. in the possibility that the god this word an
nounced or prophesied mighl come. This, even though Heidegger
mainrained until the end, up through the lasl interviews granted
to Dr Spirl. that it was a necessary to o:pect, and prepare for,
the defnitive decline or in-advent of the god. "Praise be 10 you, no
one."
(In the same way. "Psalm" is indecipherable without Heideger's
meditations on nothingness; it is Ihe prayer born of them. It is in
decipherable without the pages of Principk of &OI, Sltz vom
Cdprompted by Lcibniz's question: "Why is there something
rather than nothing?" Thcse are pages benl on saying the abyss
of being or presence: the Ab-glwd and UI-gund, the without
grounds and the non-ground; they recall Angelus Silesius's famous
phrase: "The rose is withom a why. blooms because it blooms.")j8
A dialoguc like this in no way requires an encounter-an "efec*
tive" encounter, as we say. Probably the opposite. The encounter is
also that which cn prohibit or break off dialogue. Dialogue, in this ,
sense, is fragility itself
Ji u Pnm by Paul Crim
Yet belWcen CClan and Heideger, an ellcoumeuook place. It
happened in 1967, probably dIring the summer. Celan went to
visit l-eidtgger in TodtnaubeI'' in the Black Foret chalet (Hiif
that his refge, the place w.ere he wrote. From [his mecting
to which I know there were wimesses, direct or indirect-there re
mains a m: a second versic ofwhich, in conclusion, 1 invite
you to read.
Here is how I hear it:
TODTNAUBElC
Aic, baum: des yeux, [a
gorgb: 1 Ia fonaine avec
[e jCt d'ctoi[oau-dessus,
dans [e
chatet,
la, dans Ie livIC
-de qui, les lams qu'iI ponait
avant Ie mien-,
dans ce livre
la ligne ttritesur
un espoir, aupurd'hui,
dans Ie mot
1 venir
d'un penseur,
au coeur,
humus debeis, non ap[ani,
orchis et ords, epars,
crudil,, plus lrd, en voilUre,
disdncte,
qui nous conduit, I'homme,
a son CcOUle ussi,
a demi
frayCes Ics snc
de rondins d:m la fange,
humidil!.
beaucoup.
Tu Porms b Palll Crl11
TODTNAUBIRC
Arnic, eyebalm, the
draught at the foumain with
the spray of SlaTS above.
.
in the
hut,
there, in the book
-whose, the names it bore
before mind-
in that book
thc line wrinen about
a hope, today,
in the coming
word
of a thinker.
in the hean,
woodland humus, unlevelled,
orchis and orchis, scattered,
crudenes, laler, in the car,
distinct,
he who drive us, the man,
listening 100,
half-
dored the paths
oflogs i n the mire,
dampness,
much.
"
My uanslation is very rough; wimess or nat, who L know what
the allusions refer to? "Todtnaubcrg" is really bardy a poem; a sin
glc nominal phrase, choppy, distended and elliptical, unwilling [Q
take shape, it is nm the oudine but the remainder-the residue
of aborted narr.uive. h consists ofbrief nOtCS or notations, seem
ingy jOtted in haste with a hope for a future poem, comprehensible
only to the one who wrote them. h is an eXfenuated poem, or, [Q
36
li(O POtII S b Pnll CIII
pm it belief. a dislppoilld one. It is the poem of a disappoim
"
mCIH; as such
.
it is, and it says, (he disappoimmem of p<lry.
One could of course supply a gloss, try 10 decipher or translate.
'l1,erc is no lack of readable allusions. The Holrl for example;
here they are no longer ways through the forcst tOward a possible
cie-.uing, a Lhmg, but cluJos[ in a marsh where the poem itsd(
gets lost. (watcr again, but without a source-nor even; dampness
no more about the dizzying Neckar. the "spirit of the rivcr, rhe
beda7.emenr-cngulfmcm. Only an uneasiness). Another example:
one CQuid pick, or cat, as it were, the image of thc spray of srars
above the man drinking from the fountain, throwing back his head
to the sky; dice (hrown like the "golden sickle" abandoned by Hugo's
"harvester of eternal summer." And this could be a gcsture tOward
I
Buchner's Le:nz, the fgure of the poet, of whom "The Meridian" re
calls, "Now and [hen he experienced a sense of uneasiness bec1usc
he w not able to walk on his head,"39 only to add, "Whoever walks
on his head, ladies and gentlemen, whoever walks on his head has
heaven beneath him as an abyss. "-4 An echo, perhaps, of Holderlin's
mange proposition:
.
. Man kann auch in die Hohe flk", so wie in
die Tiefe ("One an as well aU in eight JntQ depth''.' One
could surely go very &r in this direction, as in many another.
But that is not what the poem says, if indeed it is still a poem.
What the poem says is, frst, a language: words. German, with
Greek and Ltin woven in. "Common" language: AlgflfOll, \/.
HW, Hochmoor, and so on. "Learned" language: Amika, Orchis.
Bur still simple, ordinary words. The kind of words in another of
Celan's few explanatory prose tens, "Conversation in the Moun
mins" (a son of tale. halfay between L and HJ itic Tl, where
two Jews discuss language); words like "turk's-cap lily," "corn-salad,"
and "tiam/JI l S/lprbuJ, rhe maiden-pink," that bespeak a native re
t:uion to nature (or to the earth, as Heidcggcr would have said):
So it was quiet, quict up there in thc moun rains. Bil il was not
quici for IOllg, bceause whcn a Je comes along and IlKts anothcr, si
[cnce cannot Iasl, even in the mountains. Bccause the Je and nalure
arc stranger 10 each orhcr, have always moen and still are, even loday,
even here.
";vo Ponm by Paul Cll 37
So there they are. the cousins. On the left, the IlIrk's-cap lily
blooms, blooms wild, blooms lik nowhere tlsc. And on the right.
corn-salad, and di anthus sup"bus, the maidn-pink, not far of. But
thcy, tho cousins, have no yes, alas. Or, more exactly: they havc,
even they hav eyes, but with a veil hanging in frOIl of them, no not
in frolll, behind them, a movble veil. No sooner does an imagc n
ter than it gt Cught in the web . . . .
Poor lily, poor corn-slad. There they st3nd, the cousins, on a road
in the mounfins, the stick silent, the SlOnc silent, and the silence no
si[enc at;dl No word has come Oan end and no phrae. it is nothing
but a pause, a mpl}' space berween the words, a blank . . .
Onc ag3in, a matter of blindness or half-blindnss ("they . . .
have no eyes, alas"). But because blindness, blinding-we under-
'
stand now-is Ihe mpr SplU bmvren the wr (and doubtless also
H blank): nm having rhe words to say what is. Words are not in
nate; language is nor altogether a mother tOngue (or a father
tongue-it hardly maners). There is difculty with it (there is also
perhaps a question of plu in language).
This difculry-tht difculty-is named in the Bremen address
when it evokes. as Blanchot says, "the language through which
death came upon him, those near to him, and millions of Jews and
non-Jews. an wm wilhoul ansr" (my emphasis):J
Only one thing rcmaine rchabl, do and secure amid ;l los :
lang. Ye la. lOspite of eerything, it remained secure against
loss. But it had to g through its own lack of answcrs, through tcrri
fing silence, throu the thousnd darkncs of murderous speech. It
went through. It gave me no words for what was happning. but went
through ir. Went through and could resurface, 'enFiched' by it all.
[n this language I tried, during those yrs and the years arer, U
writc poems: in ordcr M speak. to oriclll myself, IO fnd out where I
was, where I w going, to chart my realiI).
It mcl movemelll, you see, something happening, being C rlI,
an attempt U fnd a direction.'"
What "Todlllauberg" speaks abollt, then. is this: the language
in which Auschwitz was pronounced, and which pronounced
Auschwin.
'liv Porm b Pall CrI
That is why lhe poem also says, and says simply, rhe meaning of
the cncoulHer with Heidegger-that is, its disappointment. I sus
pected as much, bm I confess that I was told this, by a friend who
had it on the best authority.
To Heidcgger the thinker-the German thinker-Celan the
poet-the Jewish poet-came with a single yet precise entreaty:
(hat the thinker who listened to poetry; the same thinker who had
compromised himself. however briefy and even if in the least
shameful way, with JUSt what would result in Auschwin; the
thinker who, however abundant his discussion with National S
cialism, had observed total silence on AuschwirL. as hismry will re
call; that he say JUSt a single word: a word about pain. From there.
perhaps, all might still be possible. Not "life," which is always pos.
sible, which remained possible. as we know, even in Auschwin, but
existence, poetry, speech, Language. That is, relation to others.
Could such a word be wn:nchrd?
In the summer of 1967 Celan writes in the guestbook of the
Hi m in Todtnauberg. He no longer knows who signed before
him; signatures-proper names, as it happens-matter little. A( is.
sue a word. JUSt a word. He write-what? A line, or a verse.
He asks only for the word. and the word, of course, is not spoken.
Nmhing; silence; no one. The in-advent of the word ("the event
without answer").
I do not know what word Celan could have expected. What
word he felt would have had enough force to wrench him from the
threat of aphasia and idiom (in-advent of the word). illlo which
this poem. mumbled against the silence, could only sink as if into
a bog. What word could suddenly have constituted an rwnf.
I do not know. Yet something (ells me it is at once the humblcst
and most difcult word to say, the one that requires, precisely. "a
going our of the self." The word that the West, in irs pathos of re.
demption, has never been able m say. The word it remains for us
to lear 10 speak, lest we should sink ourselves. The word paroll.
Cclan has placed us before this word. A sign?
PAR T T W O
Remembering Dats
Ptrh:p! Oi cn sy tlut (ery pom h: its
-10th of J:nu:ry-? l'rh:ps tht novelty of poems
th:l :re written 1y is to I found in precisely
this point; th31 here the attempt is most denty
m:dt to rem:in mindful of such d3ta.
-The Meridi3n"
I Catastrophe
"Tiibingen, January": the PaHiarchs' beard of liglll, the stam
mering. Might it not be, asks A. R., an allusion [Q Moses?1
Not for a momem had I thought of this. Bur rereading pages de
voted as if despite themselves I me oedipal motif of blinding, a I
had to today, I became aware [hat [hey may indeed secretly have
only one object: the interdiction against representation; or ramer,
Ihey are haunred solely by me unfgurable or unprescntable. They
are fundamentally overwhelmed. more or less unwittingly, by me
destruction of metaphor or image that seems (0 draw in Celan's po
Clry as irs fnal conquest. "TUbingcn, January" shatters an image
{the refection}; "Todtnauberg," a poem about the disappointmem
of poetry. no longer contains any image, unless it is-this should
be checked. supposing it could be-the:"starred die: ," [he:"Stcrn
wiirfd" of the third stanza. The:extenuation, one might say, of the
tropic.
"The Meridian," appropriately, providcs some explanation of
Ihis.
Appropriately, because the tide itself, or more precisely, the
word, when it makes its appearance in rhe course of the speech,
docs not do so without crossing or intersecting, without "encoun
tcring" a ccnain Wireon tropes and (the) tropics. On the plural of
"
Tope": "Topen." Virtually the lasl words arc:
4'
42
RlllIemberingDale
1dics :md gClldcmcn. I fnd something which ofers me some conso
blion for having mvcfe the impossible path, this path of the impos
sible. in yOllr presence. I fnd something which binds and which, like
,hI poem. leads (0 an encounter. I fnd something. like language, abo
5ILl+ yel eanhly. ((rfesuia!, something circular. which Inverses both
I,oles and returns f iIdf, thcreby-I am happy to report-even
crossing the tropic and HOpes. I fnd . . . a mrn.1
The "tropic." then. On the "dialogue" ,hat is the poem, a dialogue
with beings but also with thing, we can read:
When we speakwith things in this manner we always fnd ourselve
faced with the question of theif whence and whither: a question which
Mremains open" and does nO! come to an end," which points into
openness, emptiness, freedom-we are outside, al a considerable
distance.
The poem, I believe, also seeks this place.
The poem?
The poem wilh i[S images and tropes?
Ldie and gemlemen, what B I relly speaking of when, from IhiJ
direction, in Ihidire<tion, with thmwords, I speakof the poem-no,
of thpoem?
I am saking of the poem which does not exist!
The absolute poem-no, it doe not exist, it cnnot exist.
But each real poem, even the least pretemious, contains this in
escapable quetion, this incredible demand.
And what, then, would the images be?
That which is perceived and [0 be perceived one time, one time
over and over again, and only now and only here. And the poem
would then be the place where alHOpes and metaphors are developed
ad absurdum. (199) 37-38; 78-79)
How should we undersland this?
To even begin to see our way clear, we must consider things
froma greater distance.
Tht poem, Cclan had said earlier-this is my point of depar
turt-the poem is alone: "Das Gedicht ist einsam" (198; 87; 78).
GlIlStroph 43
"Alone" is a word that says singularity_or at leasl, il makes n

sense here except in reference ro singularity, to the singular ex
pe
n
c:ncc. "The poem is alone" means a poem is only efcliwl a poem
insoF as it is absolutely singlr. This is undoubtedly a defnition
of poetry's essence (which by iudf is not at all poetic). there is
no poetry, poetr does nO[ occur or rake place. and is therefore not
ftpcatedly questioned, except a the event of singularity.
In a way, the efon to say this singularity, or at least designate it,
underlie the whole "Meridian" speech-and is awyon the verge
of breaking through. Circumstancc= dictated that this efort
.
be
directed to a debate or discussion, an Ausei"oldenetzungwuh
Buchner:'
The locus of the discussion is the question of art. More precisely,
thequestion of art in relation to poetry. Jean LaUnay circumscribes
the issue in these terms:
An is a stranger Upoetry-that is, a[ fr, at the time to which the
poet'S mood always returns when he despairs or hopes tOO m

ch
:
And
then 8I is poetry's stranger; an is fcinating for poetry. It mdlcatc=
the possibility of spectacle; it indicates a window; it invites one t
?
jump. Thi s is also why, in art, there is always the hubbub f a crni
v the drumroll preceding an artist's rformance, thaI IS: alwa

s
more or less that "death-defying leap which, barring a foolish accI
dent, always ends well.
Te artist lands on his feI. That is what makes him an artist}
Thi s is crtainly nOt incorre, in any c from the point of view
of "theme," U Lunay says when justifing comparisons of Cclan
with K and Egon Friedeli. BU! one it is also a 1mplete,
prVorgized response: the question Celan bears with him and tries
to articulate, literly out of breath, no longer resonatcs. Thus Lau
nay does not enrircly do justice to the way CClan prceds, t
.
o te
road followed, L\ the difficult (if not completely 1lpossible )
journe; nor to Clan's prCise but complex strategy vis-a-vis Btich
nCr. And above al . dinkcticnly re-treating [he opposition berween
art and poetry, reducing [he strange to rhe fascinating by means of
U genitive and appropriating it as such (art is poetry's stranger),
..
Remembering DnuI
rakes into UL1lU neither singulariry itself. nor poetry as Celan
desperately st.oks (0 understand it.
What docs MThc Meridian" actually say?
Not. cxaclly, that art is a srranger ( poetry, but that yes, poetry
is the interruption of art. Something, if you will, that "taka art's
breath away" (I thinking of the motif of Atmzxlde, of ruro
of-breath,' which makes iu frst appearance in Celan here). Or, to
recall another of Celan's words, me "SlCp" (SrIrit) outside art; in
French one could say. closely following Derrida's reading of Blan
chot, Ie pm-d'r or k PI-ude l'n"" The event of poetry (and as
such, poeuy iscYcnt, and there i s poetry) is thus a "setting free," a
"P"iulg" (194; 34; 75) It is a liberation, nor in the sense, com
mon in German, of dismissal, bur in the sense of deliverance. And,
as we shall see, in the sense of free action. This is perhaps, in a
phrase I leave to its own ambiguity, an liberation. And very prob
ably, a cenain kind of"cnd of a."
Bur the idea that poetry occurs in this manner, when art gives
way, and that the poem is said to be "itselr when it is "an-less" or
"anfrccn (196; )5; 76), docs nm mean merely [hat for poetry, an is
a form of supervision or oppression. Nor even that an is, strictly
speaking, the alienation of poetry. Certainly, art is "strange"
(fmd). One can thus c it "other," but Celan prefers to say that
it is elsewhere or distant, that it is th distant and t" elsewhere
(195; )5; 75) Yet in reaJity, is only so because it is frst uncanny,
Imh(imlicI: strangely fmiliar, or, in other words. disorienting, un
usual. disquieting. An is even the Disquieting, as such: dl U,
himlich. Its strangeness or alterity is thus not a pure a!rerity. Nor
is it a "determinate" aherity in the sense that Hegel speaks of "de
terminate negation." In relation to a "same" or to a "self," 10 a
/ "nearn or to an "own,"B an exists in a strangeness which is itself
strange, anmher alletity. The difference it makes differs from itself;
il is unassignablc. For this reason it is disquiering ralher than "fas
cinaling." h could not be fascinating unless it occupied its own
place. exerciS. xI attraction in a particular direction. But that is just
Ihe point: art has no place of its own. Indeed, there is nothing one
can call art proper, properly itself Without a stable idellliry, pre-
ClatThe
45
sent everyhere but always elsewhere (Celan says that "it poss
,
:Iside from its ability to uansform, rhe gift of ubiquity" (
190; )1;
-tl), it is not "poetry's stranger." Moreover, this is why. if the task
or deslination of poetry is to liberate itself from art, this task or
destination is nearly impossible. One is never done with an.
It is clear Celan's discourse on an has to do with mimesis. This
much should be nmOO. So should the choice of ulIluimUcb (or its
cquivalellf: Ulg/JUT), the word used by Holderlin, rhen Heideg
ger, to translate the Greek deiloIwirh which Sophocles names the
essence of uchle in Amig01u. For Heidegger, an and the work of
:rt are equally ulIluimUcb. Celan no doubt fully aware of
(his-one respect (though cenainly not the only one) in which
"The Meridian" is a response to Heidegger. Yet I think it would
be more enlightening for a reading of the speech (and for the
question I am asking) to focus on art in the explicit debate with
Biichner.
Thus defned as Imb;mlicb, art is indeed, initially, art as Buch
ner understands it, or rather as he contests it: artifce and the ani
{icia!. It is the marionette or puppet Camille Desmoulins de
nounces in Dl 1 To: You can see the rope hanging down rhat
jerks it, and . . . the joints creak in fve-footed iambics at every
step"; it is the monkey in Woyk, dressed in coat and trousers, or
the robots in UOllU ,md Ul1 announced "in a pompous tone" as
"nothing but art and mechanism, nothing but cardboard and
watch springs" (188; )0; 69). In this sense, Launay is right to evoke
barkers, circuses, and carnivals. But with literature and poetry, with
Ihe Diclmmg that is Buchner's business, art is really also . . . elo
quence, once again. Yet this time it is bombast and turgidiry:
grandiloquence, with its inevitable effects of dtja-mtmdl and a
repetitive, wearisome aspect. Art. says Celan, is an old problem
("hardy, longlived . . . thaI is to say. eteral"), a "problem which al
lows a monal, Camille, and a person who can be understood only
in the context of his death, Danton, to Siring words together at
great length. It is easy enough to talk about art" (188; )0; 69)
Yet this kind of determination is not enough: it assigns an toO
easily, appropriates rhe Ullb;mlich tOO rapidly (and in an entirely
Rnnmbrilg Dnus
classical mode, with marionenes, robots, and anifcial bombast).
This is why, for Celan, an remains what Buchner himself oppose
to an thus understood, Namely-according to that most ancient,
indeslructible model-the natural. Creation, as Camille says in his
great speech on art: "IThe people] forget God himself, they prefer
his bad imitators,"" So art is simply nature once one takes pains to
imitate if. That is, once nature preents a spectacle. enters the relm
of representation-in short, when it aligns itself with Thus the
tableau of the twO girls in the valley that Lenz evokes when he
speaks of art and defnes his (or rather Buchner's) poetics: "At time
one would like to be the Medusa's head so as I be able to trans
form such a group imo Stone, and call Out to the people so that
mey might see" (191-92; 32; 69). Celan comments on these lines in
me following terms: "Ladies and gemlemen, please take note: 'One
would like to be the Medusa's head,' in order to comprehend that
which is natural as that which is narural, by means of art!" (192; 31;
72). And he adds, a litde further on, "Ayou can see, whenever art
makes an appearance . . . [the] pompous one cannOt be ignored"
('92; 33; 73)
Behind Buchner's Len! stands Buchner himself. But behind
Buchner. there is the historical (literary historical) Lenl, "Reinhold
Lenz, the author of the 'Notes on the Theater. '" Behind him, in
[ur. the Abbe Mercier, with his phrase" Elars nlim." That this
was namralism's mUt d'rdnand comains "the social and politicl
roots of Buchner's thought" (191; 32; 71), is scarcely important here,
BUI in iu most general sense, torn from historical inscription and
context, Elrs nlim tells the very secret of art; it indicates art's
movement-and the obscure will presiding over this movement,
or animating it from within. Art wants to expand iudf; il clamors
10 be expanded. It wants its diference from the things and being
of nature efaced. In a way, Ihat which is art's own, "proper" to art
I (to Ihe Ullluim/c/u), is Ihe tendency to mitigate differentiation,
:lIld in so doing invade and contaminate everything. Or mediate
everything, according to Lenz-Biichner's dialectical formulation
(nature is only nature by means of art). Thus, to "dis-own" /. 'cry
thing. Art is, if the word can be risked, generalized, never-cnding
Clltrop" 47
estrangement"-the Medusa's head, the robots, the spec
ches

