MERID I A N

Cross;'lg Aesthetics

Werner Hamacher
& David E. Wellbcry
Edito1"f

POETRY AS
EXPERIENCE

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

Translated by
Andrea Tarnowski

Stanford
U"jwniry

fun

Sta llford

California
1999

Contents

Porlry dJ &pmrllU

A Nou 01/ Ciltlrioll

was originally published in French in [986

undN [he tide La pohir rI1mmr rxphirllu

@1986byChrinian Bourgois Editeu r.
i\s$is[~nce

for the translation was provided by Ihe

French Minisrry of Culture.
SI~nford

Univeniry Pr=;
Stanford, Californ ia

Chm by [he Bo.Jrd of Trusll'eS

ofJhe Leland Stanford Ju nior University
I'rim<"d in [he Uni[cd SEales of America
C[P

d~ta al)pc~ r

at [he end of [he book

"

PART I: TWO P O E/l,t S BY PAUL CE LAN

PART II: REMEMBER ING DATES

39

, Catasu ophe

4'

, Prayer

7'

3 Sublime

87

4 H agiography

9'

5 The Power of Naming

95

6 Pain

98

7 Ecstasy

' 0'

8 Vertigo

' 04

9 Blindness

.06

9904 345

COllums

viii

10

Lird

.07

II

Sky

'"

/2

The Unforgivable

Not~

A Note on C itation

"7

WOrks Ciud

The abbn.'Viation GW designates Paul Celan's Gnammrlu Werke;

SW designatcs Friedrich Holderli n's Siimrliche Werkt'.

"

POETRY AS
EXPERIENCE

PART

ON E

Two Poem, by Palll Celan

ExlUond an!
No. BUI accollllUony an imo )'Our own unique
place or no !'SCIpe. And ~ you rsdrfra:.

MOIne McridianM,

Here are rwo poems by Paul Cclan:

TOSINGEN, JANNER

Zur Blindheil ubc rredete Augen.

Ihre-~ei n

Ratsel ist Reinemsprungencs"- , ihre

Erinnerung an
schwimmende Holderiimurme, mowenumschwirn:.
Besuehe enrunkener Schreiner bei
diesen
tauchenden Wonen:
Kame,
kame ein Mensch.
kame tin Mensch Iur Welt, heme, mit
dem Lichtban de r
Patriarchen: er durfle.
sprach er von diese r
Zeil, er
durfle

7;1'0 Poml! by POIII C~"",

fa llen und lallen.

immc r-, immcr-

Ilur

J;II ZU .

(~ Pallaksch, PaJJ aksch. ~)

TOB INCIlN, J A NUARY

Eyes l:llked imo

blindness.
Thei r- "an cnigm:l is
the purely
originaled"-, [heir
memory of
Holderli n lowers aRoal, circled
by whirring gulls.
Visits of drowned joiners 10
these
submerging words:

should :l man,
should a man come: into the world, today, wi,h
[he: shining ~2fd of the
patriarchs: he could,
jfhc spoke of this
lime, he
could
only babble and babble
over, over
againagain .
J>allaksh .ft)~

TOD T NAU8RC

Arni ka, Augemrost, der

Trunk aus dem Bmnnen mit dem
Su:rnwlirfcl dt:luf,
in (ler
Hii IlC,

die in <las Such

-wessell Namen nahms auf
vor dem mcincn?die in dies Such
gcschricbcnc Zcilc von
einer Hoffnung, helUe,
auf cines Dcnkenden
kommendcs
Won
im Hcncn.
Waldwascn. un cingccbnct,

O rchis und Orchis. einzdn,

Krudcs, spau~r, illl Fahren,
dcud ich,
def uns f:ihrt , def Mensch,
der's mil anhart,

die halb-

Should,

(" Pallaksh.

Two Pomu by Palll U"1Il

bcschriuc:nc:n Knl.ippelp&dc im Hochmoor,

Feuchtcs.

viel.
TO DTN AU8 RG

Arnica, eyebright, the

draft fro m t he well with the
starred die above it,
in the
hut ,
the line
- whose name did the book
register befo re mi ne?the li ne inscri bed
in that book abom
a hope, today.
of a thinking man's

Ji4t(} PomlS by Paul C~km

COnlins

wo rd
in the hc:l.fI,

woodland sw:a.rd, unlevelled,

orchid and orchid, single.
coa rse stufT, l:ucr, clear
In

passing,

he who drives us, the man,

who listens in,

the halftrodden wretched

tracks through the high moors.

dampness,

much.'
These rwo poems are well known; each of them has been translated into French at least rwice. The fim, which is pan of the Ni~
mandsrou collection (1963), was initially translated by Andr~ du
Bouche! (appearing in L'Ephtmm7. and then in Smru, published
by Mercure de France in (971) before figuri ng in the completc ed itio n of Ln T()U tk ~rsoml~, edited by Martine Broda (I.e Nouveau
Com merce, 1979). The second. issued o n its own in 1968 and then
republished in LichrzWflllg in July '970, two or duet months after
Celan's death. was translated by Jean Daive as early as 1970, and
then , several years latcr, by And re du Boucher (Po~mt:J d~ Palll
C~/a l1, C livages, 1978). O rher published vcrsions of these poems
may ex is t .~
II is obvious that the tidcs of bmh arc placcs: Tlibingen, Todtnauberg. The poems seem, in each case, to commemorate a visi !.
BlIt it is also obvious that these place names can additionally, even
primarily, be names of JX:ople. Whatever trope we usc, the indications. Ihe quotations, the allusions are all perfectly clear; and in any
case. we already know that Tlibingen is H 6JderJi n. and Todt nauberg, Heideggcr. I don't imagine it would be very useful to
stress the reasons that prompt us today (hmtr. each poem includes

Two Pomu by Paul C~/1t1l

the word) 10 associate the two poems. Fo r everyone who is. as we

say. "concerned about our times" and ~ mind ful of history~ (Europt.'an history), the two names, HQ,lderl in and Heidcgger, arc now
indissolubly linked. T hey ~ice to...wbaLis..aLstake in our era
(dit:ur ait). A world age-perhaps the wo rld's old age-is appr03ching its end, for we are reaching a completion , closing the
ci rcle of what the philosoph ical West has called. since Grecian
times and in multiple ways, "knowledge. ~ T hat is, U(/me. What has
not bttn deployed. what has been fo rgon cn o r rejected in the
midst of this completion- and no doubt from the very beginning-must now dear itself a path to a possible future. let us agltt
to say [hat this pertains. as Heidegger says himself, to the "task of
thought." Such thought must re- inaugurate history. reopen the
possibil iry of a world, and pave the way fo r the im probable, un/fo reseeable advent of a god. Only this might "save" us. For this I
task. art (again. uchlle). and in art. poetry. are perhaps able to provide some signs. At least. that is the hope, fragile. tenuo us. and
meager as it is.
While it may nm be useful to suess. it is no doubt helpful at
least to remark the following:
I. ~inkiog_oLHistory. is..csse mial l~ German.
It is nOt exclusively so, but since [he end of the eighteenth century.
Germans have brought it a dimension never attained before or elsewhere; o ne reason for this, among others, is that the question of
, he rcladon berween Modern and Ancient, and of the possibiliry
of uniqueness o r idemiry for a whole people. has never been so
much a qll~stioll as it has been in Germany. T hat is. first and foremost. a q uest ion for the "nation"- [he people-and in the langU3ge, a latecomer to the world after the sumptuous. "re n~ nt~
display of European unin ity. German has never ceased asp lTln ~,
o n pretense of its strange similarity 10 Greek (the "language of O ri gin"). to the unique relation it has believed it could establish to
everything most authemically Greek about Greece.
2 . Paul Celan (Ancel) was born in Czernowirl, Bu kovina. of
German Jewish parents. Whatever the fine of Bukovina in the years
that marked the end of Cclan's adolescence {he was born in

1;00 PomlJ by Paul Celnn

192.0)- il was, sliccessively, annexed by the U.S.S. R. in 1940, oc

cupied by Germany and Romania in 1941, and reconquered by the

Red Army in 194J-Celan was not jUst a l the extreme fringes of

Milu/l'/Iropa; he was of German binh, born into that language. In
a mit: :Uld understandably forgonen sense, his nl1tio""liry was Ger
man. Th is did nO( in any way preclude his having a completely diffcrclH origin, or to be more precise, a completely different herimge.
Thus, his language always remained that of the Other, an Other
language without an "olher language," previously rather than laterally acquirf, agai nst which to measure itsdf. All OIher languages
were necessarily lateral for Celan; he was a gre.:.l.1 translator.
J. Paul Celan knew, as everything he wrote attests (and first and

foremost, his acceptance of German as his working language), that

today ("~ut~) it is with Germany that we must clarifY things. 5 Not
o nly because Cdan suffered as the victim of German y's " HclJ en i c.~
"Hyperborean" utopia, but because he knew it was impossible 10
el ude the question that the m opia's atrocity had transformed into
an an swer, a "solution." He embodied an exu eme, eternaJl y insol.
uble paradox in Germany as one o f the few people, aJmost the only
person , to have borne wi tness ro the truth of the question that remains, as ever: (But) who are we (still, IOday, hmu)?
4 The extermination gave rise, in itS impossible possibility, in
itS immense and intolerable banality, to the postAuschwio. era (i n
Adorno's sense). Celan said: " Death is a master who comes from
Germany. "6 It is the impossible possibility, the immense and intol.
crable banality of our time, of this time (diNa ait). It is always
easy to mock ~distress," bm we arc its contemporaries; we arc at
the endpoint of what Nom, ratio and Logos, still today (hellu) the
ffamcwOrk for what we are, can not have tailed to show: that mur.
de~ is th~ fi rs t thing to COUnt on , and eliminatio n the surest means
of Identification. Today, everywhere, against this black but "enlighten ed~ backgrou nd , remai ning reality is disappearing in the
mire of a "globalized" world . Nothing, nOI even the most obvious
phenomena, nOI even the purest, most wrenching love, can escape
th is era's ~ h:ldow: a cancer of the subject, whether in the ego or in
the masses. To deny this on pretcxt of avoiding the pull of pathos is

Two Pomu by Paul ulan

behave like a sleepwalker. To transform it into pathos, so as 10

be able "stiW 10 produce art (.sentiment, etc,), is u nacceptable.
I want to ask the most brutal quest io n possible, at rhe risk of
being obnoxious: Was Celan able to situate not h imself, bu t us
v i s- ~-v i s " it"? Was poetry still able to? If so, wh ich poetry, and
what , in fact , of poetry? Mine is a distant way (distant now by
many degrees, heavily layered over th e very man who first asked)
of repeating Holderlin's question: WOZfl Dichurf What for. indeed?

{O

Here is how the twO poems I believe carry all [he weight of this
q uestion have been tra nslated into French:
TQ8INGI!N, J ANV I ER

(And" du Boudm)
A c6:itt' meme
mucs, pupillcs.
Leur-'cnigme cd a,
qui cs[ pur
jaiUissc:mem'-, leur
me!moirt de
[ours Holderlin nage;mt, d'un baltemem de moueefes
scrties.

Visitcs de menuisiers engloutis par

lelles
paroles plongcam:
S'il venail,
venait un homme.
homme venait au monde, aujourd'hui avec
da n e! et barhe des
patriarc.hes: illui faudrail,
dut-il parler de tdle
e!poque, illui fa udrait
babiller uniquemem. babiller
toujours el loujours babiller iller.

CPalb.ksch.

Pallaksch. ~)

Till{)

'0

Po~ms

by Palll Cr/1I11

Two Iwm! by Palll C,.iall

(Mflr/illt' Broda)

rite dans cc livre

DI.'S )"<:U;II: $Ous les paroles

1a lignc,

uvcugl6 .

aujourd'hui, J 'unc mente:

de qui pense
parole il, ve nir
au coeur,

Lcur-~enign1e

cc qui nail
de source pur~-, leur
souvenir de
[Ours H olderlin nageam, tournoyecs
de mouC:ltcs.

Visites de menuisiers noyes

'"

de 13 vcro cur, plus tard , en voyage.

distincte,
qui now conduit , I'homme,
qui, ~ eela, lend l'oreille,

mots qui plongent:

S'il

de la mousse des bois, non aplanie,

orchis ct o rchis. cbirscmc.

YC ll ait,

la barbc de dane

Ics chemins
de rondins ~ demi
parcourw dans la fange,

des pat riarches: it devrail,

de I'humide,

vc nait un homme,
vcnait un homrnc au monde, aujourd'hui, avec

s'i1 pariah de: cc

temps, iI

u ..

devrait

begayc:r sculemcm. begaycr

fOutoulOujours

bCgaycr.
r PaJJaksch. Paliaksch.

(jl'flfl Dair~)

Arnika, ccm2ur&:, [a
boisson du puil.S avec, au--<!.essus.
danslc
refuge.
ecrit c dans Ie livre
IIIe! nom ponair-it
aV:l.1l1 Ie rni cn?).

Arnika, lum inel, cene

gorg~ du pUilS au
cube etoile plus h3U1 du de,

TODTNAUBERG

l'asHc.dt'.

(Andr! du Boudm)

dans la
hune,
I~ ,

dans un livre

- Ics noms, de qui, rdeva.

avant Ie mien?la. dans un livre,
lignes qui inscrivent
une 3I1ent(, aujourd' hui.
de qui m&liteta (~
venir, inccssammcll1 veni r)
un mot
du coeur

"

IiI)() Poems by Paui Celan

hUlIlus

des bois, jamais aplani,

orchis, orchis,
un ique,
chose crue, plus [ard, chemin faisam,
clai re,
qui nous voitura,
I'homme,
lui-meme a son 6.::oute,
it moitie

fraye Ie layon de rondins

la-haut dans Ie marais,
humide,
OU I.

(At rhe end of Andre du Bouchet's slim volume, we read the following note: '''Todtnaubcrg' was translated using the initial version
of the poem, dated 'Frankfurt am Main, 2 August 1967.' From a
word-for-word translation suggested by Paul Celan , I have kept the
French 'qui nous voitura' fo r 'der uns fahrt .' A.d.B.")
I am nor juxtaposing these rranslations here in order to compare
or commem on them. It is nor my inrenrion [Q "cri tique" them. At
most, I thi nk it necessary [Q remark that what we might call rhe
uMallarmean" style of Andre du Bouchet's n anslarions, their effete
or precious quali ty, does not do justice [Q the lapidary hardness,
the abruptness oflanguage as handled by Celano O r mher, the language that held him, ran through him . Especially in his late work,
prosody and synrax do violence [Q language: they chop, dislocate.
truncate or Cut it. Something in this certainly bears comparison [Q
what occurs in Holderlin's last, "paratactic" efforts. as Adorno calls
them: condensat ion and juxtaposition, a strangling of language.
But no lexical "refinemelll ," or very little; even when he Opts for a
SOrt or ~s u rreal " handling of metaphor or "image," he does not depart from essentially simple, naked language. For exa mple, the
"such" ( It''I~) used twice as a demonstrative in the "Mallarmean"

Two Ponm by Paui C~lan

'3

translation of "Tubingen, January" is a turn of phrase totally foreign [Q Celan's style. Even more so the "A ccc i[t~ mcme I mue,
pupiJles" CTo blindness itsel f I moved , pupils") that begins the
same poem in what is indeed the most obscure way possible. But I
do not wish to rcopen rhe polemic initiated a decade or so ago by
Meschonn ic.'
No, though I recall these rranslations, and though I will even, in
turn , try my hand at translating, I do not wish to play at comparison- a game oflimited interest. Nor do I cite them as an obligatory preamble to commentary. I give the translations only so we
can see where we stand. I believe these poems to be completely untranslatable, includ ing within their own language, and indeed, for
this reason, invulnerable to com mentary. T hey lucmarily escape
imerpretation; they forbid it. One could even say they are written
to fo rbid it. This is why the sole question carrying them, as it carried all Celan's poetry, is that of meaning, the possibility of meaning. A transcendental question, one might say. wh ich does to some
extent inscribe Celan in Holderlin's lineage or wake: rhat of "poetry's poetry" (without, of course, the least concession to any SO rt of
"formalism") . And a question that inevitably takes away, as Heidegger fo und with both H olderlin and TrakI , all fo rms of hermeneutie power, even at one remove: fo r example, envisioning a "hermeneutics of hermeneurics." For in any case, sooner or later one
finds oneself back at "wanting to say nothing," which exceeds (or j..falls shorr of) all "wanting to say," all intention of signifYing, since
it is always caughr in advance in an archetypal double bind of the
"Don't read me" sort; in this instance, something like, "Don't belit.'"Ve in meaning anymore." Since Rimbaud's time, ler's say, this has
always amounred to saying "Believe m~, don't believe in meaning
anymore, " wh ich at once raises and demotes, pathetically, risibly,
or fraudu lently, the "I" that thus projects itself to (and from) the
fUllction of incarnati ng meaning.
The question I ask myself is indeed that of the subject, that cancer of the subject, both the ego's and the masses'. Because it is fi rst
the question of whoever today (hntte) might speak a language other
than the subject's, and attest or respond to the unprecedented ig-

'4

T/uo

P()~ms

by Pall! C~lall

nominy thac the "age of the subjed' rendered itself-and remains- guilty of. At least since Schlegel and Hegel, it is also, indissocial>ly. the question of rhe lyric: is lyric a "subjective" genre?
In S UIll , it is the question of the banished singularity of rhe subject
or. wh:u amoun ts to the sa me thing, rhe queslion of idiom, of
"pure idiom," if that can exisr. Is it possible, and necessary. ro
wrench oneself Oll( of the language of the age? To say what? Or
rather, to speak what?
Such a question, as you perceive- and here 1 am barely shifting
angles-is no different from that of rhe relation between "poetry
and thought," Dichtm IIlId Denkm, a question indeed speci fi cally
asked in German. What is a work of poetry that. forswea ring the
repetition of the disastrous, deadly, already-said, makes itself absolutely singular? What should we th ink of poetry (o r what of
thought is left in poetry) thar must refuse, sometimes wi th great
~tu~~rnness, (O.sign.iff.? Or, simply, what is a poem ~hose "cod109 IS such that If fo ds 10 advance all arremprs to decipher it?
I have been aski ng myself this question, which I gram is nai"ve,
for a long rime, and especially since reading Peter Szondi's analysis
of"Ou liegst ... ,"8 the poem on Berlin written in 1967 and published in SclmfNlrt in 1971; it is, along with twO essays by B!anchor
and by Uvinas published in 1972 in the &IJU~ d~s b~11n kttm ("Le
demier a parler" and "Dc I'etre a l'autre"9), amo ng the very few illuminating commemaries on Celan. But whereas Blanchor's and
LCvinas's readings remain "gnomic," to recall Adorno's objection to
Heidegger's illlerprctation ofHoldcri in lO-that is, they found their
arguments on phrases lifted from Cclan's poems (his verse contains
many such isolatable bits, as does all "thinking poetry")-Szondi's
analysis is (0 my knowledge rhe on ly one il to completely d ecipher
a poem, d own to irs most resistant opacities, because jt is rhe only
one to know what "material" gave rise to the work: the circumstances remembered, the places traveled to, the words exchanged,
the siglHS glimpsed or contemplated, and so on. Szondi SCOuts OUt
the least allusion, the slightest evocation. The result is a translation
in which almost nothing is left over; almost, because we must srill
explain, beyond Szondi's delight ar having been present in the right

Two

POnlU

by Palll Ctlnll

"

place at the right time, a poetry based o n the exploitation of such

"singularity," and thus (i.e., in this respect) forever inaccessible to
those who did not initially witness what the poetry transformed
into a very laconic "Story" or a very allusive "cvocatio n."
The question I have called that of idiom is therefore more exactly rhat of singulariry. We must avoid confusing th is with anmher, relatively secondary or derivative question, that of the "readable" and the "un readable." My question asks not just abo u t the
"texr," but about the singu lar txperimu comi ng inro w riti ng; it
asks if, being singular, experience can be written, or iffrom the mo- \
ment of writing its very singularir: .is not forever lost an~ b~rne
away in one way or another, at o n glll or en route to destl natlon,
by the very fact of language. This could be d ue to language's impossible inrransitiviry, or to the desire for meaning, fo r universality, that animates voices divided by the constrain t of a language
that is itself, in turn, only o ne of many. Is there, can there be, a sj n~
gular experience? A silen t experience, absolutely untouched by lan~
guage, unprompted by even the most slightly articulated discourse?
If, impossibly, we can say ~yes," if singu larity exists or subsists de~
spi te all odds (and beyond all empi rical consid erations, the prese nce of a witness such as Peter Szondi, for example, or of someone
else who knows), can language possibly take o n its burden? And
would idiom su ffice for the purpose-idiom of course different
fro m the facile "crypting" or refusal to reveal one's point so terribly endemic to the "modern"? These questions pose neither the
problem of solipsism nor that of autism, but very probably that of
solitude, wh ich Celan experienced [Q what we must justly call the
utmost d egree.

J retead "Tubingen, Jan uary" (a poem with an old ~fashioned

date, Jiilm~r for jallllar, as if in all usion to H olderli n's di sco n cert ~
ing manner of da ti ng poems during h is "mad ~ period); J reread it
as J read it, as I understand it, as J th us can nor but translate it.
This effort is pardy unnecessary because of Marrine Broda's beauriful French translation, w h ich to my mind can hardly be improved upon , and from which I will at least borrow the u nsurpas-

\
16

Ttl/O

Pomu by Paul C~lrm

sable phr.uc ~wll(:ded with gulls" rrour I noy~ de moucttes"),12

But I cannol help translating here. So I reru m , with emendations,
to a rendering I an empted a few years ago whi le working on
Holdcrlin:
T O BINCEN, J ANV I ER

Sous un

ROl

avcugl6.

d'cloquence

Jt'S yeux.

Uur- "unc

cnigme est Je

pur jaillt - , [cur

mcmoi rc:dc
tOurs H oldcrl in nagcam, IOUfnoy~s de moucttes.
Visites de men uisiers submerges sous

co,
paroles plongeam :
Vie ndrait,
vicndrait un homme
vicndrait un homme au monde, aujourd'hui.:lV
la barbc de [umiere des Pauiarches: il n'aurait,
parlerait-il de cc
tcmps, il
n'aurai!

qu'a bCgaycr. bCgayer

sans sans
sans cesse.

(" Pallaksch. PalJaksch. ~)

TOOINCEN, JANUARY

Beneath a Row of eloquence

blinded. the eyes.

Thcir-"an
cnigma is the
pure Sprung forth~- , their
memory of

Two Pomu by PauL C~lnll

17

H olderl in lowers swimming,

wheeled wi th gulls.
Jo incrs' visits submcrged bene:lth

"""
d iving words:
If thcre C:;Lme
if mcre C:;Lmc a man
if the rc C:;Lmc a man inlO Ihc world today, wi,h
thc beard oflighl of thc
Pat riarchs: he would net=d only.
if he spokc of Ihis
time, hc wo uld net=d o nly
10 stuller, stuncr
without, witho ut
wilhom cease.
("Pallaks h.

Pallaksh. ~)13

What these few, barely phrased phrases say. in their extenuated.

infirm discourse. stuttering on the edge of silence or the incomprehensible (gibberish, idiomatic language: uPallaksh"), is not a
"srory"; they do nor recount anYlhing. and most certainly not a
visit to the HJJldnlillturm in Tubingen. They undoubtedly mean
something; a "message," as it were, is del ivered. They present, in
any case. an intelligible unerance: if a man, a Jewish man-a Sage,
a Prophet, or one of the Righteous, "with I the beard of light of I
the Pauiarchs,"-wanted today to speak fon h about the age as
Holderlin did in his time, he would be condemned to stammer, in
the manner, let us say, of Beckett's "mclaphysical tramps. " He
would sink into aphasia (or "pure idiom"), as we are told Holdcrlin
did; in any case, Holderl in's ~ madnc.ss" came to define the aphasic
myth:
MNEMOSVNE ( II )

Ein Zcichen sind wir, deutungs los

SchmerLlos sind wir und haben F.iSt
Die Sprache in der Frtmdc verloren, '

18

7illo Poems by Palll ulan

1\ sign we :HC, meaningless

Pai nl CS11 we are and ha\'c nearly

Losl our language in foreign places.

More pre<:isely, we might $,;Iy thaI to speak the age, it would be

e nough :or such a rna," to stammer-stun cr; the age belo ngs 10
srammcnng. to stuUcn ng. Or rather, stutlcring is th(' o nly " language" o,r the age. The end o f mean ing- hiccuping, hailing.
Yct {his message comes second in the poem; it is a lin le like thc
"lesson" or the "moral" of a classic fable; itS presence makes cxplicil ,
wilhi n though slightly detached from the poem (see the colon 3 1
the end of the second stanza), what the poem says before- what it
says (lSa poem. It is a translation . The idiomatic poem contains its
own translatio n, which is a justification of the idiomalic. Or 31
least, we can form ulate it this way; the problem then becomes
knowing what it explicitly translates.
I propose to call what it translates "experience," provided that we
both .undemand the word in its strict sense-the Lati n tx-pttriri, a
~ro~ lng thro ugh da nger- and especially that we avoid associati ng
II wuh what is "lived," the stuff of anecd otes. Erfolmmg, then,
rather than E,kbniJ. I ) I say "experience" because what the poem
"springs forth" from here- the memory of bedazzlement, which is
also the pure dizziness of memory-is precisely that which d id nm
take place. d id not happen or occur during the singular cvent that
the ~m relates to without relating: the visit, after so many others since the joiner Zim me r's time. to the tOwcr on rhe Neckar
":h e~e Holderlin lived witho ut livi ng for the last thirty-six years of
h IS life - half of his lifc. A visit in memory of that experience,
wh ich is also in the non-form of pure non-cvcnt.
I shall try to explai n. \Vhat the poem ind icates and shows what
it movcs toward , is irs so u rce. A poem is always ~en route,~ wun_
dcrway. " as "'~h e Merid ian" recalls. 16 Thc path the poe m S<.'"Cks to
?pen up here IS.that of its own source. And making its way thus to
ItS own so~rce, It seeks to reach the gcneral source of poetry. It says,
tI ~~n, or tfl C~ 10 say. the "springing forth" of the poem in its possibility, that IS. in its "cnigma. " "An en igma is the pure sprung

Two POttms by Pnul (Linn

19

fo rth ;"17 so speaks thc first verse to the fou rth stall7.a of the hymn
''The Rhine," wh ich in a way is the source here. Holderlin adds:
" Even I T he song may hardly reveal it. " But if the poem says o r
trics to say the source in th is manner, it says it as inaccessible, o r
in any case unrevealed "cven [by] the song," because in p!ace of the
source, and in a way which is itself en igmatic, there is d i7.ziness, the
instant of blindness or bIazziement before the sparkling waters of
the Neckar, the fragmenting glitter. the image of the visi tors swallowed up. Or because therc is also the stark remind er (hat precisely
ill this piau, it was revealed 10 so many visitO rs that the source (of
the poem , rhe song) had dried up. And that prcviously it had indeed been an enigma that sprang fOrl h.
Dizziness can co me upo n o ne; it d oes not simply occur. oTl
rather, in it, nothi ng occurs. It is the pure suspension of occurrence: a caesura or a syncope. T his is what "drawing a b l a nk~
means. 'What is suspended, arrested, ri pping suddenly intO stra ngeness, is the presence of the present (rhe being-present of the present). And what then occurs without occurring (for ir is by definilion what cannot occur) is -without being- nothi ngness, [he
"nothing of being" (ntt-rns). Di7.zines.s is an txpmt'nct' o f nothingness, of what is, as H eidegger says, "properl y" no n-occurrence,
nothingness. Noth ing in it is "lived," as in all experience. because
all experience is the experience of nothingness: the experience 0[;
diuiness here, as much as the anguish Heidegger d escribes, or as
much as laughter in Bataille. O r the lightn ing recognitio n oflove.
As much as all the infin itely paradoxical, " impossible" experiences
of death, of disappearance in the p resent. How poignant and d ifficult to think that Celan chose his own d eath (the most fin ite infinite choice). throwing h imself into the waters of the Seine.
10 say this agai n in another way: there is no "poetic experience"
in the sense of a "lived moment" or a poetic "state. " If such a thi ng
exists, o r thinks it does- fo r afte r all it is the power, o r impotence,
of lirer.lfufC to believe and make others believe this -it can not give
rise to a poem. To a story, ycs, or to discourse, whether in verse or
p rose. To "literature," perhaps, at least in the sense we understand
il IOday. But not to a poem. A poem has noth ing to recount, noth-

Tiw Poom by Pnul c~!tw

Tioo Poems by Paul C~"III

ing to say; what it rCCO Ull lS and says is that from which it wrenches
away as a poem. If we speak of "poetic emotion," we must think
of its cognate bnoi,I8 whose etymology indicne5 the absence o r de-privadon of strength. "A une passante" is nor rhe nostalgic story of
an cncoumer, bUi the entreaty (hat arises from collapse, the pure
echo of such a n imoi, a song o r a prayer. Benjamin hardly dared
S.1Y. though he knew pcrfecrly well, that this is perhaps (2nd I stress
the "perhaps") what ProUSt did not undersrand in understanding

never noth ing, it is lIo th;'Ig; it can as well be pitiable o r totally

without grandeur. terrifying o r overwhelmi ngly joyous.
We a re tOld that whe n H olderlin went "mad," he constantly
repeated, " Nothing is happening to me, nothing is happening
to me."

