CELAN'S WORK AS AN INTERPRETATION OF NEGATIVE THEOLOGY A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University Dominguez Hills

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Humanities

by Eliot Alejandro Benitez Camarena Spring 2009

UMI Number: 1472199

Copyright 2009 by Benitez Camarena, Eliot Alejandro

INFORMATION TO USERS

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

UMI

UMI Microform 1472199 Copyright 2009 by ProQuest LLC All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346

TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE APPROVAL PAGE TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION Purpose Background The Question of Cultural Context On the Notions of Poem and Interpretive Model Negative Theology as an Interpretive Model 2. REVIEW OF LITERATURE 3. METHODOLOGY 4. INTERPRETATION OF CELAN'S THE MERIDIAN. 5. BASIC NOTIONS OF NEGATIVE WRITING 6. THE PROPHETIC UTOPIA 7. CONCLUDING REMARKS WORKS CITED 1 2 3 4 6 9 15 20 23 36 45 53 58 ii iii iv

in

ABSTRACT This study purports to make a philosophical interpretation of Celan's work starting with his writing of Speech-Grille. Based on the fact of his familiarity with negative theology, an interpretive model is configured based on Adorno's concept of variation. Celan's The Meridian is explored, as it provides insights both into his reasons for adopting negative theology as a framework for the preservation of poetry and language in the context of the post-Auschwitz crisis of intellectual life, and also on keys to understanding his incorporation of philosophical notions into poetic creation. The concept of'negative writing' is introduced to describe the various rhetorical mechanisms imported from negative theology into Celan's poetry which have resulted on its being seen as unexplainably hermetic. Finally, it is suggested, a somewhat less hermetic and almost prophetic vision is offered in poems such as Etched-Away, a particularly poignant turn in view of Celan's eventual suicide.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION Contemporary philosophical writing on the work of exemplary poets includes Heidegger's reading of Holderlin's poetry, Derrida's studies on Celan, and, most recently, Alain Badiou's interest in "the age of poets" {Manifesto for Philosophy 69), and Lacoue-Labarthe's work on Celan. Following Lacoue-Labarthe, I believe Celan is one of the most important poets and thinkers of our time, a post-Auschwitz thinker, and also asume his work is informed by philosophical concerns as during the 1950's he read German philosophers and writers Hegel, Schlegel, Fichte, Holderlin, Buber, Hermann Cohen, Gershom Sholem, Rilke, and Walter Benjamin. The central purpose of this work is to make a philosophical interpretation of Celan's poetry, particularly in terms of negative theology. Celan's main inspiration within negative theology is the thought of Meister Eckhart and Pseudo-Dionysius. I will demonstrate, through the interpretation of specific poems and prose texts, that Celan's poetry uses a particular transformation of negative theology which I call 'negative writing', and that in Celan's poetry can be discerned a coherent thought developed in the context of the post-Auschwitz intellectual crisis. The term 'negative writing' has been used before only once and with a very specific meaning. I believe a wider notion of negative writing is warranted in the case of Celan because there is in his work a fundamentally humanistic concern that cannot fully express itself without entering the

mystic-religious framework as it is only there that notions and meanings properly of his preoccupations can be found. Furthermore, only within the particular domain of negative theology, he found the rhetorical, discursive, and doctrinarian devices he needed to protect his poetry and thinking from the dangers and corruption he felt still threaten the post-Auschwitz remains of art and the human spirit. Thus, the sources for negative writing in Celan are two: a humanism that has to go back to its religious roots looking for a depth of meaning that can only be found in a tragedy about sacred themes, and also a negative theology understood as a language-game and a doctrine designed to shelter the faith in the sacred, be it human or divine.