without end.
When he brings up this theme, Celan knows he is echoing very
,lIlcient "rumors" about art. So ancient that they precede even the
(platonic) philosophical designation of mimnu. and its execution
or appropriation as representation, reproduction, semblance, or
simulation. A imitation. And Celan not only acts as an echo, say
ing he "listens to the noise persistently" (191; 33; 73), bur seems to
lend it a fvorable , bringing back, along with the rumors, the
old fear and condemnation of the mimetic (which can be, and has
been, conjoined with the interdiction against representation). All
Heideger's strength is required-and even that may not sufce
to dissipate the evil aura of the Ulluimlc/u, to lift the harmful and
demonic to the levd of rhe "daemonic."'o Not simply [Q succumb,
opposing it-in the end, dialectically-to the Hlill i sC-Himlc",
the Zuhaus, even the Hlill khr, [Q all the fgures and values of the
own, the fmiliar, the "at home," the native land, and so on-the
way Celan seems to do when, ncar the end of "The Meridian," he
marks the close of the poetic journey as "Ei,U Ar Himklhr," "A
kind of homecoming" (11; 39; 81).11
And it is true that for poetry, what Celan opposes or seems to
oppose to the UlhimlCu, to art (at leasl "at first," as Launay
would say), is. under various names, the own-me own-being: the
self" or "I," even the "he" of singularity (he, Lenz. Lenz himself,
and nOt "Buchner's Lenz"), the "person" Celan also curiously calls
the "fgure" ("Gmnlt") (194; 34; 74) Or, to use a word which,
though borrowed fom Buchner, does not lack religious resonance,
the "creature" (197; 36; 77). Nevertheless, despite appearances, it is
not simply the subject in the metaphysical sense Ihat is al issue.
One word condenses all these names: rhe human, dIMmschlclu.
The human, not man. And nOt the humanity of man. But the hu
man as what allows there to be one man or another-thnt man
there. singular-in the here and now, says Celano The human,
then, as the singular essence (a pure oxymoron, philosophiclly un
tenable), rhe singularity of man or of being-man. It is Camille in
Rnnembering Dffs
Tbe Dfub ofDIlton. as Lucile perceives him when he discoursa
on art and she docs nor listen (0 what he says, bUi hears him, him
panicularly. for "language is something personal, something per
ccptible" (189; 31; 70). Or mher, we suspeCt. it is Lucile herself,
" one who is blind to an" (189; 3t; 70) but who srill "perceives"
(J wjlJ return to this word).
The Ulbfiml estrangement, is estrangemem of the human
taken in this sense. It afectS existence. undoes its reality. The U
Immlcbf. despite what Cdan's formulations imply, does not open
up an otbudomain. It takes us "outside the human" (192; 31; 72),
bur opens up a domain "rurned toward that which is human." Ex
istence itself, bur "made strange": "rhe human feels out of place
[unbrimlicbJ (192; 32; 72). Life in an or in light of an. life in the
preoccupation with art-even more simply, life benumbed and
carried off by art, what I would call life in mimesis or rcpreselHa
rion, is rhe life in which one "forgets oneself" (193; 33; 73). The re
sult is that Lenz gets lost in his speeches (on literature), that
Camille and Danton "SpoUi grand phrases" althe way to the scf
fold. And that the Revolution is theater. Again, the motif of elo
quence. And dramatization.
But in reality. eloquence precedes dramatization and provides a
reason for it: theater and theatricalizcd existence only Wbecause
there is discourse. Or rather, di uOmilg. This means lhat the Ul
brimlicu is esentially a matter oflanguage. Or that language is the
locus of rhe Ulhrimlr, if indeed such a locus exisrs. In other
words. language is what "estranges" [he human. Nor because it is
rhe loss or forgetting of the singular, since by defnition language
embraces generality (this is a frequem refrain, and an old motif de
rived from so-called philosophies of existence); but because to
speak, to tet oneself be caught up and swept away by speech, to
Irust language, or even, perhaps, to be coment to borrow it or sub
mit to it, is to "forget oneself." Language is not the Unluimlic/u.
though only language comains the possibility of the Unluimlche.
But the Unbeimlche appears, or rarher, sets in {and no doubt it is
always, already there)-something turns in man and displaces the
human, something in man even ovenurns,IZ perhaps. or turns
Cntlltrphf
.Iround, expulsing him from the human-along wirh a certain pos
(tire in language: the "artistic" posture. if you will. or the mimetic.
Thai is. the most "natural" posture in language. as long as one
thinks or pre-llnderstands language as a mimeme. In the infi
nite
cross-purposes of the "artistic" and the "natural," in linguistic mis
prision, the Unheimliu is. fnally. forgetfulness: forgetting who
sp when I speak, which clearly goes with forgetting 10 whom I
speak when I speak, and who listens when I am spoken to. And,
.tlways thus prompted. forgerring whal is spoken of.
The motif of forgetfulness and turnaround (reversal) indicates
here that the Unluimlclu, because of language. is the catastrophe
of Ihe human.13 And this explains that poetry-what Celan calls
poetry or tries to save with the name of poetry, removing and pre
serving it from art-is, "every time," the interruption oflanguage:
Lucile's absurd "Long live the King!" (189; 31; 70) cried out in de
spair over Camille's death, and above all Lenz's "terrible silence"
(193; 3S; 76). The silence that fragments Buchner's narrative, StOps
it (and StopS art, including naturalism), but which already enig
marically signaled its presence in a phrase (without grandilo
quence) rhat says the cataStrophe's mOSt secret essence: "now and
then he experienced a sense of uneasiness because he was not able
to walk on his head" (195; 34; 75).
The interruption of language, the suspension of language, the
caesura ("counter-rhythmic rupture," said Holderlin)14-rhat is p
clry, then. "I Robbed) . . . of breath and speech," the "turn" of
breath, the

II ar the end of inspiration" (195; 33; 76). Poetry oc

curs where language, contrary [0 all expectations, gives way. Pre
ciselyat inspiration's filing-and this can be understood in at least
two senses. Or, even more precisely, at retained expiration, the
breathholding: when speaking (iscoursing) is about t

continue. -I
and somrole, suddenly free, forbids what was to be said. When a
word occurs in the pure sllspension of speech. Poetry is the spasm
or syncope of language.' Holderlin called Ihe caesura "the pure
word."'6
Would it seem, then, that poetry is appropriation. of speech.
and, indissociably. of the human? Yes, in a sense. And would this
RmembningDnts
mean that poetry is properly speech, becuse speech attesrs to the
"presence o( the human"? Yes, again; this is indeed what lan s
when he commenrs on Lucile's "Long live the King!" which he
calls-not without philosophic and political risk-a "counter_
word" (Gemwyt):
After al the words spoken on the platform (the sld)-what a
word!
It is a counter-word, a word thai severs the "wire. thai ref to
bowbefore the "loiterers and pafde horses o( histor. It is an act o(
frttdom. It is a step.
To be sure, it sounds like an expression o( allegiance Uthe ancien
rime-and that might not be a coincidence, in view o( what I am
venturing to say about the subject now, today. But these words
please allow one who also grew up with the writings of Peter
Kropolkin and GUStav Landauer expressly Uemphasize the poim
these words are not a celebration of lhe monarchy and a past which
should be preserved.
They are a tribute to the majesty o( the absurd, which bears witnes
to mankind's here and now.
Thai, ladies and gentlemen, has no universally recognized name.
but it is, I believe . . . poetr. (189-90; }I; 70)
We should not be too quick-let U use Celan's own politica.l
clarification as a model-to suess the undeniable philosophic
overdetermination of these remarks. This would be failing them. 1
think. It would almost be committing them an injustice.
What Celan calls Lucile's "counter-word" does not properly op
pose anything. not even the speeches delivered beforehand
(Camille and Danton's "grand phrases" at the foot of the scafold).
Not even discourse in general. The counter-word approves noth
ing either: it says nothing in favor of the monarchy. is nor a politi
cal word-or even U anarchic one. It is "absurd"; it does not mean
anything. But this does not make it "neutral." or if so we would
have t agree on the meaning of the term. It is a gesture. It is a
counter-word only to the extent ir is such a gesture and proceeds,
as Biichner says, from a "decision": rhe gesture of dying or decision
to die. By shouting "Long live the King!" Lucile kills herself. Here.
" ,
Caatoplu 5
'
(he word is suicidal; it is, as Holderlin said o( Greek tragic speech,
deadly-factual . . . [it I truly kills."' A pure provocation, it signi
fe (the decision to die), but in a mode other than signifcation. It
signifes without signifing: it is an act. an event (though I would
htsirate somewhat to use the word "performative").
Here is the scene:
(A PATROL emer)
A CITIZEN. 'o' thert?
l.UCIl.E. Long live Ihe King!
CITIZEN. In the name of the Republic.
She is surrounded by the WATCH and led away.
18
If Lucile's cry-pocrry-properly says what is proper to the hu
man, we must understand the proper here as being like the own of
"own death." In the counter-word. or rather through the "counter"
of rhe counter-word, the possibility of death "resolutely" opens up.
as does something like what Heidegger calis, with respect to Da
uil, its "ownmost possibility." And fromthat point on exist-these
arc Celan's words-"fre" and "direction" (188; 30; 69). That is, lib
erty. Exactly like the sky opening "as an abyss" beneath Lenz.
In 1ce then, poetry syeistence: the human. It says :stence.
not because it takes the opposing course to discourse or because it
upscrs the u,,"im/ic" ruraround. the catastrophe of language (the
catastrophe rhat is language); poetry is nOt a catastrophe of cata
strophe. But. because it aggf3V3tCS the catastrophe itself, it is. one
might say, irs liuralZl riol.I' This is what the "fgure" of Lenz sig
nifies: existence suddenly "released" at the height of catastrophe.
lhe "mortal's" sudden revelation of himsel( as the one whose exis
trllce rests on the abyss-the bottomlessness-of the heavens.
This is why.oetry does not take place outside art, in some else
where supposed ro be the other o( art or o( irs strangeness. It takes
place in the "stfnge place" itsclf. And ifCclan says of this place that
i, is "the place where a person [succexsJ in selling himself free, as
all-estranged-I" (195; 14; 75). we mUSI not lose sight of the fuct.
whaner rhe dialectical cast of such a remark (very close. as it hap-
Rcmrmbcrn_Otns
pens, M Hold('rlinian formula(ions), (hal the I which [hus releases
and frees itself. which Mcomes home," which perhaps even hope 10
have reached the "occupiable realm, "lO this I is in the vicinity of
death, silence, and insanity. It fls, it free ilself in (he void. If theT:
is appropriation, it is, a in Holderlin, abysmal. One could almost
sa) [hat it does not rake place U such-and (hat poerry does not
occur, unless ir is by defh Ue pasd'm in art's greatcst imimacy,
in the very diference of art from itself or in the strangeness to self of
strangeness. AI the unassignable heart of the 0ohciche.
This explains why Buchner-(he poet. nO[ the poetician-can
ocion, can even be the obviously paradoxical opportunity for the
:mempt 10 say the essence of poetry and thus call art into question:
And I must now ask if the works of Georg Buchner, the poet ofall liv
ing beings, do not contain a perhaps muted. perhaps only half con
scious, bur on that account no less radical-or for preciselythat rean
in the most basic sense a radical-callinginlO-queSion of an? . . . A
callinginto-question, to which all contemporary poetry must rclUrn
if it is to continue posing questions? To rephrase and anticipate my
self somewhat: may we proceed from art Usomething given, some
Ihing to be laken for granted, as i nowoften done; should we, in con
CIV terms, abovc all-let us say-fllow Mallarme Uhis logical con
clusion? (192-93; }O; 73)
This also explains. but in reverse, why Cdan, fced with what is
difcult" (200; )8; 80)-nO[ ro say impossible-to dislinguish
(in (he last pages he speaks of the "impossible path," the "path
of (he impossible"), is forccd to use a double language. Now (he
language of simple opposition, which is-though ironically-rhe
language of hope (poetry understood as fneing art, being the end
of art):
Perhaps . . . perhaps poetry, in the company of the I which has for
gOllen itself, travels the same path as an, toward th:lt which is mym:
rious ji:tthc:mIch| and alien jfcmd] . And ollce again-but where?
but in what place? but how? but as what?_it sets itself free?
In that casc art would be the path travelled by poetry-nothing
morc and nothing less. (19}-94; 33-}4; 74)
Cuatrpht
Now, in the midst of difculry, the language of the impossible:
the language of diference, which is not. ironically. the language of
despair (poetry underSlOod a the liberation of art; art never done
with):
Poetry: it cn signif a turn-of-breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry
travels its path-which is also the path of art-for the sake of such a
breath turing? Perhaps it succeeds, since strangeness {a F",ld,
that is, the abyss andthe Medusa's htad, the abyss andthe robots,
sccm to lie in the same direction-perhaps it succeeds here in distin
guishing between strangeness and strangeness, pcrhaps at precisely this
point the Medusa's head shrivels, perhaps the robots cease to func
tion-for t unique, Reeting moment? Is perhaps at this point, along
with the I-with [he estranged I. set free atrh' uottandnQ:|m|Lr
mmmrr-is perhaps al this point all Other set free?
Perhaps the poem assumes its own idemity as a result . . . and i s ac
cordingly able to travel other paths, that is, the paths of ar, agin and
again-in this art-less, an-free manner?
Perhaps. (t95-6; 35; 76)
Or yet, and this time in the most dcmanding. (hat is to say. the
most desperate fshion possible (but always with suitable irony):
Ldieand gentkmCn, I have reached the conclusion-I have returned
to the beginning.
E/irt! This question comes IO us with its mysterie jUn
hcimchket],new and old. I approached Buchner in its company-l
bclicved I would once agin nnd it there.
I also had an answer ready, a "Lucilean counter-word: I wanted
1O esu.blish somcthing in opposition, I wamed to there with my
comradiction.
Expand an?
No. BUI accompany an into your own unique place of no escape.
And set yoursclf free.
Here, tOO, in your presence, I have travelled this path. It was a
circle.
An-and onc must also include the Medusa's head, mcchani7.ation,
robots; the mysteriou$, indistinguishable, and in the end perhaps the
only strangeness nutcncf"mdcl-art lives on. (200; 38; 79-80)
5
Reub--gDln
If thc differcllcc can ever be made, if there CXiSlS the slightest
possibility of a separation of poetry, then we must think of this dif
ference and this separation as internal to an itself. Inside an, p0-
etry would succccd-perhaps-in withdrawing from art; it would
exit an within an. Thus we must think, in an's greatest intimacy
and as this intimacy itself, of a sort of spacing or hiatus. A secret
gaping. Perhaps intimacy-the "heart" of the same-is always
such a gaping, a the possibiliry for the same (Q be itself and to join
within itself to itself; the pure-empry-arriculation of the same.
And perhaps for art (the 0hiJc), this intimate gaping would
be precisely what ceaselessly "estranges" the strangeness of art (of
the strange): precisely the caesura of an, the spasm-furlive,
! hardly felt-of the strange. In which case poelfy would not be, in
arr-outside-of-art, the Raw or filing of art, oflanguage: let liS say,
silence. Bur rather the pain of art (of language). Hence the aggra
vation of the catastrophe. which is, strictly speaking, a revolt (Lu
cile. Lcnz).
This is why poetry, if it ever occurs, occurs as the brutal revela
tion of the abyss that contains arr (language) and nevertheless con
stitutes it, as such, in its strangeness. Poetry takes place, can take
place, in art. But this place is not anyplace. The place of poetry, the
place where poetry takes place, every time, is the place without
place of the intimate gaping-something we must cerminly con
ceive of as the pure spacing which places (do not) sup-pose and
which upholds them, with no hold.
No doubt this is what Celan rigorously calls u-ropia:
Topossmdy?
Certainly! But in light of that which is lO be studied: in light of
u-lOpia.
And human beings? And all living Crl'IUrc?
In this light. (199: 38: 79)
Poetry. by this accoum, can be called the abyss of art (language):
it makcs art (language) abysmal. In alsenscs. This mode of occur
rence, advent, is "proper" (0 it.
But it docs nO{ occur, if ever it does occur, as Poetry, even if af-
CtJtb
terward it can with difculty b:recognized as such. "The absolute
poem-no, it does not exist, it cannot exist" (199; 38; 79). It oc
curs, then, every lime, in the time or be: twntime of the caesura,
in a syncope, as a poem, that is to say as a word-singular, unique.
It occurs in "this unique. Reeting moment" (196; 35; 76), in the "in
stant" (Augmblick), the wink of an eye or the head's inclinadon
(Celan speaks of "the angle of inclination of . . . cxisu:ncc" 1197; 36;
77 D, in the blink of "release," of the "free act": in the instant of the
cdtastrophe, the revoh-the conversion of the I that opens to ex
istence and allows the human t take "place" within it.
This instant makes a date each rime-it is date-making. The
poem remains mindfl of dates:
Perhaps one cal say (hat every poem has its "20th of January"? Ilr
haps Ihe novelty of poems that arc written today is Ube found in pre
cisely this point that here the attempt is most clearly made to remain
mindful of such dates?
BUI U< we all not descended frmsuch dates? And Iwhich dates
do we anribUle ourselve? (196: 35; 76)
In a way that difers altogether from the standard epresion, and
thus i n its strongest sense, poetry is OClioni/ pOt.21 It is on this
account [hat it keeps, if you will, a dates register, or that it is the
search, poem after poem, for the dates an I can ascribe to itself
(Celan plays on Jcb"ibm, "to write," and zUJc/"ibm, whose pri
mary meaning is "to note on an account"). Jt is thus the memory
of events, that is, each rime, of the singular though certainly not
unique advenr into existence. Yel this memory is not pure. Like
wise, there are probably neither pure evellts nor pure advents: they
arc numerous, repeatable. prompted in advance by language. Thus
the singular, unique word is, precisely, nor unique: the pom is al
ways already carried away in the pomJ, which is to say in the inf
nite approximation of existence that is an, and language. Whatever
task or absolute vocation it assigns or accords itself a regards exis
tence (the human), poetry is language. It speaks: "BUl lhe poem,"
says Celan, "does speak! It remains mindful of irs dates, but-it
speaks" (196; 35; 76). Poetry is thus the memory of dates JUSt
)
Remembailg Dle
strictly insofur as il is mlemorecJme: an a, after all-of memory.
And lilliS, an an, afer aU-ofianguage: ll/me.
Ccrlainly-we must nOI be afraid of always having to lravd the
same circle-memory here is, irreducibly, the memory of a single
pcrson. A soon as it speaks and must speak (for this is also its im.
perative, (he "you must" that commands it), the poem can do so
only in "its own, its own, individual cause": il Jeitu eigmm, a/.
"i Sche. in what properly concerns it . This is
why, at the limit of its own possibility, "at the edge of irsdf,"
wrenching itself from irs "now.no-longer." toward irs "as-always"
. the poem must dear a way between silence and djs
course, between mUlism's sying nothing and the Jtying too mich of
eloquence. It is the poem's narrow parh, the sitenilg: the path
that is "most narrowly" that of the I (200; 8; 80). But this path
does not lead to speech or language. It leads to only one wr to a
"language berome reality, language set free under the sign of an in
dividuation which is radical" (1.-.8; 36; Irreducibly, to the
language of a single person: "Then the poem would be-even
more clearly than before-me language of an individual which has
taken on form; and, in keeping with its innermost narure (Jeinem
imtnte \ulj it would also be the present, the here and now"
. 77).
Such is, in sum. the "solitude" of (he poem, and what obliges it,
with as rigorous an obligation as the obligation to speak, not to
"invent" a singular language or build an idiolect from Start to fn
ish, but to undo language (semantically and syntactically); disar
ticulate and raref it; cur i( up according to a prosody which is nei
rher thai of spoken language nor that of earlier poerry; to condense
it until one comes t rhe hard center. the mured resinance where
one recognizes a voice that is singular, that is (0 say, separa(ed from
language, as is a tone or a style.
Here, clearly, resides what I have called, for lack of a more judi
cious Icrm, the "idiomatic" Ihreat: the Ihreat of hermclicism and
obscurity. Celan has, if I may put it thus. a very clear awareness of
this. He even demands the risk. What is surprising, though, is not
tlla( he demands il. The surprise J that this demand is in faCt, once
Gltnstplu