'0

Baudelai re, and pro bably also what rhe overly nostalgic Baudelaire
sometimes did not undersrand in understanding himself (though
he did write the prose poems, which redeem all).I'
BUI the poem's "wa nrin g~not. to.say" does not want not to say.
A poem wams to saYi indeed , it is nothi ng but pu re wanting- tosay. But pure wanti ng-to-say nothing, nmhingness, that against
which and th rough which there is presence, what is. And because
nothingness is inaccessible to wanting, the poem's wanting collapses as such (a poem is always involunrary, like anguish, love, and
even self-chosen death); then nothing lets itself be said , the thing
itSelf, and letS itself be said in and by the man who goes to it despite himself, receives it as what cannm be received, and submits
to it. He accepts it. trembling that it should refusc; such a strange,
Aeeting, elusive "being" as m e meaning of what is.
In th e end , if there is no such thi ng as "poetic experience" it is
si mply because experience marks the absence of what is "lived ."
This is why, stricd y speaking, we can talk of a poetic aiJullu, assuming existence is what at times PUtS hol~ in life, rending it to
PUt us beside ourselves. It is also why, given that existence is furti ve
and discontinuous, poems are rare and necessarily brief, even when
they expand to try to stay the loss o r deny the evanescence of what
compelled them into being. Further. this is why there is no thing
necessa rily grandiose about the poetic, a nd why it is generally
wrong to confuse poetry with celebration ; one ca n find , in the
most extreme triviality, in insigni fi cance, perhaps even in fri voli ty
(where Mallarm e occasionally lost himself), pure, neve r-pure
strangeness: the gift ofnotbing o r pT~s~m ofllorhillg comparable to
the linle token one describes. saying: " Jr's nothing." Indeed. it is

"

The dimness of existence is what the poem "Tubingen, January"

says. It says it inasmuch as it says itselfas a poem. inasmuch as it
says what arose from, o r remains of, the non-occurred in the singular event it commemorates. " In_occurrence" is what wrenches the ""
event from its singularity, so that at the height of singularity. singularity itSelf vanishes and saying suddenly appears-the poem is possible. Singba," Rm: a singable remainder, as Cclan says elsewhere.20
This is why the poem commemorates. Its experience is an experience of m emory. The poem speaks of Erhmertmg, but also secretly calls upon the Andmkm of H olderli n's poem o n Bordeaux,
and the Gediichtnis where H 61de rlin fo und Mnemosyne's resonance. The poem was not born in the moment of the Hjjld~Tlill
tIInll visit. Properly speaking, it was not born in any moment. Not
o nly because dizziness or bedazzlement by defi nitio n never constitutes a moment. bur becausc what brings o n the dizziness and recalls me waters of the Neckar is not those waters. bur another river:
the H olderlin ian river itsclf. A double meaning here: first me river.
o r rivers. lhat Holderlin sings (the Rhine, the Ister. the source of
the Danube, etc.). and then the river of H olderlin's poetry. Or, as
I've said. the "Rood of eloquence. n
In "Tubingen, January." the eyes are not in fact blinded; no bedazzlement rakes place. They a re Zltr BlilldJuit jiba"du~, persuaded to blindness. BlIt to translate jib~"tdm by "persuade," or
"co nvince," does not convey the full sense of jiher and all it contains as a signifier of overflow. To be iiber"det- I take this o n
Michel D e ursch's autho rity-is si mply "to be taken in ," "run eircles around ," overwhelmed by a tide of eloquence. Less "taken for
a ride" than "submerged ," "drowned ," o r, mOSt accurately, " to be
had." The eyes-the eyes that see H olderlin's tower, the waters of
the Neckar, the wheeling gulls-are bli nded by a Rood of words

21

Two Pom-u by Palll C~lIln

or eloquence; the eyes are taken in, and the memory of the river
poem "The Rhine" recalls and calls forth the memory of the dizzi.
ness, the engulfing bedazzlement: that is, as with all "involuntary
memory. ~ the memory of "what was neither purposely nor con.
sciously 'lived ' by the subject," as Benjamin perfectly demonslr:lIcd for Baudelaire using Freud's argument agai nst Ikrgson. 21
Thus dizziness here indicates the in-occum:nce of which memory-and not merely recollection-is the paradoxical restitution.
T he dizziness is memory because all real memory is veniginous,
offering the very atopia of existence. what takes plaa: without taking place; giving a gift that forces the poem into thanking. into ecstasy. This is why the poem is obliged into thoughl: "To think and
thank," says the Bremen speech. "dmkm Iwd dankm. have the
same root in our language. If we follow it [0 g~dmkm. ~i"g~dmk
s~i1l. A"denktn and Audlle"t we enter the semantic fields of mem.
ory and devotion. "21
Thus. "TUbingen , January" does nO[ say any state of the psyche.
any lived experience of the subject. any ErI~b1li$. Nor is it- this
fo llows logically-a celebration of Holderlin (it comes closer to
saying how Holderlin disappoints). It is definitely 1Iot a "senti.
mental" poem, whether in Schille r's o r the com mon sense. The
poem says "drowning" in Holderlin's verse. It says it as its "possi.
bility," a possi bility infi nitely and interminably paradoxical, be.
cause it is the possibi li ty of the poem inasmuch as, possible-im.
possible. it says, if not the pure impossibility, then atlcast the scam
possibili ty of poetry.
Here. according to standard procedure, I should begi n my com.
mentary. Bm I have said I will refrain-not to reject commentary
in and of itself, but lx.'Cluse such commentary, which in any case
would be impossible to complete, would require fur toO much in
the present context. Among other things, one would have to read
''The Rhine," return generally [0 the H oJderiinian themaries of {he
rivcr./dcmi.god. and ask what links the entirety of such thematics
to the possibility of poetry (an), the opening of a sacred space (and
the expectation of a god), the appropriation of the own (and the

Two Poems by Paul Celall

2J

birth of a homeland). This would not only require raking H eideggerian commentary inro account- both the one Cclan knew and
the one of which he was ncussarily ignOrantilJ one would still have
to measure, and measure accurately, the myth this commentary
created of H olderlin, tin Die"t" tin Die"hmg, for thought and p0etry within and outside Germany. The extraordinary magnirude of
his task, me immeasurable occurrence he hoped for from poetry,
reduced him to silence, to babbling and stuttering, subject to rhal
harshest constraint of in-occurrence. Subject to its law.
I can only mention all this as the underpin ning ofCelan's poemi
but also, I mUSt immediately add . as that from which, against all
odds, it lifts away, succeeds in lifting. For in the e nd there is a
poemi in the end there is art, as "The Meridian" says, borrowing a
theme from Buchner: Acb, die K,UlJt!
That is why I will limit mysclfhere to examining this "success."
I will ask only this simple question- the question, as it were, of
the si1lgbam- Rest, the singable residue: whar saves this poem from .
wreckage in, and the wreckage of. poetry? How does it happen that .,
in poetry, Out of poetry, all is not lost, that a possibility of articu
lating something still remains, if only in stuttering, if o nly in an
incomprehensible and incommunicable language, an idiolect or id
iom ? (The whole poem, insofar as it succeeds in springing back
from poetic engulfing, is drawn as ifby magnet to the double "Pal
labeh," which, in parentheses, punctuates it definitively, and punc
lUates it thus on H olderlin's ruined words: in this case, a "Swabian"
Greek which evinced, for those who witnessed his reclusion, what
Schelling called the "dilapidation of his mind," and which , along
with (he thirty-odd poems saved fro m this period , attests-no
matter how we m ight propose, like Bertaux, all possible em pirical
decipherings-to the drying up of the poetic source and idiomatic
babbling. Not th at this proh ibirs the poems from remaining poems. Such, precisely, is the enigma.)

A moment ago I said "the wreckage in and of poetry." To be en

gulfed in a flood of poetry means [hat poetry itself sinks, drowns,
that irs own overflow dries in it irs very possibility-a source sub

1"illO Poems by Palll Celtlll

Two Pomls by Palll Celnll

merged in Ihe flood ,hal it brought fonh itself, as Holderlin 100

perhaps w:lOted to say when he spoke of the rivers (hat flow back
. sou rce..Z.
IOward IIlelr

required to "purify" and contain it; o nly th us could they avoid

burning Ihemsclvcs with "heaven's fire, '" or dizzily losing Ihemsclvcs
in enrhusiasm. Hfilderlin's definition of ,ragedy:

[)EK ISTER

... Dcr scheinet abcr fitsl

Rlikwam zu gehen und
!eh mein, er miissc kommen
Von Osten.
Viek'S ware
Zu sagen davon.
Umsonst nichl gehn
1m Troknen die Strome. Abcr wie? Ein Zeichen brauchl (,s ..
... Yet almosl this rh'er seems
To Irdvd backwards and
I think it must come from
The East.
Much could
Be said about this ....
Not for nothing rivers flow
Through dry land. Slit how? A sign is needed ... n
What poetry sinks into, what drowns poetry, is an eloquence.
But we must make no mistake about eloquence; a "saying tOO
much" is of course at issue, but the "100 much" docs nOI mean
o nly abundance or overabundance ("overflow"); ir means, also, or
fi rsl, eXCeSs ("sayi ng 100 much abolll someth ing"). It is nOt Ihe
word that divulges a secret, but rather, the one that transgresses an
interdict.
In Hfilderlinian themacics, such a word is mainly tragic, Ihe
word of dbnmm; for example, Anrigone vying and identifying
with the divine. It is the word of infinite desire, desire of the in-finite 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 E.1St possessed
by Ihe d ivine, that all the formal rigor and sobriety of their an was

"

The presentation of Ihe , ragic reslS primarily on the nemendous

(das Ul1g~h~un)-how Ihe god and man mate and how nalUral force

and man's innermost boundlessly unite in wrath-conceiving of itself; (rests] on rhe boundless union purifying itself through boundless
separadon.16
But according 10 a logic I cannot derail here, i[ is precisely Ihis
word that Westerners, Hesperians-that is, first of all, Germans must find , or rediscover. They who arc naturally sober, o r, as
Hfildcrlin says of Oedipus, the hero with a Western destiny, naturally flt"~oi, lacking a god, without furo r or desire, "wandering beneath the unthin kable." They mUSt rediscover this word, the "sacred pathos," even at [he risk of sinking, of lening themselves go.
Even at the risk of losi ng their innate "clarity of presentation
(Dars/ellrlng)," their sense of proportion-of "neglecting the native," as the Greeks d id in the opposite direction when they instituted the "empire of arr."2S This was Holderlin's folie abroad, in
France, in Greece, according [0 the myth he himself had forged of
his existence (and of rhe Wesl'S fa te): " I can say what Ihey say of
heroes: I have been muck by Apollo. " It was the fate of Oedipus,
blind for having "an eye tOO many." Both were struck in the extremity of their eloquence, in their sacred word ("May the sacred
be my word!"), Iheir "too infinite" interpretation of the oracle or
divine signs. In their "madness. "
Madness is, indeed, Ihe absence of artistic production. In turning away from madness, the G reeks lost themselves in works, in
arriSlic virtuosif)'. If Ihey undergo the trial of madness, Westerners
or moderns risk Ihe inabiliry ro accede ro work, ro artistic sobriety;
and yet in rhis sobriery resides [har which is their own. Proportion
is thus needed, as Holderli n's poems ceaselessly repeal because
Hfilderi in, pressed by madness, knew his poems drew their fragile
possibiliry from this source. Limits are needed: rhe law. The acceptance, even rhe aggravation, of finitude. What Holderi in calls loyI

1iuo Po~ms by Paul C~/all

airy. And first. loyalry to the God's "categorical turning away," [0
his withdrawal, that is, [0 his very obviousness in eternal inappcar.lIlcc, the pure appearance of nothing.
IN I. TEBUCHER BLXUE

... So lange die Freundlichkeit noch am Henen, die Reine, dauert,

missel nicht unglliklich der Mensch sich mil der Gonheil. 1st unbckannt Con? 1st er offenbar wie der Himmel? dieses glaub' ich eher.
Des Menschen Maass ists. Voll Verdiensl, doch dich lerisch, wohnel
der Mensch auf dieser Erde.
IN LOVELY BLUENESS .

Two Pomu by Paul C~lall

Mit
dem G rifTel seelenhell ,
dem Staubfaden himmelswilst,
der Krone rot
yom Purpurwort, das wit sangen
tiber, a liber
dem Oorn.
PSALM

No one moulds us again out of tarth 2nd clay,

no one conjures our dust.
No one.

. . . As long as kindliness, which is pure, remains in his heart not

unhappily a man may compare himself with the divinity. Is Cod unknown? Is He manifest as the sky? This ralher I believe. II is Ihe measure of man. Full of acquirements, but poetically, man dwells on this
earth.Z9

Praised be yout name, no one.

For your sake
we shall flower.
Towards
you.

The poem that precedes "Tiibingen, January" in the Nimlilmis-

A noming

rose collection, and whose motif gives the collection its lide, is
called " Psalm":
PSA LM

Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm,

niemand bespricht unsern St2ub.
Niemand.
Gelobt seisl du, Niemand.
Oir 'lulieb wollen
wir bliihn.
Oir
entgegen.
Ein Nichls
waren wir. sind wi r, werden
wir bleibcn, bliihend:
die Nichts-. d ie
Niemandsrose.

'7

we were. are, shall

remain, flowering:
the noming-. the
no one's rose.
With our pistil soul-bright ,
wim our stamen heaven-ravaged,
our corolla red
with the crimson word which we sang
over, 0 over
the thorn.,}O
As o ne of [hose who have undergone the trial of dlmNllff and
risked being e ngulfed. as o ne o f the heroes and (ncar) demi-gods
of H esperia. "The Rhine" names Rousseau: the Rousseau of the
R~vuj~J, we suppose, in a pure poe m of contained flooding eloquence, of 'urittm drowning in en thusiasm. The poem inaugurates
modern lyricism.

7illo Potms by Pllul Ctlllll

DIlIl IlIIEIS

... Halbgotter denk'ich jent

Und kennen muss ich die Teuern ,
Wei I ofl ihr Leben so
Die schnend!.' Brust mir bewegel.
Wem aber, wie. Rousseau, dir,
Unu bcrwindlich die 5le
Die starkausdauernde ward,
Und sieherer Sinn
Und sil.sse Gabe"tu horen.
Zu reden so, dass er aus heiliger Folic
Wie der Weingou, lorig goulich
Und gesenlos sic die Sprache der Rei ncslen gibt
Verstandlieh den Guten, abcr mit Recht
Die Achtungsloscn mil Blindheil schlagl
Die elltweihenden Knechte, wie nenn ieh den Frcmdcn?
TilE RH I NE

... Of demigods now I think

And I must know these dear ones
Because oflen their lives
Move me and fi ll me with longing.
BUI he whose soul, like yours,
Rousseau. ever strong and patient,
Ikcame invincible,
Endowed with sleadfasl purpose
And a SWCCI gift of heari ng,
Of speaking, so that from holy profusion
Like the wine~god fool ishly, divinely
And lawlessly he gives it away,
The language of the purest, comprehensible to the good,
But rightly strikes with blindness the irreverent,
The profaning rabble, what shall I call thai manger?J!
Rousseau, the "Sage," the "noble spirit"- to whose tomb, says one
of Holderlin's earliest poems, "the child hurries ... seized by a great
shivcr" -imercedcs; he was the first of his era who understood how
to grasp a "sign. " the sign from G reece, land of Dionys us: the dj ~

Two PomlS by PIlIlI Ctlllll

'9

viners) sign'. It was therefore he who opened up ,he possibil ity of

poetry, that is. its prophttic possibility. The ode entitled " Rousseau"
says so thus:
Und Strahlen 2US der schonern Zeit. Es
Haben die Boten dein Hen. gefunden.
Vernommen hast du sie, ve!Sl2nden die Sprache der
Fremdlinge,
Gedeutet ihre Sccle! Oem Schnenden war
Der Wink genug, und Winke sind
Von Allers her die Spr;l.che der Goner.
Und wunderbar, als harte von Anbeginn
Des Menschen Geist das Werden und Wirken all,
Des Lcbcns aile Weise schon c:rfahren
Kenm er im eTSu:n Zeichen Vollcndeles schon.
U nd fliegl , der kuhne Geist, wie Adler den
Gewitlern, weissagend seinen
Kommenden Goncm, VOr;l.US.
The radiance of a bener age. The
Heralds who looked for yo ur heart have found it.
You've heard and comp~h ended lhe slra ngeTS' tongue,
Interp~ted rheir soul! For rhe yearning man
The him sufficed, because in hinu from
Time immemorial the gods have spoken.
And marvellous, as though from lhe very first
The human mind had known all that grows and move,
Foreknown life's melody and rh ythm,
In sc..-ed grai ns he can measure the full ~grown plant;
And Aies, bold spirit. Aies as the c2gles do
Ahead of thunderstorms, preceding
Gods, his own gods, to announce their coming. Jl
Such is eloquence: rhe "prophetic tone," or what H old erlin also
calls "eccemric enthusiasm , ~ (another name for "sacred padlos").
In rhe :'time of distress" and the "wo rld's night ," between , as H ei~

Tiro Pot:lm by Paul CelAn

Two PomlS by Paul Celnll

deggcr says, "the 'no more' of gods who have Red and the 'not yet'
of the god to come." the possibi lity of poetry, and with it that of a
world. is ecstasy. And risk; onc may be bested , may sink or "[Ouch
OOlfol11," as Niensche says, "by way of rhe truth," Si nce rhe fifth
"Promenade," whose place in (he exact center of the RnNritJ was
determined by Rousseau's death , water has been precisely the
"reveric" of the dizziness that comes, nm from the subject's cxahalion, as rhe reductive intcrpretadon of lyricism always maintains,
but from its loss. or rather from the "forgetting of the self. " 'The

Bm Celan's d izziness has a completd y different meaning. if o nly

because it is d iz.z.iness at the sight of the diz.z.incss just dcscribeda diz.z.iness all suond degrt, as it were. BUI that does not mean it is
lesser, or simulated.
Celan, like Oedipus-the blind man, the "poor stranger" in
Greece-is athtos. This certainly does nO( mean "atheist"; "Praise be
10 you, no one" is a true prayer. Oedipus-bm Oedipus without
the slightest hope of reruming 10 Colonus, of the Eumenides's sacred wood, of a call originating elsewhere, among the bushes or in
the earth, to respo nd ro the prayer and grant it. To signal "all is
done," the sin (without sin) is expiated, the suffering is d rawing to a
dose, persecmion can no longer take place. For Celan. an exile, per~
sccution was without possible remission-and what persecution,
compared [0 that of the royal phnrmakos. It was u nforgettable and
indelible; Auschwin, the purely uunthinkable," had ushered in for
all time a "time o f d istress" that no hope of a god could still buttress.
The time of d istress is the time- now our history-of what
Holderlin also called pain (both Schm~rz and Leidm), the word
that runs through both " In Lovely Blueness" and modern lyricism,
from Baudelaire to Trakl and Mandelstam. Pain, which is nOt ex~
acdy suffering, affects and {ouches man's "hean"; it is what is most
intimate in him; the extreme interior where, in his almost absolute
singulariry (his ab-solutcness), man- and not the subject-is pure
wai[ing~for-an -other; he is hope of .. dialogue, of a way out of soli~
tude. I again cite 'The Meridian";

30

Meridian" again: "Whoever has art before his eyes and o n his
mind ... has forgonc n himsel( An produces a distance fro m the I.
Art demands here a certain distance, a certain path, in a certain
direction. "33
He re, among all possible examples, are the last twO sta nzas o f
Rimbaud's poem "Mcmoire," on nostalgia and desire, ~hich opens
with " L'eau claire; comme Ie sel d es larmes d 'enfance, I L'assaut au
soleil d es blancheurs des corps de fem mes" ("Clear water; like the
salt of chi ldhood tears; I T he assault on the sun by the whiteness
of women's bod ies");
Jouet de cer oeil d'cau morne, je n'y puis prendre,
6 ClnOI immobile! oh! bras nop coum! ni I'une
ni I'aulre fleur; ni la jaune qui m'imporrune,
l~; ni la bleue, amie ~ I'cau cou/eur de ccndre.
Ah! la poudre des saules qu'une aile secoue!
Les roses des roseaux des longtemps devortcs.!
Mon ClnOl, roujour "lie; et sa chaine tiree
Au fond de cet ocil d'cau sans bords,-;\ queUe boue?
Toy of this sad eye of water, I cannot pluck,
arms tOO short, either Ihis
Or the other flower; ncirher the yellow one which bothers me
There, nor the friendly blue one in the ash-colored water.

o mOlionle.s.s boat! 0

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
In the bOllom of this rimless t'}'e of water-in whll mud?.M

3'

But I think- ... I think rhat it has always belonged to the expectations of rhe 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 in tlu caUJ~ ofan O,lur-who knows, perhaps in the cause
of a wholly 0,/)"".
This "who knows," at which I see I have arrived , is the only thing I
can add- on my own, here, tOday- tO the old expectations.
Perhaps, I must now say 10 myself-a nd at Ihis point I am making
use of a well-known term-perhaps it is now possible to conceive a
meeting of Ihis ~who lly Other" and an ~O l he r" which is not f.u re~
moved, which is very near.

J'

Two Poems by Prill! Celnn

The poem tarries. StopS to catch a scent-like a crealUre when Confromed wilh such thoughts.
No Olle C',lJl say how long the pause in breath- the thought and the
slOpping 10 catch the seem-will ian ....
The poem is alone. h is alone and underway. Whoever writes it
Illust rem;!.in in ilS company.
But doesn't the pctI!m, for precisely tha i reason, ;1.[ this point panicipatc in an encounter-in tiN mJlury o/an mcoullur?
The poem wanlS to reach the Other, it needs the Other. it needs a
vis ~ vis. h ~rch es it oU[ and addres.se!l it.
II becomes dialogue- it is often despairing d ialogue. lS

From that place, thaI sol irude-pai n-Celan speaks. It is the

same solilUde and pain {hat H olderlin fe lt ill [he end , when he
had succumbed to t he excess of eloquence and been submerged,
reduced to silence, by sacred pathos. "T iihi ngen, Jan uary" is a
poem to this pain and solitude beeause it is the poem of th is pai n
and ofrhis so[i rude; that of always being th rown back from the dialogue one had thought possible and then, in withdrawal, "huddling, " as Heidegger says of H 6lderlin , no lo nger able to speak;
stuttering, swallowed up in idiom. Or fa ll ing silent. In a world
with nothing and 110 Ollno authorize or even "guarantee" the least
dialogue, the slightest rd ation to anomer, however or whoever he
may be, how to wre nch away fro m aphasia, fro m silence? T he
poem, says Celan, once again in "The Merid ian," "today ...
shows a strong incl ination tOwards falling silent. ... It takes its
position ... at the edge of itself; in order to be able to exist, it
without interruption calls and fe tches itself from its now- nolonger hack illlo its as-always. "..16
The question of poetry's poss ib il ity-and Celan never asked
another- is the q uestion of the possibiliry of such a wrenchi ng.
The question of the possibiliry of going Ollt oftlu ulf This also
means, as "The Meridian" again recalls, goi ng "outside t he human," in the sense, for example (but is this still just OfU exam ple?)
that rhe (fi nit e) n anscen dcnce of Daseill in the experience of
nothingness, in ek-sistcnce, is a going outside the human: " Here
we have stepped beyond hu man nature, gone o utwards, and en-

Tll/o Pomu by Pmt! Celn1l

JJ

tercd a mysterious realm, yet o ne tu rned towards Ihat wh ich is

human."J7
It would be an understatement to say Cdan had read Heidegger. Celan's poetry goes beyond even an unreserved rt."COgnition of
Heidegger; I t hink o ne can assen that it is, in its entirery, a dialogue with Heidegger's thought. And essentially with the part of
this thought th at was a dialogue with H6lderlin's poetry. Withour
Hcidegger's commcmary on Holderlin, "Tilbingen, 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 il a Ttsponu to this commentary. Indeed , the dizziness
on the edge of Holderl inian pathos is JUSt as much dizziness vis-avis its amplification by Heidcggcr; vis-a-vis [he beliefin which Heidegger persisted, whatever his sense of "sobriety" in other matters.
A belief, not o nly in the possibili ty that the word H61derlin "kept
in reserve" might still be heard (by Germany, by us), but also, and
perhaps especially, in the possibility that the god this word announced or prophesied might come. T his, even though Heidegger
maintained until the end, up th rough the last interviews granted
to D" Spi~~l. that it was also necessary to o:pcct, and prepare fo r,
the defin itive decline or in-advent of the god. "Praise be to you, no
one."
(In me same way, "Psalm" is indecipherable without Heidegger's
meditations o n nothingness; it is the prayer horn of them. It is indecipherable without the pages of Priflcipk of Reasoll, Sl1tz vom
Crt/lid, promp ted by Leibniz's question: "Why is there something
rather than nothing?" These are pages belli on saying the abyss
of being o r presence: the Ab-grlwd and VII-grund, the withoutgrounds and the non-ground; they recall Angel us Silesius's famous
phrase: "The rose is without a why. blooms because it blooms.")}8

A d ialogue like this in no way requires an encounter- an "effecrive" encounter, as we say. Probably the opposite. The encounter is
also that which can prohibit or break off dialogue. Dialogue, in this ,;.sense, is fragi liry itself.

liuo Ponm by Paul Critm

Yet belWcen C clan and H eidegger, an eDcou mcuook place. It
happened in 1967. probably dI ring the summer. Celan went to
visil I-Ieidc."gger in Todt naubeI'F. in the Black Forest chalet (Hiiflr)
Ihat was his refuge, the place w.ere he wrote. From [his mec:tingto which I know there were wimesses. direct or indirect-there remains a poem: a second versicn of which . in conclusion . 1 invite
you to read.
Here is how I hear it:
TODTNA U BElC

Arnica. baull'X: des yeux, [a

gorgee a Ia fOHaine avec
[e jet d'clOi[oau-dessus.
dans [e
chalet,
la, dans Ie livJe

--de qui, les lams qu'il ponait

avant Ie mien'- .
dans ce livre
la ligne ttritesur
un espoir, aupurd'hui,
dans Ie mot
a venir
d'un penseur,
au coeur.
humus des bcis, non ap[ani,
orchis et ordis, epars,
erudite, plus rard, en voiture,
disti ncte,
qui nous conduit, I'homme,
ason Ccoute ~uss i ,
ademi
frayees Ics sen:es
de rondins d:m la fange ,
humidilt!,
beaucoup.

Ttuo Pomu by Paul CrimI

"

TODTNA U BI:!RC

Arnica, eye balm, the

d~ughl at the fountain with
the s p~y of stars above. .
in the
hut,
there. in the book
-whose. the names it bore
before mind in that book
the [inc wrincn about
a hope. today,
in the coming
word
of a thinker,
in the heart .
woodland humus. unlevelled,
orchis and orchis, scattered,
crudeness, later, in the car.
distinct ,
he who drives us, the man,
listening 100,
h~f-

dea.red the paths

of logs in the mire,
dampness.
much.
My uanslation is very rough; wimess or not. who can know what
the allusions refer to? "Todtnaubcrg" is really barely a poem; a single nominal phrase, choppy, distended and elliptical, unwilling to
take shape, it is nm the outline but the remainder- m e residueof an aborted narrative. It consists of brief nOtes o r nO[3(ions, seemingly jotted in haste with a hope for a future poem , comprehensible
o nly to the one who wrol'e them. h is an extenuated poem, or, to

36

7i(JO PO{'IJIS

"j;uo Ponm by Paul Ctlnll

by Paul CrulII

pm it belief. :l disaPl!!!.illlrd one. It is the poem of a di sappoim~

... mem; as such. il is. and it says, rhe disappointment of poetry.
One could of course supply a gloss, try 10 decipher or translate.

'111crc is no lack of readable allusions. The

HolzlU~gl',

for example;

here they are no longer ways through the fo rcst tOward a possible
clearing, a LidJhmg, but ~cluJos[ in a marsh where the poem itsd.(.
gets lost.(watcr again. bur without a source-nor even; dampness-

no morc ahom the dizzying Neckar. the "spirit of the river," the
beda7.z.1emem.cngulfmem. Only an uneasi ness). Another example:
onc could pick, or cast, as it were, the image of the spray of stars
above the man d rinking 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
Buchner's Lenz, the figure of me poet, of whom "The Meridian" recalls, " Now and then he experienced a sense of uneasiness bec.1use
he was not able to walk on his head,"39 o nly to add, "Whoever walks
on his head, ladies and gentlemen, whoever walks on his head has
\ heaven beneath him as an abyss. "'0 An echo, perhaps, of Holderlin's
mange proposition: .. Man kann auch in die H o he folk", so wie in
die Tiefe ("One em as well aU in
eigh tJlUn.(Q.depth").~' One
could surely go very fitr 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, first, a language: words. German, with
Greek and Lati n woven in. "Common" language: AlIgmfTOJI, \'(11/d.
waU1J, HochmooT, and so on. "Lcarned" language: Amika, Orchis.
Bur still sim ple, ordinary words. The kind of words in another of
Cclan's few explanatory prose texts, "Conversation in the Mounrains" (a son of tale, halfway between Lmz and HtlJJidic Tnln, where
two JL"WS d iscuss language); words like "turk's--cap lily," "corn-salad,"
and "diallllmJ J/lp~rbuJ, the maiden-pi nk," that bespeak a native rel:uion to nature (o r to the eanh , as H eidegger would have said):

So it was quiet, quiet up [here in the mounrains. BUI il was not

quiel for long, bcrause when a Jew comes along and nK"Cts another, silence cannot lasl , even in the mountains. Because Ihe Jew and natUre
:Ire strangers 10 each olher, have always been and st ill are, even today,
even here.

37

So there they are. the cousins. On the left, the tUrk's-cap lily
blooms, blooms wild, blooms like nowhere else. And on the right.
corn-salad, and dianthus lup"bus, the maiden-pink , not far ofT. But
they, those cOllsins, have no eyes, alas. Or, more exactly: they have,
even they have eyes, but with a veil hanging in frOIll of them, no nOI
in frolll , behind them, a mov~ bl e veil. No sooner does an image enler than it gets aught in the web ....
Poor lily, poor corn-salad. There they stand, the cousins, on a road
in the mountains, the n ick silent , the stones silem, and the silence no
silence at aU. No word has come to an end and no phrase, it is nothing
but a pause, an empl}' space between the words, a blank ... ~l
Once again, a matter of blindness o r half-blindness (" they ...
have no eyes, alas"). But because blindness, blinding-we understand now-is Ih~ ~mpry space bmuren the words (and doubtless also
(/ blank): nm having the words to say what is. Words are not innate; language is nOt altogether a mother tongue (or a fa the r
tongue-it hardly matters) . There is difficulty with it (there is also
perhaps a question of plnce in language).
This difficulry-tht' d ifficulty-is named in the Bremen add ress
when it evokes. as Blanchot says, "t he language through which
death came upon him, those near to him, and mill ions of Jews and
no n-Jews. an ~m wilhoul aTIJ~r" (my emphas is):~J
Only one thing remained reachable, dose and secure amid all losses:
language. Yes, language. In spire of everything, it remained secure against
loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence. through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It
went through. It gave me no words for what was happening. but went
through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all.
In this language I tried, during those y~ rs and the years aner, to
write poems: in order to speak, to orielll myself, to find out where I
was, where I was going, to chart my realil)'.
It meam movement, you see, something happening, being m roMe,
an attempt to find a direction.'"
W hat "Todmauberg" speaks about, then. is this: the language
in which AuschwirL was pro no unced , and which pronounced
Auschwin.