Purpose As stated earlier, one of the main goals of this study is to determine how the meaning of Celan's writing could be characterized in philosophical terms. The ultimate essence of the poem remains within but at the same time we cannot really grasp it as it is beyond the limits of language and reason, so that even the powerful evocation of the You in Celan's poetry will be seen initially as entirely o^er-referential and selftranscending, leading from the ephemeral grasp to a de-reified indeterminacy, that which is without, of necessity pretending in turn to declare what humanity is. We find a good example of this in "POEM-CLOSED, POEM-OPEN/ here come the colors / toward the non-defended / freely headed / Jew. / Here the heaviest Levi- / tates. / Here am I" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 391). This can be read as: my enemy, simply and radically defined by a color (poem-closed), comes looking for me, wondering and vulnerable as I

am, immersed in a tradition of rigid and complex laws (poem-open), yet he and I remain something more than this eternally recurring scene. Celan seems to refer to this in The Meridian: "a poem is the language-becomeform of a single person... following its nature, presentness, and presence" {Selected Poems and Prose 409). The poem is not reduced to language or to reason, but they are necessary to reach a position from which its essence is intuited in some other way. There may never be a final reification of the 'poetic' nor of the 'human' but there always remains a need to propose one. Yet once again, philosophy is here sketching out its own unsurmountable limitations and trying to suggest a truth that is beyond philosophical thought: "No one/ bears witness/ for the witness" (from the poem "Ash-Aureole" - Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 261). At the end of this work, we will explore how, in Celan's poetry, a human subject which cannot be philosophically reified is nevertheless proposed a path to hope and salvation.

Background This study will limit itself to analyzing the work of Celan starting from his book entitled Sprachgitter ('Speech-Grille') and the works that followed. The reason for this is that Sprachgitter is a reaction to Adorno's declaration of 1955 that "it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz" (Notes to Literature II87), which, Felstiner's biography of Celan tells us, "was taken to refer to 'Todesfuge' - a stricture that pained and angered Celan (though Adorno... probably did not know Celan's poem)" (Felstiner, Poet 139). Abandoning the lyric and musicality of horror and irony, Celan, from Sprachgitter onwards, strove to show that poetry, culmination of all art, is the distilled exteriorization

of the essence of language, itself a survivor of the spiritual exhaustions of recent history and memory. Poetry is the hollow in which language -the one thing that remained "in the midst of the losses" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 395)- may maintain itself in its being. For Celan now, the truest notion of "life" will be the life of the sacred. This is what drives Celan's later poetic thinking, and most likely, his very life. The Question of Cultural Context A philosophical revision of Celan's work entails diverse problems that require a unified theoretical understanding: at issue is the status of Celan as poet and thinker and also a truthful interpretation, cautiously delineating what is to be understood as 'truth' in the case of his poems, with their multiplicity of underlying themes and logics: death, life, language, the sacred and the divine, cultural heritage, contemporary cultural conflict, just to name a few. These elements carry both remote and near influences of a cultural, religious and personal background that may hinder interpretive efficacy: if Celan was a Jew from Bukovina who wrote poems in German, what are the conditions for understanding them from our own entirely different background? This question was taken up by Gadamer in his study of Celan, and his attempted solution is that Celan's poems must be viewed as "something intended for... a world in which the poet is just as much at home as his readers" {Who Am I? 129), and that "interpretation... would not be what it can be without taking up its historical-effective position... and thereby entering into the effective event of the work" (146). The first part of this phrase will be taken here to mean that the reader must be prepared to be able to understand the 'world' which is now shared with this poet who died by suicide in 1970.

Certainly Celan's work itself encompasses such a complicated context in its various culturally nuanced uses of motifs and symbols: in the poem "Tenebrae," a poetical revision of Christ as a "Jewish Jesus" is encountered (Felstiner, Poet 104) -"blood, it was / what you shed, Lord" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 103); in the poem "Whichever Stone You Lift" (71), Celan "alludes to the harrowing New Testament story of the resurrection of Lazarus at the hand of Christ" (Baer, Remnants of Song 111), specially in the verses "Whichever word you speak / you owe to / destruction" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 71); the ancient Greek term "pneuma" is used with decisive significance, as a dislocation of meaning, in the poem "Benedicta" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prosell5); the poem "Todtnauberg" (Celan, Lightduress, 63), a reference to a meeting with the unapologetic "thinker of National Socialism" Martin Heidegger, (Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry 83), in which Celan expresses his disappointment in the verse ".. .dampness, / much..." (Celan, Poems 281) and the poem "Tubingen," which makes allusion to Holderlin. Considering these elements within Celan's work, it may now be accepted that we share the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman 'world' with Celan, and that this "historical horizon" (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 306) is still the "historical-effective position" (Gadamer, Who Am I?, 146), projected towards past and future, that outlives the Second World War - and this includes the yet-presencing (past) life-world realities effected unto 'our present': German Nazism, Neo-Nazism, and Auschwitz. From this, it follows that the 'common world' of us and the poet offers substantial footholds of cultural communication, and thus of hermeneutic community.