again, absolmely paradoxical; for if it is indeed made. as one might
expect. in rhe name of catastrophe itSelf (in the name of abysma
l
conversion, or even revolt), Ihat is, in the name of exiSlence, it is
rightfl y justified or authorized by onJy one thing: the hope of
what Celan cl s me "encounter," die Bung .
JUSt afer evoking the one who "walks on his head," and the
abyss of rhe heavens beneath him. Celan says. without ado:
Ldie and gendemen, nowadays it is fshionable to reproach p
etry with itS "obscurity." Permit me now, abruptly-but h: not some
thing suddenly appeared on the horiWn-pcrmit me now to quote a
maxim by Pac a maxim that I read some time ago in L Schos
lOw: Nr noUi reprochrz ptl I manqlr t drt! pli squr noUi Cfoiom
profmiol! Thai is, I believe, if nor the inherent obscurity of poetry,
the obscuriry anributed 1O it for the sake of an encounter-from
a great distance or sense of strangeness possibly of its own making.
(195; }5; 75)
Obscuriry i s thus not at al native to poetry; it does not belong to
its essence. But it comes upon poetry; it is or can be conjoined
with it. That it L thus come upon poetry is precisely only, Celan
says, "for the sake or (U11 + + wikn) the encounter, in me name
of and for rhe love of an encounter, which itself befls "from a
great dis lance or a sense of sirangeness." The paradox here is that
obscurity originates in taking the encounter into consideralion,
and not in the demand for solitude. ulan doe not say obscurity is
destined to prepare or provoke the encounter, that it i s a cl 10 the
encounter, or thar the encounter is in fnal aim. He says obscurity
is, on the contrary, a mark of attention-even respecl-with re
gard [0 the encounter. This means the encounter is Ihe occasion,
or rather the very cirmstmtce of rhe poem: only once Ihere is an
encounter is there the poem's "solitude," and Ihus obscurity. And
ill fact:
The poem is alone. It is alone and underway. WhoCvCr writes it
must remain in its company.
But docs not the poem, for precisely that reason. at this paim par
ticipate in the CnCunter-n tlx "Jsur of AW mrOlmrr (198; 37; 78)
Rmmnbtring DtIts
II is difficult to conceive the encounter, its secret or mystery
(Gtiti",ni s; a word in which the Htimof the near and rhe own, of
the f.uniliar and intimate, still resonates).
In what is perhaps the most miking twist of "The Meridian" (the
moment when Celan recognizes that, afer all, the poem "does
speak." even if1in its own . . . individual cause"). rhe Oil,, indttd,
the Iholl olllr. abruptly appears to replace lhe elsewhere and the
alien, which until (his point had been the only terms in question. It
is here that the encounter is decided in its essence and possibility;
But I think-and this thought can scarcely come as a surprise to
you-I think that it has always belonged to lhe expectations of the
poem in precisely this manner to speak in the cause of the strange_
no, I can no longer use this word-in precisely this manner-to speak
il the LNofan Olhtr-who knows, perhaps in the cause of a wholL
Ollur.
This "who knows," at which I see I have arIived, is the only thing I
can add-on my own, here, today-w[he old expectations.
Perhaps, I must now syto my5lf-BJd at this point I am making
us( of a well-known tcrm-perhaps it is now possible to concdve a
m((ring of lhis Mwholly Other" and an "OIh(r which is not far M*
movld, which is ver ncar. The poem t3riC, StOpS to catch a sccnt
like a creature when confronted with such thoughts. (t96-97: }S-}6;
76
-77)
This is nOI, contrary [Q what one might think, a "forced pas
sage." At most, on me "path" that never stOpS closing of. coming
to nothing or leading back to the same poim. it is an attempt at a
new clearing. We already know that at any rate Ihere will be no
"passage" in "The Meridian."
Nor is this a simple "profession of faith"; the "who knows,"
which is itself dllttd("at which I see I have now arrived"), suspends
what precedes it. In any case it leaves open the question of exis
tence, or of the possibility of the "wholly other" thus designared.
Moreover, the justifcation for recourse to such an expression is i[
self panicularly discreet and reserved; there is nor a word tOO many,
and nothing to Ratter the "old expectations" tOO much.
Ctamh,
59
Ver this sBid, how is the encounter decided in the substitution of
aherity for suangeness? And how is such a subsritution
possible?
The logic we have already seen at work is still thl same; cata
strophic and paradoxical. Speaking in its own name or its own in

dividual cause, speaking the language of singularity. of "an indi
viduation which is radical." the poem hopes, has always hoped,
precisely in this manner, in fhi J language (though it is so difcuh
to reach), t speak "in the cause of the strange," in the name of the
strange and the alien. That is, to use, in and as one's own, proper
language, the alien language, rhe language of estrangement. Ccla's
brutal reversal here of the movement which up to this point has
straitened his gait is simply the sign that between proper and not
proper, near and far, familiar and strange, the exchange is always
revcrsible. and for [his reason nevcr StopS; it is nOt fxed and has
no dctermined direction. At the very heart of cstrangement or dis r
appropriation, by way of an enigmatic trope or turn, appropria
tion occurs. But this also means that such an appropriation takes
place "outside the self." The appropriation, [he singular appropri
ation. is nOt lhe appropriation of Ihe self within itself. The self
or the singular I-reaches itself within ilSClf only "outside." Reap
plying one of Heidegger's formulas. we can say that the "outside
self" is the self's origin. It is thus, for example, that in the last
poem of Di Nimwuurl, "In der Luft" ("In the Air"), "die Elt
weiten" (the disunited) are described: "heimgekehn in I den un
heimlichen Bannstrahl l der die Verstrcuten versammelt" ("re
turned home into I the un-homely banishment I which gathers up
the scattered ones" I GW,; 2
90
)).L!
And in fuct, the volte or revoh of appropriation docs not take
pIu. The "here and now" of singular existence is immediately an
elsewhere and anmher time (a date whose memory mUSt be kept).
If appropriation occurs, we know it is in u-topia itself. This is why
wc mUSt substitute for rhe topological division ofherc and strange,
ncar and fr-which inevitably assigns places-the unlocarable di
\'isio.diffc[ee or alrerity. I n the place (without place) of the
elsewhere, an "other" occurs, that is, a singular existent i n whose

Rnm1Ibmng Datn
name-and (his time, Ihe expression is apt-the poem maintains
the hope of speaking. Estrangement yields ground [0 the encountg.
But the encounter is no less abysmal than estrangement. A SOOn
as other occurs, as such, there is the threat of an absolute aherity:
ab*sohne, which forbids or renders impossible all relation. The
olher. if it is indeed other, is immediately the wholly mher. Bur at
the same time, the other. even if wholly other, is. insofr as it is
OIher, unthinkable without relation to the same: as soon as other
appears, detaching itself from rhe same, the same, in advance. has
already recovered it and brought it back. It is impossible to think a
total unbinding.
Alterity is contradictory in its esence. From precisely this para
dox, Weter onto-theolog up t Hegel and beyond-one might
as well say, al our thought-has developed. Here i( underpins
Celan's entire discourse. Bur wirh a very particular accent, once
again dose ro Heidegger's, which aims to remove it from all struc
turing of a dialectical type, to suspend in it the movement of r
lurion, ro mainrain it as pure paradox.
For the same, in rum, is irself only in relation to the other; the
beginning of D; W;Hfclnf dr Loik says in substance that the
simple and immediate posidon of the same (of Being) is pure no
thingness or empty nmhingncss. Between the s1me and the other
there is necessarily a relation. a reciprocal relation, or rather, as
Holderlin said, an exchange. One could say that this double rela
lion, which simultaneously divides the same and the other to put
them, chiasmatically, in rclarion ro other than what they are. stems
qllnll from the sameness of the same and the alterity of the other.
BUI this is nOI at all so. In the "relating to," it is by defnition the
movement of alteration that predominates. Or if one prefers, dif
ference is always more primitive. So that in the relation of the same
and the other there is an imbalance. This means thar it is the alter
il of (he mher. [he being-wholly-other of the other or a cerrain
"duplicir( in the other that institutes the same as a relation to the
other. and thus always differentiates it. The same is Heraclitus's
"one diferentiated in itself" -a phrase moreover "rediscovered" by
Holderlin al rhe dawn of speculative idealism . This is why the
Calastrpl

wholly other-whelilcr or nOt the word, for Celan,
designates
God-de-parts the other, that is, approaches it: relarcs il [0 the
same, which receives il in, or rather Qits most imimarc difference.
The wholly other is the gif of the other as the possibility of (
he
samc, that is, as the possibility for the same of establishing itsclf as
"diferance" (I M Derrida's spelling here for what it indicates as 10
temporality and the origin of time). The same (the SubjCt) does
not, as speculative logic believes. go outside the self and pass into
its other, with a view to fUming and relating back to the self so as
to establish itself as such. But under the (original) gif of the other
to which it already always relates itself, the same is the pure move
ment that allows lhe intimate gaping-which is. within the self. its
"original outside selr" {time)-to hollow itself out. 10 open and
spread.
I may be wrong, but in the frst pan of Dit Nimdrost there
arc twO poems, "Dein HinUbersein" (Your Being Beyond") and
UZu heiden Handen" ("On Either Hand")-they in faCt appear
one right afer the other-that seem to me to speak not of this
(they in no way say Ihis very thing), but fom lhis. In the frst, one
rcads:
GOll, das lasen wir. ist
cin Tcil und cin zwciter. urstrtu[er:
imTod
all der Gem;hten
wichst cr sich zu:
Donhin
fuhn uns der Blick,
mit dieser
H;l fte
han wir Umgang.
God. so we read, is
a pan and a second, a scattered one:
in the death
of al those mown down
he grows himself whole.
Remembering Onu:
There
our looking leds Q
with this
hr
we keep up relations.l
And in the second:
. . . ich
nnde hinaus.
o dicsc wanderde lcere
ganliche Mitle. Getenm,
fall ich dir zu, fl lst
du mir :U, einander
emfllen, schn wir
hindurch:
D
Selbe
hat uns
verlorcn, das
Sdbc
hat uns
vergcs n, d
Sdb
hat uns-
. . . 1
fnd my way OUI.
o this wandering cmp}'
hospirable midst. Apart,
1 fall IO you, you
fl to me, fllen away
fromeach other, we see
through:
One
and the same
h"
lost us, one
Ctlrpbe
and the same
h
forgotten Q one
and the same
ha_ls
Tesubstirution of the other and the wholly other for me Sg
and the elsewhere thus produces an ocueme thought of diference .
And this thought in turn permits one to think of singularity a the
secret-we could also say the imimacy-of the encoumer. Wat
Ceian cl the encoumer is thus frst the hollowing out, the inti
mate gaeing of singularity. The encounter is the original intimate
ectasy according to which singular being exists. This is why one L
say of the poem which is "alone" that it also takes place "in the mys
tery of an encounter." II is also why Celan can say the following
when he evokes near the end of "The Meridian" the two tOU in
which he "stancd write from a '20th of January'" -the "cata
strophic" quatrain I have already cited ("cme on your hands to us")
and the "Gesprach im Gebirg" ("Conversation in the Mountains"):
"In each instance I started to write from a '2mh of January,' frm
my '20th of January.' 1 encountered . . . myself" (201; 39; 81).
It is true mat in the encounter (lm ), the value of "against"
(gtgm) of "across from" or "vis-}-vis," .eems to predominate. A
value of opposition. This certainly seems t be the way Celan un
derSlands it when he defnes the poetic aCt U "anention," "percep
tion," and "diaJogue":
The poem wants to reach the Othcr, it nccds this Olher, it needs a
vis-a-vis. It searches it out and addrsil.
Each thing, each person is a form of the Olhcr for the poem, as it
makes for this Other.
The poem anemplS 10 pay ctreful attention U cverything it en
counters: il has a fner scnsc of detail. of outline, of Slfucturc, of color,
and also of the movements and the Msuggestions. These are, 1 be
li{'Ve, not qualities gained by an eye competing (or cooperating) with
mechanical devices which arc continually being brought 10 a higher
degree of perfcction. No. it is a concentration which remains aware of
all of our dales . . . .
ebe-gDaus
The poem IComcs-and under what conditions!-a po<m of one
who-a before-pereivc, who fe lhat which appears. Who quc
liolls this appearing and adds it. It become dialogue-it is ofen
despairing dialoe. (198; 37; 78)
BUI at the same time, the value of opposition is dearly not the
determining value here. It is inevitably attached to the motif of a-
terity. Yet nothing indicates that it constitutes the conCep!.
What these lines really seek ro say is the poetic act as an act of
thought. It is no accident that Celan
'
s defnition of attention is, via
Benjamin, that of Malebranche: "'Attemion'-permit me at this
poin! to quote a maxim of Malebranche which occurs in Walter
Benjamin's essay on Kafka: 'Anention is the natural prayer of the
soul' (198; 37; 78). Again, it is no accident that the encounter is
defned as a "perceiving" and a "questioning." The "perceiving"
(wnhnuhmen}-and onCe more we must considcr Heidegger, who
hcre, as it happens, is both vcry f from and near to Benjamin-is
the Greek lorin, thought, the very essence of reaon (Vrrmmf); as
for the questioning-but here, the proximity is very strange-we
well know that Heidcger, in a fmous rexr, said it nothing les
than the "Frommigkeit des Denkens."2
Yet thought supposes what I am calling, of course for lack of a
bener term, intimacy or the intimate diference. It supposes, or
more precisely, it originate in intimacy as the possibiliry of nkung
/0 in general. It is in this sense that the poem thinks or is a dia
logue. The dialogue is a speaking and a naming (which one would
have to call "pure" if echoing Benjamin, "essential" if thinking of
Heidegger). But speaking and naming are, in turn, a "Ierring
speak." To speak to the other being or thing-ro address him or it,
is ro let what speaks in him or it occur, and accept this word in the
very heart of the poem (in irs "immediacy and proximity") as the
gif of the othcr. It is to prepare, ecstatically, for the "presencc" of
the other within oneself; ro let intimacy open up.
Only in the realm of this dialogue does that which is addressed rake
form and gather around the I who is addressing and naming it. But
the one who has been addressed and who, by vinue of having been
Camsoyhe
o,
named, has, a it were, become a thou, also brings its otherness along
into the prent, into this preselll.-In the heT and now of lhe poem'
it is still possible-the poem iuelf, afer all, has only this one, unique,
limited present-only in thi s immediacy and proximity docs it allow
the most idiosyncratic quality of the Other, its time, to participate in
(he diaoe. (198-99; J7; 78)
The "counter" of rhe encounter or the against is thus not sim
ply the "counter" of opposition. Rather, in the very vis-a-vis that
is the encounter, it is what rids itSelf of opposition. It is the
counter" of proximity, that is, of de-parting. The other de-parts,
close against a proximiry such that it makes the very space of inti
macy which renders possible thought and word, [hat is, dialogue.
For this reason the poem turns, within itself, to theppearin&
y.rhat is "in the process of apeearing"; it questions the very coming
into presence. The poem (the poetic act), in this mode proper ro
it (dialogue), is the thought of the present's prcsence, or of the
other of what is present: the thought of no-thingness (of Being),
that is to say, the thought of time. "Soviel Gestirne" ("So Many
Constellations"):
. in den Schluchten,
d, wo's verglnhte. stand
zitcnprachtig die Zeit,
an der schon empor- und hinab
und hinwegwchs,
ist oder war oder scin wird-,
ich weiss,
ich weiss und du weisst. wir wWten,
wir wussu'n nicht, wir
waTCn ja da und nichl dort,
und 1uweilen, wenn
nur d Nichts zwischen uns stand. fnden
wir ganz zucinander .
. . . in chasms.
and where they had burlll Ou[,
splendid with leatS, stood Time,
66
RmltmbrjllgDnu!
O1 which already geup
and down and away althai
is Ol or will b-.
I know,
I know and you know, we knew,
we did not know, `
were then. afer all, and not there
and at times when
only the void stood between us we gOl
atthe way lO each mher.v
Of course, Celan is not saying time itself, but rather, speaking of
the other who is, in every instan a Rarticular other, hi ! tin.The
poetiC act (the poem) is a singular experience, the dialogue is a sin
gular dialogue. And this is of course what distinguishes poetry
from thought proper, from rhe exercise of thought. even (and es
pecially) if poetry thinks. But I do nor think one can make this an
argument, a Uvinas does a bit hastily, in fvor of who knows what
improbable "beyond" of "ontology"; in favor of a pathos (here,
srrictly conceived), of the "otherwise [han Being."18 Ccrrainly f
etic questioning begins with a singular address: to the other, in fCt
mlj sgda a "you." But this address to the you is an address to the
alterity of the you-of rhi sother; it is the address, obscurely arisen
from intimacy (from the intimate diference), to the being of the
other, which always "is" and can only "be" Being. How could one
speak at all if Being was not involved? There is no "otherwise than
Being," unless, once again. one understands Being as being, and
misses, in the other, precisely its alterity. Poetry's "you-saying," irs
llaming. iSi way of "Being-saying" other than that which prorrlx
belongs to thought, but still a way of "Being-saying." It is possible
that another space opens up from such a naming, or that naming
sheds a different light on the space opened up by any saying. To
express this, Heidcggcr uses Holderlin's word: "the holy" (dlHi
lige). Uut the other space or the space on which a different liglll is
shed is nO! "beyond" Being. The experience of the You, the en
counter, opens onto nothing other than the experience of Being:
Cntnstroplu
of the no-thing of being-which Celan designates,
precisely in
Holderlin's terms (not Rilke's), a "openness," "emptiness," "free
dom." I again quote the decisive passage:
When speak with things in this manner .. ' always find ourselves
faced with [he quVtiOn of their whence and whither Inach ih"m
W""" umWohinl : a question which "remains opcn and "docs not
COO< Uan end," which pointS into openness, emptiness. freedom
we B outside, at a considerable distance.
The poem, I believe, also St kl this place. (199: }7: 78-79)
In other words, poetry's questioning is meta-physical questioning
itself, in the sense [hat it is the repetition of the metaphysical as
Hcidegger understands it. It questions in the direction of being as
"transcendence as such" (d tmmuld SChlcJJhhl).19 JUSt such a
" transcendent" is sought in the singular thing or being it is incum
bent upon poetry-the poem-to perceive (think): it is the "wholly '
other," the nrchL and the tLlos of the other, and nothing here
permits us to simply identif this wholly other with God. That is
why Cclan cn say of poetic questioning, of the demand or pre
tension (Alspmch) in al poems, even the least pretentious (al
spmcbslnu) that it is at once "inescapable" and "incredible." The
question the poem carries is, a Lunay correctly translates, "exor
bitant" (199; 38; 79)
In this sense. the poetic act is ecstatic. The exorbitant is the pure 1
transcendence of being. h follows that the poem, as a questioning,
is turned toward the open, ofered up to it. And the open is itself
open, afer a fashion, to u-topia, to the pl

ce wi

hoUi place

f the'
advent. To put it in other terms, the poellC act IS catastrophiC: an
upsetting relation to what is an upset, in being, in the direction a
no-thingness (the abyss).
.
This is just what justifes the idea that paclry is the interruption
of art, that is, the imerruplion of mimesis. Poetic an consists of
perceiving, not representing. Representing, :11 least according to
some of the "ancienr rumors," can only be said of the already-pre
sent. What is "in the process of appearing cannot be represented,
or if so, we mllst give a completely different meaning to represen-
68
Rememb(ring DIts
ration. For pOClfy. represcmarion is organized starting with what
onc might call Qmic comparison (the comparison of the already
prcS.'I widl the alrdy-prescm), from which arise fgures or im
ages. "metaphors and mher rope," all the turns of phrase that al
Iow a ccrrain use of language to I defned as "poetic." Measured
against the requirements of questioning tOward Being or presence,
the omic comparison, and therefore me "poetic," have to do with
what Heidcggcr denounced as "idols" (Git) and problcmatized
as "thinking in models" (Dmkm in Modlkn).j There is nothing
_to which onc can compare Being: Being is, purely and simpl
nrcpresentable.
Poetry as Celan understands it is rhus in this sense the imcrrup
tion of the "poetic." At least, it is defned as a battle against idola
try. All "real" poems, all that are efectively poems, seem 1 aim at
nothing other than being rhe place where rhe "poeric" collapses and
becomes abysmal. The taSk of poetry seems to be tirelessly undoing
the poctic"; nor by "puuing an end" to fgures and tropes, bur by
pushing them a abll4rl1 as Lucile's "Long live the King!" in the
sharp light of dealh suddenly makes absurd the Ihearricality and
grandiloquence of "historic" discourses. In the highly rigorous
sense the term has in Heidcgger, poetr would thus be the "decon
struction" of the poetic, that is to say, both of what is recognized
as such (here there is a closely foughl confonration with the p
etic lradition) and of the sponraneous "poericiry" of language
(which supposes the strictest possible language work).
Such a task. which amounrs to extenuating the "poetic," is per
haps impossible-Celan is the first ro say so. Nevertheless, it is
what his poetry strives to do. It strives as "poetry of poetry." But it
also strives inasmuch as it seeks t reduce the image to pure per
ception, that is, seeks to empty or hollow out the image. To the
question "And what, then, would the images be?" once rhe poem
condenses in "exorbitant" questioning, the response is: "That
which is perceived and to be perceived one time, one time ovcr and
l over again, and only now and only here" (199; 38: 79). Poetry
would thus measure itself against the impossibility of a language
Gtfroplu
without images or the impossibility of what Benjamin
calls "pure
language," that is, the language of names.J1
Two remarks to close:
I. In its impossible. exhausting combat with art (the motif of
panting, babbling. or stammering), hatry wants to rid itself
of is the beautjfl. The poem's threat is the beautiful, and al p
ems are always tOO beautiful, even Celan's.
The beautiful is obviously closely linked to mimesis. This is par
ticularly visible in Benjamin, who defnes the beautiful "as rhe ob
ject of experience in rhe state of resemblance." He quotes Valery
on this: "Beauty may require the servile imitation of what is inde
fnable in objects."H If one wenr so fr as to say thc servile imita
tion of that which is inimitabl in things," one would reach what
makes POCtry's essence for Celan, thai is. what does not destine it
for the beautiful-or for mimesis. But at thc same time this pure
oxymoron, he imitation of the inimirable. marks the impossibil
ity of poetry. This is where Celan locates thc tragic.
2. I do nOt know, finally. if "Tilbingen, Janncr" contains the
sligh[est allusion to Moses and the interdiction against representa
tion. Ai i know is t Holderlin, more than has bn beli and
more [han Heidegerian commentar led M to think, evoked the
Patriarchs. "A Quell der Donau" ("At [he Source of the Dan
ube"), for example. says this:
And think of you, a valleys of the Kukasos.
Whatever your antiquiry. paradises far,
And your patriarchs and prophels.
a Mother Asia. and your heroes
Without fear for the signs of the world.
HC3ven and fate upon their shoulders.
Rooted on mountaintops days on end.
Were the frst Uunderstand
Speaking to God
AonC.3
70
Rml"wrlgVain
Patriarchs and prophCIs arc named here: those who have known an
CIlCOUlUcr-: dialogue-with God. Cclan would perhaps have
.id: with the wholly other. And perhaps he would have conceived
such a dialogue as poetry itself. Perhaps. AnOlher poem from Di,
Ninnmrg, "Sci Wein und Vcrlorenhcil" ("Over Wine and Lost
ness"), speaks in this direction. It says:
ieh ritt dUTch (len Schnee, horst du,
ieh rill Gon in die Fcrnc-ie Nahc, cr sang.
cs war
unser iet1Cr Rif ilbcr
die Mcnschcn-Hurdcn.
Sic ducktcn sich, wenn
sic uns tiber sich horten, sic
schricbcn, sic
logcn unser Gcwichcr
ur in cine
ihrer bbildcrun Sprachcn.
I rode through the snow, do you hear,
I rode God into frncss-ncarnc$S, he sang,
II was
our last ride over
the human hurdles.
They duckedwhen
they heard U5 abo,'c [heir her. Iht'
wrote, they lied
?
ur whinnying
inTO one
oftheir be-imaged languagcs.
2 Prayer
Novmbr 10-15, 1983 (Brk/r)
1 said of "Psalm," in Di Nimlfdru, that it is a wreal prayer."
Just what did 1 mean?
Three things, it .ems to me (1 had difculty aniculating them
while improvising a response. And even now, what 1 propose is
hardly better than a sketch).
I. First of all, I meant simply that "Psalm," at least in its second
stam.a, is in standard prayer form:
Gelobt seist du, Niemand.
Oir zulieb wollen
wir bluhn.
Oir
entgcgen.
Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall ioCF.
Towards
you.
1
The standard form of prayer happens to be invocation and ad
dress-laudatory address. Unlike what happens in Trnkl's famous
poem, for example, the tide "Psalm" is not formally denied; this is
indeed a song or a hymn in honor of . . . No one. Moreover, it is
7'
RmnlbOing Dnus
a ncar qllole. Ihrough which it becomes clear thai No one is named
in place of Ihe biblical God, the God invoked in Hebrew (then
Christian) liturg. In place of the creator God to whom the first
SI:a alludes:
Niemand kelel uns wieder aus Erde und uhm
niemand bcsprichl unsern Siaub.
'
Niemand.
No one moulds U :gain OUI of eaIIh and day,
no one conjures our dU5l.
No one.
That is why, for the love of such a "God," man (the "we who
profers the prayer) sees and designates himself as a creature: the
no one's rose.
One can of course think that the substitution of "No one for
God. and the transformation of the substantive (the "common
noun") into a proper noun, H ironical-that this is a I of sar
casm bordering on blasphemous parody . .. N.. e
..
ha never been
a n
:
e. except i n the wily Wt Us u t escape the Cyclops,
or H Pessoa. But nothing in the tone of the poem indicates such
an irony. Unless, that is, one understands irony as itself the fgure
of despair. a despair here absolute:
Ein Nichts
waren wir, sind wir, werden
wir bleiben, blUhend . . .
A nothing
we were, :re, $h:ll
remain, fowering . . .
Whence a second possible objection: this poem may be an anti
or coullIcr-prayer, a SOrt of"ncgative" prayer; a prayer whose aim is
1 show prayer's inanity. But the prayer form, the invocation, docs
JOLW rc.naniry of the prayer itself. The prayC seems to nul
I f ItSef as