Two Porms by Palll CrimI

That is why the poem also says, and says simply, rhe meaning of
the encou nter with Heidegger- that is, its disappointment. I suspected as much, bm I confess that I was told [his, by a friend who
had it on rhe best au mority.
To Heidcggcr the thinker- the Gcrman thinker-Cdan me
poet-the Jewish poet-came with a single yet precise entreaty:
th.u the thinker who listened to poetry; the same th inker who had
compromised himself. however briefly and even if in the least
shameful way, with JUSt what would result in Auschwin; the
thinker who. however abundant his discussion with National S0cialism, had observed total silence on AuschwirL. as histOry will recall ; that he say JUSt a single word: a word about pain. From there.
perhaps, all might still be possible. Not "life, n which is always pos.
sible, which remained possible. as we know. even in Auschwin, but
existence, poetry, speech. Language. T hat is, relation to others.
Could such a word be wn:nchrd?
In the summer of 1967 Celan writes in the guestbook of the
Hiiru in Todtnauberg. He no longer knows who signed before
him; signatures- proper names, as it happens-maner little. At is.
sue was a word, juSt a word. He writes- what? A line, or a verse.
Hc asks only for the word, and the word, of course, is not spoken.
Nmhing; silence; no one. The in-advent of me 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 wo rd). imo which
this poem. mumbled against the silence, could only sink as if into
a bog. W hat word could suddenly have constitutcd an nJrm.
I do not know. Yet something tells me it is at once the humblcst
and most difficult word to say, me one [hat requires, precisely, "a
goi ng our of the self. " The word that the WCSt, in irs pathos of re.
dcm pt ion, has never been able to say. The word it remains fo r us
to learn 10 speak, lest we should sink ourselves. The word pardoll.
Cdan has placed us before this word. A sign?

PART

TWO

Remembering Dates

Ptrh:lps Oil(' can say tlu t ('Very poem h:l.S its

-10th of J:lnu:lry-? l'rrh:lps tht novc:lty of poems
th:ll :lre written to(by is to Ix fou nd in precisdy
this point; th31 here the attempt is most clearly
madt to rem:li n mindful of such dates.
-The Meridi:ln"

Catastrophe

"Tiibi ngen, Janua ry": the Palriarchs' bea rd of ligh t. the stammering. Might it not be, asks A. R., an allusion to Moses?1
Not fo r a momem had I thought of this. But rereading pages devoted as if despi te themselves to meoedi pal motif of blinding, as I
had to today, I became aware [hat rhey may indeed secretly have
only one object: dl C interdiction against representation; o r rather,
they are haunred solely by the unfigurable or unpresentable. T hey
are fundamentally overwhelmed. more or less unwittingly, by me
destruction of metaphor or image that seems to draw in Celan's poClry as its final conquest. "TUbingen, January" shatters an image
{the refl ection}; "Todtnauberg," a p<Kffi about the disappointment
of poetry. no longer contains any image, unless it is -this should
be checked. supposi ng it could be- the:: "starred die::," the:: "Srernwiirfel" of the third stanza. The:: extenuatio n, one might say, of the
tropic.
"The Me::ridia n," appropriately, provides some expla natio n of
Ih is.
Appropriately, because the ti rle itself, o r more precisely, the
word, whe n it make::s its appeara nce in the course of the speech,
does not do so wi tho ut crossing or intersecting, withom "encountcring" a cenain Wire on trOpcs and (the) tropics. On the plural of
"Trope" : " Tropf!II. " Virtually the last words arc:

4'

Rnllembering Dales

42

wdics and gcndcmcn. I find something which offers me some consoI:llioll for ha vi ng mvefed Ihe impossible path , this path of the impossible. in yOll r presence. I lind something which binds and which, like
Ihe poem. leads to an enCOUnicr. I find something. like language, abo
nrJCI. yel e:lrlhly. terresuial, something c ircular, which Inverses both

poles :md returns

fO

itsdf, thereby-I am happy to report-even

HOpes. I find ... a mrridian.1

crossing the tropics and

The "tropic." (hen. On the "dialogue" Ih at is the poem, a dialogue

with bei ngs bUI also with things, we can read:
When we speak with things in this manner we always find ourselves
faced with the question of thei r whence and whither: a question which
Mremai ns open" and ~doe$ nO! come to an end," which poinr.s into
openness, emptiness, freedom - we are outside, al a comiderable
distance.
The poem, I believe, also seeks this place.
T he poem?
The poem with its images and tropes?
Ladies and gentlemen, what am I really speaking or. when, from IhiJ
direction, in IhiJdircaion, with tht'St"words, I speak of the poem-no,
of t"~ poem?
I am speaking of the poem which does not exist!
The absolute poem-no, it does not exist, it cannot exist.
But each real poem, even the least pretentious, contains this inescapable question, 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 all HOpes and metaphors arc developed
ad absurdum. (199; 37- )8; 78-79)

How should we undemand this?

To even begin to see our way clear, we m ust consider thi ngs
fro m a greater distance.
Tht' poe m , Ccla n had said earli er- this is m y point of d epa rture- the poem is alone: " Das Ged ich t ist einsam" (198; 87; 78 ).

GlIllJtropb~

43

"Alone" is a word that says singularity_o r al leasl, il makes n~

sense here except in reference to singulariry, to the si ngu lar expen c:ncc. "The poem is alone" means a poem is o nl y efficliwly a poem
insoF.u as it is absolutely singular. This is undoubtedly a d efinitio n
of poetry's essence (which by itself is not at all "poctic") : there is
no poctry, poetry does n O[ occu r or rake place. and is therefore not
ft'peatedly q uestio ned . except as the event of singularity.
In a way. the eff'on to say th is singularity, or at least designate it.
und erlies the whole " Meridian" speech- and is always o n me verge
of breaking th ro u gh . Circu mstances d ictated t hat this effort .be
directed to a deb ate or discussion . an Ausei1lnlldenetzu"g with
Buchner:'
T he locus of the discussion is the question of art. More p recisely,
the q uestio n of art in relation to l>OCtry. Jean Launay circu mscribes
Ihe issue in these terms:
Art is a stranger to poetry- thai is, al first, at the time to wh ich the
poet'S mood always returns when he despairs or hopes tOO m~ch: And
then an is poetry's stranger; an is ~cinating for j>lXtry. It mdlcates
the possibility of s p~tacl e; it indicates a window; it invites one t?
jump. This is also why, in art, there is always the hubbub ~f a carnival, the d rumroll pr~ed ing an artist's jXrformancc, that IS: alwa~s
more or Ir:ss that "death-defying lea p~ which, barring a foolish accIdent. always ends well.
The artist lands on his feet . That is what makes him an artist. 4
T his is certainly nOt incorrect, in any case fro m the point of view
of "theme," as Laun ay says when justifYing compariso ns of Celan
with Kafka and Egon FriedelJ.' BUI one sees it is also a complete.
preorganized response: the question Celan bears wi th hi m and tries
to articu late, literally o ut of b reath , no longer resonates. T hus Launay does not entirely d o justice to the way C elan p r~ceds, t.o t~e
road followed , to the d iffi cult (if not completely Impossible)
journey; no r [0 Celan's precise but complex strategy vis-a-vis Buchnct. And above all. dinkcticnlly re-treati ng the oppositio n berween
art and poetry, red ucing the strange [0 the fascinati ng by means of
a gcn itive and ap propriating it as such (an is poetry's stranger),

..

Remembering DnuI

CAlaJtroph(!

rakes into :JCCOtiOi neither singulariry itself. nor poetry as Celan

desperafely seeks to understand it .
What docs 'The Meridian" actually say?
Not. exactly, that art is a stranger ro poetry, but that yes, poetry
is the interruption of art. Something, if you will, that "taka art's
breath away" (I am thinking of the motif of Atmltllde, of tumof-breath ,' wh ich makes its first appearance in Celan here). O r, to
rt"C..Il another of Celan's words, me "$lep" (Srbritl) outside art; in

sen t everywhere but always elsewhere (<:elan says that "it possesses,
:Iside fro m its ability to uansform, the gift of ubiquity" (190; 31;
-tl), it is not "poetry's stranger." Moreover, this is why. if the task
or deslination of poetry is to lib<:rate itself from art, this task or
destination is nearly impossible. O ne is never done with art.
h is clear ulan's discourse on an has to do with mimesis. This
much should be nmOO. So should the choice of ulIluimUcll (or its
equivalent: ung~Il~uT), the word used by HBlderlin , then Heideg.
ger, to translate the G reek d~illosw ith which Sophocles names the
essence of uchn(! in Antigolle. For Heidegger, art and the work of
art are equally ulIluimUch. Celan was no doubt fully aware of
this-one respect (though certainly not t he only one) in which
"The Merid ian" is a response to Heidegger. Yet I think it would
be more enlightening for a readi ng of the speech (and for the
question I am asking) to focus o n art in the explicit debate with
Biichner.
Thus defined as Imluim/ich, art is indeed, in itially, art as Buch
ncr understands it, or rather as he contests it: artifice and the ani
ficial. It is the marionette o r puppet Camille Desmoul ins de
nounces in DIl1/tollS Tod: ~ You can Stt the rope hanging down that
jerks it, and ... t he joints creak in five footed iambics at every
step"; it is the monkey in Woyuck, dressed in coat and trousers, or
the robots in UOllCt! ,wd Ul111, announced "i n a pompous tone" as
MnOlhing but art and mechanism, nothing bm cardboard and
watch springs" (188; 30; 69). In this sense, Launay is right to evoke
barkers, circuses, and carnivals. But with literature and poetry, with
the DichNlIIg that is Buchner's business, art is really also ... elo
quence, once again. Yet this rime it is bombast and tu rgidity:
gra ndiloquence, with its inevitable effects of dlja-mtmdll and a
repetitive. wearisome aspect. An , says Celan, is an old problem
("hardy, longl ived ... that is to say, eternal"), a "problem which allows a monal, Camille, and a person who can be understood only
in the context o f his deat h, Danton, to string words together at
great length. It is easy enough to talk about art" (188; 30; 69)
Yer this kind of determ ination is not enough: it assigns art toO
easi ly, appropriates {he V1IIl~im/ichrtoo rapidly (and in an entirely

French one could say. closely following Derrida's read ing of Blanchot, k pm-dan or k PIlI- "de I'an."" The event of poetry (and as
such, poeuy isevcnI, and there is poetry) is thus a "setting free," a
"FnisetzulIg" (194; 34; 75) It is a liberation, nm in the sense, common 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 i{s own am bigui ty, an liberation. And very prob.
ably, a certain kind of "cnd of an."
But 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
"anfrcc" (196; )5; 76), docs nm mean merely that for poetry, art is
a form of supervision or oppression. Nor even that an is, st rictly
speaking, the alienation of poetry. Certainly, art is "strange"
(fomd). One can thus caU it "other, " but Celan prefers to say that
it is elsewhere or distant, {hat it is th~ distant and t"~ elsewhere
(195; 35; 75) Yet in reaJity, an is only so because it is fi rst uncanny,
Imh(!;m/ich: strangely fami liar, or, in other words, disorienting, un.
usual. disquiet ing. Art is even the Disquieting, as such: dlls VIIh~;m/iche. its strangeness or alterity is thus not a pure alterity. Nor
is it a "determinate" aherity in the sense that Hegel speaks of "determinate negation. " In relation to a "same" or to a "self," to a
"ncar" or to an "own , "8 an exists in a strangeness which is itself
strange, anmher alterity. The d ifference it makes differs from itself;
it is unassignable. For this reason it is disquieting rather than "fas.
/ cinal ing." It could not be fasci nating unless it occupied its own
place. excrcised attraction in a panicular direction. But that is just
Ihe point: art has no place of its own. Indeed , there is nothi ng one
can ca ll art proper, properly itself. W ithout a stable idellliry, pre-

45

Ri'ffl~mb~rillg

Call1Stroph~

Onus

classical mode. with marionen es, robots, and an ificial bombast).

This is why, for Celan, an remains what Buchner himself opposes
[Q an thus understood, Namely-according [Q that most ancient,
indeslructible model-the natural. C reation, as Camille says in his
great speech on art: "[ The people] forge r God himself, they prefer
his bad imita[Qf$,"" So art is simply nature once o ne rakes pains to
imitate it. That is, once nature presents a spectacle. enters the realm
of representation-in shon , when it aligns itself wi th an. Thus the
tableau of the (WO girls in the valley that Lenz evokes when he
speaks of art and defines his (or ramer Buchner's) poetics: "At times
one would like to be the Medusa's head so as to be able [Q transform such a group infO stone, and call out to the people so that
mey might see" (191-92; 32; 69). Celan com ments on these lines in
me following terms: "Ladies and gentlemen, please take note: 'One
would like [Q be the Medusa's head,' in order to comprehend that
which is natural as that which is namral, by means of art!" (192, 32;
72). And he adds, a litde further on, "As you can sec, whencver art
makes an appearance ... [the] pompous rone cannot be ignored"
('9 2 ; 33; 73)

Beh ind Buchner's Len2 stands Buchner himself. But behind

Buchner. there is me historical (literary hisrorical) Lenl., "Reinhold
Lenz, the author of the 'Notes on the Theater. '" Behind him, in
rum. the Abbe Mercier, with his phrase" Elargissnlim." That this
was naturalism's mOt d'ordn and contains "me social and political
roots of Buchner's thought" (191; 32; 71), is scarcely importam here.
BUI in its most general sense, torn fro m historical inscription and
COllleXt, Elargissnl'art tells the very secret of art; it indicates art's
movement-and the obscure will presiding over th is movement,
or animati ng it from within. Art wants to expand irself; it clamors
to be expanded. It walliS its difference fro m the things and beings
of nature effaced. In a way, rhat which is art's own, "proper" to art
I (to the Ullluimlic/u), is the tendency to mitigate differcntiation,
and in so doing invade and contami nate everythi ng. Or mediate
everythi ng, acco rding to Lell2 Buchner's dialectical fo rm ulation
(nature is only nature by means of art). Thus, to "dis-own" cverything. Art is, if the word can be risked, generalized, never-ending

47

~estrangeme nt "-(h e Medusa's head , the robots, the specches-

without end.
When he brings up this theme, Ce.lan knows he is echoing very
ancient "rumors" about an. So ancient that they precede even the
(platonic) philosophical designation of mimnu. and its execution
or appropriation as representation, reproduction, semblance, or
sim ulation. As imitation. And Ce:lan not o nly acts as an echo, saying he "listens to the noise persistently" (192; )); 73). bur seems to
lend it a favorable ear, bringing back, along with the rumors, the
old fea r and condemnation of the mimetic (which can be, and has
been, conjoined with the interdiction against representation). All
Heideggcr's strength is required-and even that may not sufficeto dissipate the evil aura of the U"Juimlic/u, to lift the harmful and
demonic to th.e level of the "dacmonic."'o Not simply to succumb,
opposing it-in the end, dialectically-to the Hl!imiJchl!-H~imlichl!,
the Z uhausl!, even the Hl!imkl!hr, to all the fi gures and values of the
own, the fa miliat, the "at home," me native land, and so on-the
way Celan seems to do when, near the end of "The Meridian." he
marks the close of the poetic journey as "EiluArt H~imkl!hr, " "A
kind of homecoming" (201; )9; 81).11
And it is true that for poetry, what Ce.lan opposes or seems to
oppose to the Ullh~imlich~, to art (at least "at first," as Launay
would say), is. under various names, the own-me own-being: the
~sel f" or "I," even the "he" of singularity (he, Lenz, Lenz himself,
and nOt "Buchner's Len2'"), the "person" Ce:lan also curiously calls
the "figure" ("Gmalt") (194; 14; 74) O r, to use a word which,
though borrowed from Buchner, does not lack religious resonance,
the "creature" (197; 36; 77). Nevertheless, despite appearances, it is
not simply the subject in the metaphysical sense that is at issue.
One word condenses all these names: rhe human, dllJ MmschlicJu.
The human , not man. And nOt the humanity of man. But the huma n as what allows rhere to be one man or another-that man
there, si ngula r- in the here and now, says Celan . T he human,
then, as the singular essence (a pure oxymoron, philosophically untenable), the singularity of man or of being-man. It is Camille in

Rnnembering Dm rs
Tbe Drl1lb of DII/IIOn, as Lucile perceives him when he discoursa
on afl and she docs not listen (Q what he says, bUi hears him. him
panicularly. for "language is something personal. something ~ r
ccptible" (189; 31; 70) . O r rather. we suspeCt, it is Lucile herself,
"1Iv;: one who is blind to an" (189; 31; 70) but who still "perceives"
(I wjlJ return to this word).
T he Ullbrimlicbr, estrangement, is estrangemcm of the human
taken in this sensc. It affectS existence, undoes its reality. T he Unbrimlicbr. despite what Ctlan's fo rm ulations imply, does not open
up an otlur do m ai n. It takes us "oUiside rhe human" (192; 31.; 72),
but opens up a domain "rurned toward that which is human." Existence itself, but "made strange": "the human feels o ut of place
[llllbeimlicbJ" (192; 32; 72). Life in an or in light of an , life in the
preoccupation with an - even more simply, li fe benum bed and
carried off by an , what I would call life in mimesis or rcprcselHation, is the life in which olle "forgets onesel f" (193; 33 ; 73) . T he result is that Lenz gets lost in his speeches (on literature) . that
Camille and Damon "SpoUi grand phrases" all the way (Q the scaffold . And that the Revolution is theater. Again, the motif of eloquence. And dramatizat ion.
But in reality. eloquence precedes dramatization and provides a
reason for it: theater and theatricalized existence only flre because
there is discourse. O r rather, diuOIming. T his means lhat the Unbrimlichr is essentially a matter oflanguage. O r that language is the
locus of the UIIJJrimlichr, if indeed such a locus exisu. In other
words. language is what "estranges" rhe human. Not becausc it is
rhe loss or forgetting of the singular, since by definition language
embraces general ity (this is a frequenr refrain , and an old motif derived from so-called philosophies of existence); but because to
speak. to tet o neself be caught up and swept away by speech, to
Irust language. or even, perhaps, to be content to borrow it or submit to it , is to "forget o nesel f. " Language is not the UIIJuimliclJr.
though only language contains the possibili ty of th e Ullbrimlic!J~.
But the UllluimlidJr appears, or rather, sets in {and no doubt it is
always. already there)-something turns in man and d isplaces the
hu man , something in man even ovenurns,l l perhaps, or turns

C(1t,utropb~

.Iround, expulsing him fro m the human- along with a certain poslUre in language: the "artistic" poSture, if you will . or the mimetic.
That is, the most "natural" posture in language, as long as one
thi nks or pre- u.ndersrands language as a mimeme. In the in finit e
cross-purposes of the "artistic" and rhe "natural," in linguistic misprision, the Unh~imliclu is, f-i naUy. forgetfulness: forgening who
speaks when I speak, which clearly goes with forgetting to whom I
speak when I speak. and who listens when I am spoken to. And,
.llways thus prompted, forgetting what is spoken of.
T he motif of forgetfulness and tu rnaround (reversal) indicates
here that the Unlu imlic/u, because of language, is the catastrophe
of the human. 13 And this explains that poetry- what Celan calls
poetry or tries to save with the name of poetry. removing and preserving it fro m art- is, "every time." the interruption ofla nguage:
Lucile's absurd "Long live th e King!" (189 i 31i 70) cried out in despair over Ca m ille's death. and above all Lenz's "terrible silence"
(193; 3S; 76). T he silence that fragments Buchner's narrative, StOpS
it (and StopS art, includ ing naturalism), but wh ich already enigmatically signaled its presence in a phrase (without grandiloquence) that says the cataStrophe's most secret essence: "now and
then he experienced a sense of uneasiness because he was nO[ able
10 walk on his head " (195; 34i 75).
T he interrup tion of language, the suspension of language. the
caesura r counter-rhyrhmic rup t ure,~ said Holdcrlin)14-that is p<>ct ry, then. "I Robbed ) . .. of breath and speech," the "turn" of
breath. the "ru m at the end of inspiration" (195i 33i 76). Poetry occurs where language. con trary to all expectations, gives way. Preciselyat inspiration's fa iling-and th is can be understood in at least
two senses. O r, even more precisely, at retai ned expiratio n, the
breath-hold ing: when speaking (discoursing) is about to contin ue, -It'
and somrollr, sudden ly free. forbids what was to be said. When a
wo rd occurs in the pure sllspension of speech. Poetry is the spasm
or syncope of la n guage . ' ~ Holderlin called t he caesura "t he pure
wo rd. "'6
Would il see m, then, that poetry is appropriation. of speech,
and, ind issociably. of the human? Yes, in a sense. And would this

,\

~o

Catastroplu

mean that poetry is properly speech, because speech attes[S to the

"presence of tile h uman"? Yes, again; this is indeed what ~I an sa~
when he com ments o n Lucile's " Long live [he King!" which he

calls- not without philosophical and political risk-a "counter_

word" (Gegmwort ):
After all the words spoken on the platfo rm (the scafTold)- what a
wo rd!

It is a counter-word, a word thai severs the "w i rc.~ t hai refuses

bow before the "loiterers and parade horses of history. ~ It is 2 n act of

frttdom. It is a Stcp.
To be sure, it sounds like an expression of allegiance to the ancien
rigimc- and that might not be a coincidence, in view of what I am

venturing to say about the subject now, today. B UI these wordsplease allow one who also grew up wi th the writings of Pelt:r
KropOikin and GUStav Landauer expressly to emphasize the pointthese words are nOi a celebration of the monarchy and a past which

should be preserved.
They are a tribUie to the majesty of the absurd, which bears witness
to mankind's here and now.
That, ladies and gentlemen. has no universally recognized name.
but it is, I believe ... poetry. (189-90; }I ; 70)
We should not be too quick- let us use Celan's own political
clarification as a model-to suess the undeniable philosophical
overdetermination of these remarks. This would be fai ling them.l
think. It would almost be committing them an injustice.
What Celan calls Lucile's "counter*word" does not properly oppose anything, not even the speeches delivered beforehand
(Camille and D anton's "grand phrases" at (he foot of the scaffold).
Not even discourse in general. The coumer*word approves noth
ing either: it says nothing in favor of me monarchy. is not a politi
cal word- or even an anarchic one. It is "absurd"; it does nOf mean
anything. But this does not make it "ncutral," or if so we would
have to agree on the meaning of th e term . It is a gesture. It is a
counter-word only to the extent it is such a gesture and proceeds,
as Biichner says, from a "decision": the gestu re of dying or decision
to die. By shouting "Long live the King!" Lucile kills herself. H ere,

..

.,.
5l

the word is suicidal; it is, as H olderlin said of Greck tragic speech ,

"deadly-factual ... [it] truly kills."" As pure provocation, it signifies (the decision to die), but in a mode othcr than signification. It
signifies without signifYing: it is an act. an evcnt (though I would
hc::sirate somewhat to use me word "performative") .
Here is the scene:
(A PATROL

10

emers)

'Xfho's there?
Long live the King!
C IT I Z EN. In the name of the Republic.
A C ITI ZEN.
l.UC Il. E.

She is surrounded by the WATC H and led away. II

If Luci lc's cry- poe rry- properly says what is proper to the human, we must unde rstand the proper here as being like the own of
"own death." In the coumer-word . or rather through the "counter"
of the counter*word , the possibility of death "resolutely" opens up,
as does something like what H eidegger calls, with respect to DaU;ll. its "ownmost possibility." And from that point on exist- mese
arc Celan's words- "fate" and "direction" (188; 30; 69). That is. liberty. Exactly like the sky opening "as an abyss" beneath Lenz.
In dfict, men. poetry says existence: the human. It says :,Ystence.
not because it takes me opposing course ro discourse or because it
UI>SCts the un"~im/ic" rurnaround, the catastrophe of language (me
catastrophe [hat is language); poetry is nOt a catastrophe of catastrophe. But , because it aggravates the catasu ophe itself, it is, one
might say, its liuraliZllrio1l.I' This is what the "figure" of Lenz signifies: existence suddenly "released" at the height of catast rophe,
[he "mortal's" sudden revelation of himself as the o ne whose existence rests on the abyss-the bottomlessness-of thc heavens.
T his is why _poet ry does not take place outside art, in some else*
where supposed to be the other of art or of its strangcness. It takes
pbce in the "strange placc" itself. And if Cclan 5.1YS of this place that
it is "thc place where a person [succC<.xlsJ in sCll ing himself free, as
an-estranged- I" (195; 34; 75), we IllUSt not lose sight of the fact,
whan:ver the dialectical cast of such a remark (very dose, as it hap-

Remembering Dflus

CUaJtropht

pens. TO H old ('rlinian fo rmula(ions), (hal the I which thus releases

and frees itself. which "comes home," which perhaps even hopes 10
have reached the "occupiable realm, "lO this I is in [he vicinity of
deat h, silence, and insanity. It fal ls, it frees ilselfin [he void. If theT(:
is appro priation, it is, as in Ho lderlin, abysmal. One could almost
say that il does nOl rake place as such- and thai poelry does not
occur, unless il is by def.l.Uh as dte pas~dim in art's grcaicsi imimacy,
in the very d ifference of art from itself or in Ihe strangeness to self of
strangeness. AI the unassignable hean of [he Ul1JNimlkIJe.
This explains why Blichner- (he poel. not [he poetician-can
occasion, can even be the o bviously paradoxical o pportunity for the
a[[empt to say the essence of poetry, and thus call art into question:

Now, in the midst of difficulry, the language of the impossible:

the language of difference, which is not. iron ically. the language of
des pair (poetry underSlOod as the liberation of art; art never done
with):

And I must now ask if the works of Georg Buchner, die poet of all living bei ngs, do not contain a perhaps muted, perhaps only half conscious, bur o n that account no less radical- or for precisely that rt'3S0n
in the most basic sense a radjcal-calling~into-ques tj o n of an ? ... A
ca lli ng~ int o-qu est ion , to which all contemporary poetry must return
jf it is to continue posing q ucstions? To rephrase and antici pate my~
self somewhat: may we proceed from art as something given, so m e~
thing to be raken for granted, as is now oft-en done; should we, in concTt'te terms, above all- let us say-follow Mallarme to his logical conclusion? (192-9); )0; 7)
This also explains. but in reverse, why Celan, faced with what is
so difficult" (-2.00; )8; 80)-nOl ro say impossible-to dislinguish
(i n (he last pages he speaks of the " impossible path ," the "path
o f (he impossible"), is forced to use a double language. Now (he
language of simple o pposition , which is- tho ugh ironically-rhe
language of hope (poerry unders rood as freeing art, being rhe end
of art):
U

Perhaps ... perhaps poetry, in the company of the I which has forgOllcn itself, travels the same path as an. toward th:lt which is mysterious [Illl/'rimlic/'J and alien [frrmd). And once again- but where?
hut in what place? but how? but as what?_ it sets itself free ?
In lilal casc art would be the path travelled by poetry-nothing
morc and nothing less. (t9}-94; 33-)4; 74)

Poctry: it can signify a turn-of-breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry

travels its path-which is also me path of art-for the sake of such a
breath turning? Perhaps it succeeds, since strangeness {das Fmlldt)'
that is, the abyss and the Medusa's head, the abyss and the robots,
seem to lie in the same direction- perhaps it succeeds here in d istinguishing between strangeness and Strangeness, perhaps at precisely this
point the Medusa's head shrivels, perhaps the robots cease to fun ction- for this unique, Reeting moment? Is perhaps at this point, along
with me I- with the estranged I. set free at this point and in It similar
manntr-is perhaps at this point an Other SCt free ?
Perhaps the poem assumcs its own identity as a rcsult ... and is accordingly able to travel other paths, (hat is, the paths of art, again and
again- in this art-Icss, art-frt'C' manner?
Perhaps. (t95- 6; ) 5; 76)
Or yet , and this time in the most de mandi ng. (hat is to say. the
most d esperate fashion possible (but always wirh suitable irony):
Ladies and gentlemen, I have reached the conclusion- I have returned
to the beginning.
EkJrgi;sez li1rt! This question comes to us with its mysteries [UnJNimiichJuirl . new and old. I approached Buchner in its company-I
believed I would once again nnd it there.
I also had an answer ready, a " Luci lean~ counter-word ; I wanted
to establish something in opposition, I wanted to be there with my
contradiction.
Expand art?
No. But acco mpany an into your own unique place of no escape.
And sct yourself free.
Here, too. in your presence, I have travelled th is path. It was a
circle.
Art- and one must also include the Medusa's head, mechani7.3tion,
robots; the mysterious. indistinguishable, and in the end perhaps the
only strangeness inur tint f"rrmdrl-art lives on. (100; 38; 79-80)

Remembering Datn

CntaJtropb~

If thc difft"rcllcc ca n ever be made, if there exislS the slightest

possibility of a separation of poetry, then we must think of this difference and this separation as internal to an itself. Inside art, paetry would succecd-perhaps-in withdrawing from art; it would
exit art withi n an. Thus we must think, in an's greatest intimacy
and as this intimacy itself, of a sort of spacing or hiatus. A secret
gapi ng. Perhaps intimacy-the "heart" of the same-is always

terward it can with difficulty be:: recognized as such. "The absolute

poem- no , it does not exist, it cannot exist" (199; 38; 79). It occurs, then, every time, in the time or be::tw~ntim e of the caesura,
in a syncope, as a poem, that is to say as a word-singular, unique.
h occurs in "this unique. Reeting moment" (196; 35; 76), in the "instant" (Augmblick) , the wink of an eye or the head 's inclination
(Celan speaks of "the angle of inclination of ... existence" 1197; 36;
77]), in the blink of"rdeasc:," of the "free act": in the instanr of the
catastrophe, the revolt- the conversion of the I that opens to existence and allows the human to rake "place" within it.
This instant makes a date each time-it is date-making. The
poem remains mindful of dates:

such a gapi ng, as lhe possibiliry for the same (Q be itself and to join
within itself to itself; the pure-empry-aniculation of the same.
And perhaps for art (the Unh"imliC/u), this intimate gaping would
be precisely what ceaselessly "estranges" the strangeness of art (of

the strange): precisely the caesura of art, the spasm- furtive,

hardly felt-of the strange. In which case poelfy would not be, in
arr-ourside-of-art, the Raw or failing of art, oflanguage: let li S say,
silence. Bur rather the pain of art (of language). Hence the aggravation of the catastrophe. which is, strictly speaking, a revolt (Lucile, Lcnz).
This is why poetry, if it ever occurs, occurs as the brutal revelation of the abyss that contains art (language) and nevenheless const irutes it, as such, in its strangeness. Poetry takes place, a ln take
place, in an . 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 gapi ng-something we must cen ain ly conceive o f as the pure spacing which places (do not) sup-pose and
which upholds them, with no hold.
No doubt this is whar Cdan rigorously calls u-ropia:

Topos smdy?
Certainly! But in light of that which is to be studied: in light of
u-lOpia.
And human beings? And all living Crl'alUrcs?
In this light. (199: 38: 79)
Poetry. by this aCCOUIlI, can be called the abyss of art (language):
it makcs art (language) abysmal. In all senscs. This mode of occurrence, advent, is "proper" to it.
But it docs nO{ occur, if ever it does occur, as Poet ry, even if af-

Perhaps one can say that every poem has its "20th o fJanuary"~ Perhaps ,he novelry of poems that are wriucn loday is 10 be found in prccisely ,his poim ,hat here the auempl is most dearly made 10 remain
mindful of such dates?
BUI are we all not descended from such dales? And 10 which dates
do \\-'C anribUic ourselves? (196; 35; 76)
In a way that differs altogether from the standard expression. and
thus in its strongest sense, poetry is OCCaJionll/ pO~try. 21 It is on this
account that 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
(Cdan plays on Jcb"ibm, "to write," and ZUJcIJ"ibm. whose primary meaning is "to note on an account"). Jt is thus me memory
of evenrs, that is, each dme, of rhe singular though certainly not
unique advenr into existence. Yel this memory is not pure. Likewise, there are probably neirher pure evenrs nor pure advents: they
arc numerous, repeatable. prompted in advance by language. Thus
the singular, unique word is, precisely. nor unique: the po~m is always already carried away in the pom/J. which is to say in the infinite approximation of existence rhat is an, and language. Whatever
task or absolute vocation it assigns or accords irself as regards existence (rhe human). poetry is language. It speaks: "But the poem, "
says Celan , "does speak! It remains mindful of its dales, but- it
speaks" (196; 35; 76). Poet ry is thus the memory of dates JUSt

Remembaing Dmes

Ut tllStroplu

suictly insofur as il is mnemoucJme: an art, after all-of memory.