However, besides the issue of the remoteness of cultural context and its possible impediment to understanding, it is necessary to define the thought-matrix which makes it possible to interpret Celan's poems in a specific way. In this study, it is negative theology which provides the specifically philosophical lens of interpretation -not as an ideological instrument, especially since this study could never profess a belief in negative theology.

On the Notions of Poem and Interpretive Model Here we return to the citation of the poem as an "effective event" (Gadamer, Who Am I? 146), and its theoretical meaning and function. Gadamer remarks that: "all interpretation is speculative" (473) and that this thought-determination cancels out and sees "through the dogmatism of a 'meaning in itself" (473). Gadamer tries to convey with this notion of the effective event of poetry that language abandons all forms of utilitarian functionality and is laid bare as an as-yet unqualified, but truly substantial potentiality of meaning, waiting for the reader's effective-historical and knowledgeactive situational engagement of thought, which will make concrete the full actuality of the poem's meaning. In short, Gaddamer suggests that poetry is much more than utilitarian language, but Celan goes even further and, for him, poetry is much more than language: it is also, in particular, dialogue, and sometimes, prayer. The fixation of a 'whatness' that is to be obtained in the interpretive workingthrough of the literal and the immediate definition of the poem cannot be accomplished directly. As Alexander has suggested, definitions require to be preceded by concepts and models, and indeed, a specific notion of 'model' must be established, because from its similarity to 'system' there arise "arguments about the [noetic] freedom allowed by [the]

element of theory [which is] a certain type of model" (Alexander, Theoretical Logic I 56). The model must receive its full philosophical import if it is to bear the tension between thought-freedom and thought-system. Furthermore, it is assumed here that the 'model' is, along with the other elements of our theoretical platform, a "two-directional continuum" {Theoretical Logic 12), that both describes our thought-intervention in the 'model' towards the poem and also captures a logic that is inherent in the poem itself, which is to say, that which the poem delivers in return to constitute the 'model'. The delineations of the 'model' as category also shed light on the eveftf-character of the poem, but an urgent question remains to be posed to the Gadamerian reification: in what sense is the poem an 'event'. It is an ideal event, certainly drawing its force from material events, as if its truth as a being-an-event were individuated in each poem as a response to the event of a life: one material event that may be cited as unique among events is Celan's experience of the Shoa. This experience is so intense that it seems that poetic thought, in Celan's case, is indissoluble from the heaviness of this material fate, but even if poetic thought is situationally grounded, the resulting poem cannot be reduced to thought or language. Thus the transcendental event of the poem is such that it may be conceived as "the spiritual act par excellence" (Celan: From Being to the Other 46), as Levinas qualifies Celan's poems. Moving on to the question of an interpretive model, it will be taken from Adorno's use of this term. J. M Bernstein writes: "models... are another of the forms of writing Adorno identifies as a critical successor to the system" {Disenchantment and Ethics 371). A normative notion of 'system' must be identified, in such a way that its

differentiation and rejection from out of 'dialectics' may be recognized as necessary, rather than merely nominal. Heidegger defines 'system' as "the inner jointure of what is comprehensible in itself, its founding development and ordering" (Schelling 's Treatise 28) - the 'jointure' is 'being' [Sein/Seyn] in Heidegger's sense. It must be taken into account that Celan's thought and work are clear of any doctrine of being and the positivereified construal of reality and the real that it entails - Celan, a reader of Heidegger, was vigilant of even the implicit and unconscious insinuations of the over-constituted 'being' notion. Thus 'system', while having a well-determined aim in every philosophy that espouses it, is inimical to the study of Celan's thought, and, as if in theoretical alignment, is incompatible with the formal theoretical instruments - taken, to a large extent, from Adorno - which are central to this study. Adorno formulated his notion of'model' thus: "...conjoined with development, variation serves the production of universal, concrete, nonschematic relationships... [Variation] undoubtedly continues to cling to its initial material... called the 'model'; all is identical 'the same'. But the meaning of this identity is reflected as nonidentity. The initial material is fashioned so that holding it fast means at the same time transforming it" (Philosophy of New Music 46). Jameson comments on this passage that, for Adorno, the application of the 'model', the thinking that does its work within it, means that "the concept... precedes the philosophical text, which then 'thinks' about it, criticizes and modifies it" (Late Marxism 61), although ultimately, in accordance with the inner coherence of 'model', "the concept or problem will not be independent of the Darstellung [presentation], but already at one with it" (62). The applications that Adorno himself used