n address because it nullifes its addressee by present-

1Ilg or na.him a No one. But "No one" only ever means the
73
:bsence or non-existence of the addressee. not that there is no :d
drCS"C. There is no :bsurdity in such a proposition. It means sim
-
ply that by not invoking anJonr,l jhe prayer is indeed empty or _
vain but that by invoking No one it remains a prayer. To put it an
other way, the paradoxical naming of irs address make it at once
(formally) possible, and impossible. It is no less a prayer for that,
in its very impossibility; a prayer and, "who knows," perh:ps a "at
prayer. The paradox here is just the one that ceaselessly creates the
tension in Celan's poetry and thought.
2. To subsli(Ute No one for God is to reveal in a dng way
that God" is not, or was not, a name. This poem has an apoca
lyptic qualiry.
1 say rhat "God" was not a name amounts 10 saying that
"God," long thought the name of al names, e name of the name'l
desig!!ared no one to whom to dco: an addres; iu a word or _
concept signifing that whic.h llthea.. but
neither more nor les B name than "man" is (one L address some
one by calling out "Man!" but only when one doe not know the
person's name, or when, depending on circumstances, one cannot
or will not say it). A HeideggeL
.
Says, in substance, before such a
(concept of) God, one can neither kneel, nor ofer sacrifces, nor
pray. And if people believed they could address God. cl him by
the "name" God, this was no less paradoxical than invoking No
one (the divine, on (he other hand, is always named and renamed:
Apollo. Jesus, the oblique "Christ." The biblical god is known by
several names, or an unpronounceable, written one).
That God is nor a name, that one can be aware of this even
when invoking him with this name, can of course also mean that
God has no name. or th:t God, the name of the name, is beyond
all names. We knm; at least this minimum of negative theolog:
God exceeds through infnite power (i.e., by his infnite presence)
any kind of assigning. Finite language cannot take the measure of
his infniry. That is, the language of here cannot 5:y what is wholly
other. But that is not what Cclan's poem_praycr_reveals. The
poem reveals simply that GPd, because he is God, i. .:no onc."
74
ThaI Cod such docs nosl. j-is "namLmcans .:no one. n .
"oame" is no one's name. If underlying this revelation there is a SOrt
of accus;lion-which I think there is; I would say. even, a depcr
U1V accuS3lion-il isderly at theolog, which is M sayaginst
philosophy. Plato did not only "dispose people toward Christian
ity"; in PlaIDS language. our language. althat is divine came. irre
versibly. [0 be said (But if an accus:ion of this son is indeed pre
sent here. it in no way prohibits me strange elation. rhe libery, thar
traverses the poem),
"Cod does nOt exist" is nor a declaration of atheism. At mOSI, it
wlllx only iC"God does not CXiSl" meant "God has never ex
l isted." "Psalm" SUggeslS nmhing of rhe son; rather, it intimates that
God has revealed himself to be "no onc."3 Indeed. the aimof the
frst verse, side by side with kntm, is striking:
Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Ede und Lhm.
No one nluld w agin out of earth and clay.
This dearly means thai someone did so in [he past; someone, a
god, the god of creation, molded us OUt of eanh and day and con
jured our dusr. Or a[ least, we hM believed so; believed mat
we werecreatures and that someone, the god of this creation, com
forud us even in death. Thus defned as mortal crealUres, il was
possible for us (0 address the god who de-termined our existen/X
in Ihis manner. But once we DO longer defne ourselves as mortal
creatures, it M reve.taJlO one creatid us, that we'are noth
ing-or rather mat we arc "a nothing," (tn NicJ), a WC^CM in
the sense of CcrNlI-and mat the only prayer it is still in our
power to proffer, in echo of the old prayer, is a prayer ( No one. Ir
is revealed that Revelation has come ( an end. Since this end
can $1Y, in prayer, not that God has never existed, but Iha[ we hu
mans have never been. aod will never be, anything but "nothings."
The possibility of the Revelation is closely linked-and this has
always, necessarily been Ihe case-(O the question of man, Ihe
essence of man. A soon as man in his essence is no-thing, as
soon as Ihe being he is can be defned-in recolleclion of Angelus
Pmyu 7'
Silesius's abysmal rose, the "rose of nothing" or of nothingness
(admirable still, like everything that is)-what has been called l .;
-God," rhe C summum, is revealed no longer (0 exist. And t
ntence is anesled to i its becoming anonymous: the word
"God" did not name anyone, or in any no being in [he mode
of a being, even one of incomparably more than human being
infnite, supreme, and so on.
We still need to know, however, if "(0 exist" is the same thing as
"to be." I mean simply that the qucstion of God depends on the
question of man. Yel the question of man or his essence is not
What is man?" but rather, "Who is man? Heidegger took it in
this form from Holdcrlin in an attempt to pry it away from
Kam-to the detriment of a programmatic philosophical anthro
polog. The same goes for God; the question What is God?" will i
never reach God himself, in his existence or non-existence. If God
is man's other, only one question about him is possible. That is: !
"Who is God?" Moreover, to the question "Whal is man?" the an
swer, today, is awy already that man is the subject. This indicates
simply that man is God, or the converse.
Celan's extraordinary, "exorbitant" efort consisrs of keeping
opcn the quetion "Who?" even with repecr to God and even if, as
Heidegger says, the question ("Who is the Godn is "pcrhaps . . .
ro difcult for man, and asked 100 early." One hears it resonate, I
think, in another poem friC N;mlmdrs in which, after a
fashion, Ihe Alliance is afrmed:
E war Erde in ihnen, und
sic gruben.
Sic gruben und gruben, so ging
ihrTag dahin. ihre Nach!. Und sic loblen nich! Gou,
der, so honen sic, alles dies wollle,
der,.so horten sic. allcs dies WUSSIC.
Sic gruben und hor!cn niclm mellr;
sic wurdcn nichl wcisc, crf.tndcn kein Lied.
erdachtcn sich kcinerlei Sprache.
Sic gruben.
Rl"n"bri"g Dous
(kam cine S\illc# es kamauch ein Sturm,
C> kamcn die Mtrc alc,
!eh grabe, du gribsl, und grjbt auch der Wurm,
und d Singende don s: Sie gr.bcn.
o einer, O keincr, O niem8dg O du:
Wohin gings, da's nirgcndhin ging
o du grjbsIund ieh grab, und ieh grab mich dir lU,
und am Finger erw:.chl uns der Ring.
There w Cnh inside them, and
Iheydug.
Theydug and they dug, so Ihcir day
went by for lhem, their night. And Ihey did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, knew all this.
They dugand heard naming more;
they did nOI growwise, invented no song,
thought up for themseh'eno language.
They dug.
There cme a stillness, and therc came a storm
and al{he oceans cme.
'
I dig, you dig, and the wormdigs tOO,
and that singing OUI thcrc s): Theydig.
o one, O none, M no one, O you:
Where did the way lead when il It- nowhere?
o you dig and I dig, and I dig towards you,
and on our fnger the ring awakcs.6
Cclan's questioning thus considers the possibility that God-
I t?rough the "name" "God" -has become anonymous. The revela
tion of God's anonymity is a historical event (like the Revelation
itsel). It is perhaps the very event, or advent, of his lory. God'

mu

g
.
anoO.(as, I think it probable, the Revelation itself) i
hlStonclty; that is, the dislocation of the religious. We arc very close
here to the meaning of Holderlin's "retreat" and "return-turning
away," or to Niethe's "God is dead."
77
Nie

che'

"God is dead" (let us nor forget that weare the onc

I
who killed him) produces, howcver, man's extreme self-assumption o
as a subject-the subject of the Will to POwer. This culminates in
W entirely necesary way in what I have found it accurate to call
"the subject's plunge into insanity":' I am God-Dionysus; Qr, pre
cisely in the loss of the name, I am al names (the names of his
lOry). For behind NietChe's "God is dead," there is (he (specula
live) death of the LutheroHegclian God; that is, the absolute,
unto-death fnitization of God, his absolute becoming man. And
this is his resurrection the Absolure. the subject itself. Celan dis
tances himself frm both these ideas-ifindCd they U lWO-of
the end of the divine.
On the orher hand, t "withdrawal" of the divine in Holderlin,
the categorieal turning away" of the god (the Father, who is the
"futher of time") that draws on the essence of Creek tragedy, is in
no way related [0 any of the fgures of Gad's death. "Rte" i s nQ
death; i.0s, on [he contrary. l. reerve the god an P.tCS '
th an from the divine. wt (tl t ofJnitude. for
"the immediate, rigorously considered. is impossible for mortals
and immortals alike.'" Which means at least that the immediacy \
of the god, his pure and simple epiphany,J.s-as tragedy anests
man's death, or plunge into turmoil. It is the monStrous (ulge
hen) coupling in which the god, tOO, is lost in man's ecess, his
enthusiasm. Retreat is thus neces to preserve the god's "holi'
ness," in the same way that the law commands man 10 endure the
god's "Raw"-bccause only the Raw helps or saves. E.the man re
q.trned 1 earth (carastrophized), sc "wlfthfulilCS" i sthe height
o "piety." This supposes that epiphany always be conceived as the
initial moment of retreat, or the initial test of fnitude; man's fnite
being is his being a-tleo!. But it also supposes that the divine be
subject to the very history its epiphany-or retreat-sets into mo
tion: the gods have rumed away from [he world; perhaps a god is ...
still to come.
Cclan is closer to this idea. Obviously, he cannOt deplore thcI
"lack of sacred or holy names." The god he is thinking of is the ... . '
Jewish god, and he knows with o\erwhclming ce((ainty where the

Rn"embring DntN
Jlostalgia for mmhos, and me frenzied anempt al remythologiza_
lion (which Holderlin escaped. but with which Heidegger com
promisc.- himself well beyond 1933's proclamations) led Germany
(Europe). Nevertheless, be s:with Holderlin, in direct desccnt
from the motif of the "time of disrress," the hope of a religion to
come. Implicidy, at least. Near the end of "The Meridian," we
read;
Ldia nd gentlemen, I am approaching the conclusion . . . . [ am
approaching Ihe cOllciusion of . . . "!.eonce and Lena.
And here. with the fnal OO words of the drama,' I must paycare
(l anenliOIl, lesl, like Karl Emil Franzos, the editor of that "FirSI
Complete Critical Edilion of Georg BUchner's Collccted Works and
Posthumous Ppcrs," which the Sauerlander Press publisht.' in Frank
furt am Main egilly-one years ago-l must paycareful anemioll. lcst,
like m,ll1Itrm41 KarlEmilmnZ, whom I hawhrTfuldaglin, I
read "coming" for comfortableQ which is now the accepted variant.lo
But on second thought; arell't Ihere quotation marks prescnl in
"I. nce and Lena," quotation marks with an invisible $mile in the di
rClion of Ihe words? And perhaps these B to b understood not
mere punctuation scrouches, but rather as rabbit cars. listening in,
somewha( timidly. on themselves and the words?
Cclan of course chooses "comfonable." But he chooses it with its
uoration

larks. I
.
t is. moreover,
,
"with that as a staning point"
but also In the light of utopia -that he attempts. he says, a
"topo

raphy,"

rching for Lenz's and Franzos's place of origin;

searchlllg for hIS own. None of these places can be found; inS(ead,
one encounters the meridian, that is. the very line that conducts
the poem tOwards the encounter.
So there will have been at least this possibili'ty suspended before

us; a way of saying "who knows?M A religion to come. And even if.
after Dir Nimllmdrouand then the explicit ruming poim of Aum
wmdr. the reference to God is. as it were, rarefed; even if a poem
in Di Nimllll dsrou speaks of rhe god who ;'comes nor,
'J 1
Celan
wi1 never ha

e said whaf, in reading him, I am rempted ro say

(without wanting to PUI the words in his momh); namely, Jim it is
Pry" 79
all over; God's becoming-anonymous is irreversible. Cclan will
have maintained me possibiliry of prayer.
3. I w thinking. too. of this; mightn't il be that a poemwhich
thus maintains the possibiliry of prayer-at itS outer limit, ro be
sure-is the sign that a link, and perhaps a necessary link. exists
berween prayer and potry? TIm poetry in its essence is prayer, and
conversely. that every prayer is a poem?
The second proposition apparendy poses lirtie difcuhy; arer
all. the sole archives orlhe divine are poems, and an address to the
god, more than a!ly other kind, requires a conversion in language
or an entirely diferent anitude within it. When, in viewof the en
counrer, Cclan dedicates the poem ro attemion. he does nor take
lightly Malebranche's defnition; attention is "the soul's natural
prayer." If the idea of prayer magnetizes the poem's search. it is
dearly because aAvocation is here conceived as the original form of
<dd.ress. And prayer is conceived. in a way, as the element of the
poetic
.
Bur that amounts to saying that in itS essence, poetry is
prayer. How ro understand this?
" . . . I think that it has always belonged to the cxp"Crations of
the poem . . . to speak in tlu IWMC ofnil OthCrwho knows, per
haps in the cause of a w/m/l Oth";"u one cnnot long prelend
not to ko thai this phrase frm "The Meridian" appeals ro God.
And that it appeals specifcally to God so as to say the original
hope, and thus the frst aim, of poetry. This amounts to structuring
Ihe phrase to God. or assigning it. in its essence, to be the word ut
fered in God's name, for his cause. And fnally. to be prayer.
We must not be 100 quick to believe. however. that such assign
mcnr is simply tantamount to renewing onlo-theological confu
sion. Thus invokillg the wholly other is obviously risky. But
nowhere in "The Meridian" docs one fnd the slightest proposition
thaI would authori7. dosing the wholly other down onto Iking
being which is. moreover. never designated as such. even if it is
siricrly conceived as no-thingness (thaI which is open. empry. free).
perhaps beyond what Heidegger's statemenrs on poetry as a "topol-
80 ebegDale
ogy of bcing suggesl.13 The reference 10 the wholly other, in its
suspensive mode (" . . . who knows, perhaps . . . ") is, on the con.
Irary. ; question asked, toward God, to the detrimem of onto-the
olog. It is precisely bttause the being re itself as nmhingness,
no Ihing, that the God (someone, ;ntr) reveals himsdf as "not
onc" or "nonc" (kri,"). and nom there as "no onc" (Nimnd). A
1
10 one whom it is (nill) possible to address (you. du):
o dncr, 0 keiner. 0 Niemand, O du.
The movcmcni from nothingness to you indissociably links the
movement of the "encounter" and the movement of God's becom
ing-anonymous. But one must also understand [hat it is the God,
and he alone, who makes possible the address or appeal. That is,
he prayer. God wilhout a name is needed in order to name, i
order to say you," roivoke, andpcrhaps.us to save nalJs.
Two poems evoke this movement if one anempts to read them
together. The poem 50 iel Gestirne" ("50 many conslCliations"),
{hal I have already quoted in part bUI whose lasr stanza I would
like to cite again:
ich weis,
ich weiss und du oist, wir WUSlen,
wit wussten nichl, wir
waren ja d und nichl dOf[,
und luweilen. wenn
nur das Nichts zwischen uns stand, fmden
wir g zueiOder.
I know,
I know and you know, we knew,
we did nOI know, we
were there, wer all, and nOI there
and al times when
only the void stood beteen U we gOt
al the way U each other.14
And the very difcult poem Radix, Matrix":
Pryu
Wie man Z\ Stein spricht, wie
d"
mir vom Abgrund her. von
ciner Heimat her Ver
schwisterte. Zu
gcuderte, du,
du mit vorCiren,
du mit im Nichu einer Nacht.
du in der Abcr-Nacht Be
gegnete. du
Aber-Du-:
Damals. d ich nicht d war,
damais, da du
den Acker abschritfst, allcin:
Wer,
wet wars, jcnes
Geschle<hr. jcnes gemordere, jenes
schwan in den Himmel stehende:
RUle und Hode-?
(Wl.
Wl Abrahams. Wurl Jes . Niemdes
Wun.d-o
unser.)
j"
wie man zu Stein spricht, wie
d,
mit meinen Handen donhin
und ins Nichts greifst, so
ist, hiet i st:
auch diescr
Fruchtboden klaft.
diescs
Hinab
is! die cine det wild
blUhenden Kronen.
8,
Rmu:mwr;lg Dnus
A ol1e sp to SlOne, like
you,
from the chasm, from
a home become a
siSler 10 me, hurled
towards me, you,
you that long a,
you in the nothingness of a night,
you in the multi-night en
countered. you
multi-you-:
At that time, when I was nO! there,
at that lime when you
pace the ploughed feld, alone:
Who,
who was it, thaI
lineage. the murdered. that looms
black into the sky:
rod and bulb-?
(Root a
Abraham's rool. Jes.'S rool. No one's
rOI-O
oufs,)
Yes.
as one speaks U stone,
yO"
with my hands grope into there,
and into nothing, such
is what is here:
this fertile
soil IO gp,
this
going down
is one of the
crests growing wild. `
Among many other things this at least is disclosed: the poem
melds with the address itself; there exists only a SOft of nomina
tion without a name, a "saying-you." The address here-at least
this is one of the poem's possibilities-is the very gesture of love. It
docs nOt say, it i. such, the "encounter," starting from the abyss
or nothingness. That is, starting from death itself; nO( only the
death-capability of finitude. but. aggravating or having perma
nendy aggravated this, the historically occurred death, the exter
mination. Starting from annihilation (behind the motif of noth
ing or nothingness, that particular nothingness is always prcscnt. It
will have imposed a wholly other form of rhe memorable. the un
forgenablc; another formulation of the question in general; an
other partition of the thinkable and the unthinkable, It will have
altered thought), But to address someone else, {Q love him. is nec
t'ssarily {Q address in him the wholly other, in the very recognition
of alterity and always under the threat that the aherity might take
refuge in irs ab-solmenes. The "you" is divided, and it is nOt only
in God that one half doses in on itself The you is also an "Against
youn or a "Not_you" (Aber-dl), a name-incidentally, untranslat
;ble-that one fnds again in "Zurich, Zum Storchen" ("Zilrich,
Ihe Stork Inn"), a poem written in memory of an encoumer wilh
Nelly Sachs:
Vom ZuVicl war die Rt-e, vom
Zuwenig. Von Ou
und Aber-Du. von
der T riibung durch Hcllc, von
Judischem, von
dcinem Gon.
Of tOO much our talk, of
100 little. Of Ihe You
and Not-You, of
how clarity troubles, of
Jcwishncss, of
your God.16
&mnnbri1gDnU
Calling the You NOI-You says: if I call you, it is the Olher in you
that I clin calling you "you"; it is the wholly other, it is God. It is
no one," which remains your place of orign; you whom I call and
L cl (and it is indeed love, or probably ). From nOlhingncss,
calling the wholly mher, even if he is"no one," is Ihe very possibil
il)' of address, of "speaking to," of "saying-you"; the possibiliry of
the poem as the possibiliry of"re-Iating [0" in general. And it is in
this sense that every poem is a prayer.
At least lImil Celan writes the last poem in Lichtwang:
Wirk nieht voraus,
sende nicht aus,
steh
herein:
dUTch grundet vom Nichts,
ledig aUen
Gebcu,
feinfUgg, naeh
der Vor-Schrif,
unubcrholbar,
nehm ich dich au
stan aUer
Ruhe.
Do nO! work ahed,
do not send forth,
stand
into it, enter:
transfoundedby nothingnes,
unburdened of all
prayer,
mierostrucrured in heeding
the pre-script,
unovcrtakable,
I makeyou at home,
instead of al
rest.17
PY"
But it is also truc !.hal "unburdened of alprayer" remains a prayer,
or the citation of one. A Tcalled in "Treckschurcnzcit ("I-Iour of
1
the Ba"), another poemnom Lic/IWng, it is Meister Eckhart's:
" Let Upray t God to keep us freand clear of God." Rc*citcd by
Cclan, me prayer i saddr to God for him 10 Stop the pain, the
pure pain that he is in us and between |. Or even, to stop the
agony that he is, the agony of de:uh:
. . . der Emhohte, geinnigt,
spricht unter den Stirnen am Ufer:
Todes quill, GOlles
quilt.
. . . caSt frm rhe throne, he turned inwrds,
speaks amongbrows on the shore:
dear ofdeath, deaT
of God. `
One could probably say Eckhart's prayer condenses. to me great
CSt possible degree. all speculative onto-theolog. Bernard BOschen
stein interpretS Celan's fe-usc of it thus:
The poet . . . then utters the words ofliher.uion: der of death, der I
of God. With th words, men would b fred of their burden; they
could consciously achieve double death: God's, and that of death it
slf. For these deths are linked. Death in Celan is a moderform of
the divine prence. Hi poems receive fm deth their center ofgV
ity, theirsens and their legibility. A the words' magnet, death is their
structuring pole. With the death of death, a turning point is reached
that ordains a newponi 14tion. The last poem in Litht"g yields
the formula: "uansfoundcd by nothingness. I unburdened of aU I
prayer.M" It is incumbent upon the poet to accept this newfounda
tion and nO! to Aee into a distant world.lO
Bur we should not necessarily understand it this way, if only be
calise Eckhart's formulation. here truncated, modifed or diverted,
is removed from the properly dialectical syntax it originally pos
sessed: let us pray to God 10 keep us dear of God. Thus, Celan's
86
iOlroducrion or"dear of deth" cannot mean ''rhe death of death,"
which is really the Hegelian notion of God's death (the resurrcc
tion) and thus rhe correct, speculative way to understand Eckhart's
phrase. Rather. Cf rmulation means; Civen thaL wc no
longer owe anything to dgrh, that we have no deb t it or have
already paid it everything (rhe allusion is dear), we are in cfreel
and without asking God, "who . . . wame al thar I who . . . knew
all thal-dcar of God. The citation of the prayer is "unburdened
of all prayer," The poem arrives in the prayer's stead and in its
place; the poem as i, is henceforth uttered by the deposed or
"fallen," [he desubJimed (d Emblm, who no loMger inhabits the
heights), revealing precisely through this [har "there is no longer a
God, ather than that "there is no God."
Celan's poctry would thcn perhaps also bc Ihe place where thc
essence of pOClry ccases t be prayer. Or more accurately, where jt
renounces pfyer.
3 Sublime
Novmber 21, 1983 (Bcrkeq
In J.-F L.'s lecture on Barnett Ncwman, "The Sublime and the
Avant-garde," I found a passage on Burke particulafly striking.
J.-F. L. later gave me a copy of his text:
However much Km rtjecu Burke's theis 3empiricism and phys
iologism, however much he br, on the other hand. Burke's analy
sis of the comradiction characterizing the SCllliment of the sublime.
he strips Burke's esthetic of what I think is its greatest value. which is
lOshow that the sublime is provoked by tlu thrilt thaI "othi"g aw
hnppm nlymo,. The beautiful gives positive pleasure. But there is an
other sn of pleasure. linked IO a passion stronger than satisfaction,
which is pain and the approach of death. In pain the body affects the
sul. But the soul C3n also affect the body as if it felt pain of external
origin, just by means of representations unconsciously :Siatcd with
painful situations. This wholly spiritual passion is C3lled terror in
Burke's lcxicon. But terrors are linked to being deprived: deprived of
light. terror of dkes ; deprived of others, terror of slilUde; deprived
of language, terror of silencc; deprived of objccts. terror of the void;
deprived of life, terror of death. What terrifes is that the possibility of
the phrase Mit happens that docs not happen; it ces lO happen.
In order for terror to commingle with pleasure and thus create the
sentiment of the sublime, it is also necessary. writcs Burke. for the
threat that produces terror lO be suspended. held at a distance, re
stTincd. This suspense, the lessening of a threat or d:nger. provokes
a SOrt of pleasure which is cCr!:inly not that of positive satisfaction,
88 &mmbmfg DnU
bill nnhn of relief It is still priv;uion, but once removed: the soul i
deprived of the threat ofbcing deprived of light, langu.ge. lift. Burke
disringuishes the plesure of second-degree priv:uion from positive
pleasure. chrincning it "ddigh!.-
Here, then, is how the sublime scmimen! U analy: an imposing,
powerful obj, thretening to deprive the soul of any "It happens,
"aslonishes- the soul (at lesser degrees of intensity, the soul is seized
with admiration, veneration, respecd. The soul is made stupid. im
mobilized: il seems dead. In distancing this threat, Bl procures the
pleasure of relief. delight. Thlnks to an, the soul is reslOred to the ag
itation between life and death, and this agitation is it heahh and its
lif. The sublime fr Burke is no longer a quetion of dcvadon (which
is the Clt'ory by which Aristotle distinguished tragedy), it is a quC*
tion ofintensihcation.
This analysis describes what L be strictly called the COI/o1I1 of
the sublime: the "threat that nothing will happen anymore" (which
creates terror), once suspended, still produces pleasure. The pain,
at It, is relit.ed. But it is Uthat suspends the threat and, in fct,
converts the pain into plure (or procures the "masochisric" sat*
isfaction that Freud connects to tragedy and relates to the para*
doxial tension constitutive of "preliminary pleasure"). With this
in mind, J suddenly understand Celan's mUTed, obstinate rage
against art. At base it is quite similar to Bataille's, strange as that
may seem. Was Bataille more radical? I'm not sure; less ironic and
playful, more emphatic, and not withOUT-I think it was Barrhcs
who nOted this-a cerrain preciousness, encompassed in his "ha*
rred" of what Celan tries to save: poetry.
But this rage, tOO, responsible for the grandeur of modern an,
its hostility toward the beautiful, its obsession with truth-which,
in a world without God, in the absence of a world, gives it all its
"metaphysical" tension-this rage, too, is perhaps vain. True,
"economy'" (of art, of poetry, of the beautiful) is appalling in view
of th "realiry of the real." thar is, death and pain. But here is an
old argument that Bataille himself recognized as he sought to
throw a wrench into the perfect dialectical machinery: what else
can one do with death except "simulate" it? Again, he himself
Sllblim 89
called such simulation "experienee" (in a sen5C not dissimilar to
mine), provided that the simulation pushed to the limit of the
possible. He thereby indicated what Celan, tOO, indica