And lilliS, an an, after aU-ofianguage: logotlme.
Ccrlainly- wc must nOI be afraid of always having to travel the
same circle-memory here is, irreducibly, the memory of a single
person. As soon as it speaks and must speak (for this is also its im.
perative, the "you musr" that commands it), the poem can do so
only in "its own, its own, individual cause": ill Jeinn eigmm, a/k.
"iguwm Sache, in what properly concerns it (196; 35; 76). This is
why, at the limit of its own possibility, "at the edge of itself,"
wrenching itself from its "now.na.-longer," toward its "as.a1ways"
(197; 36; 77), the poem must dear a way between silence and djs
course, between mutism's JIlying nothing and the Jllying too milch of
eloquence. It is the poem's narrow path, the strlliunillg: the path
that is "most narrowly" that of the I (200; 38; 80). But this path
does not lead 10 speech or language. It leads 10 only one word, to a
"language berome reality, language set free under the sign of an in
dividuatioll which is radical" (197-98; 36; 77) . 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 nature (Jeinem
imunfm \Vtoultj it would also be the present, the here and now"
(197-98; )6; 77).
Such is, in sum, the "solitude" of the poem, and what obliges it,
with as rigorous an obligation as the obligation ro speak, not to
"invent" a singular language or build an idiolect from Start to fin
ish, but to undo language (semantically and syntactically); disar.
riculate and rarefy it; cut ir up according 10 a prosody which is neither that of spoken language nor that of earlier poetry; to condense
it until one comes to the hard center, the muted resistance where
one recognizes a voice that is singular, that is ro say, separ:l.ted fro m
language, as is a tone o r a style.
Herc, clearly, resides what I have called, for lack of a more judi.
ciolls term , the "idiomatic" threat: the rhrear of hermeticism and
obscurity. Celan has, if! may put it thus, a very dear awareness of
this. He even demands the risk. What is surprising. though, is not
lila! he demands iL The surprise is that this demand is in faCt, once

again, absolutely paradoxical; for if it is indeed made, as one might

expeCt, in the name of catastrophe itself (in the name of abysmal
conversion, or even revolt), lhat is, in the name of existence, it is
rightfully justified or authorized by onJy o ne thing: the hope of
whal Celan calls me "encounter," die !kgegrlU1Ig (198; 37; 78).
JUSt after evo king the one who "walks on his head," and the
abyss of the heavens beneath him, Celan says, without ado:

57

Ladies and gentlemen . nowadays it is f.ashionable to reproach p0etry with itS "obscurity." Permit me now, 3bruptly- bul has not something suddenly 3ppcared on the hori1.On ~-permit me now to quote 3
maxim by rasa !. 3 maxim th3t I re3d some time 3g0 in Leo SchoslOw: Nr nous reprochrz ptlJ Ie manqllr tk dart! pllisqur nom en foisom
proftsJion! Tha t is, I believe, if not the inhercm obscurity of poetry,
the obscurity amibuted 10 it for the sake of an encounter-from
a great dist3nce or sense of strangeness possibly of its own making.
(195; }5; 75)

Obscurity is thus not at all native to poelry; it does not belong to

its essence. But it comes upon poetry; it is or can be conjoined
wi th it. That it can thus come upon poetry is precisely only, Celan
says, "fo r the sake or (um . .. wi/kn) the encounter, in me name
of and for the love of an encounter, which itself befalls "from a
great distance or a sense of strangeness." The paradox here is that
obscurity originates in taking the encounter into consideration ,
and not in the demand for solitude. Celan does not say obscurity is
destined to prepare or provoke the encounter, that it is a call to the
encountet, or that the encounter is its final aim. He says obscurity
is, on the contrary, a mark of attention-even respecr-with re
gard [0 the encounter. This means the encounter is the occasion,
or rather the very cirmmstllnu of the poem: only once there is an
encounter is there the poem's "solitudc," and thus obscurity. And
ill fact:
The poem is alone. It is alone and underway. Whoever writes it
must remain in its company.
But does not the poem, for precisely that reason. at this point participate in the encoumer- in tlx mJlltry of1111 mroumrr? (198; 37; 78)

Rmmnbt'rillg Dnft's

II is difficult to conceive rhe encounter, irs secret or mystery

(Gt'iJt'imnis; a word in which rhe Ht'im of the near and the own, of

the fu miliar and intimate, still resonates).

In what is perhaps the most striking twist of "The Meridian" (the
moment when Celan recognizes that, after aU, the poem "does
speak," even if"i n its own ... individual cause"), rhe 011,", indeed,
the IUholly ollur, abrupdy appears to replace the elsewhere and the
alien , which umil (his point had been the only terms in question. It
is here (hat the encounter is decided in its essence and possibility;
But I think-and this thought can scarcely come as a s urpri~ to
you- I think that it has always belonged 10 the expectations of the
poem in preci~ly this manner 10 speak in Ihe cause of the strange_
no, I can no longer use this word- in precisely Ihis manner- to speak
ill the caliit' ofan Olht'r-who knows, perhaps in the cause of a wholLy
Olllt'r.

T his "who knows," at which I see I have arrived, is the only thing I
can add-on my own, here, today-ro the old expectations.
Perhaps, I must now say ro myself- and a( this point I am making
usC' of a well-known term-perhaps il is now possible to conceive a
mC'ering of this "wholly Other" and an "mhd' which is not far removC'd, which is very near. The poem tarries, StOpS 10 catch a sccntlike a cre:l.Iure when confronted with such thoughts. (196-97; }S-}6;
76-77)

This is not , cont rary [Q what one might think, a "forced passage." At most, on me "parh" that never StOPS dosing off, coming
to nothing or leading back to the same poim. ir is an altempt ar a
new dearing. We already know that at any rare there will be no
"passage" in "The Meridian. "
Nor is this a simple "profession of faith"; the "who knows,"
which is itself dllft'd("at wh ich I see I have now arrived"), suspends
what precedes it. In any case it leaves open the question of cxis~
tence, or of the possibi liry of the "wholly other" thus designated.
Moreover, rhe justification for recourse to such an expression is i[~
self parlicularly discreet and reserved; there is nor a word too many,
and nothing to flatt er the "old expectations" tOO much.

CatllIlTOpht

59

Yet this said, how is the encounter decided in the substinttion of

aherity for strangeness? And how is such a subsritution possible?
The logic we have already seen at work is still the same; catastrophic and paradoxical. Speaking in its own name or its own in ~
dividual cause, speaking the language of singularity, of "an individuation which is radical." the poem hopes, has always hoped,
precisely in this manner. in this language (though it is so difficult
to reach), to speak "in the cause of the Strange," in the name of rhe
strange and the alien. That is, to use, in and as o ne's own, proper
language, the alien language, the language of estrangement. Cclan's
b rutal reversal here of the movement which up to this point has
srraitened his gait is simply the sign that between proper and norproper, near and far. fam iliar and strange, the exchange is always
reversible. and for this reason never StopS; it is nor fi xed and has
no determined direcrion. At the very heart of estrangement or dis~ r
appropriation, by way of an en igmatic trope or turn , appropriatio n occurs. Bur this also means that such an appropriation takes
place ~ours id e the self. " The appropriation, the singular a ppropri ~
ation, is nOt the appropriation of the self within irself. The selfor the singular I- reaches itself within irsclf only "outside." Reapplying one of Heidegger's formu las, we can say rhat the "outside
self" is the self's origin. It is thus, for exam ple. that in rhe last
poem of Di~ Nimuwdsrolt', "In der Luft" ("In the Air"), "die Enttweiren" (the disunited) are described : "heimgekehn in I den un ~
heimlichen Bannstrahl l def die Verstreuten versammclt" ("re~
turned home into' the un-homely banishment I which gathers up
the scattered ones" I GW ,; 290)).L!
And in faCt, !he volte or revolt of appropriation does not rake
PUtCt'. The "here and now" of singular existence is immediately an
elsewhere and another time (a date whose memory must be kept).
If appropriation occurs, we know it is in u-topia itself. This is why
we mUSt substitute for the topological division of here and strange,
nea r and far- which inevitably assigns places-the unlocatable di\'i sion...o(diffC[e~ aheriry. In rhe place (without place) of the
elsewhere, an "other" occurs. that is. a singular existent in whose

60

Rnll~mbmng

Call1StroplJ~

DatN

name- and (his time, the expression is apt- the poem maintains
the hope of speaking. Estrangement yields ground to the encoumg.
But the encounter is no less abysmal than csua ngemcnt. As SOOn
as other occurs, as such , there is the threat of an absolute aherity:
ab*solutc. which forbids or renders im possible all relation. T he
olher. if it is indeed other, is immediately the wholly mher. But at
the same ti me, t he other. even if wholly other, is. insofar as it is
OI her, 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 essence. From precisely this para
dox, Western onto-theology up to Hegel and beyond-one might
as well say, all our thought- has developed. Here it underpins
Cela n's em ire discourse. Bm with a very particular accent, once
agai n close to Heidegger's, which ai ms to remove it fro m all struc
turing of a dialectical type, to suspend in it the movement of res0lution, ro maintain it as pu re paradox.
For the same, in turn, is irself only in relation to the other; the
begi nning of D;~ W;Jl~mclJnfi d~r Logik says in substance that the
si mple and immediate posi tion of the same (of Being) is pure no
thingness or empty nothingness. Between the same and the other
there is necessarily a relation, a reciprocal relation, o r rather, as
Holderli n said, an exchange. One could say that this double rela
tion, which simultaneously divides the same and the other to pUt
them, chiasmatically, in relation to other than what they are, stems
~qlln'ly from the sameness of [he same and the alterity of the other.
But this is not at all so. In the "relating to," it is by defin ition the
movement of alteration that predominates. Or if one prefers, dif
ference is always more prim itive. So that in the relation of the same
and the other (here is an imbalance. This means that it is the alrer
ifY of (he other, the being-wholly-other of the other or a certain
"duplicityn in the other that insti tutes the same as a relation to {he
other, and thus always differentiates it. The same is Heraclitus's
"one differentiated in itself" - a phrase moreover "rcdiscovercd~ by
Holderlin at {he dawn of speculat ive idealism:u This is why the

6,

wholly other-whcther or nOt the word, for Celan, designates

God-de-parts the other, that is, approaches it: relatcs it to the
same, which receives it in, or rather IlJ its most imimatc difference.
The wholly other is the gift of the other as thc possibility of the
same, that is, as the possibility fo r the same of establishing itself as
"differancc" (I use Derrida's spelling here for what it indicates as to
temporality and the origin of time). The same (lhc SubjC1:t) does
not, as speculative logic believes. go outside the self and pass into
its other, with a view to turning and relating back to the self so as
to establish itself as such . But under the (original) gift of the other
to which it already always relates itself, the same is the pure move
mem that allows the intimate gaping-which is, within the self. its
"original outside scl f n {time)-to hollow itself out. to open and
spread.
I may be wrong, but in the firs t pan of Dit Nimlilfldsrost there
arc twO poems, "Dein Hin Ubersein" (~Your Being Beyond") and
~ Zu heiden Handen" ("On Either Hand")-they in faCt appear
one right after the other-that seem to me to speak not ofthis
(t hey in no way say this very thing), but from this. In the fi rst, one
rcads:
GOll , das lasen wiT, is!

ein Teil und ein zweiter, zerstTtuter:

imTod
all der Gem;thten
wiichst er sich zu:
Donhin
flihn uns deT Blick,
mit dieser
H;tlfte
habcn wi r Umgang.

God. so we read, is
a pan and a second, a scattered one:
in the death
of all those mown down
he grows himself whole.

Remembering Dl1lt's
There
our looking leads us,
with this
h~r

we keep up rela t ions. l~

And in the second :

... ich
nnde hinaus.

o dicsc wandernde leere

gastliche Mitte. Getrenm,
fa ll ich d ir zu, fallst
du mir zu, ei nander
emfullen, schn wir
hind urch:

On
Sdb<

hat uns
verloren, das
Sdb<

hat uns
vergc:sscn, das
Sdb<

hat uns-

... 1
find my way out.

o this wandering emp}'

hospirable midst. Apan ,
1 fall to you, you
full to me, fallen away
from each other, we see
through:
One
and the same

h"
lost us, one

CntllJlrophe
and the same
hn

forgotten us, one

and the SlIme
has_ ls
The substirution of the other and the who lly other fo r the strange
and the elsewhere thus produces an ocueme thought of d ifference .
And this tho ught in turn permits o ne to think of singularity as the
secret- we cou ld also say the imimacy-of the encoumer. What
Celan calls the cncounter is thus first the hollowing o ut, the intimate gae ing of si ngularity. The encounter is thc o riginal intimate
ecstasy according to which singular being exists. This is why o ne can
say of the poem which is "alo ne" that it also takes place "in the mystcry of an encou nter." II is also why Celan can say the fo llowing
whc n hc evokes near the end of "T he Meridian" the two texts in
wh ich he "staned to writc from a '20th of January'" - the "catastrop hic" quatrain I have alread y ci ted ("come o n your hands to us")
and the "Gesprach im Gebirg" ("Conversatio n in the Mountai ns"):
" In each instance I started to write from a '2mh o f January,' from
my ' 20th of January.' I encountered ... myself" (201; 39; 81).
It is true that in the encounter (!hgtg11Ullg), the value o f "against"
(gt'gm) of "across fro m" o r "vis-}-vis," seems to p red o minate. A
value of o ppositio n. This certainly seems to be the way Celan unde(Slands it when he defines the poetic act as "an ention," "perceptio n," and "diaJogue":
The poem wants to reach the Other, it needs this Other, it needs a
vis-a-vis. It searchcs it out and addresses il.
Each thing, each person is a form of Ihe Other for the poem, as it
makes for this O ther.
The poem anemplS 10 pay areful attention to everythi ng it encounters: it has a finer ~n~ of detail. of oudine, of Slfuctu re, of color,
and also of the ~ movemems~ and the Msuggestions." These are, 1 beli('Ve, not q ualities gained by an eye competing (or cooperati ng) with
mechanical d evices which arc contin ually bei ng brought to a higher
degree of perfection. No. it is a concentration which remains aware of
all of our datcs ....

Rmumb~r;ng

Darn

'111e poem becomes-and under whae condieions!-a poc:m of one

who- as before-perceives, who fitees that which appears. Who qucsdons Ihis appearing and addresses it. It becomes dialogue-it is often
dl.'S pairing dialogue. (198; 37; 78)
BUI Ole the same time, the value of opposition is d early not the
determining value here. It is inevitably attached to the motif of aIlerity. Yet nothing indicates that it constitutes the concept.
What these lines really seck ro say is the poetic act as an act of
though t. It is no accidem that Celan's definition of anention is. via
Benjamin , that of Malebranche: "'Attemion' -permit me at this
point to quote a maxim of Malebranche which occurs in Walter
Benjamin's essay on Kafka: 'An emion is the natural prayer of the
sou l ~' (198; 37; 78). Again, it is no accident that the encounter is
defi ned as a "perceiving" and a "questioning." T he "perceiving"
(wllhnuhmen)- and once more we must consider Heidcgger, who
here, as it happens, is both very far fro m and near to Benjamin- is
the G reek 1I0~in, though t, the very essence of reason (Verll/mft); as
for the questioning- but here, the proximity is very strange-we
well know that Heidegger, in a F.unous text, said it was nothing less
than the "Fromm igkeit des Denkens."26
Yet thought supposes what I am calling, of course for lack of a
bener term , intimacy o r the int imate difference. It supposes, or
more precisely, it originates in inti macy as the possibiliry of "lnring
/0 in general. It is in this sense thai the poem thi nks o r is a d ialogue. The dialogue is a speaking and a naming (which one would
have to call "pure" if echoing Benjam in , "essential" if thinking of
Heidegger). But speaking and nami ng are, in turn, a "Ierring
speak. " To speak to the other being or thing- ro address him or it.
is (Q let what speaks in him or it occur, and accept this word in the
very heart of the poem (i n irs "immediacy and proximity") as the
gift of the other. It is to prepare, ecstatically, fo r the "presence" of
Ihe other withi n oneself; ro let intimacy open up.

Only in [he realm of Ihis dialogue does thai which is addressed rake
for m and galher around the I who is addressing and naming it. BUI
[he one who has been addressed and who, by vin ue of having been

UUflstropJU

6,

named, has, as il were, become a thou, also brings its olherncss along
into [he presenl, into Ihis pre:sent. -In Ihe hcre and now of the poem '
il is still possible""":the poem iuelf, after all. has only Ihis one, unique,
limiled present- only in Ihis immediacy and proximity does it allow
Ihe mosl idiosyncratic quality of Ihe Olher, its time, 10 participate in
(he dialogue. (198-99; m 78) The "counter" of the encounter o r the against is thus not sim-

ply the "counter" of oppositio n. Rather, in the very vis-a~vis that

is [he encounter, it is what rids itSelf of opposition. It is the
~co umer" of proximity, that is. of dc-parting. The other de-parts,
dose against a proxim ity such that it makes the very space of inrirnacy which renders possible thought and word. that is. dialogue.
For [his reason the poem turns, within itself, to the~ ppea rin&.JQ
yvhat is "in the p rocess of ap~a ring"; it questions the very coming
into presence. T he poem (the poetic act) , in this mode proper ro \
it (dialogue), is the thought of the present's presence, or of the
other of what is present: the_th2Yght of no-thingness (of Being),
t hat is 10 say, t he thought of time. "Soviel G est irne" ("So Many
Constellations"):
... in den Schluchten,
dOl. wo's vergliillle. stand
zlttcnprachlig die Zei t,
an def schon empor- und hinabund hinwegwuchs, was
is[ oder war oder sci n wird-,
ieh weiss,
ieh weiss und du weissl. wir wussten,
wir wuSSlcn nichl . wir
waren ja dOl und nichl doC!.
und 1.uweilen, wenn
nur d3S Nichts zwischcn uns Siand , fitnden
wir ganz zueinandcr.
. . . in chasms,
and where Ihey had burm OUl,
splendid wilh leatS, stood Time,

66

Rmlt!mb~rillg Dnu!

011 which already grew up

and down and away all thai
is or was or will bc-.

I know,
I know and you know, we knew,
we did not know, we
were there. afte r all, and nor there
and at times when
only the void stood bcrwccn us we gOi
att the way lO each m her.17

Of cou rse, Cclan is not saying time itself, but rather, speaking of
the other who i s~ in eve'}' instance, a Rarticular other, hi! tin.!.. The
poetiC act (the poem) is a singular experience, the dialogue is a s in~
gular dialogue. And this is of course what distinguishes poetry

\ from thought proper, from [he exercise of thought. even (and es~
pecially) if poetry thinks. But I do nor thi nk one call make th is an

argument, as Uvinas does a bit hastily, in favor of who knows what

improbable "beyond" of "ontology"; in favo r of a pathos (here,
mictly conceived), of the "otherwise [han Being."18 Ccrrainly pow
cric questioning begins with a singular address: to the mher, in faCt
ml/isng~d as a "you. " But this address to the you is an address to the
al tcrity of the you-of this other; it is the address, obscurely arisen
from intimacy (from the intimate diffe rence), to the being of the
other, which always "is" and can only "be" Being. I-Iow could o ne
speak at all if Being was not involved? There is no "otherwise than
Bei ng," unless, once again, o ne understands Be ing as being, and
misses, in the other, precisely its altcrity. Poetry's "you-saying," irs
llaming. is.!! way of " Being-saying" other than that which proru;rI
belo ngs to thought, but still a way of " Being-saying." It is possible
,har another space o pens up from sllch a naming, or ,hat naming
shcds a diffcre nt light o n the space opencd up by any saying. To
cxpress this, H eidegger uscs Holderlin's word: "the holy" (dllS H~i
lige). nut the other space or rhc space on which a diffc rcnt liglll is
shcd is 110! " beyond" Bcing. The experiencc of the You, thc el1 COUllter, ope ns o nto nothing other than thc experience of Being:

CnlnstropJu
of the no- thing of being-which C elan design;lI es, precisely in
Holderlin's (erms (not Rilke's), as "openncss," "empt iness," "freed o m ." I again qume the d ecisive passage:
When \'o'e speak with things in this manner "'ot always find ourselves
faced with the qUCition of tht ir whtnce and whither [naeh ihrtm
W1:I/"" und Wohin]: a qucstion which "remains ope n~ and "docs not
come (0 an end," which pointS into openness, emptiness, frcedomwe are outside, at a considerablt distance.
The poem, I believe, also Sttk.ol this place. (199; J7; 78-79)
In other words, poetry's questioning is mela-physical questioning
itself, in the sense that ir is the repetition of rhe meta-physica1 as
Hcidegger undersrands it. It questions in the direction of being as
"transcendence as such" (das tritmulldens SChlLcJJthhl).19 JUSt such a
"transcendent" is sought in [he singular thing or being it is incumbent upon poetry- the poem- to perceive (think): it is the "who lly "...
other," [he nrch~ and rhe uUJs of the other, and nothing here
permitS us [ 0 simply identify this wholly other with God . That is
why Celan can say of poetic questioning, of the d emand or pre~
tension (Ampmch) in all poems, even the least preten tious ( all ~
spmchsUJsnu) [hat it is at o nce " inescapable" and " incredible." The
qucstion the poem carries is, as Launay correctly translates, "exor~
bitam" (199; 38; 79)
In this sense, the poetic act is ecstatic. The exorbitant is the pure I
transcendence of being. It follows that the poem , as a questioning,
is [limed toward [he open, offered up to it. And rhe open is itself/
open, after a fashion , to u-topia, to the pl~ce w i~hoUl place ~f the
advent. To put it in other terms, rhe poeliC act IS catastrophIC: an
upsctting relation to what is an upset, in being, in rhe direction
no-thingness (the abyss).
T his is just what justifies the idea that poetry is the interruption
of art, that is, the interruption of mimesis. Poetic an consists of
pe rceiving, nor represe nti ng. Re presenting, at least according to
some of the "ancienr TUmors," can o nly be said of the already-present. W hat is "in rhe process of appearing~ can not be represented,
o r if so, we must give a completely different meaning to represen-

01

Rnnemb(!rillg DIlIt's

CntllJtToplu

ration. For pacify. represemation is organized starting with what

onc might call omic comparison (the comparison of the alreadyprcscm with the a l ~dy-presen[), from which arise figures or images, "metaphors and mher ropes," all the turns of ph rase that alIowa ccrrain use of language to Ix defined as "poet ic." Measured
against the requirements of questioning tOward Being or presence,
the amic comparison , and therefo re
"poetic," have to do with
what Heidcggcr denounced as "idols" (Giitun) and problcmatized
as "thi nking in models" (Dmkm in Modelkn). j(J T here is nothing
_to which onc can compare Being: Being is, purely and s imp l~

wi thout images or the impossibility of what Benjam in calls "pure

language," that is, the language of names.}l

68

me

~n rc=p rese ntable.

Poetry as Celan understands it is thus in this sense the imcrruption of rhe "poetic." At least, it is defined as a banle against ido latry. All "real" poems, all that are effectively poems, seem to aim at
nothing other than being the place where the "poeric" collapses and
becomes abysmal. The taSk of poetry seems to be ti relessly undoing
the "poetic"; nor by "purring an end" to figures and tropes, bur by
pushing them ad ab1t4rtill1n, as Lucile's " Long live the Ki ngl" in the
sharp light o f death suddenly makes absurd the thearricali ty and
grandiloquence of "historic" discourses. In the highly rigorous
sense the term has in H eidegger, poetry would th us be the "deconstruction" of the poetic, that is to say, both of what is recognized
as such (here there is a closely fought confrontation with the p<>etic tradition) and of the spontaneous "poeticity" of language
(wh ich su pposes the strictest possible language work).
Such a task. which amounts to extenuating the "poetic," is perhaps impossible-Celan is the first to say so. Nevertheless, it is
what his poetry strives to do. It strives as "poetry of poet ry." But it
also strives inasm uch as it seeks to reduce the image to pure perception, that is, seeks to empty o r hollow o ut the image. To the
question "And what, then, would the images be?" once the poem
condenses in "exo rbitant" questioni ng, the respo nse is: "That
which is perceived and to be perceived one time, o ne time over and
lo ver again, a nd ollly now and o nly here" (199; 38: 79). Poetry
would th us measure itself against the impossibility of a language

Two remarks [ 0 close:

I. In its impossible, exhausting combat with an (the mot if of
panting, babbling, or stammering), ~ha~t ry wants to rid itsel f
of is the beautiful. The poem's threat is the Ixautiful, and all p0ems are always ( 00 beautiful, even Celan's.
The beautiful is obviously closely linked to mimesis. This is particularly visible in Benjamin , who defines the beautiful "as the object of experience in t he state of resemblance." H e quotes Valery
o n this: " Beauty may require the servile imitation of what is indefi nable in o bjecrs."H If one went so fa r as to say "the servile imitat ion of that which is inimitllble in things," o ne would reach what
makes poetry's essence fo r Cclan, that is. what does not destine it
fo r the beautiful- o r fo r mimesis. But at the same time this pure
oxymoron , ~he imitatio n of theinimitable. marks the impossibility of poetry. This is where Celan locates the tragic.
2 . I do nOt know, finally. if "Tilbingen, Janner" contains t he
slightest allusion to Moses and the interdiction against representation. AlII know is mat Holderlin, more than has 1>n Ixli~ and
more than H eid eggerian commentary leads us to think. evoked the
Patriarchs. "Am Quell der Donau" ("At the Source of the Danube"), for example, says this:
And think of you, a valleys of the Kaulwos.
Whatever your antiquity, paradises far,
And your patriarchs and prophets,

Mother Asia , and your heroes

Without fea r for the signs of the world,
Heaven and fate upon their shoulders,
Rooted. on mounlaintops days on end ,
Were the first to understand
Speaking to God
Alo nc.J3

Rmumwring Vain

70

Patriarchs and prophets arc named here: those who have known an
CIl CO Uluer-

:1.

dialogue-with God. Celan would perhaps have

2 Prayer

s;tid: wit h Ihe wholly other. And perhaps he would have conceived
such a d ialogue as poetry itself. Perhaps. AnOlher poem from Dj~
NinnmuiJrou, "Sci Wein und Vcrlorenhcit" ("Over Wine and Lostness"), speaks in this direction . It says:

Novtmb~r

10-15, 1983 (B~rk~/ry)

ieh ritt dUTch den Schnee, horst du,

ieh rill Gon in die Fernc--dic N:thc. cr sang,
cs war
unseT tettte r

Rift

il~r

die Mcnschcn-H fi rdcn.

Sic ducktcn sich, ~n n

sic.: uns tiber sich horten, sic
schricbcn, sic
logen u nseT Gcwichcr
urn in cine

ihrer bebildcm:.n Sprachcn.

I rode through the snow, do you hear,
I rode God into fu rness-nearness, he sang,
II

was

our last ri de over

the human hurdles.