of the 'model' are found in Negative Dialectics, which includes the ground-breaking philosophical commentary concerning Auschwitz. For Adorno, each model is a mental experiment in which vast concepts coincide with historical phenomena; the differences between one application and another are incommensurable. For example, in the attempt to determine a model for the notion of 'empire' we can say that Alexander's 'empire' waspreceded by Darius' and succeeded by the Roman and the Napoleonic empires, but the true agent at the core of this conditioning and its synthetic possibilities is not 'variation', which is merely the intratheoretical name postulated by Adorno, but rather 'interpretation'. Negative Theology as an Interpretive Model. It must be noted how, while retaining Adorno's notion of model, the crucial element of 'variation' inherent to it is understood in this study as 'interpretation', having in mind that every new variation of a model, be it produced by the theorist himself or an epigonist, constitutes a re-evaluation of the whole model. This provides the possibility of a specific application of Adorno's notion of model as interpretive model, whose historical ground is negative theology, and whose van'arioft-determination is obtained in the eventcharacter of Celan's poems, effected in reading. Partly then, Celan's experience of the Shoa - "the most real of realities" (Lyotard, Differend 58) - and its expression in his poems may be understood as the material aspect of eve^-character of the poems and also as the first remote, yet eminently historical expression of negative theology in its concrete negativity.

10

The two poles of negative theology, Eckhart and Pseudo-Dionysius, constitute a 'model' in Adorno's sense because they give voice to a recurring philosophical pathos that both precedes and succeeds them: the radical certainty that the world is reified, and that only a constant process of de-reification of the entire horizon of thought may strip reality of its thing-like quality, leaving only the purity of affective truth-content. This is one of the points at which negative theology and Celan's work coincide with the mainstream of philosophical tradition. Negative theology also displays the 'variation' element that is made possible by the shifting whole of the 'model': de-reification is never uniform, but is rather constantly affirming the intricate and productive possibilities of denial, negation, and silence. As an interpretive model, negative theology magnifies the consequences of meaning that are latent within Celan's thought, precisely because it is already at work in the main corpus of his work. The choice of this model -negative theology- is not arbitrary, but rather determined by Celan's work itself. We know from Felstiner's biography, that thanks to his acquaintance with Middle High German, Celan "was studying Eckhart" {Poet 249). We also learn from Felstiner that the poem "You be like you" (Celan, Lightduress 197) is a poetic transmutation of "Meister Eckhart's medieval German version of Isaiah" (Felstiner, Poet 248). Lacoue-Labarthe also discusses Celan's "re-use" of Eckhart's writing, stating that "the poem arrives in the prayer's stead, in its place" {Poetry as Experience 86). If, in poetry, pure meaning is the residue of the sacred, then Eckhart's ideas must have a decisive influence not only on a systematic understanding of Celan's work, but also on what Lacoue-Labarthe and Gadamer have retained of it. Eckhart

11

inaugurates the German philosophical tradition with a 'negative theology', that is, a manner of discourse which safeguards the sacred, and thus preserves the divine, by negating the reifying tendencies of language by the refusal to use some key terms, names, and words. Reification, speech and writing, are themselves conceived as the sacrilegious substantialization of the sacred. Eckhart adopts negative theology in his treatment of the traditional issues of religious philosophy: "Being is so high and pure that God cannot be more than being" (Eckhart, A Modern Translation 171). Here, the 'negative' practice of discourse, the active negation of God as a way of vanishing the Deity into the protection of indeterminateness is not yet active. Further on in this sermon, Eckhart adds that "God and the Godhead" (178) - a distinction which he often used - cannot be "abstracted from being" (178). Being, and with it the Godhead, must be understood, however, as intimately united, and in fact, indistinct, from 'non-being'. We find this idea expressed in the following statement, in which Eckhart appears to contradict himself, when he is in fact completing the vision of his negative theology: "the soul reaches into non-being and follows God, who acts in non-being" (221). It will be the all too conscious thing that is thought, the one that is made present as an idea, that will be repudiated in negation, and it is this thought-act that is the core of the discourse of negative theology. The most famous of Eckhart's negative-theological statements is: "Therefore I pray God that he may quit me of god, for [his] unconditioned being is above god and all distinctions" (A Modern Translation 231). Along this same vein, Eckhart also states, 'negatively', that: "Truth is something so noble that if God