e

n his
own way: that mimesis is the condition for the poSSIbility of
thought. A ancient indication (it appears already in Aristotle's
PMta), but one that, unbeknownst to him, Kant can perhaps take
credit for having mapped Out in al its consequences; Heidegger
knew this without wanting to admit it, while NietzSChe had lucidly
intuited ilS truth.
What we must think out is indeed the I bappm tbat. BU( from
where do begn to think if not the starting point of "terror," the
threat that "lr happens that" will srop happening? In other words,
from where can we begin ro think, we (Q whom birth has been
"given," if not from the starting point of death? Death, that other
gift-or more exactly, the pro*spect of the f

st and only one (th

enigma of our birth is before us). The question wrme

ts Celans
poetry. I n t sense his poetry is sublime, though there I

no qucs*
lion of either e1evationn or "intensifcation." Celan's sublIme could
be defned, rather, a the sublime of dtutioll.
Withal! does it produce pleasure? Ye, since pleasure is nes *
ily linked LL mimeis (Aristotle again). Yet plure in Celan is of a
very particular nature. One could qualif it as the pleasure of
thought. In fact, it would probably b more accurate to speak of
the motion of/bought: a contradictory emotion, owing more to
Kant's description than to Burke's. and which is basically compa*
rable to the sort of "syncopated" emotion that tragedy provokes
(but it is tragedy, the representation of the tragic contradiction,
that provides the model for the sublime). One can say ofCelan, :u
of Holderiin, that he W a tragic poet; perhaps even the last tragic
poet-the last "possible"; and one can mock this, as I have often
seen done, because only poetry is al stake. (I've also heard the re*
Sponse LL this artitude: "It killed him." But that i

not a

argu
ment. Or if so, it pleads only in favor of the despair of fuclllg art
and the impossibility ofi,uerrupting it.llle argume

t I wot
.
'
ld
yn
*
fer would be this: one could mock such poetry and Its subltmlty If
it were "earnest" verse, something that still exists in large quanti*
90
Remembering Dntl'
tics. But Celan, in a certain, secret way one might call elusive.
seems sublime despite himself We mUSI nOl defect onto Celan the
pathos of some of his readers. And we must not forgel, even in
Cdan's own pathos-for it is (here, despite his lapidary formula
tion and resuicted phrasing-the sort of"Jcwish joy" [Fdj, ,he
light, almost silent laugh, perhaps the counterpart to what saves
Holdcrlin from wallowing in the tragic: another joy, or rather a
serenity. in the seriousness of his thought.)
From Kant and the Kantian theory of the sublime, J.-F. L. re
tains the concept of "negative presentation" (of the Idea), On the
basis of this concept, his formula for the sublime is: presenting that
the un-presentable exists.
I am not SUfe this formula is right, and the way I think Celan
deals with the question of the represenrable and the unrepre
semable confrms my uncertainty.
Bluntly PUt, this formula has two Raws: it separates out the un
presentable (positing its eistence somewhere beyond presemarion)
and in so doing, it substantializes or hypostatizes it. By defnition,
only the presenrable is presented. Therefore the unpresemable, if
such a thing exists, cannor present itself. Or ifit docs, it is like the
Jewish God in the Hegelian analysis of sublimity, breaking through
presentation itself, annihilating it for its greater (dialectical) glory.
We would thus need to think, according to the (onto-rheological)
oudine of negative presentation, that there is presentation, nor of
what is beyond presentaion, but thnt there is something beyond
presentation. In which case the presentation would indicate, in
what is present or insofar as it des present, irs beyond.
But rhis beyond is nmhing, it is nOl a part ofthe unpresenrable.
At most one can say, naturally enough, that presentation is Irans
ferred from the un presented. But the unpresented does 1101 equal
the unpresenrable. Here is what happens when presentation al
tempts 10 indicate its beyond, or rather the (baseless) base, pure
I1mhingness or pure openness, fromwhich il detaches itself as pre
sentation: in or level with presentation, Ihe diference of the pre
sented from presentation presents itself. Diference docs not mean
Sublime 9'
inadequation, as a large parr of modern art perhaps inevitably
holds, for modern art cultivates what is not beautiful," that is, Ihe
simple opposile of the beautiful according 10 its classical definition:
the adequation of form 10 content. Nor docs it mean the reduction
of presentation to the purity inherent in the phrase "There is pre
sentation": the white square of the "minimal" that is the end point
of negative theolog. But it does mean the disappointment of pre
scntation, or, more broadly, the disappointment that the presentabl
o:ist1. The baseless base ofpresentation is indicated in rhe very dif
ficulty ofpresentation; it does not "come naturally." It is indicated
in a sort of internal differentiation of presentation, or, I venture to
say, at the heart of the very fct of presenting; indicated in a man
ner (for it is indeed a matter of style) of making apparent the non
appearing that underpins or, more exactly, withdraws and encloses
itself in the midst of presentation. In a manner of making appar
ent the hiatus of presentation, of retracing the retreat that it is, of
rftrMting it.
Modern art, "sublime" art, the art afer Ihe end of an," shows
the pain of presentation; it is, or could be, joy itself-or serenity.
4 Hagiography
Deuber 7. 198} (Strabour)
I page through the e"i"de LHeevolume on HeidegVr ,hal
Michel Haar SCnt me. Gadamer's texl-a series of "memories"
ends in the following way:
9'
Among the many pilgrims who wen! up IOTodtnauberg, P3ul Celan.
tOO, paid a visit one day lO the thinker; from their encounter, a poem
br. Fo for thought: a persccutedJcw. a poet who lived not in
Germany but in P;ris, but a German poet nonetheless, risks such a
visil, nor without SOIllC anxiety. He must have been greeted by thai
bam for the era" (ugcnmu) that was the little country prop<rty
(nw )with ilS foumain (IOppcd by a starred wooden die"), and
the liule man, with his rustic appce and tinkling g. He left
his name in me chalet's guclbook3 many had before him, with a few
lines ancsting to a hope he crried in his heart. He [Ook a walk with
the thinker in sof moumain pastures. each ofthe men turned inwar,
in his own isolation, like all isola(edRower ("orchis and orchis). Only
later, once he had returned home, did he see clearlywhat had seemed
IOappalling in the wr Heideg er murmured while walking; he b
g to understand. He understood the audacity of a thought th;l an
other rthe man") can her without capturing ils meaning, the risk of
a step thaI moves forwrd onshifing terrain, like on the logging paths
one cannot follow to ;n end.
Hcre is [he poem:
Hagogaphy
LIMALUIVL
Arnica. little-light balm,
the dixir ofthe founrain lOpped by the
starredwooden die;
in the
chalet.
the lines on the book
-whose. the n;me named
before mine?-
inscribed in this book
the lines hoping, today.
for the wor
IO come
from a thinker,
at hC;rt
Sylvan prairie of uneven earth,
orchis andorchis, isolatedly,
Appalling, what later, en roUle,
became clear
He who guides U) this man
listens to QtOO,
on the path
of log
half
covered in mire,
damp,
many.1
One could emitle this piece "birh of a hagiography."
9
3
My initial anger having pU edq Marc B. de Launay's French
translation nevertheless holds my attention. II is certainly more "ac
curatc" than all the Olhcrs, but it explicates the poem strangely, at
least on two points First, the SwiiTlof [he third verse:
9
4
-eb-gDln
deT
Trunk aus dem Brunnen mit dem
Slcrwirfd drauf
is rendered as: ",he elixir of the foumain lopped by the I slarred
wooden die," "Elixir" is clearly a result of Gadamcr's edifing f
ble: "He (CelanI must have been greeted by the 'balm for the es'
(Algmt ,hal was the linle country property (Amum) with itS
foumain ('lOpped by a starred wooden die'), and the little man,
with his rustic appearance and twinkling g," Drinking a draught
of water at said foumain seems nearly like imbibing a miraculous
elixir . . . . But the "starred wooden die" is only possible if olle is
fumiliar with the Anwtm in question-and if one translates, even
in Gcrm,l, the formation Sl wirl Such a "translation" is plau
sible, and eliminates the sole image ,hal this poem without images
might still have comained. It should perhaps be given credit for its
prosaic quality.
The second point concerns the verses:
Krudc, spalcr, in Fabren,
dcudich
which are explicated i n the following manner: Appal1ing, what
later, en route, I became de." Marc B. de Launay could not have
translated otherwise; afer aU, he had to transcribe Gadamer's in
terpretation. ("Only later, once he had returned home, did he see
dearly what had seemed tOO appalling in the words Heidegger
murmured while walking; he began to understand. ") I have l'n
tOld more than once-and not only by D.C.-that Celan had re
turned from the encounter in a state of despair. The expression
B.B. used was even: "I saw him when he returned to Frnkfurt; he
was sick about it. Yes, the birth of a hagiogrphy.
5 The Power of Naming
1.uestion iml(jcl.bY .Jhapp1 1O the wholly oJher-again
I come back to this-is double: it concerns the existence of rhe
wholly other, but also, ;;the same time, the possibility of
.
speak
ing in hjs name (or in his absence-of-name). Inasmuch as I con
cerns the existence of the wholly other, it implies another, under
lying question, perhaps the only question of "The Meridian": is to
exist simply to be? To attempt to formulate it once again
:
it g
without saying that only what is, exists-in the mode of belllg. But
does that really mean that existence consists solely of "being (.m)
in the mode of being (iam)"? The question applies frst to man,
the only creature who, as ROUsse2U says, "feels hi

e
.
xistenc

." is
feding as Celan's writing allows us to approach II I5 comallled M
three "abilities": the ability to die, the ability to receive (relate to),
and the ability to think (perceive). Tht' three are united in the
ability to speak, through which the fact of presence is generally at
tested, and also through which man, attesting that he is (presem),
attests who he is: the one who exists as the being capable of anest
ing presence and absence in general.
Existence would thus be languagc, or more precisely, the faculty
oflanguage. which, in thc being (tm,) (hat is man, docs DOt come
under thc heading ofbcing-so that man "is" not only the bcing
that hc is. The faculty oflanguagc, the ability to name. is in reality
95
Rmlnbri"g Onu
intimacy itself the imimate difrenriarion of the being. Through
this diferentiation, man, beyond what he is, corresponds to a be
ing (I'I1 by naming what is, by naming himself, by naming who
he is nO[ (God). For this reason language is nor, in irs essence,
purely and simply being (lnm); yet there language, or language
exists-like the possibility of relating fa (addressing), which is
closer to our origins than any formof "communication." Lnguage
is the O[her in man; it constitutes him as man hinl1 Man does
nOt hal language in the sense of ps ion or property; "language
is what is proper fa man" means that man is conSlituted beginning
with language; he is not its master (on the COntrary; language op
erates a strange dispossession, attracting man-within himself
outside of himself). This is themOlif of "pre-scription" (Vor-hrif).
Lnguage is the essence, the inhuman essence, of man; it is his
(in)humanity.
Thus, language can be considered man's origin. NO[ as God is,
according to the olllo-theological $lructure established in the frst
line of the founh gospel'Eu Qxf f 0 A .But a that by which
man is necessarily related to the other, and thence to the wholly
other, so that God is not language, bur its supposition, or at least
whaf irresistibly draws if. It is perhaps what has been called u,
anima, the soul, provided these words c;;rry no ceho of any sub
Stance, that is, of any subjcct. l i.di(fance,
' :
d
U
t
;o.lt.is
.
nocl lng.but the &2ping of me subjea.
cing i bg. Language in the immor imimo mo
that onto-theology confsed with God.
From that might follow this: when pocu:y accomplishes its task,
which is t push itself to the origin oflanguage (a rask that is by
defnition impossible); when it strains to "dig" right to language's
possibility; iunlS, at m edge of the in=ible and for
eva-concealed gaping, me nposibility of address.
And from that would [hen follow this: if God exiSts, he exists as
a speaking being, and is thus himself subject lO language. The fuct
I that he is now silelH, that he has ceased lO speak, perhaps delivers
us from the irresistible magnetization he creates in language; it de-
71" Po ofNaming 97
livers us fromprayer. One might [hen catch sight of a wholly other
poetry, which is perhaps what Celan did glimpse in the end, and
what made him despair.
6 Pain
Perhaps all I've ever done is movc back and forth, morc or less
unwittingly, between two or three passages ofHeidegger's Untr
w zur Sprdu (Ollht Way10 Ln, which I reLently reread
after an abundance of Olhcr reading:
Exprience mns lund asstqui IO obtain something along the way.
to :l;in something bygoing on a way.`
To undergoan expcricnctwith something-il a thing a person, or
a go-mens thai tissomethingbflU strike U come r U
overhelms and Isforms U. Wen we tk ofundcrgoing an ex
prience mean specifcally tha\ the experience is nOi of OUI OO
maki ng; to undergo here means thai we endure ii, sufer it, re dYit
B it sIikes Uand submit to il.1
BUI the more joyl the joy. (he more pure the sadness slumbering
within it. The dccpcr the sadness, the more summoning the joy rCling
within il. Sadness and joy play into each other. The play itself which
anullCS the two by letting the remoLe b ncar and the near b remote
is pain. 1lis is why bolh, highest joy and deepest sadness, are painful
) each in its way. But pain so touches the spirit of morals that the spirit
ilS gravity fmm pain. That gravity kCps mortals with all their
wavering at reSI in their being. The.spirit which_ ali wers to pain. t
spirit auuned by pOin and topin. is. melancholy.3
But what is pain Pain rends. II is the rif. But it docs nOt tear apart
Pnil .