They ducked when

they heard us above Iheir heads. Iht')'
wrote, they lied
whinnyi ng
In t o one
of their be-imaged la nguagcs.~

?ur

I said of "Psalm ," in Di~ Nimlafldsrou, (hal it is a ureal prayer."

Just what did I mean?
Three things, it .seems to me (I had d ifficul ty articulating them
while improvising a respo nse. And even now, w hat I propose is
hardl y bener than a sketch).
I.

First of all, I meant simply that "Psalm," at least in its second

stanza , is in standard praye r fo rm:

Gelobt scisl du, Niemand.
Dir rulieb wollen
wir bluhn.
Dir
elllgcgen.
Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flowe r.
Towards
you.1
The standard fo rm of prayer happens 10 be invocation and ad dress-laudato ry add ress. Unlike what happens in Trakl's Fam ous
poem , for example, the tide " Psalm" is not fo rmall y d enied ; th is is
indeed a song or a hymn in ho no r of ... No o ne. Moreover, it is

7'

R~mnllb"ing

Daus

a ncar '1l1ote. through wh ich it becomes clear that No one is named

in place of the biblical God , the God invoked in Hebrew (thcn
Christian) liturgy. In place of the creawr God to whom the first
SllJl7.ll alludes:
Niemand knelel uns wieder aus Erde und u-hm
niemand bcspricht unsern Staub.
'
Niemand.
No one moulds us again ou( of earth and day,
no one conjures our dun.
Noone.
That is why, for the love of such a "God," man (the "we" who
proffers the prayer) sees and designates himself as a creature: the
no onc'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, art" ironical-that this is a SOrt of sarcasm bordering on blasphemous parody... No....o.nc.. has nevcr been
a n:une. except in the wily Witz U!xsses used to escape the Cyclops,
or In Pessoa. But nothing in the tone of the poem indicates such
an irony. Unless, that is, one understands irony as itself the figure
of despair, a despair here absolute:
Ein Nichts
waren wir, sind wir, werden
wir bleiben, hlilhend ...
A nothing
we were, are, shall

remain. Rowcring ...

Whence a second possible objection: this poem may be an antior cou llIer-prayer, a SOrt of "ncgative" prayer; a prayer whose aim is
10 show prayer's inanity. But the prayer form, the invocation, does
J~OL~W mc..inanity of the prayer itself. The praycLSeems to nu[~ I fy ItSelf as ~n address because it nullifies its addressee by present1Ilg. or nanung..him as No one. But " No one" only ever means rhe

73

absence or lion-existence of the addressee, not that there is no addrCSSt."1:. There is no absurdity in such a proposition. It means simply 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 another way, the paradoxical naming of irs address makes it at once
(formally) possib[e, and impossible. It is no less a prayer for that ,
in its very impossibility; a prayer and, "who knows," perhaps a "at
prayer. The paradox here is just the one that ceaselcssly creatcs the
tension in Cclan's poetry and thought.
2. To substimte No one for God is (0 reveal in a daz.z.l.ing way ~
that "God" is not, or was not, a name. This poem has an apocalyptic quality.
To say that "God" was not a name amounts (0 saying that
"God," long thought the name of all names, ~e name of me name' l
desiS!!ated no one to whom to direct an apdress; iuv.as a word or a.
c~cept signifying that whic.h_was":'wholl~theiJhan..man, but
neither more nor less 2 name than "man" is (one can address someone by calling out "Man!" but only when one does not know the
person's name, or when, dependi ng on circumstances, one can not
or will not say it). As H eideggeL.Says, in substance, before such a
(concept of) God, one can neither kneel, nor offer sacrifices. nor
pray. And if people believed they could address God. call him by
the "name" God. this was no less paradoxical than invoking No
one (the divi ne. on (he other hand, is always named and renamed:
Apollo, Jesus, the oblique "Christ." T he biblica[ god is known by
several names, or an unpronounceable, written one).
T hat God is nOt 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 that God, the name of the name, is beyond
all names. We kno; at least rhis minimum of negative theology:
God exceeds through infinite power (i.e., by his infinite presence)
any kind of assigning. Finite language cannot rake the measure of
his infi nity. That is, the [anguag~ofhere cannot say what is wholly
other. But that is nor what Cdan's poem_prayer_ reveals. The
poem reveals simply that GPd, because he is God, i.\..:no one."

74

Prayer

Remembering Dates

( rhat ~od as such d~oU!!lst. j{is ~Ilamc:mca n s..::.no...onc," .hit

"uamc" is no one's name. If underl ying this revelation there is a son
of accusation- wh ich I th in k rhere is; I would say, even, a desperau: accusation- it is clearly against theology, which is to say against
philosophy. PlatO d id not only "d ispose people tOward Ch ristian, ity"; in Plato'S language, our language, all that is d ivine came, irreversibly, to be said (Bm if an accusation of this son is indeed present here, it in no way prohibits the strange elation, the liberty, that
traverses the poem).
"God d oes not exist~ is not a declaration of atheism. At most, it
would be only if "God does not exist" meant "G od has never exp sred. " "Psalm" suggestS nothing of the SOrt; rather, it intimates that
, God has revealed himself to be "no one."3 Indeed, the wieder of the
first verse, side by side with knett'n, is stri king:
Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm.
No one moulds us again OUI of earth and day.
This clearl y means that someone d id so in the past; someone, a
god, (he god of creation, molded us out of eanh and day and conju red our d ust. Or at least, we h umans believed so; we believed that
we were creatu res and that someone, the god of this creation, comfo rted us even in death. T hus d efi ned as mortal creatu res, it was
possible for us to address the god who d e-termi ned our existence
in this manner. But once we no lo nger d efine oursclves as mon a!
creatu res,jt is revealed_(h~JJlo o ne created us, that we' are nothing- o r rather that we are "a nothi ng." (eill Nicbts), a m:-t'ns ~ in
the sense of nIS crMtum- and that the only prayer it is still in our
power to pro ffer, in echo of the o ld prayer, is a prayer to No one. It
is revealed that Revelation has come to an end. Since th is end we
can say, in prayer, not th at G od has never existed, but that we h umans have never been , a[ld will never be, anythi ng but "no things."
T he possibility of the Revelation is closely linked- and this has
always, necessarily been the case-(Q rhe q uestion of man, the
essence o f man. fu soon as man in his essence is no-th ing, as
soon as the being he is can be defi ned- in recollection of Angelus

7'

SilesLus's abysmal rose, the "rose o f n.9thi ng" o r o f nothingness

(admirable still, like everythi ng that is}- what has been calledl), ...
"God , the ~m mmmll1l/, is revealed no longer [Q exist. And this,
I~ten ce is attested to in its becom ing anO!lymous: the word
"G od" did not name anyone, or in any case no being in the mode
of a being,5 even one of incomparably more than human beingin fin ite, supreme, and so on.
We still need to know, however, if "to exist" is the same thing as
"to be." I mean simply that the question of God depe nds on the
q uestion of man. Yet the questio n of man or his essence is not
~ What is man ?H b ur rather, "W ho is man?" H eid egger took it in
this form fro m H old erlin in an a[(em pt ro p ry it away fro m
Kant- ro the de triment of a program matic philosophical anthropology. The same goes for God ; the question "What is G od?" will \~
never reach G od hi mself, in h is existence or n on~exis tence. If God
is man's o ther, o nly one q uestio n abo ut h im is possible. T hat is: +
"W ho is G od ?" Mo reover, ro the q uestion " What is man ?" the answer, today, is always already that man is the subject. T his indicates
simply rhat man is God , o r the converse.
C elan's extraordinary, "exorbi ta nt" effort consists of kee ping
ope n the questio n "Who?" even with respect to God and even if, as
Heidegger says, the q uestion ("Who is the G od ?") is "perhaps .. .
t OO d ifficu lt for man, and asked tOO early." One hears it resonate, I
th ink , in another poem fr;;;-Die Ni~mmldsrou in wh ich , after a
fash ion , the Alliance is affi rmed:
H

Es war Erde in ihnen, und

sic gruben.
Sie gruben und gruben, so ging
ihrTag dahi n, ihre Naehe Und sic [oblen nichl Galt,
de t, so horten sic, alles dies wa llie,
de r,.so hortcn sic, alles dies wusstc.
Sie gruben und hon en nichts mchr;
sic wurdcn nicht weise, erfanden kei n Lied,
erdachten sich keincrlei Spl"Jehe.
Sic gruben.

Rl'I,,~mb~ri"g

Dau!

F_~ kam ei ne SlmC, es kam aueh ein Sturm,

e$ kamen die Mccre allc.
!eh grabe, du griibst, und es grjbt aueh de! Wurm,
und das Singende don sagt: Sic graben.

o einer, 0 keincr. a niemand, 0 du:

Wohin gings. da's nirgcndhin gi ng~

o du grjbst und ieh grab, und ich grab mich dir lU,
und am Finger erwachl um der Ring.
There was canh inside them, and
they dug.
They dug and they dug, so thcir day
went by for thcm, thci r night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so rhey heard. kncw all this.
They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise:, invented no song,
thought up for themse:h'es no language.
Thcr dug.
There camc a stillness, and therc came a storm
and all the occans came.
'
I dig, you dig, and the worm digs tOO,
and chat singing out thcre sa)'3: They dig.

o onc, a none, 0

no one, 0 you:
Where did the: way Icad when it led nowhe:rc?
o you dig and I dig, and I dig towards you.
and on our finger the ring awakcs.6
Cclan's questioning thus considers the possibility that GodY t?rough the "name" "God"- has become anonymous. The revela-

tion of God's anonymity is a historical event (li ke the Revelation

itsel~). It is perhaps the very event, o r advent, of hislOry. God's..be~1~g. anollJl1
~ (as, I think it probable, the Revelation itself) is_
blStonclty; that is, the dislocation of the religious. We are very d ose
here to the mean ing of H olderl in's "retreat" and "return-turning
away," o r to NietzSChe's "God is dead."

77
Nie~he'~ "God is dead" (let us nor fo rget that weare the o ncSj J
who killed hIm) produces. however, man's extreme sclf_assumptio n1Df"
as a subject-the subjcct of the Will to Power. This culminatcs in
an entirely necessary way in what I have found it accura te to call
"the subject's plunge into insanity":' I am God- Dionysus; Qr, precisely in thcJoss of the name, I am all names (the names of hislOry). For behind NietzSChe's "God is dead," there is the (specula~
tive) death of the Luth e ro~ H egelian God; that is, the absolute,
unto-death fi nitization of God, his absolute becoming man . And
this is his resurrection as the Absolure. the subject itself. Celan distances himself from both these ideas-if indeed they are lWO-of
the cnd of the divine.
On the other hand , t@."withd rawal" of the divine in H olderiin,
the "categorical turning away" of me god (the Father, who is the
"mther of ti me") that draws on the essence of Creek tragedy. is in
no way related [0 any of the figures of Cod's death. "Reueat" is nQJj
death ; i.0s, o n the contrary.
r eves the god and..Kp~tes
to
an fro m the divine. what (C:ttaq,ubOimi~of..6n.it_ude, 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,,is-as tragedy attestsman's death, or plunge into turmoil. It is the mo nStrous ( ulIgeheun) coupling in which the god, tOO, is lost in man's excess, his
enthusiasm. Retreat is thw necessary to preseeve the god's "holi,)
ness," in the same way that the law commands man to endure the
god's "Raw"-bccause only the Raw helps or saves. Eauhe man re.q.trned to earth (carastrophized), such "wlfitithfulncss" is the height
o "piety." This supposes that epiphany always be conceived as the
initial moment of retreat, o r the initial tCSt of finit ude; man's fi nite
bei ng is his being a-tlleo!. Bm it also supposes that the divine be
subject to the very history its epiphany-or retre3t-sets into mo~
tion: the gods have rurned away from [he world; perhaps a god is ....

still to come.
Celan is closer to this idea. Obviously, he cannOt de~lore thC I
"lack of sacred or holy names." The god he is thinking of is the ...,. '.'
Jewish god , and he knows with overwhelming cen ainty where the

79

Rrmrmbrrillg Data

Pray"

rU0smigia fo r ,,/IItbOI, and the frenzied attempt at re m Ylh ologiza~

tion (which Holderl in escaped , but wirh which Heidegger com ~
promist:ti himself well beyond 1933's proclamations) led Germany
(Europe). Nevertheless, be shanxlwith Holderlin, in direct desttnt
fro m the motif of the "time of distrcss,~ thc..hopc of a religion to
come. Implicitly, at leas!. Near the end of "The Merid ian," we
read:

all over; God's becom ing-anonymous is irreversible. Cclan will

have maimained the possibili ty of prayer.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am approaching the conclusion ... . 1 2m

2pproaehing the conclusion of ... "u-once and Lena. ~
And here, with the nnal twO words of the dt3ma,' 1 mwt pay arc~
/jJ1 attention, lest, like Karl Emil Fra.nzos. the editor of that KFirst
Complete CritiC:l1 Edition of Grorg BUchner's Collected Works and
Posthumous P2PCrs," which the SauerHinder Press published in FrankfUT! am Main eigilly-one years ago-I must pay careful attention, lcst,
like my rOUlItT'J111411 KArl Emil FmIlZI)J, /Uhom I haw htTtfoll lld 4gaill, I
Tad Kroming" for Kcomfortable, ~ which is now the accepted variant. IO
But on second thought: aren't there quof3tion marks present in
"Leonce and Lena," quotation marks with an invisible: smile: in the direction of the words? And perhaps these 2ft to be understood nOi as
mere punctuation scra.tches, but rather as rabbit cars, listening in,
son1ewhat timidly, on themselves and the words?
Celan of course chooses "comfortable." But he chooses it with its
quotation marks. It is, moreover, "with that as a starting point""but also in the light of uto pia" - that he an empts, he says, a
"lOpo~rap h y," ~ea rchin g fo r Lenz's and Franzos's place of origin;
searchlllg for hiS own. None of these places can be fou nd ; instead,
o ne encounters the meridian, that is, the vcry line that conducts
the poem towards the encounter.
So there will have been at least ,his possibilj'ty suspended before
..-! us; a way of saying "who knows?" A religion to come. And even if,
after Di~ Ninnnndsros~ and then the expl icit turning point of Amn~umd~. th~ reference to God is, as it were, rarefied; even jf a poem
Ill. Du Numal/dJr~u speaks of the god who "comes /lot , "I I Cclan
wL~1 never pa~e sa id what, in reading him . I am tempted 10 say
(wllhout wanting to put the words in his mouth); namely, fhat it is

3. I was thinking, too, of this: mightn't it be that a poem which

thus maintains the possibi lity of prayer- at its oU[er limit , [0 be
sure-is the sign [hat a link. and perhaps a necessary link, exists
betwccn ptayer and poetry? That poetry in its essence is prayer, and
co nversely, that every prayer is a poem?
The second proposition apparcmly poses little difficulty; after
all . the sole archives 0( 1I1e divine are poems, and an address to rhe
god, more than ~y othcr kind, requires :i conversion in language
or an entirely diffcrent attitude within it. When, in view of the encounter, u lan dedicates the poem to attention , he does not take
lightly Malcbranche's defi nition: attention is "the soul's natural
prayer." If the idea of prayer magnetizes the poem's search, it is
d early because ~ocation is here conceived as the o riginal fo rm of
3.ddress. And prayer is conceived, in a way, as the clcment of the
poetic. But that amounts to saying that in its essence, poetry is
prayer. How to undersrand this?
..... I think that it has always belonged to the expectations of
the poem ... to speak in (h~ eallst ofan Otlur-who knows, perhaps in the cause of a who/ely Olh~T;"12 one cannot lo ng pretend
not to know that [his phrase from "The Meridian" appeals 10 God.
And that it appeals specifically to God so as to say the original
hope. and thus the first aim, of poetry. This amounts to Structuri ng
the phrase to God, or assign ing it, in its essence, to be the wo rd uttered in God's name, for his cause. And finally, to be prayer.
We must not be tOO quick to believe, however, that such assignment is simply tantamount to rencwing olllo-theological confusio n. T hus invoking the wholly other is obviously risky. But
nowhere in "The Meridian" docs o ne find the slightest proposition
that would authorize d osi ng the wholly other down 0 1110 Beingbei ng which is, moreover, never designated as such, even if it is
Strictly conceived as no-thingness (that which is open, empty, free),
perhaps beyond what Heideggcr's statements on poetry as a "to pol-

Rmmnbmllg Dales

80

ogy of bcing~ suggesl. 13 T he reference 10 the wholly other, in its

suspensive mode (" ... who knows, perhaps ... ") is, on the con.
lrary. a question asked, toward God, to the dcrcimcm of o nto-theology. It is precisdy bttause the being reveals judf as nmhingness,
no Ihing, [hat the God (someone, ~jnt:r) reveals himsdf as "not
o nc" o r "nonc" (krin"). and nom there as "no o nc" (Niml/md). A
no o ne whom it is (nill) possible to address (you. du):

o dner,

keiner.

Nicmand, 0 duo

The movcmcni from nothingness ro you indissociably links (he

movement of Ihe "encounter" and the movement of God's becoming-anonymous. But o ne 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, in
order to say ~yo u ," to..in.voke, and.pcrhaps..thus to savc names.
Two poems evoke this movemem if one attempts (0 n:.id"rhem
together. The poem ~50x!ELGestirne" ("50 many constellations"),
that I have already quoted in part but whose last stanza I would
like to cite again:
ich weiss,
ich weiss und du ....OCiSSI, wir WUSSlen,
wit wussten nichl, wit
waren ja da und nichl don,
und tuweilen. wenn
nur das Niches zwischen uns sl2nd, f.mden
wir ganz zueinander.

I know,
I know and you know, we knew,
we did nOI know, we
were there, wer:.tll, and nOI there
and at limes when
only the void stood between us we gOt
alJ the way to each othcr. 14

And Ihe very difficult poem "Radix, Matrix":

8,
Wie man tum Stein sprichl, wie

d"
mir vom Abgrund her, von
ciner Heimat her Verschwisterte, Zugcschleudene, du,
du mir vorLCiren,
du mir im Nichts eincr Nacht.
du in der Abcr-Nacht BegegnCle. du
Aber-Du-:
Damals, da ich nicht da war,
damals, da du
den Acker abschritfst, allein:
Wer,
wet wars, jenes
Gescble<:hl, jcnes gemordere, jenes
schwan. in den Himmel stehende:
RUle und Hode-?
( Wund.
Wund Abrahams. Wun.c:l Jesse. Niem2ndcs
Wun.d-o

unser.)
j"
wie man zum Stein spricht, wie

d,
mil meinen H anden donhin
und ins Nichls greifst, so
ist, was hier ist:
auch dies<:r
Fruchtboden klafTI,
dieses
Hinab
ist die cine der wild
blUhendcn Kronen.

Rnllmlber;lIg Dnus
As ol1e spe:lkl

[0 SlOne, like
you,
from Ihe chasm, from
a home become a
sister 10 me, hurled
towards me, yo u,
you that long ago.
you in the nothingness of a night,
you in the multi-night encountered, you
multi-you- :

At that time, when I was nOi there,

at that lime when you
paced the ploughed field, alone:

Who.
who was ii, that
lineage, the murdered, [hat looms
black into the sky:
rod and bulb-?
(Root ..
Abraham's rool. Jesse's root. No one's
rOOI-O
ours.)

Va.
as one speaks 10 stone, as
yO"
with my hands grope into there,
and illlo nothi ng, such
is what is here:
this fertile
soil 100 gapes,
this
going down
is one of the
crests growing wild. 11

Pmyer
Among many o lher things this at least is disclosed: the poem
melds wi th the add ress ilself; there exists only a SO rt of nomination without a nam e, a "saying-you." The address here-at leasl
th is is one of the poem's possibilities-is the very gestu re of love. II
does nOt say, it is. as such , rhe "encou nter," starting fro m the abyss
or noth ingness. That is, starting fro m d eath itself; not only the
deat h -capabili ty of finirude, but, aggravat ing or having permanentl y aggravated th is, [he historically occurred death , the extermi nation . Starting from annihilation (behind the mo tif of nothing o r no thingness, that particular nothingness is always prCSCllt. It
will have imposed a wholly other fo rm of the memorable, the unforge ttable; another fo rmulation o f the question in general; another partition of the thinkable and the unthinkable. It w ill have
altered thought). But to address someone else, {Q love him. is necessarily to address in h im the wholly other, in the very recogn ition
of aherity and always under the th real Ihat the aherity might take
refuge in irs ab-sol uteness. The "you" is divided, and it is nOt only
in God that one half doses in on itself. The yo u is also an "Agains t
you" or a "Not-you" (Aber-dll), a name-incidentally, untra nslatable-that o ne fi nds again in "Zu rich, Zum Storchen" ("Zilrich ,
the Stork Inn"), a poem written in memory of an encounter with
Nelly Sachs:
Vom Zuvicl war die Rc.-de, vom
Zuwenig. Von 011
und Aber-Du. von
der Triibung durch Hclles, von
Judischem, von
dcinem Gon.
Of tOO much was our talk, of
100 little. Of the You
and Not-You, of
how clarity troubles, of
Jcwishncss, of
your God. lt.

8,
Calling the You NOIYou says: if I call you, ir is ,he other in you
that I call in call ing you "you"; i, is the wholly other, il is God. It is
"no one," which remains your place of origin; you who m I call and
can c..ll1 (and il is indeed love, or probably was). From nm hingness,
C.1.J1ing the wholly other. even if he is "no one," is the very possibiliry of address, o f "speaki ng to," of "sayi ng-you"; the possibiliry o f
Ihe poem as Ihe possibiliry of"re-lating to" in general. And it is in
this sense thai every poem is a prayer.
At least lImil Cclan writes the last poem in Lichtzwang:
Wirk nicht voraus,
sende nieht aus,
steh
herein:
durch grilndet vom Nichts,
ledig allen
Gebets,
feinfugig, nach
der Vor-Schrin,
unuberholbar,
nehm ich dich auf,
sian aller
Ruhe.
Do nOI work ahead,
do not send fonh ,
stand
into it, enter:
lransfounded by nothingness,
unburdened of all
prayer,
microstruetured in heeding
Ihe pre-script,
unoverlakable,
I make you at home,
instead of all
rdt. 11

But il is also true that "unburdened of all prayer" remai ns a prayer,

or the cilation of o ne. As re-called in "Trcckschmenzcit" (" Hour of
the Barge"), anmher poem from LichrzWfll1g, it is MeiSler &:khan 's:
"Let us pray (0 God to keep us fret and dear of God. " Re-cited by
Celan, the prayer is addressed to God for him to stop the pain , the
pure pain that he is in us and between us. Or even, 10 SlOp the
agony that he is, Ihe agony of death:
. .. def Enthohle, geinnigt,
spricht umer den Stimen am Vfer:
Todts quill, Goues
quitt.
... caSt from the throne, he turned inwards,
speaks among brows on the shore:
dear of death, d ear
of God.

I'

O ne could probably say Eckhart's prayer condenses, (0 the great

CSI possible degree, all spttUlalive omo--theology. Bernard Boschensiein imerpretS Cclan's re-use of it thus:
The pott ... then uners the words of liberation: dear of death, dear I
of God. With these words, men would be freed of lheir burden; they
could consciously achieve double death: God's, and thai of death itsel( For these deaths are linked. Death in Celan is a modern form of
Ihe divine presence. His poems receive from death their center of gravity, their sense and their legibility. As the words' magnel, death is their
Structuring pole. With the death of death , a turning point is reached
that ordains a new ~ti fIOCation. The last poem in !ithtzwant. yields
the formul a: ~trans fo unded by nothingness, I unburdened of all I
prayer."I' 1I is incumbent upon Ihe pott to accept this new foundation and not 10 Ace into a distant world.lO
But we sho uld not necessarily understand it this way, if o nly because Eckhart's formulatio n, here truncated, modified o r diverted,
is removed fro m Ihe prope rly dialectical syntaJI it origi nally possessed: let us pray to God to kee p us dear of God. Thus. Cela n's

')

86
imroduclion or "dear of death" can nOl mean ''rhe death of death, "
which is really the Hegelian notion of God's death (,he resurrcction) and rhus the correct, speculative way to understand Eckhart's
phrase. Rather. Cc1a o's..furmulauon means; C iven thaLwe no
longer owe anything to dq rh, that we have no debt to jt or have
already paid it everything (rhe allusion is d ear), we are in cfreeland without asking God, "who ... walHcd all that I who ... knew
all that"-dear of God. The citation of the prayer is "unburdened
of all prayer, " The poem arrives in the prayer's stead and in its
place; rhe poem as it is henceforth uttered by the "deposed" or
"fallen ," the desubJimed (d" Emhobu, who no lo nger inhabits the
heights), revealing precisely through this [hat "there is no longer a
God, n rather than Ihar "there is no God."
Celan's poelry would then perhaps also be the place where the
~nce of poetry ceases to be prayer. Or more accurarely, where ir
renounces prayer.

3 Sublime
Nov~mber 2 1,

1983 (Berktlry)

In J.-F. L.'s lecture on Barnett Newman, "T he Sublime and the

Avant-garde," I fou nd a passage on Burke particularly striking.
J.-F. L.later gave me a copy of his text:
However much K:!.m rejecu Burke's thesis as empiricism and physiologism, however much he borrows, on the other hand, Burke's analysis of the comradiction characterizing the .sentiment of the sublime.
he strips Burke's esthetic of what I think is its greatest value. which is
to show that the subl ime is provoked by tlu (hriarrhat nothing will
happrn allymorr. The beautiful gives positive pleasure. But there is anot her son of pleasure, linked to a passion stronger than satisfaction,
which is pain and the approach of death. In pain the body affects the
soul . But the soul can also affect the body as if it felt pai n of external
origin, just by means of representations unconsciously associated with
painful situations. This wholly spi ritual passion is called terror in
Burke's lexicon. But terrors are linked to being deprived: deprived of
lighl' terror of darkness; deprived of others, terror of solitude; deprived
of language. terror of silence; deprived of objects. terror of the void;
deprived of life, terro r of dC';lth. What terrifies is that the possibility of
the phrase " It h ap~n s that ~ does nOi happen: il ceases to happe n.
In order for terror to commingle with pleasure and thus create the
sentiment of the sublime, it is also necessary. writes Burke, for the
threat that produces terror to be suspended, held at a distance, restrained. This s us~nsc, the lesseni ng of a threat or d:l. nger, provokes
:I. son of pleasure which is certainly nOI that of positive satisfaction.

88

&m~mbmfJg

DaUs

but nnhn of rdief. It is still privation, but once removed: the soul is
deprived of the threat ofbcing deprived of light, langu2gc:, life, Burke:
dininguishes the pleasure of second-degree priv:uion from posilive
pklSurc. chriucning it "ddight."
Here, then, is how the sublime semimem is analyzed: an imposing,
powerful object, threatening to deprive the soul of any "II happens,"
"aslOnishcs" the soul (at lesser degrees of intensity, the soul is seized
with admiration, veneration, respecd. The soul is made stupid. immobilized: il Sttms dead . In distancing this threat , :m procures the
pleasure of relief. delight. T hl nks 10 an, the soul is reslOred to the agitation between life and death, and this agitation is its heahh and its
life. The sublime for Burke is no longer a question of dcvado n (which
is the cu egory by which Aristotle diS[inguished tragedy), it is a qUe$*
tion ofintensihcalion.

This analysis describes what can be strictly called the uOllOmyof

the sublime: the "threat that nothing will happen anymore" (which
creates terror), once suspended, still produces pleasure. The pain,
at least, is relit."Ved. But it is an that suspends the threat and, in fact,
converts the pain into pleasure (or procures the "masochisric" 5at*
isfaction that Freud connects to tragedy and relates to the para*
doxial tension constitutive of "preliminary pleasure"). With this
in m ind, J suddenly understand eelan's m UTed, obstimtte rage
against art. At base it is q uite similar to Baraille's, st range as that
may seem. Was Bataille more rad ical? I'm not sure; less ironic and
playful, more emphatic, and no t without- I think it was Barrhes
who noted this-a certain preciousness, encompassed in his "ha*
rred" of what Celan tries to save: poetry.
But this IOIge, 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 beauti fu l) is appalling in view
of ths: "realiry of the real," that is, death and pain. But here is an
o ld a rgument that Bataille himself recognized as he sought to
throw a wrench into the perfect dialectical machi nery: what else
ca n one do with death except "simu late" it ? Again , he himself

Sublime

89

called such simulation "experience" (in a scnsc not dissimilar to

mine), provided that rhe simulation was pushed to the limit of the
possible. He thereby indicared what Celan, tOO, indi ca~~ ~ n his
own way: that mimesis is the condition for the poSSibility of
thought. An ancient indication {it appears already in Aristotle's
PMtia), but one that, unbeknownst to him, Kant can perhaps take
credit for having mapped Out in all its consequences; Heidegger
knew this without wanting to admit it, while NietzSChe had lucidly
intuited itS truth.
What we must think out is indeed the It IJappem that. But from
where do we begin to think if no r rhe starting point of "terror," the
threat that "It happens that" will Stop happening? In other words,
fro m where can we begin to thi nk, we to whom birth has been
"given," if not from rhe starting point of death ? Death, that other
gift- or mo re exactly, the pro*spect of the fi ~st and only one (th~
enigma of our birth is before us). The question to rme~ ts Celans
poetry. In this sense his poetry is sublime, though there I~ no ques*
tion of either ~devationn or "intensification." Celan's sublime could
be defined, rather, as the sublime of dmirurion.
W ithal], does it produce pleasure? Yes, since pleasure is nccessar*
ily linked to mimesis (Aristotle again). Yet pleasure in Celan is of a
very particular namre. One could qualify it as the pleasure of
thought. In fact, it would probably be more acculOlte to speak of
the ~motion ofthought: a contradictory emotion, owing more to
Kant's descriptio n than to Burke's. and which is basically compa*
rable to the sort of "syncopated" emorion that tragedy provokes
(but it is tragedy, the representation of the tragic contradinion,
Ihat provides the model for the sublime). O ne can say ofCelan,
of Holderiin, that he is a tragic poet; perhaps even the last tragic
poct- the last "possible"; and one can mock this, as I have often
seen done, because on ly poetry is at stake. (I've also heard the re*
sponse to this attitude: "It killed him." But that i~ not a~ argu*
menl. O r if so, it pleads on ly in favor of the despair of facmg art
and the impossibiliry of interrupting it. 111e argum c~t I wot.tldyn;*
fe r would be this: one could mock such poet ry and ItS subhml ty If
it were "earnest" verse, somethi ng that st ill exists in large quanti*

:u

Remembering Dntl'S

Sublime

tics. Bm Celan, in a cenai n, secret way one might call elusive.

seems sublime des pite hi mself We mUS t n Ol defl ect Onto Cclan the
pathos of some of his readers. And we must not fo rget, even in
Cdan's own pathos- for it is rhere, despite his lapidary formulation and rcsu ictcd phrasing- the sort of "Jcwish joy" [Freudt'], the
light. almost silent laugh, perhaps the counterpart to what saves
Holderl in from wallowing in the tragic: another joy, or rather a
serenity. in the seriousness of his thought,)

inadequation , as a la rge pan of modern art perhaps inevitably

holds, for modern art cultivates what is not beautiful ," that is, the
simple opposite of the beautiful according to its classical definition:
the adequation of form to content. Nor does it mean the reduction
of presentation to the puriry inherent in the ph rase "There is presentation": the white square of the "minimal" that is the end point
of negative theology. But it do~ mean the disappointment of presentation, o r, more broadly. the disappointment that the presmtabk
n.:im. T he baseless base of presentation is indicated in the very difficu lty of presentation; it does not "come naturally." It is indicated
in a sort of internal d iffe rentiation of presentation, o r, I venture to
say, at the heart of the very faCt of presenting; indicated in a manner (for it is indeed a maner of style) of making apparent the nonappearing that underpi ns or, more exactly, withdraws and encloses
itself in the midst of presentation. In a manner of making apparent the hiatus of presentation, of retracing the retreat that it is, of
rttreating it.
Modern art , "sublime" art, the art after "the end of an," shows
the pain of presentation; it is, or could be, joy itself-or serenity.