into dispersive fragmems. Pain indeed tears asunder, it sepOrattS. yet
O that at the same time il draws everything to itself, gathers it to it
sdf. Is rndng, A a separating that g;lhers. is at the same lime thai
drawing which, like the pen-drawing of 8 plan or sketch, draws and
joins together what is held apart in separation. Pain is the joining
agem in te rending that divide Ond gathers. Pain is the joining of
the ril . . . . Pain joins the rif ofthe diference. Pain is the dif-ference
itself.
In connecting th texts, I think of the passage from the lener
to Junger, Zur Sin, which happens to deal with lines and
meridians (Junger's expression is the 7I meridian." by which he
means the boundary of nihilism, considered by Heideger to be an
insurmountable barrier). I think of the passage in which Heideg
ger, speaking of his work on the negative and its pain in the
Hegelian dialectic, suggests that a;yr and AyoC have a common
root. It hardly maners whether this is true or not. The idea is that
a consraint more ancient than philosophy made the height of phi
losophy "logic," that is. the thought of pain. That Heidegger's
ceaseless return to the motif of pain in his readings of H6lderlin,
lr. George-of poetry-is a sure indiction that in his e. it is
urgent to pry the essence of pain, and thus of language, away from
its negative. laborious and servile defnition. Or that it is urgent 10
think of diference U orer than negative, Had I been capable of
it, I would have shown that in this sense, Celan's poetry is a poetry
of pain; I would have shown that that is lyricism.
There is another passage in Ullurwzlr Sprn(h; it concerns
solitude (and this one, when I read it, rang no bell, however faint.
in my memory):
Only he C be lonesome who is not alone, if "not alont means nOI
apar(, singular, without any rappons. But it is precisely the absence in
the lonesome of something in common which persists as the most
binding bond /ithit. The "somen in loncsoml. is the Gothic JHNW

the
Gr:tk
_
GNQ

and the English JHH. "Lonesomcn means: the same in

wlm unites Ihat which belongs together.s
'00 Rrmbmlg Dltn
Could this be rhe staning point for trying to understand the prob
lem of what Celan calls "the encounter"? But t what community
could (the poem's) solitude, rhe lack of community, be rdated in
the mOSt sociable manner? Perhaps me one that incarnates not the
lack, but the d

srruction of all community. Such a designation

goes, not exclusIvely hut frst, 10 rhe Jewish ople. Dit Ninl1 m
rose is dedicted ro Osip Mandelstam.
PostScript: a few days later, ). Le R. sends me a translation of
"Tiihingen, Janncr" by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. It follows:
H is eye worn down
unto blindness by discourse,
Their-an enigma is pure
gushing (orlh"-, [heir
memory of
H(ldcrlin lOwers encircled
with sl s' cries.
His drowned joiners' visit to
,h=
diving words:
If there came.
if there cme a man.
if a there ore a man into the .. . 'orld, today, wim
the b of light of
the Patriarchs: he could,
if he spoke of this
lime, he
could only mumble, and mumble
still, mu-mumble all-
ways, ways.
rPailaksch. Pallaksch. R)'
Earlier J. Le R. had drawn my anemion to [he motif of blind
ness "as lucidity." He cited as suppOr! for his claim these verses
from Di Nimlndsrost:
Pain
W"
sl, dass uns allcs erstarb,
da uns das Aug beach?
Alles erachle, alles hob an.
Who
sy thaI everything died for us
when our eyes broke?
Everything awakened, everything began?
'00
I was reminded of a passage in BlanchOl's L drir a par/r
( 7 lt to Sak):
Prhaps the recourse-is it U recourse, an ap(I?-is IO give one
self over, beyond the language mesh ("Eye's roundness between the
bars. )' to waiting for a wider g, for the possibility of seing, of see
ing without me very words that signifY sight:
Do nOI read any more-look!
Do not look :my more-go!'
Sight, (hen (perhaps), but always in vjw o/movement, associated
with movemem. A if the idea was to go toward (he appeal of eyes
,hat sce beyond what there is to sec: "eyes world-blind,"lo "eycs
submerged by words, umo blindness";11 eyes th:;n look (or have
their place) "in the fssure of dying."
1
l
Eye worldblind,
eyes in the fssure of dying, e, e . . .
Do not read any more-look!
Do nOI look any morc-goPJ
In Holderiin, the mOSt lucid blindmen are Tiresias and especially
Oedipus (a surfeit of eyes). II was to this motif I sought to relate
,he "eyes submerged by words, umo blindness," as BlanchOl trans
lates. The gaze beyond the gaze, the view of beyond-viewing,
would be spa". But in "Tiibingcn, Janncr," the spareness becomes,
in the absence of eloquence, pitiful stammering.
7 Ecstasy
March 5. 1984 (Stabour)
The model for ecstasy in the RvrJ is the rapture that seizes
Rousseau when he regains consciousness after an accident that 0(.
curs as he descends the hill from Menilmotuam t Paris ("Second
Wlk"),
Night coming on. I saw the sky, some Stars, and a few leaves.
This frst sensation was a moment of delight. I conscious of noth
ing clse. In this inStall! I V being born again, and it seemed as if all
I perceived was flled with my frail existence. Emirely raken up by the
prm, I could remember nothing; I had no dislinC( notion of my
self as a peron, nor had I the ]e( ide of what hO just happened IO
me. I did not know who I was, nor whc I + I felt neither pain,
fear, nor anxiety. I WlItched my blood Rowing as J might h:vc watched
a mear, without even thinking that the blood had anything !O do
with me. I felt thIughOut my whole being such a wonderful calm,
that whenever I recall this fecling I C fnd nothing ro compare with
it in all the pleasures th3t nir our liv. I
It is extraordinary here that ecsrasy is not prcseOied as a "going
Out of the self," as it is always tOO quicky and simplistically put.
On the connary, it is expressed frst as night's advance and arrival
("Night was coming on"), and thell as the reception-before the
auil)Or gets hold of himself or returns to himself, before even the
appearance of the perceiving "In_of this advance, which happens
'0'
'O
J
by itself, and in which no "subject," in any case, has the least re
sponsibility. And it is exactly such an advance and reception that
give the feeling of existing, a feeling that is itself anterior L any
form of self-consciousness, and so linle connccted with a subject
that it simultaneously reaches all earthly objects ("It seemed as if
ali i perceived was fllt- with my frail existencc"); the result. con
versely, is that even the body itsclr (blood) is perceived as some
thing belonging to the earth (a stream), and is drawn into the same
feeling of "it exists. "
Rousseau's ecstasy here takes the form of what I have called, for
lack of a better word, the paradoxic:l experience of death; that is,
its simulation. It is why Rousseau can say 11l this instant I bc
ing born again," if, as J have attempted to articulate, death is the
pro-spect ohhe gift of birth. It is thus a paradoxical experience of
birth (intO [he world)-pcrhaps even of the birth of the world. In
the frmest possible manner, Celan calls this birth "perceiving," or
thinking, and assigns its taSk to poetry.
8 Vertigo
Marh 25, 1984 (Tiibingm)
With R.L on {he banks ofthe Neckar. near the rower.
Some time ago, R Bonargcm, an engraver who produces lux
uryeditions of books, published a collection of"quotations" frm
Suiu,' accompanied by etchings and entided Tumor (Whirl).
But beyond. or rather, before anecdote, I think here of Cclan's
diziness (J would learn morc about this in Nice in February 1985,
during a conversuion with Ikrnard Boschenstcin), I rread:
The prisoner ofa dod but unbordered space. I amsucked in by an
eddy. and thw. owing U(he 5irling, I U brought back O a InUT
frmwhich I have tried. in vain, fO move awy: resembling, even in
my own eyes, a rambling, repetitive old man incap3ble of silence, and
incapable myselfof either rakingoff,his mask or identifing with its
chalctcr.
There is a sentence In "The Meridian" that I haven't dared
much. II says:
Die DiehlUng, mcinc Damen und Herren-: dies< Uncndlieh
sprhung von lauter Sterbliehkeit und Umsonsdl
Blanchot translates:
Poetry, Ladies and Gentlemen: the word of the infnite, the word of
vain death and of sole Nothing.
V
'0
'
Du Bouchet:
l'IY-: a converion imo the infnite ofpure monality and the dead
leller.J
(Why did du Bouchet systematically eliminate "Ldies and Gen
tlemen" from"The Meridian"?)
Jean Launay:
Poetry, Ladies and Genuemen-: those infnite words th:1 treat only
what is mortal and useless.4
And if I venture to translate:
Petry, Ldieand Gentlcmen-: that infnite speaking ofpure mor
tality and the in-vain.
9 Blindness
April I). 1984 (Barcelna)
Blindness:
In den vcrfuhrencn Augen-lies da:
In (he eyes all awry-read there:'
This is the frst verse of the poem L globes," in D:eN:and-
FM. The poem ends thus:
It dCfnes love.
.06
Ales.
das Schwerste noch, war
fugge, nichts
hid, zuriick.
AJJ thing.
even ,he hovicst, were
fedged, nothing
held back.
IO Lied
April21, 1984 (Tdalber)
Hcidcgger:
Ihc dl o., ,'ini ties.iw . BUI ae is nOl
nOlhing; rather I{ is p.!ey Wc.pc e, which must frsl i( appro
priated, of the hidden fullness :nd welth of what has been and wh:,
thus gathered, is presencing. of the divine in the world of the Grt k,
in prophetic Judaism. in the preaching of Jesus. This no-longer is in
itself a nOI-yet of the veiled arrival of its inexh:uSlible n:llure.1
ulan:
Von deinem Got! die Rc, ich sprach
en ihn, ich
liess d Hen, da ich h:me,
hoffen:
>of
sein h&hsICS, umr&hehcs, scin
haderndes Won-
Dein Aug sah mir Z. sah hinwt,
dein Mund
spr:ch sich dem Aug [, ich hone:
Wir
wissen ja !licht, weiSSI duo
.07
.
' 08 Rmumbmlg Dnt
w"'
wimn ja nicht,

gilt.
Ofyur Go our talk, I spoke
against him. I
lei te heanthat I had
hope:
fm
his highest, death-rattled, his
quarrelling word-
Your e looked on, looked away,
your mouth
spoke its way LO the eye, and I heard:
W,
don't know, you know.
w,
don't know, do we?
what
coums,l
The path indttd bears his name; rcg cr Wc(but a
terward, 10 get to the chalet, we still have 10 walk across felds in
the snow. The noise of the mechanical ski lift doesn't StOP until
about fve o'clock).
There has been much ironic commentary on the path motif:
hlU. HoIU, UlU, Wtarkm, and so on. So much for
rustic charm. But where in philosophy, and even outside philoso
phy (in Eastern thought, for example), have people pictured
thought as other than a path? From Parmenides and Lto-Tzu to
/ I: cr. (I don't remember who [Old me that J.D. did a seminar
on this subject, using the short text I had more or less "established"
and translated with Roger Munier: "Tbe Flaw In Sacred NalJes."
lIn it, Hcidegger "invents" an aphorism on Grce. thought: "Apatj1
i-cver& method jE.")
etlan could not fil think of Heidegger and the path motif
Lid
when writing "The Meridian," and even "The Bremen Speech."
Not only poetry itself (all poems), but also the thought of poetry
appear there as paths. Some people have of course objected to me
that this motif is related to Benjamin's "itineraries," to his praise of
theflMand the Baudelairian "encounter." But I do not think
this connection is correct. If Benjamin is to be found in Celan
and he is-we should nOt look for him here. I remain convinced
that the "dialogue" with Heidegger is critical, at least for the issue
of poetry's esence. That is why the encounter of 1967, in this ver
place, took on such importance in Celan's eyes.
From the beginning, I made a rule for myself that I would not
recount the story of this encounter and irs aftermath. Or that I
would divulge only rhings (hat Celan himself had said, and that
had been recorded in various places. It is not for me [0 say more.
But I can at least repOrt on a text that W.H. passed along me:
an article that appWHo does not know when; what he gave
me a copy of the manuscript-in the LiuiuluiniJcm Vol
blu.' The author is Robert Alrmann, an editOr friendly with
Celano Prompted write by a series of articles published in lhe
ZiricJ iitu1g in honor of Heideger, and in particular by an ar
ticle by Beda Allemann on Heideger's relation to poetry, Altmann
simply presents the fc:

: whose tide comes from the place in the Black Fortt

where Heidegger played host IO the poet in the spring of t967, ap
pered in prnt in 1968. Earlier, I had published the AUJr 1 col
lection witengravingby Gile Celan, and <elan exprsthewish
to see his poempublished in a small, separatC edition. Wc cho5 the
same format ,hal of the previous edition, and we had r.ry num
br copieof the bound pomprimed on the hand presses at Fequet
el Baudier in Paris. In August
1
968, the edition was exhibited at the
Raduz technicl school, along with al the works published by Editions
Brunidor. Celan cc in person and gave, one evening, a reading of
his poems. It was one of his last readings, he took his life several
Inolllh5 later.
Todmauberg is, strictly speaking. nothing OIher Ihan a descrip
lion or the journey IO the philosopher's house: flowers, landscape,
"0 Rmumbfrilg DaU
fountain, . trip in : Clf. But 3 awywith Celan, e:ch word hides a
world of images and ideas. ica, balm for the cy is al once an
culy summer feld Ro.. and a medicinal plant. the sick man's hope
of cure and consolation. Waurdrawn frm the star-crownoo (oumain.
which is similar, we might sy. to a miraculous source. BUI then come
the ])m's cmn pint. th:u B A1lemann imerpu ; the expec
tation ofthe poet U come, in the sense ofK1eist's poet ofthe futur. I
believe, however, that this viewpoint docs nOi cnconlpass Cclan's in
u:mion, which to ask, and impose, the question of IhC philoso
phers position vis-a-vis his Hitler-era declarations. Cetan wriu:s some
thing in the guest book 3hoU! the hope that Hcidcgger will explicitly
distance himself fromhis carlier attitude. ThaI a doubt should surfatt
following this question connected with hof> is evident in the poem's
description, in a sudden change oflandscape: the marsh, the uneven
fields, the damp and muddy paths succeed and undo the image of
springtime and hope. The dialogue witnessed by the anonymous
chauffeur is then transfrmed into a monologue, as always in Celan;
he able to create a soliraryand grandiose workfrom the tragic illl
blbntt ofhis emire life.
Heideger's lener indeed avoided the crucial question. The re
dccming mpon. filed IO come. Nevertheles, for the poet this en
counter was an interior eXf>rience of grell importance. Poet lnd
philosopher both strove I grasp the meaning of the toral lrtist lnd
total language. Celan's sufering andstrugle for absolute expression
led him, from thai time on, to increasingly interiorized forms of
writing . . . .
The poet closely oversaw the production of the Todtnluberg."
Now the poem, born of an intensely topical qucstion, remains itsclf,
independent of temporal circumstances. From the small bibliophile's
edition, copieweill only to friends and a fewlibraries. NOlle sold.
It was certainly Cellns wish to CUt off any kind of discussion with
Heidegger. This explains, too, why nothing became public later on, as
Beda AJlemann nOles. The theme had been transformed into a purely
poetic one.s
Altmann's very simple description suggests that "Tdlmlllbrg" is
ptrhaps a pure Lird The last?
II Sk
I necessarily scruple Uspeak about Judaism. Yet with Celan, one
must. But I cannot. Not only my ignorance is at issue. It is more a
question of proprief)'.
Thus, I L approach only negtively the clement of ulan's po
ctry that dearly proceeds from the Jewish tradition, the essence
that is probably only readable with an underm.nding of that tradi
tion. For Cpley everything I have painfully tried to articulate on
poetry a prayer aims solely to mlsure the distance bcrween the
(so-called, clearly nan-existem) "theolog" Hcidcgger ak afHol
derlin, and the quCtion afGod that haunts ulan's poetry, perhaps
to the very end.
Perhaps t the very end; I think of [he poem in the fnal callce
[ion, ZitgJJf(FnnmuldojTnu), that so dearly Mponds. still
and again, to Holderlin:
lch trink Wein aus zwei Glascrn
lind 73ckere an
wie Jener
am Pindar,
GOIt gibt die Stilllmgabcl ab
als eiller der klcinen
Gerechten,
1
aus der Lostrommd fll!
un5r Deut.
I drink wine fromIO glasses
:d comb through
the Icing's CCWI
like that one
with Pindr.
God turns over the tuning-fork
alone of the small
JUSt ones,
from the fte-engine fl
our measure.!
I tried [0 rranslate the poem several years ago. I gave up, not
knowing how to render Dmtofered in the English as measure."
Dem, which survives only in fixed expressions (for example, MN
kehun Dell besser, "nor one whit bertern), means something in.
signifcant or triAing: a near nothing. The poem rakes up the
Holderlinian question of measure and the law, the question of the
poem "In Lovely Blueness": Is there a measure on earth? Or rhe
one Holderlin illuminates in the fagment of Pindar entitled "Das
H&hste" (''The Highest"), which he resriwtes thus:
Das Gesez.
Von allen de! Konig. Sterblichen und
Unsterblichen; das rhrt eben
Darumghig
Das gerechte5te Recht mit aJlerhOchstCf Hand.
The law.
King of all, mortals and
Immortals: it indeed drives
Powerfully. for that reason,
Justice most JUSt with the highest hand.
The "response" to Holderlin is rhat of Jewish messianism. Ws it
in Buber. Scholem, or Benjamin that I read, a long while back. this
"3
parable of the Messiah? He is there, always, at every instant; or
rather, he always there JUSt an instant ago: the beggar who JUSt
lef the room or the little man who JUSt turned the street corner.
Measure, what > the tone, is not Pindar's 6iXI, but the JUSt man,
the JUSt little man. God isstill the one who metes measure out, but
almost in rhe way one might get rid of something. And what rals
in the way of destiny i s insignifcant. But that is JUSt the point . . .
Where 1 the distance between the poets best b mlasurcd?
rirsr, of course, in Celan's elimination of all reference to the sacred.
Evcrything Heidegger was able to construct from two verses of
Wie Wenn A Feienage" ("A On A Holiday"),
Jettt aber taws! !eh harr! und sah es kommen,
Und ich 5ah, das Heilige sci mein Wrt.
But nowday bre! I waited and sawit come,
And what I saw, the hallowed. my word shall convey.'
is foreign-though nOt absoluul foreign-tO Celan. Not ab
sohml foreign is the designation of the Msacred" (a word which to
my knowledge he never used) as the Open (chaos, gaping, wild
vastness). Cl, tOO, speaks in this direction. The allusion to Pin
dar's Mking's caesura" i s quite dear: an allusion to the impossible
immediacy, or more exactly the impossible immediate atainment
of immediacy (the Open), which is nevertheless the very media
tion in, and origin of, any kind of relation," But for Celan, the
Open is not the sacred, and poetry's task is nOt "to name the sa
cred." First, no doubt, bu the sacred is nOt "the element of the
divine."5 In this sense the experience of the sacred is absolutely for
cign t Celan.
But that is relatively secondary. Somcthing much more crucial
is at issue, or at least, something that docs nOt simply participate
in the facile (and easily utilized) opposition between Greek "pa
ganism" -polytheism-and Jewish monotheism. (For conceiving
the divine, the God or God, the opposition is perhaps without
consequence. And for belief and faith, J wonder jf the same isn't
"4 ebegDam
true; I wonder LLL ifChristianity, bcu it is esscmially founded
on this opposition, is nOi ultimately reponsible for our :theism. ")
Could anything I more crucial?
The question, perhaps rwh present, of man's rescmblanct
to (the) God.
Heidcger makes this the lOpic of a long commentary thai forms
the 1C(urc "didHcrisch wohnet der Mensch" ("Poetically Man
Dwells")6-a Iccture, as it happens, on "In Lichlicher Blauc" ("In
Lovely Blueness") and on the question, as it happens, of measure.
The verses Hcidegger analyzes are the following:
Darf. wenn l:uter Milhe das Leben, ein Mensch aufschaucn lind
sagen: so will ich 3uch scyn? Ja. Sohngc die Frcundlichkcit noch 3m
Htncn, die Reine, dallcrt, missc! nich! ungluklich der Mensch sich
mil deT Gonhcit. lSI unbckannt Gott? [51 er ofcnbar wie der Him
mel? DiCglaub' ich eher. Des Menschen Ma:as ists. Voll Verdienst,
doch dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch auf diCr Erde. Doch reiner ist
nichl der Sauen der Nacl mil den Stemen. wenn ich %$gen kon
nrc. als der Mensch, der hcissct ein Bild der GOIlheit. Gicbt es auf Er
den cin Maass? E giebt keine.
May, whcn lif is all trouble, may a man
Look uprds and say: I
A would like to bc thus? Ye. A long
A kndnC? which is pure. lats in hi5 hon,
Man no. unhappily can meurc himsclf
With the divine. b God unknown?
15 He vi5ible as the sky? This
I rather bdieve. It's the measure of men.
Full of mrrit* but poetically man
Lives on this earlh. But thr shadow
Of night with the stars is not purer,
If I Luld pUI i{ like {hat, than
Man, who is called the image of God.
Is there a measure on eanh? There is
None.'
Radic;lIy reducing Heideger's "demonstration" to its strucmral
impelUs csrablishes that:
Sk "5
I, In lifing his gaze roward the sky and its inhabitants, man
whose life, otherwise, is "all trouble" and in that sense "full of
merit" -"measure althe distance that separates us from the sky,
that is, "all that is between sky and earth. The distance, the space
l>ttween, is what Heidegger calls the Dimension, which he con
siders the origin of the very relation between sky and earth, and
thus, the origin of space as such and of human habitation. Man's
tcrm on eanh starts with the Dimension. (Of course, that is not
where the diference lies. I mean thaI this other opposition, be
tween habitation on one hand-Greek, Gcrman, and so on-and
wandering and nomadism on the olher-Jtws, and others-is also
weak. Dwelling, being zuhat is, for example, Cclan's primary
preoccupation.)
2. The pre-eminent means of taking the measure-according
to "his own JEtPOU" and "thus also his own metrics"-is poetry. It
opens man's term on earth as inhabiting, or living, as a poet." But
for poetry, taking the m(asure is always rclaring to something ce
lestial" and measuring oneself with it: "Man not unhappily can
measure himself f With the divine." Man takes the measure, not
from the earth itself ("Is there a measure on earth? There is f
None. "), but, inasmuch as this gives his measure as a mortal being
(able to die), fromthe Divinity. The measure is "the Divinity with
which man mesures himself."
J. The Divinity, or rather God, is the measure in that he is un
known. Here Heideger analyzes the central passage of the verses
he extracted from the poem:
The quetion bq;ins in line 19 with the words: Is God unknown?"
Manifesdy nOI. For if he were unknown. how could he. being un
known. ever be the measure? Yet-and this is what v mll5t now linen
1O and keep in mind-fof Holderlin God, as Ihe one who he is, is un
known and it is JUSt as this Unk"own Onl lhal he i5 Ihe measure for
the poet. This is also why Holderlin is perplexed by Ihe exciting ques
tion: howcn \hat which by ilS very natufe remains unknown ever be
come a mtasure? For somclhing lhal nun measures himselr hy mUSI
after all impan itself, must appear. SU ifit appears. it is known. The
god, however. is unknown. and he is the mcasure nonetheless. NOI
,,6 Rmlnnbailg Dnus
only Ihis, but the godwho remains unknown, must by showing him
stIas the one he is, appear the one who remains unknown. God's
mHni6 -nol only he himself-is mysterious. Therefore rhe poet
immediately asks the next question: "Is he manifest like the skr?
Holdcrlin answers: I'd sooner I Believe the lauer.lo
Why-so Unowask-is the poet'S surmise inclined in that way?
The very next words give the answer. They say tersely: It's the mea
sure of man. What is the measure for human meBsuring? God? No.
The sky? No. The manifemess ofthe sky? No. The measure consists
in Ihe wayin which the godwho remains unknown, i revwcd such
by the sky. God's appearance through Ihe skyconsists in a disclosing
Ihal lers us seewhat conceals irself hut lets us see it nOI by seekingro
wrest what is concealedout ofits concealedness. but onlyby guarding
the concealed in its self-concealment. Thus the unknown god appears
U the unknown by way of the sky's manifestness. This appearance is
the meaure against which man measures himself.11
This analysis is surprising.
Surprising. because on one hand it recognizes the absolute para
dox of God's manifestation. or more exactly his revelation ( Ofn
baTkeil, Holderlin's question being "1st er offenbar wie der Him
mel?"): "At me same time he shows himself as the one He is," God
appears "as the one who remains unknown." God thus reveals him
self as not revealing himself in appearing or manifetation. The rev
elation is not an appearance. If Heidegger's reading is correct, if
Holderlin's "rather"-"This I rather believe"-is not a restriction
as to the unknown being of God, it means: God, the unknown,
shows himself as the sky does; he is as manifest as the sky. But it is
the (sky's) manifestation that is enigmatic. For how is the sk man
ifest, if nor here-"In Lovely Blueness" -as the pure void of bot
tomless light. the pure spacing, above our heads. of air and light
(Ether); the spacing that outlines, rather than being outlined by,
the eanh; the spacing, out of which the earth's space spreads and
all things become visible, articulate themselves? God shows or re
veals himself in the same way as the sky's pure opening-the
"abyss," as Celan would say; as the ceaseless ebb, on and right
against the whole surface of the visible, the invisible from which
Si "7
the visible streams. And even when the sky shows itselfin its "qual
ities," as Holderlin says in another poem,'2 Iight's luminosity con
tinues ( withdraw to it as its very appearance.
But if Heidegger reads something of this order in Holderlin
which is probable, given the connection he makes to the poem
"What is God?"'J-then it is impossible to say [hat for Holderlin,
"the measure consists in the way in which the god who remains un
known, is revealed as such, by the sky (dUTch dlHimmel)." Hol
derlin does 1101 say that God shows himself"by way of the sky," but
rather, to express it a bit diferently, that he is evident as the invis
ible is evident. withdrawn into the visible Hits visibility. Holder
lin's thought is here unrelated to, say. Hegel's: Da OfnbaTte iSI
IlT ds GotdeT Ofnblre il. This does not mean, as people arc
in the habit of translating, "The revealed is simply (hat God can
be revealed." but instead, "The revealed (that which is revealed) is
simply that God is the revealed (the manifest)." Whereas Hegel
conceives revelation's perfet being-in-evidence, Holderlin thinks
of its abyss. This, in fact, is why the logic animating the verses-
What sends irsdf into strangeness
I all the more invisible
-is completely unconnected to dialectics. Despite alappearances
to the contrary. Unlike the Hegelian Absolute, God, for Holder
lin, does not want "to be at our side." But the more he sends him
self into "the sky's aspect," which is unknown to him, the more
he "revealsn himself as invisible. Thus Heidegger can say: "The
poet calis, in (he sights of the sky. that which in its very self
disclosure causes the appearance of [hat which conceals itself and
indeed Qthat which conceals itself. In the familiar appearance, the
poet calls the alien as that (Q which the invisible impartS itself in
order t remain what it is-unknown.'" But then it suddenly be
comes de, and makes Heidegger's analysis surpri sing for a second
time, that the S[rucrure of the revelation is none other than that
of Iltheil itself; hence, in a mode doubtless no longer metaphysi
cal, the onto-theological risk is still present, and all the more so
, , 8 Rmumbrng DntN
when God is conceived from rhe initial question U"}ntis God?" II
is perhaps Ihis omotheologicl horimn thai forces Heidcggcr, in
rhe vcry gesture he uses [0 remove the whole problcmadc of imi
ralion from his commentary (a problematic which is, however, C^
plicit in the poem) to defne taking the measure nm as the imita
lion of "reserve" or divine retreat, bur as the image-rich language
of poetry that "makes us see the Invisible":
The poel makes poetry only when he take lhe mure, by saying Ihe
sighrs of hcavcn in such a way that he submitS IO its appearances as to
the alien clemen! [0 which Ihe unknown god has "yielded." Our Cllf
rem name for the sight and appce of something is "image" (BiM).
The nature of the image is U lei somclhing be seen. By Cnlrl, copies
and imirtions arc alrady mere variations on the genuine image which,
as a sight or spcctaclc, lets the invisible be seen and so imagines the in
visible in something alien to it. Because poetry takes that mysterious
msurt, Uwit, in the fce of the sky, therefore it speaks in "images.
This is why potic images arc imaginings (Bl-biublgm) in a distinc
tive MO` nO! mert fncie and illusions bm imagining lhat are visible
inclusions of the alien in the sight of the miliar.Ls
I am not saying [hat "In Lovely Blueness" is not haunted by im
ages." I would say, rather, that we should try to think about the
relationship-dear in both French and English through Ltin
helWeen image and imitation. Ad especially (hat we should un
demand what Holderlin envisions when he thinks of man as "an
image of God." The lines Heidegger extracts immediately follow
this passage:
Reinheit aber ist auch Schonheit. Innen aus Verschiedenem entsleht
ein ernncr Geise. So sehr einflhig die Bilder, so sehr.
Heilig sind die, dass man wirklieh oft flirchrel, die ZU beschreiben.
Die Iimmlischen aber, die immer gut sind, alles zumal, wie Reiche,
haben diesc Tugend und Freude. Ocr Mensch darf das nachahmen.
Darf. wenn huter Miihe das Leben, ein Mensch . .
Iut
Pureness is also beauty.
Sk
Within, divergence crate a serious spirit.
But picturs are so simple, %holy
A these that really one is
Ofen afraid U describe them. But the he:l\enl).
'ho arc always good. alat once, like the rich,
Have this vinue and plcrc. Man
May imil:le that.
May, when life is all trouble, maya man . . .
"9
This is also the measure for Holderlin: kindness, F",mdlichkil, as
the imitation of divine goodness-virtue and pleasure; it shows it
self as the 51.that is. as light's modesty-in its very nudity-and
Uthe jubilation of reserving (he visible in the self. What is lacking
is the "source": grace-as kindness is reserved. God i not (absent).
He goes away. He lets man die, lets him be human, leaves him
kindness in the capacity to die. Something like love, then; what
God gives in withdrawing from mortals' desire (will), which is al
ways to be immortal (but (his should again be understood in the
context ofHolderiin's "a{heism, and in any case without reference
to who knows what kind of "Swabian piety"),
Imitating the divine means lWO things: wanting to be God (the
Greek tragic eperience), and "humbly keeping God's retreat as a
model (the "Western" experience-just as tragic. but in another
sense).
The distance belWeen them is measured here. A poem in
Spr!gilrsys this (changing the direction of prayer in the name
of a cal proximity helWeen the God and man. in order to sig
nif that God's image is man's blood shed: God present. which is
to sy withdrawn. not in "the fgure of death," but in (he fce of
the dead-the exterminated):
I^IBVI
Nah sind wir. Herr.
nahc und grcilar.
R b-gDatn
Gegriffen Khon, Herr,
ineinander verkralt, a w
der Lcib eine jeden von uns
dein Lib. Herr.
Bete, Herr.
bete zu uns.
wir sind nah.
WindKheif gingen wir hin,
gingen wir hin, uns zu bilcken
nach Mulde und Maar.
ZurTnke gingen wir, Herr.
E Wr Blm, es war,
wadu vergossen, Herr.
E glanzle.
E warf uns dein Bild in die Augen, Herr.
Augen und Mund 51ehn soofenund leer, Herr.
Wir haben getrunken, Herr.
Da Blut und das Bild, d im Blul y Herr.
Bete, Herr.
Wir sind nah.
We are near, Lord,
near and at hand.
Handled alrt'dy, Lord,
clawed andclawing 3 thouh
the bodyofeachof UI
your body. Lord.
Pray, Lord,
pray (0 us.
we are near.
Wind-awry we wemthere.
wemthere 10 bend
over hollowand ditch.
To be watered we wemthere, Lrd.