90

From Kant and the Kantian theory of the subli me, J.-F. L. retains the concept of "negative presentation" (of the Idea), On the
basis of this concept, his formula for the subli me is: preseming that
the un-presentable exists.
I am not sure this fo rmula is righ t, and the way I think Celan
deals with the q uestion of the representable and the unrepresentable confirms my uncertainry.
Blundy PUt, this formu la has two Raws: it separates out the unpresentable (positing its existence somewhere beyond presentation)
and in so doing, it substantiaiizes o r hypostatizes it. By definition,
only the presentable is presented. Therefore the un presentable, if
such a thing exists, cannot present itself. O r if it does, it is like the
Jewish God in the Hegelian analysis of sublimiry, breaking through
presentation itself, annih ilating it for its greater (dialectical) glory.
We would thus need to th ink, according (Q the (onto-theological)
ourline of negative presentation, that there is presentation, not of
what is beyo nd presentaion, bur thnt there is something beyond
presenta tion. In which case the presentation would ind icate, in
what is present or insofar as it does present, its beyond.
But th is beyond is nothing, it is not a part ofrhe unpresen table.
At most one can say, naturally enough, that presentation is transferred from the un presented. But the unpresented does not equal
the un presentable. Here is what happens when presentation attempts to ind icate its beyond, or rather the (baseless) base, pu re
nmhingness or pure open ness, from which it detaches itself as presentation: in or level with presentation, the d iffe rence of the presented from presentation presents itself. Difference docs not mean

9'

Hagiography

4 Hagiography
Deumber 7. 1983 (Strasbourg)

93

TODTNAUII ERG

Arnica. lillie-light balm ,

the dixir of the fountain tOpped by the
starred wooden die;
in the
chalet,

I page through the cnbi" de L'Hemevolume on Heideggcr that

Michel Haar scnt me. Gadamer's text-a series of "memories"ends in the following way:
Among the many pilgrims who wen! up 10 Todlnauberg. Paul Celan.
tOO, paid a visit one day 10 the thinker; from their encounter, a poem
was born. Food for tho ught: a persecuted Jew, a poet who lived not in
Germany but in P;aris, but a German poet nonetheless, risks such a
visil, nor wi thout some anxiety. He must have been greeted by that
~ balm for the era" (Augtntrou) that was the little coumry property
(AnWffl'1l) with ilS foumain (~toppcd by a starred wooden die"), and
the liule man, with his rustic appearance and twinkling gaze. He left

his name: in me: chalet's gucslbook as many had before him, with a few
lines ancsting to a hope he carried in his heart . He lOok a walk with
the thinker in soft moumain pastures, each of the men turned inward,
in his own isolation , like an isola(ed Rower ("orchis and orchi s~). Only
later. once he had returned home, did he sec clearly what had seemed
tOO appalling in the words Heidegger murmured while walking; hc beVn to understand. He understood the audacity of a thought that another ("the man") can hear without capturing itS meaning, the risk of
a step that moves forward on shifting terrain, like on the logging paths
one cannm follow to an end.

Here is [he poem:

9'

the lines on the book

- whose, the name named
before mine~inscribed in this book
me lines hoping, today.
for the word
to come
fro m a thinker,
at heart
Sylvan prairies of uneven earth,
orchis and orchis, isoiatedly,
Appalling, what later, en rome,
became clear
He who guides us, this man
listens to us tOO,
on the path
of logs
half
covered in mire,
dam p,
many.1
One could emitle this piece "birth of a hagiogra phy."
My initial anger having passed. Marc B. de Launay's French
tra nslation nevertheless holds my anemion. h is certainly more "accuratc" tha n all the o thers, but it explicates the poem strangely, at
least o n two points. First, the Surnwiirftlofthe third verse:

Rnnt:mb~ring

94

Dlltn

def

Trunk aus dem Bmnncn mit dem

5 The Power of Naming

Sternwti rfel drauf

is rendered as: "the elixir of the founta in lopped by the I starred

wooden d ie." "Elixir" is clearly a result of Gadamer's edifying fable: " He ICelan l must have been greeled by the 'balm fo r the ~es'
(A llgmtroJl) [hal was the linle CO Untry property (AIIWt'Jt'n) with irs
fouma in ('lOpped by a starred wooden die'), and the litt le man,
with his rustic appearance and twinkling gaze, " Dri nking a draught
of water at said fouma in seems nearly like imbibing a miraculo us
elix ir.... BUI the "srarrcd wooden die" is o nly possible if olle is
fam iliar with the Anwtlnl in question-and if one translates, even
in German, the fo rmation Stemwiirftl Such a "I ralls[atio n~ is plausible. and eliminates the sole image ,hat this poem without images
might sti ll have contained. It should perhaps be given cred it fo r its
prosaic quality.
The second point concerns the verses:
Krudcs, sparer, in Fabren,
deudich
which are explicated in the fo llowing manner: ~Appal1ing, what
later, en route, I became dear." Marc B. de Launay could not have
translated otherwise; after all, he had to transcribe Gadamer's interpretation. ("Only later, once he had rerurned home, did he see
dearly what had seemed tOO appalling in the words H eidegger
murmured while walking; he began to understand. ") I have been
tOld more than once-and not only by D.C.-that Celan had returned from the encounter in a state of despair. The expression
B.B. used was even: "I saw him when he returned to Fr:lIlkfurt; he
was sick about it. ~ Yes, the birth of a hagiography.

"(he..question impliesi byJb~ap P9-lto the wholly o.ther-again

I come back to this-is d uble: it concerns the existence of rhe
wholly other, but also, at the same time, the possibility of.speaking in hjs name (or in his abscnce-of-name). Inasmuch as J( concerns the existence of the wholly other, it implies another, underlying question, perhaps the only question of "The Meridian": is to
exist simply to be? To attempt to formulate it once again: it goes
without saying mat only what is, exists-in the mode ofbclng. But
does that really mean that exiStence consists solely of "being (.?m)
in the mode ofbcing (itam)"? The q uestion applies first to man,
the only creature who, as Rousseau says, "feels hi~ e.xistenc~. " ~is
feeli ng as Celan's writing allows us to approach It IS contained In
three "abilities": the ability to die, the abil ity to receive (relate to),
and the ability to th ink (perceive). ThL'S( three arc united in the
ability to speak, through which the fact of presence is generally attcsted, and also through which man, attesting that he is (present),
attests who he is: the one who exists as thc bei ng capablc of an esting presence and absence in general.
Existence would thus be language, o r more precisely, the facu lty
oflanguage. which, in the bei ng (tlmll) that is man, docs uot come
undcr the headi ng ofbcing-so that man "is" not on ly the bci ng
that he is. The facul ry of language, the ability to name. is in reality

95

Rnn~mb~ri"g

DaIN

intimacy irself, the imimare differentiation of the being. Through

this differentiation, man , beyond what he is, corresponds to a being (I';,") by naming what is, by naming himself, by naming who
he is nor (God). For this reason language is nor, in ilS essence,
purely and simply being (tfflnt); yet there is language, or language
exists-like the possi bility of relating ro (addressing), which is
closer ro our origins than any form of "communication. " Language
is the other in man; it constitutes him as man hims~1f Man does
nOt hall(! language in the sense of possession or property; "language
is what is proper to man" means that man is constituted beginning
with language; he is not its masrer (on the COntrary; language operates a strange dispossession, attracting man-wimin himselfoutside of himself). This is the mOlif of "pre-scription" (Vor-Schrift).
Language is the essence, the inhuman essence, of man ; it is his
(in)humanity.
T hus, language can be considered man's origin. Not as God is,
according to me olllo-theological structure established in the first
lines of the founh gospel ' Eu Qpxii iiu Q Mry~ .Bur as mat by which
man is necessarily related to the other, and thence to [he wholly
other, so that God is not language, but its supposition, or at least
whar irresistibly draws it. It is perhaps what has been called ~ux.~ ,
anima, the soul, provided these words c2rry no echo of any subStance, that is, of any subject. 1nrima ~ ia.its...XCI)'_di.f~ana:, ~

tJ ~~d"t;~lLis_notb.ing.but
the &2ping of me subjw.
c..g.aping is bngu.age. Language in the intmor inrimo m~o

that onto-theology confused with God.

From that might fo llow this: when pocu:y accomplishes its task,
which is to push itself to the origin oflanguage (a rask that is by
defi nition impossible); when it strains to "dig" right to language's
possibility; i.uncDUOlttS, at me edg~of me inaccessible and foreva-concealed gaping, the nako:i-possibility of address.
And from that would [hen follow this: if God exists, he exists as
a speaking being, and is thus himself subjcct to language. The fact
Ithat he is now silellt, lhal he has ceased to speak, perhaps delivers
us from rhe irresistible magnetization he creates in language; it de-

71"

Po~ ofNaming

97

livers us fro m prayer. 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.

Pain

99

into dispersive fragments. Pain indeed tears asunder, it separalcs. yet

that at the same time: it draws everything to ilSClf, g:lIhers il to itsdf. Its rending, as a sep.trating that galhers. is It the sa.me lime ,hat
drawing which, like the pen-drawing of a plln or sketch, draws and
joins together what is held apan in separation. Pain is the joining
agent in the rending th.tl divides and gathers. Pain is the joining of
the rift .... Pain joins the: rifl of the difference. Pain is the dif-ference
itself.

6 rain

50

In connecting these: texu, I think of the passage from the letter

Ju nger, Zur S~i1lSfragt, which happens to d eal with lines and
meridians (Junger's expression is ~ t he zc ro meridian," by which he
means the boundary of nih ilism, considered by Heidegger to be an
ins urmo u ntable barrier). I think of the passage in which Heidegger, speaki ng of his work on the negative and its pain in the
Hegelian dialectic, suggests that d;\y<x; and A6yoC; have a common
root. It hardly matters whether this is true or not. T he idea is that
a consrraint more ancient than philosophy made the height of philosophy "logic," that is. the thought of pain . T hat Heideggds
ceaseless return to the motif of pain in his readings o f Ho lderlin ,
Trakl . George-of poetry-is a sure indication that in his eyes. it is
urgent to pry the essence of pain. and thus of language. away fro m
its negative. laborious and servile definition . O r that it is urgent to
think of difference as orner 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 wo uld have shown that that is lyricism .
10

Perhaps all I've ever done is move back and forth, mo re or less
unwittingly. between two or three passages of Heid eggcr's Unt~r
wq,r z.ur Sprodu (O!llh~ Way to Langutlg~), which I recen tly reread
after an ab undance of Olhcr reading:
Experience means lundo asstqui, 10 obtain something along Ihe way.
[0 :lfIllin something by going on a way. I
To undergo an expcricnct wi,h something--be il a thing, a person, or
a god-means thai this something bef.tlls us, strikes us, comes ~r us,
overwhelms and uansforms us. When we talk of "undergoing" an 0;.
perience, we mean specifically ,hal the experience is nOi of OUT own
making; [0 undergo here means thai we endure ii, suffer it, reedY(' it
as it suikes us and submit to il. 1
BUI the more joyful the joy. (he more pure the sadness slumbering

within it. The dccper the sadness, the more summoning the joy rcsting
within il. Sadness and joy play into each other. The play itself which
anuncs the two by letting ,he remOte be near and the near be remote
is pain. 11lis is why both , highest joy and deepest sadness, are painful
each in its way. But pain so touches the spirit of mortals that theipirit
~ ilS gravity fmm.pain. That gravity keeps monals with all thcir
wavering at rest in Iheir being. The.spirit which_a.lliiwers {O pain. the
spirit auuncd by pain and 10.pain .is.melancholy.3
But what is pa in ~ Pain rends. II is the rift. But il docs not lear apart

There is another passage in UllurwtgJ zltr Spracht; it concerns

solitude (and this one, when I read it, rang no bell , however faint .
in my memory):
Only he can be lonesome who is not alone, if "not alont''' means nOt
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 //Jith il. The ~so me" in lonesome is the Gothic Sl1mll, ,he
Grt:ek llama, and the English Silmt. "Lonesome" means: Ihe same in
wJm unites that which belongs together.s

Rmlr mbmllg Dlltn

' 00

Pain

Could this be rhe staning poi nt fo r trying to understand the problem of what Celan calls ''the encounter"? Bu t to what com mun ity
could (the poem's) solitude, rhe lack of community, be related in
the most sociable manner? Perhaps
one that incarnates not the
lack, bur the d~srru cti on of all communiry. Such a designation
goes, not exclusIvely hut first, to rhe Jewish ~ople. Dir Ninll(111m.
rose is ded icated ro Osip Mandelstam.

W"
sagt, dass uns aJJcs erstarb.
da uns das Aug br3ch?
Alles erwachte, alles hob an.

me

PostScript: a few days later, ) . Le R. ~nds me a translatio n of

"Tiihingen, j anncr" by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. It follows:

H is eyes worn down

unto blindness by discourse,
Their- ~a n enigma is pure
gushing (orlh"-, their
memory of
Holdcrlin rowers encircled

with seagulls' cries.

' 00

Who
says th:1t everything died for us
when our eyes broke?
Everything awakened, everything began?

I was reminded of a passage in Blanchm's L~ d"ni~r a parur

lAst to S~ale):

( 71J~

Perhaps the recourse-is it a recourse. an ap~?-is 10 give oneself over, beyond the language mesh ("Eye's roundness betwttn the
bars. R)I to wailing fo r a wider gaze, for the possibility of seeing. of seeing witho ut me very words that signifY sight:
Do nOt rt'ad any more-look!
Do nOt look any more- go!'

His drowned joiners' visits to

,h=

diving words:
If there came.

if there came a man.

if a there arne a man into the ....1)rld, today, wim
Ihe beard oflighl of
the Patriarchs: he could,
if he spoke of this
rime. he
could only mumble, and mumble
still. mu-mumble allways. ways.
(" Pallak.sch. Pallak.sch. R)'
Earlier J. Le R. had drawn my anemion [0 ,he motif of blindness "as lucidity." H e cited as sup pon for his claim these verses
from Di~ NimlOndsrost:

Sight, (hen (perhaps), but always in vi~w o/movement, associated

with movemem. As if [he idea was to go loward (he appeal of eyes
that see beyond what there is to see: "eyes world-blind,"'o "eyes
submerged by words, umoblindness";11 eyes ,h:oI.{ look (or have
Iheir place) "in me fissure of dying."1l
Eyes world-blind,
eyes in the fissure of dying, eyes, eyes ...
Do not read any more-look!
Do not look any more- goPJ

In H olderlin, the most lucid blindmen are Ti~ias and especially

Oedipus (a surfeit of eyes). II was [0 this motif I sought to relate
the "eyes submerged by words. UllIO blindness," as BlanchOl translates. The gaze beyond the gaze, the view of beyond-viewing,
would be spa". But in "Tiibingen, Janncr," the spareness becomes,
in Ihe absence of eloquence, pitiful stammcring.

' OJ

7 Ecstasy
March 5. 1984 (Strasbourg)

The model for ecstasy in the R~v~ri~J is the rapture that seizes
Rousseau when he regains co nsciousness after an accident that 0(.
curs as he descends the hill from Menilmo ntam to Paris ("Second

Walk"),
Night ~ comi ng on. I saw the sky, some Sta rs, and a few leaves.
This first sensation was a moment of delight. I was conscious of nothing clse. In this install! I was being born again , and il seemed as if all
I perceived was filled with my frail existence. Emirely rakcn up by the
prt'SCm , I could remem ber noth ing; I had no d is ri nC( no tion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of wh,l! had just happened 10
me. I d id not know who I was, nor wh('~ I was; I felt neither pain,
fear, nor anxiety. I WlItched my blood Rowing as J might have watched
a SHearn, without eve n th inki ng that the blood had anyth ing !O do
with me. I felt thro ughout my whole being such a wonderful calm ,
that whenever I recall this feeling I can fi nd nothing ro compare with
it in all the pleasures that nir our lives. I

It is O(n aordinary here that ecsrasy is not presemed as a "going

of the self," as it is always t OO quic.kJy and simp listically put.
O n the com rary, it is exp ressed fi rs t as night's advance and arrival
("Nigh t was com ing on"), and thell as the reception- before the
auil)Or gets hold of himself o r rerurns (0 hi mself, before even rhe
appearance of the perceivi ng " [n_of this ad vance, which happens
Out

'0'

by itself, and in w h ich no "subject ," in any case, has the least re~
sponsibiliry. And it is exactly such an ad vance and reception that
give the feeli ng of ex isting, a feeling that is itself an terio r 10 any
fo rm of self-consciousness, and so liule con nected with a subject
that it simultaneously reaches all earthly objects (" It seemed as if
ali I perceived was fi llt-d with my frail existence"); the result , conversely, is that even the "body itsclr (blood) is perceived as something belonging to the earth (a stream), and is d rawn into the same
fecling of " it exists. n
Rousseau's ecstasy here takes the fo rm of what I have called , fo r
lack of a ben er word, the paradoxic:a.l experience of death ; that is,
its simulation . It is why Rousseau can say "In this instant I was be~
ing born again ," if, as I have arrem pted (0 articulate, death is the
pro-speet o f the gift of birth . It is th us a paradoxical experience of
birth (i ntO the world)-perhaps even o f the b irth of me world . In
the firmest possible manner, u lan calls th is b irth "pcrceiving," o r
thinking, and assigns its task to poetry.

Vt'rtigo

'0'

Ou Bouchet:

8 Vertigo
Marc" 25, 1984 ( Tiibingm)

l'oc:IrY- : a conversion into the infinite: of pure mo nality and the dead
leller.'

(Why d id d u Bouchet systematically el iminate " Ladies and Gentlemen" from "The Meridian"?)
Jean Launay:
Poetry, Ladies and Gentlemen-: those infinite words thoU t!Cat only
what is mOftal and uscless. 4
And

With R.L on {he banks of the Neckar. near the rower.

Some time ago, Ren ~ Bonargem, an engraver who produces lux
ury roitio ns of books, published a collectio n of "quotations" from
Suiu,' accompanied by etchings and entided Tournoy~r (Whirl ).

But beyond . or rather, before anecdote, I thi nk here of Celan's

dizziness (J would learn morc about this in Nice in February 1985,
during a convers nion with Ikrnard Boschenstcin), I n=read:
The prisoner of a dosed but unbordered space. I am sucked in by an
eddy; and thw. owing (0 (he swirling, I am brought back to a IOnul'e
from which I have tried. in vai n, ( 0 move aw:ay: rese mbling, even in
my own eyes, a rambling, repetiri ve old man incap3ble of silence, and
incapable myself of either raking off this mask or identifying with its
chanCIer.

There is a sentence

In

"The Meridian" that 1 haven't dared

touch. II says:

Die DiehlUng, mci ne Damen und Herren- : d ies<: Unendliehsprechung von lau[er S[erbliehkeit und Umsonst!l
Blanchot translates:
Poetry, Ladies and Gentlemen: the word of the infinite, {he word of
vai n death and of sole Nothing.

if I ve nture to translate:

Poetry, Ladies and Gentlemen- : thaI infinite speaking of pure mortality and the in-vain.

 9 Blindness
April I). 1984 (Barcelona)

Blind ness:

IO Lied
April21, 1984 ( Todmallberg)

Hcidcgger:
In den vcrfuhrencn Augen- lies da:
In ,he eyes all awry-read there: '

This is {he first verse of (he poem ~Les globes," in Die Niema"dsroll'. The poem ends thus:

The dcfallh of God.ADd .b e ,Ij\(inities.il-absc:na. But abseo.ce is not

nOlhing; rather it is p.!eciscly Wc.prc.sence, which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness :.l.nd wealth of what has been and wh:.u,
thus gathe red, is presencing. of the divine in the world of the Grttks,
in prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus. This no-longer is in

itself a not-yet of the veiled arrival of ilS inexh:.l.USlible n:llure. 1

Alles,
das Schwerste noch, war

flugge, njehu
hid, zuriick.

AJJ things.
even ,he hoviesl, were
fled ged, nothing
held back.
h defines love.

Celao:
Von deinem Got! war die Rede, ich sprach
~en ihn, ich
liess d as Hen, das ich hanc~,
hoffen:

,uf
scin h&hsICS, umrOchehcs, scin
haderndes WonDein Aug sah mir ZIJ. sah h inwt.'g,
dein Mund
sprach sich dem Aug 7.U, ich hon e:

Wir
wissen ja nicht, weiSSI du ,

. 06

. 07

wir
wissen ja niche,

'"'"
gilt.
Of your God was our talk, I spoke
againsl him, I
lCI the heart that I had
hope:
fOl

his highcst. dealh-ranlcd, his

quarrelling wordYour eye looked on, looked away,
your mouth
spoke its way 10 the eye, and I heard:

w,
don't know, you know,

w,
don't know, do we?
what
counts. z

~,

,,, -..

The path indeed bears his name: ~l:Ie.ideggcr Weg (but afTerward, to get to the chalet, we still have to walk across fields in
the snow. The noise of the mechanical ski lift doesn't SlOp umil
about five o'clock).
There has been much ironic commentary on the path motif:
Fr/dweg, Hoizwege, Umerwegs. Wrgmarkm. and so o n. So much fo r
rustic charm. Bur where in philosophy, and even outside philosophy (in Eastern thought, fo r example), have people picrurcd
thought as other than a path? From Parmenides and Lao~Tzu to
./ l::lcidcgger. (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 "establ ished"
and translated with Roger Munier: "The Flaw In Sacred Nawes."
i n it, Hcidegge.t3n.vents" an aphorism on Creck..thought: "A p;u.!1
1\
.n~Jlc.vcr. a"method jJ.E~. ")
Celan could nO[ fail to th ink of Heidegger and the path motif

Lied

Rt'11It'mbning Darn

108

10 9

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
tlta! this morifis related to Benjamin's "itineraries," to his praise of
Ihefld"eurand the Baudelairian "encounrer." But I do not think
Ihis connection is correct. If Benjamin is to be fou nd in Celanand he is-we should nO[ look for him here. I remain convi nced
that the "dialogue" with Heidegger is critical, at least for the issue
of poetry's essence. That is why the encounter of 1967, in this very
place, took on such importance in Celan's eyes.
From the beginning, I made a rule for myself that I would not
[eeounr rhe story of this encoumer and its aftermath. Or [hat I
would d ivulge only things that Celan himself had said, and [hat
had been recorded in various places. h is nor for me to say more.
But I can at least report o n a text that WHo passed along to me:
an article that appeared- WHo does not know when; what he gave
me was a copy of the manuscript-in rhe Liechtensteinisches Volksblatt.3 T he author is Robert Ahmann. an editor friend ly with
Celan. Prompted to write by a series of articles published in the
biridler ZLittmg in honor of Heidegger, and in parricular by an ar~
tide by Beda Alleman n on Heidegger's relation to poetry. Altman n
simply presents the facts:
~ T<xItnaubsJg, whose tide comes from the place in the Black Forest
whe-;;"Heidegger played host 10 the poet in the spring of 1967. ap~
pcared in print in 1968. Earlier, I had published the Attmkristaff collection with engravings by Gisele Cclan, and Celan expressed Ihe wish
to sec his poem published in a small, separate edition. We chose the
same format as that of the previous edition, and we had fifty numbered copies of the bound poem printed on the hand presses at Fcquet
et Baudier in Paris. In August 1968. the edition was exhibited at the
Radu7. Icchnical school, along with all [he works published by Editions
Brunidor. Cdan came in person and gave, one evening, a reading of
his poems. It was one of his last readings, as he look his life several
rnomhs laler.
MTodmaubcrg is, strictly speaking, nothing other than a deseriplion of the journey 10 the philosopher's hOllse: flowers, landscape,
n

" 0

Rmumbfrillg Daw

fountain, 3 trip in :. Clr. But as always with Celan, e:.Ich word hides a
world of images and ideas. ~ArniCl , balm fo r the cyes~ is :'11 once an
clrly summer field Rower and a medicinal plant. the sick man's hope
of cure and consolation. Wau~r drawn from the star-crownoo foumain.
which is similar, we might say. to a miraculous source. BUI then comes
the poem's central point, that Beda A1lemann interprets as the expectation of the poet 10 come, in the sense of Kltiu's pot"t of the future:. I
believe, however. that this viewpoint does nOi enconlpass Celan's intention, which was to ask, and impose, the question of thc philosopher's position vis-a-vis his Hitler-era declarations. Cetan writcs something in the guest book aboul th e hope that H cidcgger will explicitly
disra nce himself from his earlicr mitude. ThaI a doubt should surfatt
following this question connected with hofK' is evident in the poem's
description, in a sudden change orl:andscape: the marsh, the uneven
fields, the damp and muddy paths succeed and undo the image of
spri ngtime and hope. The dialogue witnessed by the ano nymous
chauffeur is then tra nsformed inlO a monologue, as always in Celan;
he was able to c!'Cate a solirary and grandiose work from the tragic imb;alantt of his elllire life.
Heidegger's letterA indeed avoided the crucial quest ion. The redeeming mponse fai led 10 come. Nevertheless, for the poet this encounter was an interior eXfK'rience of gre;al importance. Poet ;and
philosopher both Strove to grasp the meaning of Ihe total;artist ;and
rotal language. <:elan's suffering and struggle for absolute expression
led him, from that time on, 10 increasingly interiorized forms of
writing....
The poet closely oversaw the production of the ~Todtn;aube rg."
Now the poem, born of an intensely topical question, remains itself,
indefK'ndem of temporal circumstances. From the small bibliophile's
edition, copies weill only to fri ends and a few libraries. None was sold.
It was certainly CeI,ms wish to CUI off any kind of discussio n with
Heidcgger. This explains, 100, why nothing became public later on, as
Beda Allemann notes. The theme had been transformed into a purely
pocticone. s

Altmann's very simple description suggests thai "Todlmlllb~rg" is

pe rhaps a pure Lird. The last?

II

Sky

I necessarily scruple [Q speak about Judaism . Yel wi th Celan , o ne

InUS. But I cannOI. Not o nly my ignorance is at issue. It is ma rc a
question of propriery.
Thus, I can approach only negatively the element of Celan's poel ry thai clearl y proceeds from the Jewish tradition , the essence
that is probably o nly readable with an understanding of that tradition. For example, everything I have painfully tried to articulate o n
poetry as prayer aims solely to ml.'asure the distance bcrween the
(so-called, dearly no n-existent) "theology" H e:idcgger asks of H olderlin, and rhe question of God that haunls Celan's poetry, perhaps
to the very end .
Perhaps to the: ve:ry end; Il hink of [he poem in the fin al collce
lion, Zeitg~JJijfi (Fnnnsuad ofTinu), thai 50 dearl y responds, stili
and again, to Holderlin:
lch Irink Wein aus zwei Glasern
lind 7.3ckere an
wie Jener
am Pind:lr,
Gon gibl die St immgabcl :lb
:lIs einer der klei nen
Gcrechten,

'"

&m~mb~ring

Dnus

aos der Losuommd fa ll!

unser Dcul.
I drink wine from twO glasses
and comb through
Ihe Icing's cacsura
like lila[ onc
with Pindar,
God turns over the tuning-fork
alone of the small
juSl ones,
from the fare-engine falls
our measure.I

I tried

translate the poem several years ago. I gave up, not

knowing how to render D~ut, offered in the English as ~ m easure ."
D~ttl, wh ich survives only in fixed expressions (for example, 11m
n
k~;llm D~lIt bnser, "nor o ne whit better ), means something in.
significant or rriAing: a near nothing. The poem rakes up the
H olderlinian question of measure and the law, rhe questio n of the
poem " 'n Lovely Blueness": Is there a measure on earth ? Or the
one Ho lderlin illuminates in the fragment of Pindar entitled "Das
H&hste" ("The H ighest") , which he rcstitutes thus:
[0

Das Gesc:z,
Von allen de! Konig. Sterblichcn und
Unucrblichcn; das tuhfl eben
Darum gcwahig
Das gercchlcsle Recht mit aJlcrh& hsler Hand. 1
The law,
King of all, mortals and
Immortals: it indeed drives
Powerfull y, for that reason,
Juslicc most JUSt with the highest hand.
The "response" to Holderlin is that of Jewish messianism. Was it
in Buber, Scholem, or Benjamin (hat I read, a long while back, [his

"3
parable of the Messiah ? He is [here, always, at every instant: o r
ra ther, he ~ always there JUSt an instam ago: the beggar who jusl
left Ihe room o r the little man who jusr rurned the sn eer corner.
Measure, what sets the to ne, is nOl Pindar's 6iXIl, bUI the just man,
lhe JUSt little man. God is still the o ne who metes measure out, but
al most in the way o ne might get rid of something. And what raIls
in the way o f destin y is insign ificant. But that is JUSt the poi nt ...
Where can the distance between the twO poets best be measured?
ri rst, of course, in Celan's elimination o f all reference to the sacred.
Everything Heidegger was able to construcr from two verses of
~ Wie Wenn Am Feiertage" ("As On A Ho liday"),
Jent aber tagts! Ich ham und sah C$ komm~ n ,
Und was ich sah, das Heili g~ sci mein Won.

But now day breaks! I waited and saw it come,

And what I saw, the hallowed, my word shall convey.'
is fo reign- though not abJoluuly foreign- tO C elan . Not ab~
solut~1y foreign is Ihe d esignation of the "sacred" (a word which to
my knowledge he never used) as lhe Open (chaos, gaping, wild
vastness). Celan , tOO, speaks in this direction. The allusion to Pin~
dar's ~ king's caesura" is q uite clear: an allusio n to the impossible
immediacy, or mo re exactly the impossible immediate atrainment
of immediacy (the Open), which is nevenheless the very med iation in , and o rigin of, any kind of relation. But fo r C elan , the
O pen is not the sacred , and poetry's task is not ~ tO name the sa~
cred." First, no doubt , because me sacred is not "the clemem of the
divine."5 In this sense the experience of [he sacred is absolutely for
cign to Celan.
But that is relatively secondary. Someth ing much more crucial
is at issue, or al least, somcthing that d oes not simply parricipa[e
in thc facile (and easily utilized) opposition between Greek "pagan ism"- polytheism- and Jewish mo notheism . (r Ot conceivi ng
the divine, Ihe God or God, the opposi[io n is perhaps without
co nsequence. And for belief and fa ith, J wonder jf [he same isn'[

R~m~mbmng

"4

Dntn

true; I wonder 100 if C hristianity, bccau~ if is csscmially founded

on Ihis opposition, is nOi ultimately responsible for our ~atheism. ")
Could anything lx: mo re crucial?
The question, perhaps ronywh~ present, of man's resemblanct

to (the) God.
Heidcgger makes this , he lOpic of a long commentary thai forms
the Ie<:turc "d ichtcrisch wohner der Mensch" (" Poetically Man
Dwclls")6- a Iccture, as it happens, o n " In Liehlicher Blauc" (" In
Lovely Blueness") and on the q uestio n , as it happens, of measure.
The verses Hcid egger analyzes are the fo llowing:
Darf. wenn !:J.uler Milhe das Leben, do Mensch aufschauen lind
sagen: so will ich 3uch scyn? Ja. Sohnge die Frcundlichkcit noch 3m
Htnc n, die Reine, daucn, misse! nich! ungluklich der Mensch sich
mil deT Gonhcit. lsi unbckannt Gott? [51 er offcnbar wic dcr Him-

mel? Diescs glaub' ich eher. Des Menschen Ma;;lSS ist's. Voll Verdienst,
doch dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch auf dies<:r Erdc. Doch rciner ist
nicht der $chauen der Nacht mit den Stemen , wenn ich so S3gen konme. als der Mensch, der heiSS("t ein Bild der GO!thcil. G iebt es auf Erden ein Maass? Es giebt keines.
May, when life is all trouble, maya man
Look upwards and say: I
Also would like to be thus? Yes. As long
As kindness? which is pure. lasts in hi~ hean,
Man nOl unhappily can measure himself
Wi,h the divine. I~ God unknown?
I~ He vi~ible as the sky? This
I rather believe. It's the measure of men.
Full of meri t' but poetically man
Lives on this earth. But ,he shadow
Of night with the stars is not pure r,
If I could put it like that, than
Man , who is called the image of God.
Is there a measure on earth? There is
None.'
Radically reducing Heidegger's "d emonstration" to its struclll ral
impeTUS esrablishes that:

Sky

"5

I. In lifting his gaze roward the sky and its inhabitants. manwhose life, mherwise, is "all trouble" and in that sense "full of
meri,"- "measures all the distance that separates us from the sky,"
that is, "all that is between sky and earth. " The distance, the space
1>Clween, is what Heidegger calls the Dimension, which he considers the origin of the very relation between sky and earth, and
thus, the o rigin of space as such and o f human habitatio n. Man's
term on eanh starts with the Dimensio n. (Of course. that is not
where the difference lies. I mean that th is other opposition , between habitation on one hand-Greek. German, and so o n- and
wandering and no madism on the other- Jt:ws, and others-is also
weak. Dwelling, being z uhatlu. is, for exam ple, e clan's p rimary
preoccupatio n.)
2. The pre-eminent means of taking the measure- according
[0 " his own f.lEtpou" 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 measure is always ~ rclati n g to something cclestial" and measuring oneself with it : "Man not unhappily can
measure himself f With the divine." Man takes the measure, not
from the ea rth iuelf (" Is there a measure on earth? T here is f
None. "), but, inasmuch as this gives his measure as a mortal being
(able to die), from the Divinity. The measure is "the Divinity with
wh ich man measures himself."
J. The Divinity. o r rather God, is the mca5ure in that he is unknown. Here Heidegger analyzes the central passage o f the verses
he extracted from the poem;

The question begins in line 19 with the words: ~ Is God unknown?"

Manifestly nOl . For if he were unknown. how could he, being unknown. ever be the measure? Yet-and this is what we mWiI now listen
10 and keep in mind- for Holderlin God. as Ihe one who he is, is un
know n and it is JUSt as this Unknown Onl Ihal he i~ Ihe measure for
the poet. This is also why Holderlin is perplexed by the exciting question: how can that which by ilS very nature remains unknown ever become a mt'3SUre? For solllething Ih:ll man measures himself by IllUSt
after all impan itself, must appear. SUI ifi, appears. it is known. Th('
god, however. is unknown . :lnd he is the measure nonetheless. NOI

,, 6

&mnllbaillg Dares

only Ihis, but the god who re mains unknown, must by showing himstlJas the one he is, appear as the o ne who remains unknown. God's
manijNtness-nol only he hi mself- is mys terious. Therefore the poet
im mediatel y asks the ncxt question: ~ I s he manifest like the sky?~
Holderl in answers: ~ I 'd sooner I Bel ieve the l atte r.~l o
Why-so wt now ask- is the poet'S surmise inclined in that way?
The very next wo rds give t he answer. They say tersely: " It's the measure of ma n .~ What is the measure for human measuring? God? No.
The sky? No. The manifesmess of the sky? No. The measure consists
in the way in which the god who remains unknown, is revwed as such
by the sky. God's appearance through the sky consists in a disclosing
that lets us see what conceals irself, hu t lets us see it n OI by seekin g ro

wrest what is concealed out of its concealedness. but only by guarding

(he concealed in its self-co ncealment. T hus the unknown god appears
as the unknown by way of the sky's manifesmess. This appearance is
the measure against which man measures himself.11
Th is analysis is surp rising.
Surp risi ng. because on one hand it recognizes the absolute paradox of God's manifestation, or more exactly his revelatio n ( OffinbaTkeit, Holderlin's question being "1st er offenbar wie der Himmel?"): "At m e same time he shows h imself as the one He is," God
appears "as the o ne who remains unknown ." God th us reveals himself as not revealing himself in appearing or manifes tation. The revelation is nor an appeara nce. If Heidegger's reading is co rrect, if
Holderlin's "rarher"-"This I rather believe"-is not a restriction
as to the unknown being of G od , it means: God. the unknown,
shows h imself as the sky d ocs; he is as manifes t as the sky. But it is
the (sky's) manifestation that is enigmatic. For how is rhe sky manifest, if not here-" In Lovely Blueness"-as the pure void of bottomless light . the pure spacing, above our heads. of air and light
(Ether); the spacing that outlines, rather than bei ng outli ned by.
the eanh ; the spacing, our of which the earth's space sp reads and
all things become visible, articulate themselves? God shows or reveals himself in the same way as the sky's pure opening-the
"abyss," as Celan would say; as th e ceaseless ebb, on and right
against the whole surface of the visible, the invisible from which

Sky

"7

the visible streams. And even when the sky shows itself in its "qualities," as Ho lderli n says in another poem , ' 2 Iight's luminosity conti nues ro withdraw to it as its very appearance.
Bur if Heidegger reads something of th is order in Holderlinwh ich is probable, given the conn ection he makes to the poem
"What is God?"'J-then it is impossible to say rhat for Holderiin,
"the measure consists in the way in which the god who remains unknown, is revealed as such. by the sky (durch dm Himmel)." H olde rlin d oes not say that God shows himself" by way of the sky," but
rather, to express it a bit differently, that he is evident as the invisible is evident. withdrawn into the visible as its visibility. H olderlin's thought is here unrelated to, say. Hegel's: Das Offinbarle iSI
IIftr dass Gott deT Offinbare isl. This d oes not mean , as people are
in the habit o f translating, "The revealed is sim ply that God can
be revealed," bur instead, ~ The revealed (that which is revealed) is
si mply that God is the revealed (the manifest). " Whereas H egel
conceives revelatio n's perfect being-in-evidence, Holderlin thinks
o f its abyss. T his, in fact, is why th e logic animating the versesWhat sends irsdf into strangeness
Is alilhe more invisible
- is completely unconnected to dialectics. Despite all appearances
to the contrary. Unlike the H egel ian Absolute, God, for H olderlin , does nOt want "to be at our side." But the more he sends himself into "the sky's aspect," which is unknown to him, the more
he ~ revea l s" himself as invisib le. Thus Heidegger can say: "T he
poet calls, in rhe sights o f the sky, that which in its very selfd isclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself, and
indeed as that which conceals itself. In [he familiar appearance, the
poet calls the alien as that to which the invisible impartS itself in
o rder to remain what it is -unknown. "'" But [hen it suddenly becomes d ear, and makes Heidegger's analysis surprising fo r a second
time, that the structu re of the revelation is no ne other than [hat
of aletheia itself; hence, in a mode d oubtless no longer metaphysical, the o lllo-theological risk is still preselll , and all the mo re so

u8

Remember;ng DIUes

Sky

when God is conceived from the initial question "whm is G od1 " It
is perhaps this oll[o~ (heologi cal horiw n that forces Hcidegger, in
the very gesture he uses (Q remove the whole problematic of imitation from his commemary (a problemalic wh ich is, however, explicit in rhe poem) (Q define taki ng the measure not as the imitation of "reserve" or divine ren eat, but as the image- rich language
of poetry that "makes us see the Invisible":

Within. divergence creates a serious spirit.

But pictures are so simple. so holy
Arc these that really one is
Often afraid to describe them. But the heavenly,
Who arc always good, all at once. like the rich.
Have Ihis virtu e and pleasure. Man
May imitate that.
May, when life is all trouble. maya man. 17

The poet makes poetry only when he takes the measure, by saying the
sights ofheavcn in such a way tha i he submits!O its appea rances as to
the alien dement to which the unknown god has "yielded. n Our CUTrent name for the sight and appearance of somet hing is "imagen (Bild ).
The nature of the image is to lei somclhing be seen. By con naSt, copies

and imitations arc already mere variations on the genuine image which,
as a sight or spectacle, lets the invisible be seen and so imagines the invisible in something alien to it. Because poetry takes that mysterious
measure, 10 wit, in the face of the sky, therefore it speaks in ~i mages . ~
T his is why poetic images are imaginings (Ein-bildllng(1l) in a distinctive sense: not mere fa ncies and illusions but imaginings that are visible
inclusions of the alien in the sight of the familiar. IS

I am not saying that " In Lovely Blueness" is not haunted by images. 16 I would say, rather, (hat we sho uld try to think abo ut the
relationship-dear in both French and English th rough Lati nberween im age and imitation. And especially that we should und erstand what H oIderlin envisions when he thinks of man as "an
image of Cod ." The lines Heideggcr extracts immed iately follow
this passage:
Reinheit aber ist auch 5chonheil. Innen aus Verschiedenem entsleht
ein ernster Geist. 50 sehr einfaltig die Bilder, so schr.
Heilig sind die, dass man wirklich oft fiirchte l, die IU beschreiben.
Die Himmlischen aber, die immer gUl sind , alles 'mmal, wie Reiche.
haben diese Tugend lind Freude. Ocr Mensch darf das nachahmen.
Darf. wenll !auler Muhe das Leben. ei n Mensch ...

8m
Pureness is also beauty.

This is also the measure for H olderlin : kindness, Fretmdlichkeit, as

the im itation of divine goodness-virtue and pleasure; it shows itself as [he sky, that is, as light's mod esty-in its very nudity-and
as th e jubi lation of reserving the visible in the self. What is lacking
is the "source": grace-as kindness is reserved. God is not (absent).
He goes away. He lets man d ie, lets him be human , leaves hi m
kindness in the capacity 10 die. Something like love, then; what
God gives in withdrawing fro m mortals' desire (will) , which is always to be immortal (but th is should again be understood in the
context o f Holderli n's "atheism," and in any case wi thout reference
to who knows what kind of "Swab ian piety").
Imitati ng [he d ivine means rwo things: wanting to be God (the
Greek n agic experience), and "humbly" keeping God's retreat as a
model (the "Western" experience-just as tragic, but in another
sellse).
The distance berween them is measured here. A poem in
Spmcbgittersays th is (changing the direction of prayer in rhe name
of a carnal proximity between the God and man, in order to signify that God's image is man's blood shed: God p resent, which is
10 say withdrawn, nor in "the figure of d eath," but in the face of
the dead-the exterminated):
T ENE B RAE

Nah sind wir, Herr,

nahe und greifbar.

Rrm~mbmllg Daln

"0

'"
It was blood, il was
what you shed, Lord.

Gegriffen schon, Herr,

inein:mder verkralh, als war
deT Lcib dnes jeden von \Ins
dein Leib, Herr.

I! gleamed.
It cast your image into our eyes, Lord.

Belt, Herr,

Our eyes and our mouths arc so open and empty, Lord.
We have drunk. Lord.
The blood and the image that was in the blood, Lord.

uns,
wir sind nah.
belt 1;U

Windschcif gingen wir hin,

ginge n Wi T hin, uns zu bilckcn

Pray, Lord.
We are n('2t,l '

nach Mulde und Mur.

Zur T rankc gingen wir, H err.

Es Won Blut, es war,

was du vergossen, Herr.
Es gl:inzte.
Es warf uns dein Bild in die Augen , Herr.
Augen und Mund nthn so offen und leer, Herr.
WiT halxn geuunken, Herr.
Das Blm und das Bild, <las im Blut war, Herr.
Bele, H err.
Wir sind nah.

We art ncar, Lord.

ncar and at hand.

Handled already. Lord,

clawed and clawing as though
the body of each of us were
your body. Lord.
Pray. Lord,
pray to us.
we are near.
Wi nd-2wry we went there,
went there to bend
over hollow and ditch.
To be watered we went there. Lord.

Tlu

12

Unforgivllb/~

The Unforgivable
No, it is nOi I, it is someone dK who suffers.
I, I could not h:lve suffered thus.
(An"" AM .....,."... Rcquitm)

c. F. says he was lold- by a French intellectual. I think- that

French intellectuals harp roo much on the pathos of Auschwin
(Auschwitz as understood by Ad orno. George Steiner, and several
others who can hardly be classifi ed as French intellectuals), If we
start to forget this, the umhinkablc-rhar it happened here, rhat
our brorhers (our fellow men) let it happen , thai they said noth
ing. were afra id, felt some degree of enjoyment, and that it was
pure monntosil)'- if we stan no longer to understand in what
ways it was pure monstrosity, then I hold Out little hope for the fUlUre of thought, o r, in any case, for those who imagine themselves
" inlclligclIl" in saying such things. The most o ne can wish them is
to avoid "palhos" o n lesser "subjecu, "
H erein lies Heidcggcr's irreparable offense: not in his dedar:alions of 1933-}4, which we can u nderstand without approving, but
in his silence on the cxtermination. He should have been thc first
10 say somcthing. And I was wrong to thi nk in itially Ihat il was
enough to ask forgiveness. It is absolutely tmforgiv(lbl~. That is what
he should have said. In any case, there is a risk that tho ugh t will
never recover from such silence:

Too

lIa6t ~aao~
To learn fO know through pain.
(ANrhylll" Ago.mcmnon)

Reference Matter

Notes

Part I
I. [~ Der Mcridiall~ is in vol ume J oreclan's five-volume GrsammrJu
\\'ll"rkr, cd. Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert, in collaboration with
Rolf BUcher (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 1983). This passage. p. 200. Unless
othuwisc noted, all English 1r.l.llshuions from ~Der Meridi:an" art fro m
Jerry G lenn's "The Meridian." in OJimgo Rn,;~ 29. no. } (1978): 19-40.
This passage. p. }8.-Trans.)
1. . IGWI: 2.26. English translatio ns of Cd an's poems will be Michael
Hamburger's unless otherwise noted. ~Ti.ibingcn , Janner" is in Paul

Crkm: Porms (New York: Pcrsca, [988), In-Trans.]

}. IGW2: 2S; H amburge r. Ctlllfl,293-Trans.]
4. [Apart from Michael Hamburger's lTanslations of both poems,
there is an English ve rsion of TUbing"', jiinn" in Joachim Ncugroschel,
I'aul Crum, SpucJ,-Grilk (N~ York: E. P. Dunon, 1971), 18s- Tr:ms.1
5, [Lacoue-Labarthe's phrase is "c'est avec 1'A1lemagne qu' jI faut ...
s'expliquer. ~ S'txpliqurr in this context means primarily "to discuss, ~ "to
cb.rify maners," even " to ha\'1:' il OUt with someonc.~ Yel the \'I:'rb could
also funa ion as a simple reflcxive; this would render the sense, "WI:' must
explain ourult-t1 with Germany." The import of such ambigui ty for reflections on the Holocaust is self-cvident.- Trans.J
6. [ From ~ Tod esfugc": "der l od ist ein Meister aus Deutschland."
GW t: 42; "Death Fugue," Hamburger, C,InIl,6J, -Trans,1
7, Henri Mesehonnic, "O n appdle cela traduirc Celan," in POllr III
pohiqu, // (Paris: G:lllin13fd, 1980) .

,,'

Nom

Notl!s

8. GWz: }J4. Peler Swnd i, "Eden," in Pu!s;t'S~t poltiqut'S tU kz modnnirl{Lillc: Presses univcrsitaires de Lille, 1981).
9. Issu<.'S 2 and j, 1972. Blanchot, U d~nli~r ii parl~r, was reissued by
fiua mOTg.lna in Paris in 1984.
10. Thcodor Adorno, "Parataxe," in NOll'S to LiumNlrr, vol. 2, tra ns.
Shicrry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia Univcrsiry Press, 1991),

[1 979]). I make slight modificadons when Ihe argument warrallts.[For

this passage, see Glenn, }7: "The poem is ... underway." - Trans.}
17. [In the original, this line ream "Ein Rathscl ist Reinentsprungenes. In English, Michael Hamburger renders it ~An enigma are things
of pure source see Ho!dt rlin: Hil Porms (New York: Pantheon, 1952),
199. I have modifit'<i the English translation because ofLacoue-Labarthe's
repeated use of jailli and jlliliissrmrnt.-Trans.]
18. [I n English, agitation o r excitement.-Trans.]
19. Waher Benjamin, Charfrs Baudtwirr, Ein LJrilttr im hila"a drs
Hochltapilalismus, in Grsammriu Scbriftrn, vol. 1.2, cd. Rolflledemann
and Hermann Schweppenhauscr (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974)
English references: ClJllrits Baudrwirr: A LJric Poct in the Era of High
C4pild/ilm, trans. Harry Zohn (London: NLB, 1973).
20. [GW2: 36.-Trans.]
21. Benjamin, " Uber einige Motive bei Baudelaire," Schriftrn, 1.2:
605~53: KSome Motifs in Baudelaire," Charlrs Bautkwirr, 107-54
22 . [Ce!an's Bremen address is published in the GW3: 186. The English translation dted here is by Rosmarie Waldrop, in PaulOwll: Colitcud Prose (Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 1986), 33.-Trans.]
2}. The lectures on Hotderlin, now published by Klostermann in Heidegger's Gtsamtausgabe. The bener pan of Heidegger's essays or papers
on Holderlin presuppose knowledge of these lectures.
2.4. Sec Bcda Allemann's commentary in Ho!derlill it Hridcgga (Paris:
P U.E,1959)
25. [Holderiin, SW2.I: 190-92. Trans. Michael Hamburger, Frirdrich
Ho!drrfin: POtms and Fragmrnu (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980), 495.- Trans.]
26. "Anmerku ngen zum 'Odipus'H in SWS; 196: "Remarks on 'OedipUS,'H in fnedrich Ho!drrlin: Essays lind Lctun on Throry, trans. Thomas
PfJu (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 107
27. I have attempted this analysis in " La c6ure du speeula ti f~ (in
Holderiin, L'Antigonr tb Sophoclc [Paris: Bourgois, 1978]) and in "Holderlin ct les Greet (Po/tiqllr 4o [1979])
28. Jean Bcaufrct, "Holderlin et Sophocle,H in Holderiin, Rrmarqurs
mr Oedipe-Rrmarqllrs sur Antigollr (Paris: U.G.E., 1965).
29. [Hamburger, Hii!dtrlin, 601.-Trans.]
30. [Hamburge r, Crwll. 175-Trans.]
31. [Holderlin, SW2.t: 146; Hamburger, Hii!daiin. 417-Trans.]
32. [Holderiin, SW2.1: 13: Hamburger, Ho!derfifl, I}L- Trans.}

II. Along with. in an entirely diffcrcm vein, Werner Hamacher, "The

Second of Inve rsion: Movements of a Figure Through Celan's Poetry,"
lrans. Peler Fenvcs, in Word TractS: &.ulingf o/Paul Olan, ed. Aris Fiorc(Os (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 219-63.
12 [The French "tour I norm" plays on a double meaning: the verb
tOllnlOJ" can be translalcd as "10 wheel around, whirl, swirl," while dividi ng the pasl parliciplc of the verb into two pans evokes "tower I
drowned. - Trans.}
13 [h is worth stressing that this English version translates LacoueLabarthe's French nanslation, rather than Celan's German.-Trans.}
14. Friedrich Holderiin, Siimrficlu Wrrkr, vol. 2.1 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1951), 195
15 I refer the reader to Roger Munier (responding to an inquiry on
experience in MiS( (f/ pagr I [May 1972]): "First there is etymology. Exprrimer comes from the Latin rxprriri, to test, try, prove. T he radical is
fUriri, which one also finds in pl!riculum, peril, danger. The Indo-European root is pa, to which arc attached the ideas of cTOssingand, secondarily, of trial., USt. In Greek, numerous derivations evoke a crossing or
passage: pt ira, to cross; prm, beyond; ptmo, to pass through; prraino, to
go to the end; prras, end , limit. For Germanic languages, Old High German fomn has given us fohrrn, to transport, and fohrrn, to drive. Should
we attribme Erfohrung to this origin as well, or should it be linked to
the second mean ing of prr, trial, in Old High German fora, da nger,
which became Grfohr, danger, and grfiihrdm, to endanger? The boundaries between one meaning and the other are imprecise. The same is true
for the Latin ptriri, to try, and pairoium, which originally means trial,
test, then risk, danger. The idea of experience as a crossing is etymologically and semantically difficult to separate from thai of risk. From the
beginning and no doubt in a fundamental sense, txptrimer mea ns to
endanger.
16. The French translation I will refer to is not Andre du Bouchct's in
Strtttt (Paris: Mercure de I:rance, 1971), but Jean Launay's (Poenir 9
M

Now
33- [Glenn, 33~Trans.]
34. [Arthur Rimbaud, Of /(/I"S 11: Vnr /JOII/l~(Iu.x, UlI~ lIliSOIl til tIIfa
(Paris: Garnier- Flammarion, 1989), 57; Rimbaud: Complftt Works, 5fI~cttd Lfllm, Hans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966), 125.- Trans. !
35 [Glenn. 35-37.-Trans.]
36. [Ibid .. 36.-Trans.]
37. [Ibid. 32.; GW3: 192.-TranS.]
38. "Die Ros' ist ohne wamm; sic blUhet, weil sic bllihet; I Sic acht'
nicht ihrer sdbst, (ragt nichl, ob man sie s iehel ~: ~ The rose is without a
why, blooms because it blooms; I Has no care for itself. nor desires to be
seen.~ Sec Heidcgger, 511fz vom Grund (Pfu llingen : Neske. 1957), and Thf
Prillcip/~OfRtdsQ1I, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
39 ]Glenn, 34; GWj: 195- Trans.]
40. [G lenn, 35: GW3: 195.-Trans.]
41. 5W 4. 1: 233.
42. [Paul vla1l, trans. Waldrop, 18-19.-Trans.]
43 Blanchot, u Danian parla, 45.
44 GW 3: 185-6; Paul Vla,t, Waldrop, 34.

ClltlUtrophe
["Stammcring translates the French blgai~mml, which corresponds
to Celan's lallm in "Tlibingen, J an ner~ (GWI: 2.26) . Michael Hamburger
translales lallm as "babble" (etlall, 177).-Trans.]
2 . [GW 3: 202; Glenn, 40. In this section, page references to "T he
Meridian ~ will be given in the main body of Ihe text: first to the German, then to Glenn's English translalion, and lasl to the French rranslalion by Jean Launay used by Lacoue-Labarthe ('''Lc Meridien.' Discours
prononce ~ l'occasion de la remise du prix Georg BUchner," POCnif 9
(t979): 68-82. Al limes, the English translalion has been modified, in
particular to coincide with Lacoue-Labanhe's use of Launay's French version of Cd an's lext,- Trans.]
3 The acceptance spt.'t.'Ch for the Georg BUchner Prize customarily addresses BUchner's work.
4, "Une lecture de Paul Celan," Poenif9 (1979): 7.
5. In the urne issue of PoCnit, Launay includes, along with his lranslations of ~T he Meridian~ and Ihe scenes from DIl1/t01lS 70dit refers to.
1.