It wa blood, it
what you shed. Lord.
I! gleamed.
S
It cst yuimage into our e, Lord.
Oue and our mouths are soopen and empty. Lord.
We have drunk, Lord.
The blood and the image Ihal in the blood. Lord.
Pray, Lord.
We are near.I'
12 The Unforgivable
AII4. 1984 (Gmon)
c.F. says he was lold-by a French intellectual. I think-that
French intellectuals harp roo much LI the pathos of Auschwin
(Auschwitz as understood by Adorno, George Steiner, and several
mhers who can hardly be dassifed as French intellectuals), If we
start to forget rhis, rhe ulHhinkable-rhat it happened here, (hat
our brorhers (our fellow men) let it happen, [hal they said /loth.
ing. were afraid, felt some degree of enjoyment, and thai it was
pure monnTosil)'-if we stan no longer to understand in what
ways j[ pure monstrosity, then I hold Out little hope for the fU
lUre of thought, or, in any , for those who imagine themselve
"imclligcllc" in saying such things. The most one can wish them is
to avoid "pathos" on lesser "subjecu,
Herein lies Heideggcr's irreparable ofense: not in his declara
tions of 1933-34, which we L understand without approving, but
in his silence on the cxtermination. He should have been thc frst
10 say somcthing. And I was wrong to think initially that it was
enough to ask forgivclless. It is absolutely tmfrgiVllbl. That is what
he should have said. In any case, there is a risk that thought will
never recover fromsuch silence:
Tolu6t 690o
To learn 10 know through pain .
(ANrl1Agmcmnon)
No, it is nOi I, it is someone dK who sufers.
I, I cud not h:vt sufered thus.
(An"Akhttt uitm)
Reference Maner
Notes
ntr! I
I. I"Dcr Mcridian is in volume 3 of Cclan's fve-volume Gl "fuit
Wtrkr, cd. Beda Alemann and Stefn Reichert, in collaboration with
Rolf BUcher (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1983). This p3Ssagc, p. 2LL. Unless
otherwise nOloo, al English u:mslalions from "Ocr Meridian" 8from
Jerry Glenn's 'The Meridian, in Chimgo&lin29. no. 3 (1978): 19-40.
This passage. p. J8.-Trans.)
2. IGW.: 26. English translations ofCdans poems will b Michael
Hamburger's unless otherwise noted. MTUbingCn, J:nner" is in Paul
uln: PMms(New York: Pcrsea, 1988), In.-Trans.)
3. IGWl: 25; Hamburger. &ln, 293-*Tn.1
4. [Apart from Michael Hamburger's translations of both poems,
ther is an English version of Tubing(l, Jiin""in Joochim Ncugroschd.
Hlul Crln, SpuGrilr (New York: E. I Dunon, 197')
'
185.-Tr.ms.J
5. [Lacoue-Labanhc's phrase is "c'es, UVCL I'Aliemagnc qu'iI /U( ,
s'expliquer. S'plqlrrin this comext I1l(OS primarily
~
IO di5uss, '"to
clarif marters," cven "'0 have it OUt with SOl1ll'One." Yet the verb could
also function a simple rclexi,
'
e: this would rtndcr the sense, '"We must
explain ouruhJ with Germany The impon of such ambiguiry for re
flections on the Holocaust is sdf-evidem.-Trans.J
6. [From '"Todesfuge": "der lod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland."
GWI: 42; '"Death Fugue," Hamburger, Ctum, 6}.-Trans,1
7. Henri Meschonnie, "On appclle eela traduirc Cchn," in Pour In
pDhiquCI(Paris: Gallimard, 1980),
"7
11' Nom
8. CW2: H4. PCler Swndi, "Edcn, in Po6;t't poltiqutt k mod
nirl{Lillc: Presses univcrsiraires de Lille, 198,).
,. Issu<' 2 and 3, 1972. Blanchot, L drir I p<rlr, was reissued by
En; mOTg.na in Paris in 1984.
10. Thcooor Adorno, "Paratae," in NOllto Liut4r, vol. 2, trans.
ShicrfY Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia Univcrsiry Press, (991),
It. Along with, in an entirely difcrem vein, Werner Hamacher, QThe
Second of Inversion: Movements of a Figure Through Cclan's Poetry,
lrans. Pelcr Fenvcs, in WordTt: R.lillgofPauf Gum, ed. Aris Fiore
(Os (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 219-63.
12 [The French "lOur I nor&:s plays on a double meaning: the verb
tOlnOcan be uanslalcd as "10 wheel around, whirl, swirl," while di
viding the past parliciplc of the verb into two pans evokes "tower I
drowned.M -Trans.}
13 [h is worth suessing that this English version translates Lacoue
Labarthe's French nanslation, rather (h ulan's German.-Trans.)
14. Friedrich Holderiin, Si mriclu Wrrk(, vol. 2.1 (Stuttgart: Kohlham
mer, 1951), 195
15 I refer the reader to Roger Munier (responding 10 an inquiry on
experience in MiS( m pag( 1 [May 1972]): "First there is etymolog. E
p(rimucomes from the Latin ap(riri, to test, try, prove. The radical is
riri, which one also fnds in plriculum, peril, danger. The Indo-Euro
pean rOOt is pl, 10 which are attached the ideas of crossingand, secon
darily, of trial ust. In Greek, numerous derivations evoke a crossing or
passage: ptiro, 10 cross; pfl , beyond; ptmo. J pass through; p"aino, to
g 10 [he end; ptr, end, l imit. For Germanic languages, Old High Ger
man fra"has given us fhrr", to transport, and fhrr", 10 drive. Should
we anribme Erhrulgto this origin as well. or should it be linked to
the second meaning ofp(r, trial, in Old High Cerman fra, danger,
which became Ghr, danger, and gphTdm, to endanger? The bound
arie between one meaning and the other are imprecise. The same is true
for the Latin ptTiTi, to try, and plricuium, which originally means [rial,
test, then risk, danger. The idea of experience as a crossing is erymolog
ially and semantically difcult to separate from that of risk. From the
beginning and no doubt in a fundamental sense, txptTimu means to
endanger.M
16. The French translation I will refer U is not Andre du Bouchet's in
Strttu (Paris: Mercure de 'rance, 1971), but Jean Launay's (PoCit 9
Nous
[1979]). I make slight modifcarions when Ihe argument warrallts.[For
Ihis passage, see Glenn, }7: "The poem is . . . underway." -Trans.}
17. [In the original, this line rcam "Ein Rathsel ist Reinel1lsprunge
nes.H In English, Michael Hamburger renders it An enigma arc things
of pure sourceM; see Ho!rlin: Hi Po(ms (New York: Pantheon, (952),
199. I have modift' the English translation because of Lacoue-Labarthe's
repeated Uof jniliand jllil mrnt.-Tns.}
18. [In English, agitation or cxcitement.-Trans.}
19. Waher Benjamin, ChnrlBuir, Ein Lyrikr im uitalur d
Hochknpitali smus, in GnmmriuSbrim, vol. 1.2, cd. Rolflledemann
and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, (974).
English references: Charits Budtlir: A Lyric Port in th Era ofHigh
Capillim, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973).
20. [GW2: 36.-Tns.}
21. Benjamin, "Uber einige Motive bei Baudelaire," Schrim, 1.2:
60553: Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Charus Butlir, 107-54
22. [Cclans Bremen address is published in the GW3: 186. The En
glish translation cited here is by Rosmarie Waldrop, in Paul Olll: Coi
iteudPosr (Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 1986), }3.-Trans.]
2}. The lectures on Holderlin, now published by Klostermann in Hei
degger's Gtsamtausgabr. The bener pan of Heidegger's essays or papers
on Holderiin presuppose knowledge of these lectures.
2. See Ba Allemann's commentary in Ho!rlill Hritg l (Paris:
PU.F., 1959)
25. [Holderlin, SW2.1: 190-92. Tns. Michael Hamburger, Fridrich
Ho!trli,,: Porms and F(flti (Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry
Press, 1980), 495.-Trans.}
26. "Anmerkungen zum 'Odipus'" in SW5= 196: Remarks on 'Oedi
pus,''' in FridriehHo!trlin: Es ysand Lmm on Thro,, trans. Thomas
PfJu (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 107.
27. I have attempted this analysis in "La c6urc du spcculatif (in
Holderiin, L'migollt tSophock[Paris: Bourgois, 1978}) and in "Holder
lin el les Crees" (Poliqllt40 [1979))
28. Jean Beaufrct, "Holderlin eT Sophocle," in Holderiin, Rrmarqun
mr Otdip(-Rl rqurs surAntigoll( (Paris: U.C.E., 1965).
29. [Hamburger, Ho!iill, 601.-Trans.]
30. [Hamburger, C(ll. 175-Trans.}
3l. [Holder!in, SW2.t: 146; Hamburger, Hi!ll. 417-Trans.]
32. [Holderiin, SW2.1: 13: Hamburger, Ho!rli", I}l.-Trans.}
33- [Glenn, H-Trans.]
34. [Arthur Rimbaud, Ot'I/I"S 1: Vny/OII/lU, UlIt liSOIl tIIfr
(Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1989), 57; Rimbaud: Compltu Works, St
l(ud Lmm, Hans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966), t25.-Trans.]
35 [Glenn, }5-37-Trans.]
}6. [Ibid .. 36.-Trans.]
37. [Ibid., 32.; GW}: 192.-Trans.J
38. "Die Ros' ist ohne wart/m: sic blUhet, weil sic blUhct: I Sie acht'
nidu ihrcr sdbst, fragt nichl, ob man sic siehet": The rose is without a
why, blooms because it blooms: I Has no care for itsclf, nor desires 10 be
$'Cn." SeHeideger, s vom Grulld{Pfl ingen: Neske, 1957), and Tht
Prilcip/ OfRtdsQl, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana Univer
sity Press,199J).
39 [Glenn. 34: GWr 195-Trans.J
40. [Glenn, 35: GW3: 195.-Trans.]
41. 5W 4.1: 2H.
42. /Pau/vln, trans. Waldrop, 18-19.-Trans.[
43 Blanchot, ' D"nitd par45.
44 GW 3: 185-6; PallVil, Wldrop, }4.
ClfUthe
1. ["StammeringH translates the French biainnmt which corresponds
to Celan's llIin "Tiibingen, JannerH (GWI: 2.6). Michael Hamburger
translates ll/tI as "babbleH (etlal, 177).-Trans.]
2. [GW3: 202: Glenn, 40. In this section, page references to "The
MeridianH will be given in the main body of Ihe text: frst to the Ger
man, then to Glenn's English translalion, and laSt to the French transla
tion byJean Launay used byLacoue-Labarthe ('''Lc Meridien.' Discours
prononce 1'0ccasion de Ia remise du prix Georg BUchner," PoCit' 9
(1979): 68-82. Al limes. Ihe English Ifansialion has been modifed, in
panicular to coincide with Lacouc-Labanhc's use of uunay's French ver
sion ofCclan's text.-Trans.[
3 The acceptance spc'Ch for the Georg BUchner Pri1.c customarily ad
dresses BUchner's work.
4 "Une Icc[Ure de Paul Celan," Pomit9 (1979): 7.
5. In the ume issue of?mit, Launay includes, along with his lrans
lations ofThc Meridian and Ihe scenes from Damo1lS 7Odi! refers to.
Nou. +
lranslations of Kafka's "Ein Bericht fUr cine Akadcmie. Gt'ammr/u
Wtrkt il sitbm8i lldm(Frankfun: Hanser, 198}), and Egon Friedell's
7ilt zr Wl"rhdt (1910), in order 10 clarify Ihe lOne proper to The
Meridian."
6. [Glenn's translation of"The Meridian" gives thn::e different versions
of ArrmU/md: "reversal of breath, "[Urn of breath." and breath rurn
ing." -Trans.}
7. "Pas {pr6mbule)." in Gmma3-4 (976).[This teXI is reprinted in
Jacques Derrida. Paragrs (Paris: Galilee. 1986), 19-116. HIin French
means both "step" and not." -Trans.]
8. [This is Lacoue-Laharthe's frst mention of proprr, a word LO which
he will frequendy rerurn. I have given it in English as kown," or, when
possible, as Mpropcr.H_Trans.J
9. [Dallt01ls Td in GeorgBUchner's Wrrkr Il1dBrir, c. Frir-L Berge
mann (Wiesbaden: lnsel, (949),41; The DratofDantoll, trans. Howard
Brenton and Jane Fry, in Georg BUchner, The Compltu Plys, cd.
Michael Patterson (London: Methuen, 1987), 40.-Trans.]
10. Connections should be made here betwccn lhe commentary on
Sophocles in Manin Hcidegger, Eilljlhrtmgil dit Mnaplrysik (TUbin
gen: Niemeyer, 1953), and lhe 1942 1ecrures on "Ocr !ster," in Martin
Heidegger, HolrlimHymnr "D"lur(Frankfun: Klostermann, 1984);
Der Ursprungdes Kunstwerkes," in Martin Heid(g er, Hol(Frank
furt: Klostermann, 1950), 7-68; and the "Brief uber den Humanismus,"
in Martin Hcidcgger, Wmarkm(Frankfurt: Klostermann, (967), 145-94
(the passage on the translation ofHeraclirus's maxim, nhoianthropr di
mOl [185-94]).
lI. Or when, on lhe comrary-but it amoums to exactly the same
thing-he seems 10 appropriate the UnJ)imlrhr as the "realm in which
the monkey, lhe robots, and accordingly . . . alas, art, too, seem to be at
home" (192; 32: 72).
I. [ucoue-ubanhe's words are quelque chose . . . se renversc, with
rrnvrrJ"as the echo of "catastrophe" (from the Greek katttrrp/till, IO
turn down.H "overturn"). Altbough I have uSx "overturn" here, the lhr(e
other instances in which a formof rrfJvrr$roccurs seem 10 require "up
set."-Trans.J
13. Once again we arc verdose O Holderlin-"language, that most
dangerous of possessions," and even to the Hcideggerian interpretation
of this phrase. S(' "Holderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung," in Martin
Heidegger, Erli lUrtmgrll ZII Ho/trlimDichlllg (Frankfurt: Kloster-
'3' Now
mann. 1911). }3-45. Hcidegger thinks ofdanger as thai which threatens
Being rather {han the human. Bur Holdcrlin's phrase derives from a
fragmen! that seeks \O respond to the qucS(ion: Who is man? A for
Ce1an's determination of the human, what would it be without relation
IQ Being. that i5-1 will come to Ihis-to time? Even ifThe Meridian"
is, as we may plausibly allow, partially addressed IO Hcideggcr, thaI is
not sufciemrcason to hastily read into it an cthical" response to Mon_
toJogy." The human is in no way an ethical" category. and moreover,
no category of this kind can resist the question of Being. [Lacouc
Labarthe qUotes Holdcrlin from the fragment Mlm Walde," in SW 2.1:
325. Cf. "In the Forest," in Friedrich Htldcrlin, Hmns andFmts,
nans. Richard Sicburth (PrincelOn, N.J.: PrincelOn University Press,
1984), S7.-Trans.]
[4. Anmerkungen zum 'Odipus,'" in SWS: 196; MRemarks on 'Oedi
pus,' inThomas Pfau, trans" EsaldUtus UH Throry, IOZ.
[5. Jean-Luc Nancy's lerm. See u di scoursd I Slcopr(Paris: Aubier
Flammarion, 1976).
16. [Holderlin, Anmcrkungen zum 'Odipus: [96; Pfall, Remarks
on 'Oedipus,'" 102.-Trans.]
[7. [Mmerkungen 2ur 'Amigona,'" in SW5: 269: Remarks on '
tigone.'" in I'fall. EsandLmron Throry. 113.-Trans.]
[8. BUchner, DantomTd 86; Bremon and Fry. T}r Drat} ofDan
ton, 80.
[9. This is the C in [he quatrain Cclan qUOtes at the end of "The
Meridian":
Voices frm [hep:lh of [e nlIl$
Cmf 0Nyurhand10 u.
Wor is alonewilh [he lap
has onlyhis palm [0 rd frm.
(GW1:>')
2. Cclan's words B` M . . . when I anemp[ed tomake for that distam
but occupiable realm which became visible only in Ihe form of Lucile"
(200; 38; 80).
2[. [In French, polit d cirom/anct. There is further reference to cir
cumstance laler on.-Trans.]
22. [The translation is taken from Brian Lynch and Peter Jankowsky,
Paul Crum: 65 Poems. (Dublin: Raven A, 1985). 41.-Trans.]
23. [The phrase is l)n diap/rron ttllO. Sec Hyprriol pt. I, bk. 2, in
Now '33
SW3: 8[. Cf. Heraclitus. fragmem51, in DitFmgmrll tdr Vorsoiratikfr,
[rans. Hermann Diels. ed. Walther Kranz, 5th cd. (Berlin: Weidmann,
1934), I: 162.-Trans.]
24. ICWt: 2t8; Hamburger, Ctln, t61.-Trans.]
25. [GWt: 219; Hamburger, Ctln, [6J.-Trans.]
26. These 8the last words of "Die Frage derTechnik, in Vormlgr
undAufi r (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), }6. Heidcgger defnes this piety
as "Weise, in der das Denken dem Zu-Denkenden fItpricht. In Ihis
way. it is itself a product ofdialogue (Gprich) as the essence of language
(of thought). Sec "Holderlin und das Wescn der Dichtung,f 38-40.
Celan himselfthinks ofperception and questioning as dialogue.
27. lGW" 217; Hamburger, uln, 159-Trans.]
28. [A play on the tide ofEmmanuel Lvinas's Aut"mrn/ qui," ou
au-dft l'urc(Haag: Nijhoff, 1974)-Trans.]
29. Srin unduir, mh ed. (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1967), }8.
}O, The denunciation concludes "Was ist Meraphysik?," in Wtg
markr19, The problematization is in ProtokoU:u cinem Seminar Ubcr
den Vomag 'Zeit und Sein,'" in Martin Heidcgger, Zur Scht drs
Dmittm (TUbingen: Niemeyer, 1969), 54
}1. Cf Obcr Sprache uberhaupt und uber die Sprache des Men
schen, in GtJammtlu Schr(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 2.1: 140-
57; "On Languageas Suchand on me Language ofMan, in Wlter Ben
jamin, &tioO e. Peter Demet. trans. EdmundJephcotl (New York:
Sehocken. 1986), }14-}2.
32. Wher Benjamin, MOber einige Motive bei Bauddaire,f Guam
mtllt Sthriftm, 1.2: 639; "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Wlter Ben
jamin, Il uminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (NewYork:
Schocken, 1969), 199. The quotation fromValcry is fromAuts Rhumb$.
}3. [Holderlin. SW2.[: 126-29; Holderlin, "At Ihe Source of The
Danubc, in Sieburth, HymnsandFramrts, 57.-Trans.]
H. CW,: 21}; Hamburger. Ctln. 155
Pryer
I. [CW!: 22S; Hamburger, Crln, 17S.-Trans.]
2. [Lacoue-Labarthe's phrase is "en n'invoquant personneft; he thus
stI thatptrsolmrin French meanS bolh Mno one" and "anyone. "[n
voquer personne would mean to invoke no one, with "no one func-
'34 Now
riolling as if it .. a name; N'invoquer personne means nO! (0 invok
anrone.-Tr.ms.J
J. I L.L. write: MDieu s'est fevcle (n')cucperson"e.M Senote above
on I>ossibic meanings for "personne.-Tns.1
4. (The Ltin connectS U the Frenchword ntamor -nothingnes."
Trans.]
s fL.L's [et reaw":lUcun hrrcn tOUt Lqui f sllr Ie mode d'un
Iam" (emphasis addcd).-Tr.ms.]
6. GWt: 211; Hamburger, 011, lB.
7. "TypographieM in Mim6is d,jcn(Paris: Aubicr-Flammar
iOIl, 1975). English references: "Typography," in TypographMimnil.
Philolop"Politics. ed. ChrislOphcr Fynsk (Cambridge: Harvard Univer
sity Press. 1989).
8. Ft!td Pi"tr, "Das Hikhstc, SW s: 28S.
9 (In English. the play ends thus:
.
.
. . . we'll . . . ask God for maca
roni, melons. and fgs. for musical voices, classical bodies, and a con1-
fortable rcligion! Georg BUchner, LonC andLma, in C0mp/lf Works
and Ltrll, trans. Henry J. Schmidt (New York: Continuum, 1986),
192.-Trans.1
10. [Celan's leXI reads M ieh muss mich hUten, wie mtin hirr
wir dr LnntUmnnll &r EmilFmnd 'Commode', d nun
gcbraucht wird, als ein 'Kommend(' 7 lesen!" (GW}: 202). Glenn
Translale "Commode" as "accommodating" (Glenn, }9), bUi I have
modifed this TO "comfoTfble," in deference to the English translation
of Bilchner (sec note 9),-Tr:ms.1
II. [Brian Lynch and PeterJankowsky translale Ihe poem thus:
lWOHOUSEO, ERAONE, y are, un
inhabir:ble. Therefre
we build and Wbuild. Therefre
it st'nds, this
pitiful bcds(d,-in Ihe rain,
there it S[nds.
Come. lover.
ThaI we lie here, (hat
i the Ianition-: He
(hen is sufcient UntO Himself, (wice.
Lei Him, He
may have Himself whoHy, 2the half
and once again (he half. We,
Now
we arc the rain-bed, may
He come and render Udry.
He comenOi
.
He d nOI render Udry.
PaulOln: 65 Pom(Dublin: Ravcn A. '985), J6.-Tr:ms.]
12. Glenn, 35-}6.
"
I}. AI let, if the "place" ofbcing and the O of DaSlill arc substan
lialiloo, OT sacrali zed, a has indeed been the C. In 71 Eu of
ThoughtHeidegger writcs: "BUI Ihinking JXXtry is in truth the topology
of Being. l it says to Being the place where it unfolds." Gamtausglbr.
vol. I), Oil Erfhrullgdn Dlnkms (Frankfurt: Klosterman, 198) , 84
Celan'su-lOpia responds to Heidegger's topology, pushing it to its limits.
14. [GWt: 217; Hamburger, Clln, IS9-Trans.]
IS. \GWI: l}9-40; Hamburger, Clk" 187-89-Trans.J
16. [GWI: 214. The English version of the poem is Hamburger's, p.
'57. However, 1 have had U modify the third verse of Hamburger's trans
lation in the interet of Lcoue-I. barthe's argument. In the French trans
lation of "Zurich, Zum SlOrchen" Ihal L.-L. prints, the Abrr-Du of the
third verse has bcn rendered as NOI-Ti; Hamburger gives il in English
as "You-Again." I have replaced "You-Again" with NOI-You" so as 10
kttp the fliation fromthe French der for L-L
!
subsequcllI remarks.
Trans.1
17. [GW2: 32.8; Hamburger, }15.-Trans.]
18. (GWl: }26. I have modifed the English translation found
.
in U'
P: Paul Oln, trans. Katharine Washburn and Margrel GULllemm
(San Francisco: North Point, 1986), 101. Washburn and GUille
.
m!n gi,
rid of dem, rid I of God" for Celan's "Tooequill, Gott(S I quit! ; their
adjcClive rhaps lends a different lOne U Ihe verses from tha
.
t of the
French venion Lcoue-Labarthe uses: quill( d( la mort, qULttC I de
Dieu." I havc u "clear" to remain in line with l.cou(-Lbarthe's read
ing.-Tans.J
19. [Hamburgcr, }Is.-Trans.]
Z. Boschenstein, MDcstiIUCions," in L MIUCd bllln IIl (1972),
187.
Hagiography
I. [I have followed de Launay's Irench version as closely as possible
for Ihis English rendering
.
It is Ihus a IrJnslalioll ofa translalion, rather
than a translation ofCelan.-Tralls.J
Nous
Rtin
I. [German: Das Wn der Sprache in Heidcggcr, Unu2NF
Spmchr, vol. 12 of GNmrl usglbr (Frankfun: KJoslermann, 1985), 159.
English translation by Peler D. Her in the tS ay The Nature of lan
guage. in 0" tlr wyMLanguagr(San Francisco: Harper & Row, (971).
66.-Tran5.1
2. [I-Ieidcger, Untnu149; Hert. 0 thr \Jto Languagr, 57.
Trans.1
J. [Hcidcgct, U1tr222, Hern, On thr wyto Lan, |5J.
Trails.}
4 ("Die Sprache, in Heidcgger. Untr24: "Language, in I-ei
dcgger, Port? ul1Iguagr, Thought, frans. Alben I-ofsfadter (New York:
I-arper & Row, 1971), 204.-Trans.}
5 [Heidcgger, "Ocr Wcg wr Sprachc. U, 244; I-er[". "The
Way U Language," 01l thr \yto Lemguagr, IJ4.-TraIl5.}
6. (Again, I have remaint" closer to Lefebvre's French than UCelan's
German.-Tr.m5.)
7 [From the poem "Mit allen Gedankell, GW1: 221; "With al my
thoughts," Hamburger, (u 167.-Trans.]
8. [Celan, "Sprachgitter," GWI: 167; Hamburger, "Language Mesh,"
uln, 119-Trans.)
9 [Celan, "Enghrung," GW,: '95; Hamburger, "The Straitening,"
Crul, IJ7.-Trans.1
10. (Cclan, "Schncebelt," GWI: 168, Hamburger. "Snow-bed." uln,
121.-Trans.]
II. I"TUbingcn,Jannlr": Blanchor's Frcnch translation is "yew que la
parole submerge ;usqu'a la eecite-Trans.]
12. ICelan, "Schnccbeu," GWI: 168; Hamburger, "Snow-bed." Oln,
121.-Trans.)
13. [From ibid.:
Augenwdtblind.
Augen imSterbegekluf,
Augen Augen . . .
From "Engflihrung (notc 9, above):
Lies nicht rnchr-chau!
Schau nieht rehr-gh!
Nom '37
Lcoul-Lbanhe cites the French translatioll by Maurice Blanchot, "L
dernilr a parler," 15.-Trans.}
wt"
I. !Jen-Jacque Rousseau, Orulrompln. vol. I (Paris: Gallimard,
Bibliolhue de la Pl6ade, 1959), 1005; Rrvrriaofthr Solitary Wl/krr,
trans. Peter France (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin. 1979), }9,
Trans.]
Vrtgo
I. Paris: Hacheue/POL, 1979.
2. [GW}: :wo.-Trans.]
3. [Du Bouchet, Srrttr.-Trans.]
4. [Jean Launay, "Le Meridicn," Potir9 (1979): 80,-Trans.]
Blnm
I. IGWI: 174: Hamburger, (ln, 21I.-Trans.)
Ld
I. (This passage can be found in the aflerword to the essay "Das
Ding," Vormr und Aufitu. 18}; trans. Hofsradter, Portr Languar,
Thought 164-Tm.]
2. [Celan, "Zurich, Zum Storchen," GWI: 214: Hamburger, "ZUrich,
the Stork Inn," uLn, 157,-1rans.]
}. The manuscript is dated April 17. t977.
4. Heidcgger's responsc to Cclan on receipt of "Todtnaubcrg. Al
mann mentions at the beginning of his article that this leuer. along with
the poem itsclf, had been Ixhibited in t9703t Radul in the exhibition
on Cehn.
5. The French translation of this text is in large part due to Jean-Luc
Nancy, the intermediary between \.H. and me. [The English version
ha been mlllsiated from the French.-Tr:\llS.]
Aote
5(
I. IGWj: 108; Washburn and Guillemin. Lattfm. 189.-Tr.ms.]
2. I HtlderJin. SWs: 28S.-Trans.]
j. ISI2.1: 118. Hamburger. FrdrichHi/in, Pcnua.dFmgnett