'J'

lranslatio ns of Kafka's "Ein Bericht fUr cine Akademie,~ Gnammrlu

W~rk<";'1 sj~bm Biil/dm (Frankfurt: H anser, 1983). and Egon Friedell's
Tn/nIlS zur Wtlhrhdt (1910), in order to clarify the to ne proper 10 ~ The
Meridian."
6. [Glenn's translation of "The Meridian" gives thn:e different versions
of AU11lwmtb: "reversal of brealh," Kturn of hrealh," and ~ breath turning."-Trans.}
7. "Pas (pr61mbule)." in Grammn 3- 4 {t976).[This text is reprinted in
Jacq ues Derrida, Paragn (Paris: Galilee, 1986), 19-116. Pas in French
means both "step" and "not."- Trans. !
8. [This is Lacoue-Labarthe's first mention of proP", a word to which
he will frequemly return. I have given it in English as Kown," or, when
possible, as "proper.~-Trans.]
9. [Dmllons Tod, in Georg BUchner's W"k<" ulld Bri'.fi. cd. Fri"L Bergeman n (Wiesbaden: Inse!, (949), 41; TlJ<" D<"ath ofDnllloll, tra ns. Howard
Brenton and Jane Fry, in Georg BUchner, Th<" Compln<" Plays, ed.
Michael Patterson (London: Methuen, 1987), 4o.-Trans,]
10. Connections should be made here between the commentary on
Sophocles in Martin Heidegge r, infohrtmg in dif Mnaphysik (TUbingen: Niemeyer, 1953), and the 1942. lectures on "Ocr !ster," in Martin
Heidegger, Ho/dvlim Hym1lf "Dn lsur(Frankfun: Klostermann, 1984);
~ Dcr Ursprung des Ku nstwerkes," in Marrin Heid(:gger, HO/zWtgf (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1950), 7-68; and the "Brief uber den Humanismus,"
in Martin Heidcgger, W<"gmarkm (Fra nkfurt: Klostermann, (967), 145-94
(the passage on the translation of Heraclitus's maxim, nhor anthropt dai111011 [185-94]),
II. O r when, on the comrary-but it amounts 10 exactly the same
thing- he seems to appropriate the UIlJuimiiduas the "realm in which
the monkey, the robots, and accordingly . . . alas, art, tOO, seem 10 be al
home" (192; 32.; 72).
12. [Lacoue-Labanhe's words are "quelque chose ... se renverse, ~ with
"1IlJ<"rsnas the echo of "catas[rophe~ (from the Greek knrast"phtill, "to
turn down,~ "overt urn"). Altbough I have uS(.. J "overturn" here, the lhn:e
other instances in which a form of "nlJ<"rUroccurs seem 10 require "upsel, "-Trans.]
13. Once again we are very close 10 Holderlin-"language, that mOSI
dangcrous of possessions," and even 10 the Heidcggerian imerprctation
of this phrase. S(''C "Holderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung," in Martin
Heidegger, ErliillUrtmgtl1 zu Ho/dalim DiclJIIlllg (Frankfurt: Klostcr-

Now

Now

mann, 19111). }3-45 . Hcidegger thinks of da nger as that which threatens

Being rather {han the human. But H olderlin's phrase de rives from a
fragmen! {hat seeks 10 respond to the questio n: ~Who is man? ~ AI; for
Cclan's determination of the human, what would it be without relation

SW3: 81. C( Heraclitus. fragmen! 51, in Dit Fragm(1lud,r Vonokratikff,

trans. Hermann Dicls. cd. Walther Kranz. 5th cd. (Berlin: Weidmann,
1934),1: 162.-Trans.]
24. leW I: 218; Hamburger. Ctlan, 161.-Trans.]
25. [ew l: 219; H amburger, etlan, [63.-Trans.]
26. These arc the last wo rds of "Die Frage der Tech nik, ~ in Vortrag,
und Aufiiiru (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), }6. Heidcgger defines this piety
as "Weise, in der das Denken dem Zu- Denkenden r1ltrpricht. ~ In Ihis
way. it is itself a product of dialogue (Gaprach) as the essence of language
(of thought) . See "Holderlin und das Weren der Dichtung," J8- 40.
Cclan himself t hinks of perception and questioning as dialogue.
27. [GW t: 217; Hamburger. Ctlan, 159-Trans.]
28. [A play on the dde of Emmanuel LCvinas's Alltrrmrnt qUttrt 014
Illl-dtiit tk l'turner (Haag: Nijhoff. 1974) .- Trans.]
29. Still und u ir, mh ed. (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1967), 38.
30. The denunciation concludes "Was ist Meraphysik?," in W'gmarkrn, 19. The problematiution is in ~ Protokoll zu einem Seminar Uber
den Vomag 'Zeit und Sein,'" in Marlin Hcidcgger. Zur Sacht drs
Drnkrns (T Ubingen: Niemeyer, 1969), 54
}1. Cf. ~Ober Sprache uberhau pt und uber die Sprache des Me nsehen," in Gtsammtltt Schriftm (Frankfurt: Suh rkamp. 1977), 2.1: 14057; "On Language as Such and o n me Language of Man. ~ in Walter Benjamin, &jkctions, ed. Peter Demett. trans. Edmund Jcphcotl (New York:
Schocken. 1986), }14-32.
}2. Walter Benjamin, "Ober einige Motive bei Baudelaire,ft Gtsammtltt Schriftrn, 1.2: 639; "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, ft in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, cd. Hannah Arend t, trans. Harry Zohn (New Yo rk:
Schocken, 1969). 199. The quotation from Valc!ry is from Autrts Rhumbs.
}3. IHolderlin. SW 2.1: 126- 29; Holde rlin, "AI the Source of lhe
Danube,ft in Sieburth. Hymns and Fragmmts, 57.- Trans.]
14. GWI: 213; Hamburger. Ctlan, 155

13'

Being. that is-I will come to this-to time? Even if~ The Meridian"
is, as we may plausibly allow, partially addressed to Hcideggcr. thai is
not sufficiem reason to hastily read into it an ~cthical" respo nse to "ontology." The human is in no wayan "ethical" category. and moreover,
no category of this kind can resist the q uestion of Being. ( LacoucLabarthe qUotes H oldcrlin from the fragme nt "1m Walde," in SW 2.1 :
325- Cf. "In the Forest," in Friedrich Holdcrlin, Hymns and Fragmmts,
nans. Richard Sicburth (PrincelOn , N.J.: PrincelOn University Press,
1984), S7.-Trans.]
[4. ~Anmerkun gen zum 'Odipus,'" in SWS: 196; ~ Remarks on 'Oedipus,'~ in Thomas Pfau, trans" Essnys lind utun on Throry, 102.
[5. Jean-Luc Nancy's term. See u discoun tk Ia syncopr (Paris: AubierFlammarion, 1976).
16. [Holderiin, ~Anmerkungen 2um 'Odipus:~ 196; Pf.m, ~Rema rks
on 'Oedipus,'" !02.- Trans.]
17. [MAnmerkungen Iur 'Amigona,'" in SWS: 269; ~Remarks on 'Antigo ne.'" in Pfau. Essays and Lmrrs on Throry. IIJ.- Trans.]
[8. BUchner, Dantons Tod, 86; Bremon and Fry. Tht Drath of Danton, 80.
[9. This is the case in [he quatrain Celan quOies at the end of "The
Meridian":
10

Voices from [he p:uh of Ihl' nl'lill'S

Com' on your hands 10 us.
WhOl'Ver is alone wilh Ihe lam p
has only his palm 10 read from.
{GW 1: >0' )

20. Celan's words are: " . .. when I anemplcd to make fo r that distant
but occupiable realm which became visible only in the form of Lucile"
(200; 38; 80).
2[. [In French, poisit d, circonstanct. There is further reference to ci rcumstance later on.- Trans.]
22. [The translation is taken from Brian Lynch and Peter Jankowsky,
Paul Ctum: 65 Poems. (Dublin: Raven ArtS, 1985). 41.- Trans.]
23. [The phrase is Jun diapJJfron tallto. Sec Hyptrioll, pt. I, bk. 2, in

IJJ

Prayer
I. [eW" 225; Hamburger. Ct lan, In- Trans.]
2. [Lacoue-Labarthe's phrase is "cn n' invoquam pcrson n e~ ; he thus
stresses thai ptnonn, in French means both "no one ft and "anyone.~ Mln _
voquer perso nne~ would mean 10 invoke no one, with "no one~ func-

Now

' 34

NoUl

rioning as if it were a name; ~N'i nvoquer pcrsonne~ means

nOI 10

invoke.-

anyone.-Tr.ms.J
J. IL. L. writes: MDieu S'CSt fevcle (n')euc personne. See note ~ above
on possible meanings for kpcrsonne."_Trans.]
4. (The Latin connectS 10 the French word nlam. or -nothingness."-

we: are the rai n-hcd, may

He: come: and rendc:r us dry.
He: comes nO!, He docs nOI rende:r

Trans.]
s f L.L 's to:t ftaW ":lUcu n hrrcn tOUl cas qui f...u sllr Ie mode d'un
Iram" (emphasis addcd).-Tr.ms.]

6. GWI: 211; Hamburger, Glall,I5).

7. "Typogro phie" in Mim6is dlsn,.,jcuMrio1lS (Paris: Aubicr-FlammariOIl, 1975). English references: "Typography," in 1jpography: Mimnil.
Philolop"y_ Politics. cd. ChrislOphcr Fynsk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1989).

8. Fmgmt!1lts d~ Pi"dnrr, " Das HOchstc." SW s: 285.

9 ( In English. the play ends thus: ..... we'll ... ask God fo r macaroni, melons. and figs. for musical voices, classical bodies. and a co n1 fonable rcligion!~ Geo rg BUchner, L~oncr and una, in Compllff Works
and Lmm, lrans. Henry J. Schmidt (New York: Co n tinuum, 1986),
192.-Trans.]
10. ICclan's texi reads
ich muss mi ch hUten, wie mtin hirr
witdngrfimdmrr LnntiJtrlitnll KArl Emil Frallzol, das 'Commode', das nun
gebraucht wird, als e in 'Kommend($' 1:U lesen!" (GW}: 202). Glenn
rranslaI($ "Commode" as "accommodating" (Glenn, }9), but I have
modified this to "comfort<Ible," in deference 10 the English translation
of Bilchner (sec note 9).-Tr:ms.1
II . IBrian Lynch and Peter Jankowsky translate the poem thus:
M

lWO-HOUSEO, ETERNAL ONE,)"ou are, uninhabir:.lbk. Therefore

we build and we: build. Therefore
il staods, Ihis
pitiful bcdst~d,-io the rain,
there it S[;lnds.
Come, lovn.
That we lie here, Ihat
is the partition-: He
then is 5ufficielll UIIIO Himsdf. twice.
Lei Him, He
may have HimMClf wholly, as the half
anll once again the half. We,

'J5

U$

dry.

Paul Olan: 65 Pomu (Dublin: R.:aven Arts, 1985), )6.-T r:ms.]

12. Glenn, 3S-}6.
I }. AI leasl, if the "place" ofbcing and the On of Das,ill arc substanlia(i"ot:oo, or sacraiizcd, as has indeed been the cast". In 771t Exprrimu of
Thought Hcidcgger writes: "BUI Ihinking poetry is in trulh the topology
of Being. l it says to Being th e place where it unfolds." Gnamtdusgdbr,
vol. I}, Dil ErfohruIIg dn Drnlw/S (Fra nkfurl: Klosterman, 198}), 84
Cclan's u-lOpia responds 10 Heidegger's topology, pushing it 10 its limits.
14. IGW t: 217; Hamburger, Cllan, IS9-Trans.]
IS. \GW I: 2}9-40; H ambu rger, C,Ia", t87-89-Trans.]
16. [GW I: 214. The English version oflhe poem is H amburge r's, p.
IS7. However, I have had to modify Ihe third verse of H amburger's translation in Ihe interest of Lacouc-Labanhe's argument. In the French translation of ~ZU rich, Zum Storch en" that L.-L. prints. the Abrr-Du of the
thi rd verse has been rendered as NOIl- To;; Hamburger gives it in English
as ~You-Again." I have replaced " You-Again" with ~N01-You" so as 10
keep me filiation from th e French clear for L -L's subscquelll remarks.Trans.]
17. [GW2: )18: Hamburger, }Is.-Trans.]
18. (GW2: }26.1 have modified the English tran.slalion found .i n
forms: Paul Olan, lrans. Katharine Washburn and Margret GUlllemm
(San Francisco: Norlh Point, 1986), 101. Washburn and GUille.m!n gi,:
~rid of death, rid I of God" for Cclan's ~Todes quitt, Goues I qULn ; their
adjcctive perhaps lends a different tone to Ihe verses from Iha.t of the
French venion Lacoue-Labarthc: uses: ~quitte de la mort, qUlne I de
Dieu." I have used "clear" 10 remain in line with Lacouc:- Labarthe's reading.-Trans.]
19. [Hamburger, }Is.-Tt:l.ns.]
20. Boschenstein, "Destitutions," in Ln mnll til blllt1 Imm 2 (t972),

W:'

187.

Hagiography
I. I I have followed de Launay's I;rcnch versio n as closely as possible
for this English rendering. It is thus a tf'Jnslalioll of a translation, rather
than a translation ofCclan.-Trans.]

Nous

Nom
Lacoue- Labanhe ciles the French tr.l nslat ion by Mau rice Blanehot, "Le
demier a parler." 15.-Trans.)

R ,i"
I . [Germa n: ~ Das W~n der Sprache" in Heidcgger, Umnwq,s Ul r
Spmchr. vol. 12 of GnAmrllusgllbr (Frankfun: Kloslermann. 1985), 159.

English translation by Peler D. HertZ. in Ihe essay ~ Th c Natu re of Language.~ in On UK W1ty to Lmgwzgr(San Francisco: Harper & Row, (971).
66.- Trans.)
2. [ Heidcgger, Umnu~ 149; HertZ. On 1m way 10 ungullgr, 57.Tra ns.1
j. [Hcidcggcr. Um"wtgJ. 222, HertZ, On Iht way to u nguagt, 151.Trans.J
4. (" Die Sprachc," in Heidcgger. UnttrWef.So 24, "Language. ft in Heidcgger, Portry. u nguagr, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York:
Harper & Row, 1971), 204. -Trans.}
5 [Heidegger, "Ocr Wcg wr Sprachc. ~ Ummwgs. 244; Hem. "The
Way 10 Language," 0" Ihr way to Lmgwzgr, 134.- Trans.J
6. [Again, I have remained closer to Lefebvre's French than 10 Celan's
German.-Tr.m s.J
7 [ Fro m the poem "Mit allen Gedanken,ft GWI : 221; "Wirh all my
thou ghts,~ Hamburger, Gum,167.-Trans.]
8. [Celan, "Sprachgitter," GW I: 167; Hamburger, "Language Mesh:
Crlml, 119-Tra ns.J
9 [Celan, ~ Engftihrun g, ~ GW I: ' 95; Hamburger, "The Straitening,"
etllln. 137.-Trans.1
10. lCelan, "Schncebelt," GW I: 168, Hamburger. "Snow-bed," Crill",
121. -Trans.]
II . I'TUbi ngcn , J an ncr~: Blanchor's French translation is "yew que la
parole submerge jusqu'a la eCciH~."-Trans.]
12. (Celan, "Schnccbeu," GWI: 168; Hamb urger, "Snow-bed," Crlnn,
n.1.- Trans.)
13. [ Fro m ibid.:
Augen wd tblind,
Augen im Sterixgekl uft,
Augen Auge n , ..
From "F..ngf'u hrung" (note 9, above):
Lies nicht m chr-sch~ u!
Schau nieht mehr-geh!

w t"'Y
I. lJe;m -Jacques RouSSt'Olu, Orulfft1comp/}rtl, vol. 1 (Pa.ris: Gallimard,
Bibliothlue de la Pl6ade, 1959), 1005; Rrwrit1 oft"r Solilary walkt'r,
trans. Peter France (Harmondswo rth, England: P~nguin , 1979), }9.Trans.]

Vertigo
I. Paris: Hachcue/PO L, 1979,
2. (GW}: :wo.-Trans.]
3. [Du Bouchet, Strrttt.- Trans.]
4. [Jean Launay," Le Mtridi en .~ POc7Jir9 (1979): 80.-Trans.]

Blindness
I.

IGW I: 274: Hambu rger, Ctlnn, 2.II.-Trans.J

Ut d
I. (This passage can be found in the afterword to the essay "Das
Ding," Vormtgr und Aufiiitzt. 183; trans. Hofstadter, Pon?> unguagr,

Thought, 164 -Trans.]

(Celan, "Zurich, Zum SlOrchen," GWI: 114: Hamburge r, "ZUrich,
Inn," CrIll", 157.-Trans.]
}. The manuscript is daled Ap ril 17. t977.
4, Heidcgger's response to Celan o n receipt of "Todtnauberg." Ahmann mentions at the beginning of his article that this letler. along with
the poem itsclf, had been exhibited in 1970 at Radu2 in the exh ibition
on Celan.
5, T he French lranslation of this text is in large part due to Jean-Luc
Na ncy, the intermediary between \'Q.H . and me. [The English ve rsion
has been Ir.lI1slated from the Fre nch,- Tr:UlS.]
L.

th~SlOrk

Nola

Nom

nce: of the sky. For the lightnings

Are the wr.nh of a god. The more somcthing
Is invisiblc, the more it yields 10 what's ali('n.

Sky
I. IGW}: 108; Washburn and Guillcmin. lAst forms. 189.-Trans.]
I. I HiildcrJin, SWs: I8S.-Trans.]
}. [SIVI. I: 118; Hamburger. Fridrich Hiildnlifl, Pomua'ld Fragmt'flts.
}7}- Trans.]
4 Martin Hcidcgger. ~ Wie Wenn am Feienagc .... " in ErliiUlt'I'Ungm

zu Hiildmins Diduuflg, 61.

5. Hcidcgger. ~ Das Gedicht," Erliiutt'I'Uflgm, 187.

6. I Heidegget, \.11rtragt und Aufiiitu, 187-204; Hofmdter, Pott",

umgllligt. Thought.21}-z9 .- Trans.]
7. ~ Kindncss" translatcs Frrufldlirhktit, which Heidegger interprets as
the Greek xapu;: grace.
8. [This line in German is ~ Voll Verdienst," which Michael Hamburger translatcs as ~ Full of profit." The French versio n L.-L. discusses
uSC$ ~ Plein de mcritcs"; I have modified Ihe English to enhance the sense
of L.-L. 's subsequent remuks.- Trans.]
9 [SI\72.1: 372; Hamburger, Hiildtrlifl, 261- 6s.-Trans.]
10. [HofStadter translatcs: MIs he manifcstlike the sky?" Hiilderii n answers: ~ I'd sooner belic\'e the latter. " The translation here has been modified in accordance with Hofstadter's.-Trans.]
It. [Hc:ideggcr, ~ ... dichte risch wohnet der Mensch ... ," Vormigt
und Aufiilru, 197; Hofsrad ter, .. . .. Poetically Man Dwells ... ,"
IAngungt'. Thought. In-lJ.- Trans.]
12. In "In Lovely Blueness," these ~qualitics" .'Ire the night stars. About
~th e shade of the night ," Hcide:gger says: .. ... the night itself is the
shade. th2t darkness which can never become a mere blackness bec.ause as
shade it is wedded to tight and remains casl by it (Heidegger, " ... d ichterisch wohnel der Mensch .... " 201; Hofstadlcr, " , .. Poetically Man
Dwells .... " 216.)
I}. Hiilderlin's poem says:

Pot""

W:.I.S ist GOII? unbcbnlll, dennoch

Voll Eigtnschanc n ist du AngC$icht
Dcs Himmds von ihm. Dic Blim namlieh
Der Zorn sind cines GOICCS. Jcmehr ist eins
Umiehtbar, schickct es sich in Frcmdcs.
(SW ... : ~H)

What is God~ Unknown, YCt

I:ull of hili qualities is thc

'39

(I101".t.d.n. nil

Heidegger's commentary: "The sight of Ihe skY-lhis is what is fami liar

man. And whal is that ? Everything that shimmers and blooms in Ihe
sky 2nd thus under the sky 2nd thus on c;,mh. everylhing that sounds
and is fragrant. rises and comcs-bUI also ('\erything thaI goes and Slumbles, moans and falls silenl, pales and darkens. Into Ihis, which is inlimatc to man but alicn 10 the god. the unknown impuu himself, in order
[0 remain guarded within it as the unknown" (~dichlcrisch wohnel der
Mensch ... ," 200; Hofstadte r, .. ... Poelically Man Dwells ... ," 2.2.S).
'4. (Heidcgger, ~ ... dichrerisch wo hnei der Mensch .... " 200; Hofstadler, ..... Poelically Man Dwells .... " 22s. -Trans.1
15. Heidegger. " ... dichtcrisch wohnel der Mensch .... ~ ZOO- WI;
Hofsladrer, ..... Poetically Man Dwells ... ," 225- 26.
16. See Jean-Luc Marion's reading of the poem in L'i,wu t't la distnnct
(Paris: Grassel, 1978).
17. [SW; 2.1: 372; Hamburger, Hiifdtrlin, 261.- Trans.1
18. IGW ,: 16J; Hamburger, Olan, ItJ.-Trans.]
10

Works C ited

Adorno, T heodor. Nom to Literaturt. Vol. 1. Trans. Shierry Weber

Nicholson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Allemann, Beda. HiildnJin t1 HriMgg", Paris: r.U.F., 19S9.
lkaufrcl, Jean, uans. ~Hol de rlin CI Sophode.~ In Friedrich H6lderlin,
R~marqun fur Otdipt.Rtmnrquts sur Antigont. Paris: U.C.E., 1965.
Benjamin. Walter. Charln &Ufklni,,: A Lyric!Wt in tIlt Era o[High Capjill/ism. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: NtH, 1973- - - , ~mmrlu Schrifim. 7 vols. Ed. Rolfliedemann and HWTl2Jln
Schweppenhauser. Frankfun am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974.
- - -. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendl. Trans. Harry Zohn. New

York: Schockcn, 191>9.

- - - , &fkctions. Ed. Peter Dcmen. Trans. Edmund Jephcou . New
York: Schocken, 1986.
8bnchot. Mlurice. "u demitr ~ parler: fA ""Ut dn btl/a kum 1(1972); this essay W2S reissued as a single Ieli. Paris: f.ua morgana,
1984.

Bonargem, Rem!. ToumOJ".

Boschenstein, Bernard. ~Dcs [ilUlions.~ Ln rrlltlrdn brlla fmm2 (1972).
BUchner, GMrg. Dantons Tod. In Wmr und Bn"rjr, l-d. Frit~ Bergemann.
Wiesbaden: Insc:!. 1949.
___ . The Dralh of Danton. Trans. Howard Brcmon and Jane Fry. In
Thr Compfru Plays. ed. Michael Patterson. London: Methuen, 1987.
- - - . Ltonuand Lma. In Compku Works (lnd LmtN, trans. Henry J.
Schmidt. New York: Continuum, 1986.

14 1

Works Ciud

Works Ciud

P-Jul. GtSlllllmrltt Wtrkt. S vols. Ed. Bcd~ Allem~nn ~nd Su:F.in

Reicher! . wilh Rolf BUcher. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 198}.
- - - . 1.Al1 Ponm: Paul (Jlan. Trans. Kathari ne Washbu rn and Margret Guillemin. San Francisco: onh Poim, 1986.
- - - . " Lc Meridien." In StrrUt, trans. Andre du Bouchet. Paris: Mercure de France. 1971.
- - - . "' Lc Meridien .' Discours prononce a ['occasion de 13 remiS( du
prix GC'Org BUchner." Trans. Jean Launay. Por:!rsit 9 (1979): 68-82.
- - - . "The Meridian. ~ Trans. Jerry Glenn. Chicago Rtvinv 29. no . .l
(1978): 29- 40.
- - - . Pdul CtU"': Collttttd Prost. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. Manchcster. England: Carcanet Press. 1986.
- - - . Potms of Pnul Ctlml. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New York:
Persca, 1988.
- - - . HlUl (Jlml: 6S Poems. Trans. Brian Lynch and Pelcr J:tnkowsky.
Dublin: Raven ArtS, 1985.
- - - . RlUl Ctlml: Spuc/'-Gril1t fllld Stlttud Potms. Trans. Joachim
Neugroschcl. New York: E.I'. Dunon, 1971.
- -- . fA rolt dt ptnonn(. Ed. Martine Broda. Paris: Lc Nouveau
Commerce. 1979.
- - - . "Todtnaubcrg. " In Pohnn dt Paul Ctlan, (Cans. Andre d u
Bouche!. Paris: C livages. 1978.
- - - . "TUbingen. janvier." Trans. Andre du Bouche!. In L'Epl,;",," 7.
Also published in Strrtu. Paris: Mercure: de Franer, 1971.
Derrida, Jacques. "Pas (prb.mbule)." Grommll 3-4 (1976). Reprinted in
Dcrrida, Pnrogn. 19- 116. Paris: GaiMe, 1986.
Friedc:ll. Egon. Taknts Zl4r WahrlKit. 1910.
Hamacher. Werner. "The Second of Inversion: MovementS of a Figure
Through Cclan's Poetry." Trans. Peter Fenvcs. In Word Trom: Rtadings ofPllul Ctum. ed. Aris FiorelOs. 219-6}. Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins Ulliversity Press, 1994.
Heidegger, Martin. Oic Erfohrung dn Omkms. Frankfun: Klostermann,
19 8}.
- - - . Eillfiilmmg ill di~ Mnnp"pik. Tilbingen: Niemeyer, 1953.
- - -. ErlnlluruIIgm:t1l Holdtrfins Dichtllllg. Frankfurt: KloS(crmann,
1981.
- - - . G~Sf/mtflllsgnb~. Frankfun: Klostcrmann. 1976- .
- __ . HiJldrr/im Hylnllt "Drr Istrr. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1984.
- - - . HO!zllJtgt. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 19S0.

- - - . 011 tlJt \%,10 fAlIgungt. Trans. Pelcr D. Herl1.. San Francisco:

CeI~n.

' 43

Harper & Row. 1971.

- - - . POtlry. fAllgungt. Thought. Trans. Albert l-Iofsradler. New York:

Harper & Row, 1971.

- - - . TlJt Principk ofRt4S4n. Trans. Reginald Lilly. BloominglOn: Indiana Univcrsity Pras, 199 1.

- - - . San wm Grund Pfullingen: Neske, 1957.

- - - . &;n und bil. mh ed. TUbingen: Niemeyer. 1967.
- - -. U"uruJrgJ :tur SpmclJt. Frankfurt: Klostermann. 1985.
- - -. Vormi'gt lI11d Allfiiilu. !,fullingen: Nc:ske. 1954.
- - - . W~g",arkm. Frankf\lrt: Klostermann. 1967.
- - - . ZlIrSacht dn Dmktns. TUbingcl1 : Niemeyer. 1969.
Heraclitus. Oit Fragmmu drr Vorsokratikrr. Sth cd. Trans. Hermann
Dick Ed. Walther Kranz. Berlin: Weidmann. 19H.
HBlderlin, Friedrich. Fritdrich Holdrrlin: EssnYI nnd Lmm Oil Th~ory.
Trans. Thomas Pfau. Albany: SUNY Press, 1988.
- - - . Fritdrich Hold~rfill: POtms alld Fmg1llmtJ. Trans. Michael Hamburger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1980.
- - -. Hylnm IIl1d Frngmmu. Trans. Richard Sieburth. Princelon, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, [984.
- - - . Holdtrlin: His POtms. Trans. Michael H;lmburger. New York:
Pamheon, 19S2.
- - -. SiJ",tlic/'t Wtrk~. 8 vols. Sluttgart: Kohlhammer, 1944-8S.
Kaf\u, Franz. kEin Bc:richt fur cine Akademie. ~ In Grsmnm~/u IX"",c ill
sitbtn lJiimi",. Frankfun: H;lnS(r, 1983.
Lacoue-Labarthe. Philippe:. " La c6ure du spt'cublif." In Friedrich
Holderlin. L'Amigollt dc Sop/Joc/t. Tr.Jns. Philippe Lacoue-Labanhc.
P;lriS: Bourgois, [978.
- - - . " HBlderlin el les Grees." PoItiquc 40 (1979).
- - - . Mimrsis dIsIlrricula,iom. Paris: Aubier- Flammarion. 1915.
- - - . ljpography: Mimrsis. Philosophy. Politics.. Ed. ChrislOphcr Fynsk.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1989.
Launay. jC"J.n. "Unc ItclUrc de Paul Celan. ~ Pomit 9 (1979): }-8.
LCvinas. Emmanuel. Alltrl'1I/mt 111ft" 011 IIIIdrlti dt l'rssm(t. Haag: Nijhoff. 197+
- - - . "Dc 1'{:1Ie 11 l'autre." 1../1 "/lIiC dtS brllrs /t Url'S } (1972.).
Marion, Jean-Luc. Lldo/c rI II, disstlllcr. Paris: GrJsset, 1978.
Meschonnic. Henri. Pour u, polri111~ II. Paris: Gallimard. 1980.
Munier. Roger. Essay in Misrm /NIgt 1 (May 1972).

..

'

Works

Cit~d

Nancy, )cOln-Luc. U disroun Jr /a syncop~. Paris; Aubie r-Flammarion,

1976.
Rimhaud, Arthu r. Onlum II: Vt'n" nouwaux, Un, SlIuon m mfr. Paris:
Garnier-Aammarion, 1989.

- - -. Rimbaud: o,mpku \.%rkr.

~kr:ud UtlflJ.

Trans. Wallace Fowlie.

MER I D I AN

Crossing Aesthetics

Chiago: University of Chiago Press, 1966.

Rousseau, Jan-Jacques. Otuum (omphm. Vol.

I. Paris: Gallim.ud. BibliolhCqut de la Pleiadc. 19S9.

- - -, Rwvin oftiN Solitary Wallur. Trans. Peler France. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, '979.
Szondi , Peler. ~Ede n ." In Po/sies rI pohiquts rk fa motU",i,l. LilIe: Presses
Univcrsitaires de Lille. 1981.

Deborah Esch, In tIlt Event: Rinding jouma/jlm, Rtading Theory

Winfried Menninghaus, In Praist of NOllmur: Kant and Bfutbtard
Giorgio Agamben. Th, Man Without C01llmt
Giorgio Agamben. TIN End of,h,. Au",: Essap in PortiN
Throdor W. Adorno, Sound Figurrs
Louis Marin,

Sublim~

Poussin

Philippe Lacoue-ubanhc, PotITylU Expmma

Jacques Derrida, Rnistllnus of PsychoalUllpis
Ernst Bloch, Liura'] Es.s4J1

Marc Fromcm-Meuricc, That 11 to Say: Hridtfgrri PHtics

Francis Ponge, Soap

Philippe ucoue-ubarthe, Typography: MimrIil, PhifoSfJphy, Politics
Giorgio Agambcn, Homo Saar: Sovrrrign Powrr and Barr Lift
Emmanucll.evinas, Of God Who Comrs to Mind
Bcrnard Stiegler, Ttd",i(I and 7imr, I: 'l7N 1,'tlIllt of Epimrthrus
Werncr Hamacher, pl~roma-Rradillg in lIrerl
Serge Leclaire, Psychoanalyzillg: 0" thr
Prttrtia ofthr Lrtur

Om" ofthr Ullcomciom and tiN

Serge Leclaire, A Child Is &ing KiI/uJ: On Prima'} NaTTissism alld II"

JAat/, Drivr
Sigmund Freud, Writinfl on An and Litmtturr
Cornelius CaslOriadis, World in FragmmtJ: Writinfl on Politics. So.itty.
Psy(/x}(ulII/ysis. and "" Imagination
Thomas Keenan, Fabln of RtSponsibi/iry: AbffT'atiollS alld Prrdicllfnt'flts

in /;i},i(1 Imd Politi(J

J. Hillis Miller,

Topographin

Philippe Lacoue-Laban he, MusiClI Firtll (Figum of U'1lgllt rJ

Jacques Derrida, Aporias
Emman uel Levinas, Outsidt tIlt Subjm
Jcan-Fra no;:ois Lromrd, LroorlS

011

Iht Anarytic ofrI" SUb/;I1t(

H
:

Peter Fenves. HChatur umguagrllnd History ill Ki"lugllard

Emmanuel uvi nas, Proptr Nll/lltS

Jean- Luc Na ncy, TIlt Exptrit'flt'l' of Frrtdom

Alexa nder Garda Duu mann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking IIlId

Jean-Joseph Gou", Otdip'lJ. Philosoplltr

Talking About II VirllJ

Maurice Blanchot. Frimdship

Jean-Luc Nancy. Tht Must'l

Massimo Cacciari. POllhumous Ptopu: Yimnll at tk 7itrning Poi",
David E. Wdlbcry. TIlt Sptrnlar Momt'fll: Gonllti EIIrly LJrit' and tIlt

&ginninfl of fWmalltirinn
Edmond Jabes. 71lt Link Book o[Unsusptcud Subvrrsion
Hans-Jost Frey. Srudin in Ponic DisrourM: Ma/lannl, &utblairr.

Rimbllud, Ho/&rlin
Pierre Bourdicu. TI" Rum ofArt: Gmts;s alld Structurr oftIlt

Litt",'} Fitld
Nicolas Abra ham. RhJlhms: On lIlt WOrk, T,multlfio", IIl1d

PSY(/}()(lIl1tlysis
JlC(IUCS

Dcrrid:l., all tht Namt

David Wills, Prosrlmil

Maurice Blanchm, 'I1lt WorkofFirr

Jacques Dcrrida, Poi/lls . .. : Illunlitws, 1974 - 1994

Haun Saussy, TIlt Prob/em ofa Chillnt Am/mit'

Jean- Luc Nancy, 71lt Birth 10 PrrSt'flrt