j7j-Trans.]
4 Manin Heidcg er. Wie Wenn am Feic & " in Ew utcnge
zu Hi!mins D|dtug, 62.
5. Heidegger. Das Gedichl," Lrw utcnge. 187.
6. I Heidegget, rtrgc undu[atz. 187-204. Hofmdter, Pon"
lmg: ogc. 7houghr 213-29.-Tl3ns.]
7. Kindncs.'t translatcs Frrundirbktit, which Heidcger interprets as
the Greek xapl;: grace.
8. IThis line in German is Voll Verdienst," which Michael Ham
burger tmnsbtcs as Full of proft." The French version L.-L. discusses
UM"Plein de mcritcs"; I have modifed Ihe English to enhance the sense
of L-L. 's subsequent rcmarks.-Trans.]
9 [SI12.1: 372. Hamburger, Hi!rlill, 26t-65.-Trans.]
10. IHoftadter translatc: "Is he manifcst like the sky?" Htideriin an
swers: "Id sooner believe the latter." The translation here has !xcn mod
ifed in accordance with Hoftadter's.-Trans.]
II. [Hcidcgger, . . dichterisch wohnet der Mensch . . . , '

Iorn
uttdu an, 197. Hofradtcr, . . . . Poetically Man Dwells .

Pop
1.nguagc

7hought

In-lJ.-Tmns.]
12. In "In Lovely Bluenes," thee qualitic" . the night Stars. About
"the shade of the night," Heidcggcr says: . . . . the night itself is the
shadc. thai darkneswhich c never bcrome a mere blacknesbuas
shade il is .. -ded to lighl and remains L1 by it (Heidegef . .. . . . dich
lerisch wohnel der Mensch " 201; Hofstadlcr, " . . . Poetically Man
Dwells " 216.)
Ij. Htlderlin's poem says:
W: isl COli? unbcbnlll, dennoch
YoU igenschaflcn isl dJAgichl
Des Himmds von ihm. Die Blir.tC namlieh
Ocr Zorn sind dn COlle. Jcmchr iSI cins
Umiclnbar, schickct es sich in Fn:md.
Wat is Cod Unknown, YCt
I:ull of hili qualilies is the
(SW... : 11)
Aou
ncof thc liky. For Ihe lightning
A thc wTnh ofa god. Thc moresomclhing
Is invisiblc, the morc il yields IO whal's alicn.
(I .. :o'n. ..I)
'39
Heideger's commentary: "The sight of Ihe sky-this is what is familiar
to m2n. And what is th21? Everything thai shimmers and blooms in Ihe
sky 2nd thus under the sky and thus on c;mh, everylhing that sounds
and is fgrant. riseand comcs-but ase"erything that go and stum
bles, moans and falls silent, pales and darkens. InlO Ihis. which is inli
mate to m2 but alien 10 the god. ,he unknown impartS himself, in order
10 remain guarded within i, as the unknown ("dichtcrisch wohnel def
Mensch . . . ," 200; Hofstadler, .. . . . Poelically Man Dwells . . . ," 225).
'4. (Heidegger, " . . . dichterisch wohnel der Mensch + + " 200; Hof
stadler, . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . } lls.-Trans.l
15. Hcidcgger. " . . . dichtcrisch wohnct der Mensch + " 1.00-201;
Hofsladter, . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ," 15-26.
16. See Jen-Luc Marion's reading of the poem in L',u rt f d' utancc
(Paris: Grasset, 1978).
17. [SW 2.I' 372; Hamburger, Hifrin, 261.-Trans.]
18. IGWI: 163; Hamburger, Ofm, II}.-Trans.]
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M E R I D I A N
Crossing Aesthetics
Deborah Esch, In tlu Ewnt: RtadingJoural, Rtadillg rhtory
Winfried Menninghaus, In lair ofNOllfr: Kant andBlutbtard
Giorgio Agambcn. ThrMan Without Colltmt
Giorgio Agamben. TitEndoftlPOln: Esays ill POlliN
Thcodor W. Adoro, SoundFigum
Louis M:rin. Sublmr POUS ;I
Philippe Lacoue-ubanhe, POllrylU Exptrimrt
J;cques Derrida, R` uwnooPchoa1lis
Ernst Bloh, UttrarE
Marc Fromem-Meurice. That Is to Sy: Htidtg "i POltiN
Francis ronge, Soap
Philippe ucoue-ubarthe, Typoaph: Mimrsis. Philsoph. P/itiN
GiorgioAgambcn, Homo SC": Soll igl Powr /llldBrUf
Emmanuel Levinas, OfGoWho Conus to Mind
Bernard Stiegler. Trd",ics alld7i/lt, /: 'J FIlI lt ofEpimrrhrus
Werner Hamacher, plrom-Rradillg;1 !Itrl
Serge Leclaire, PSJhoa1l1Iyillg: 0" fht On"oftht Unc01sciomalldtht
ltartirt ofthr Lrllrr
Serge u. "Llaire, A ChilI &ingKilOn PrimarNaTwismalldI"
fAat/' Driv
Sigmund Freud, Writinfl on AnIndLitmturr
Cornelius CaslOriadis, Worin Frmmt: W,,'tinfl on Politics. &Kin].
Pl ,u,lis. l"dIh Imagination
Thomas Keenan, Fabln ofRomibilir: Abfatio,alldPrrdimmmt
in tihiaImdPoltics
Emmanuel Lcvinas. ProptrNalltl
Alexander Garda DUumann. At OdwithAIDS: ThinkilgIIlId
TalkingAboul I VinlJ
Maurice BI:lchot, Frimdship
Jean-Lue Nancy, Th M
Massimo Caeciari, Posthumous Prpk: Vmnaat tht 7i"nilgPoint
David E. Wdlbcry. TnSpulr Mommt: GonlniErlLyri r andt
&inninfl of&manticism
Edmond Jabes, 71n Littk Book ofUtdSubvr sion
Hans-Jost Frey, Srudinin Ponic Disur: Mallnnl, &udlirr.
Rimbaud Hillt
Pierre Bourdicu, Th RuiofArt: Gmrsi s alld Sructurr of,IN
Litrl r F
Nicolas Abraham. RhJlbms: 01 lIN Wrk, T,rll"uioll, IIl1d
I'chOll'"lysis
Jac(lucS Dcrri<l.. 01 th N{lm
DaVid Wills, Prost/mi s
Maurice Blanchet, "N WorkofFirr
Jacques Dcrrida, Poi/ts . . . : IIlnl't(ls, 1974-1994
J. Hillis Miller. Topoapbin
Philippe Lacouc-Labanhc. MusicaFil'ta(Fi gumofUr)
Jacques Derrida. Apria
Emmanuel Levinas, Outid th Subjt
Jean-Frantois Lyotr, Lmon on IhAllalytil ofthSub/mr
Peter Fenves, HChatttrH: Lmtguagralld Hi storill Kirrkttard
Jean-Luc Nancy, TINEptrimtofFrrrdm
Jean-Joseph Coux, Ordip'. PhiiosoplNr
Haun Saussy, "IN?rob/m ofI ChinnrAm/mil
Jean-Luc Nancy, 71n Birth to Prrsmrt