12

could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go" (240). Another example of this same kind of assertion is: "Who is Jesus? He has no name" (233). Other statements by Eckhart seem to dissolve negativity into a kind of pantheism of the souls: "wherever the soul is, there is God" (214). And he adds, quoting Augustine: "God is nearer to the soul than the soul itself (214). A variation of these notions is Eckhart's assertion that there is a "spiritual birth of God in man". In this vein, Klossowski refers to Eckhart's conception of the soul as "Hochheim's [Eckhart] thesis... according to which intelligence is of itself increate" (Roberte 39), where Klossowski seems to insinuate that Eckhart equates intellect with the soul. One particular idea places Eckhart in surprising proximity to Heraclitus': "One set against itself," as quoted in the Fink-Heidegger text, Heraclitus Seminar (113); Eckhart's idea is expressed thus: "The One [God] is a negation of negations... he is a not-god, a notghost, a-personal, formless" (A Modern Translation 246-247). The nearly sacrilegious nature of these statements is nevertheless an undeniably strong influence over Celan's poetry as a negative writing in correspondence to negative theology. Just as Eckhart inserts denial by writing about the "not-god," so too will Celan use it in writing the sacred, in the "not-you" that is mentioned by Lacoue-Labarthe (Poetry as Experience 81). Eckhart's thought owes also to Pseudo-Dionysius, as exemplified in Eckhart's sermons: "[Pseudo] Dionysius says: 'To be buried in God is nothing but to be transported into the uncreated life'" (A Modern Translation 201). In Mystical Theology, PseudoDionysius begins by mentioning the "divine darkness... the deepest shadow... the hidden silence" (Works 135). He goes on to say that "the divine shadow is above everything that

13

is" (135), and that people are mistaken when they believe that "by their own intellectual resources they can have a direct knowledge of him who has made the shadows his hiding place" (136); since "the Cause of all beings... surpasses all being" and is thus "beyond every denial, beyond every affirmation". Pseudo-Dionysius' negative theology is far more radical than Eckhart's in that it avoids using the term "God" in any affirmative way, and keeps to the "divine names," which are acceptable utterances about the divine. A similar silence will be noticed in Celan's poems. Pseudo-Dionysius' radicalism is also epistemological, since he believes that the attempt to render the divine thinkable is a mistake that calls for the thought-act of entering "the mysterious darkness of unknowing," effectively "renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invisible"; by determining thought as being "neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind, by knowing nothing" (137). Thomas A. Carlson, who wrote a study on the extensive tradition of negative theology has termed this negational aspect which is specific to Pseudo-Dionysius "negative language" {Indiscretion 158) and "hyper-negation (160). The poetic implications of this line of thinking are explored extensively by Celan's writing. Negative theology had great significance for Celan in his production of a poetry that seems to be entirely about the soul and the concrete and spiritual violence that subjugates it in life, and about its restoration in language and writing. This is made clear when Celan declares, in his Bremen speech, his reasons for writing poetry: "to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out reality for

14

myself {Selected Poems and Prose 396). This declaration gives an inkling into the character of his poetry as a duty to thought and to life. Celan experienced the same distance that any other contemporary thought may have regarding the negative theology of Meister Eckhart and Pseudo-Dionysius. Celan was, as much as we are, in a position to discern and differentiate the "subject-matter [Sachgehalt]," which requires a commitment to a specific faith -Christianity, in Eckhart's case- from the "truth-content [Wahrheitsgehalt]" (Agamben, Infancy and History 134), a pure historical remnant of negative theology. From our situation, however, it will be Celan's intentions and their results that will be sought, that is, the truth-content specific to his work which cannot be Christian, nor entirely Jewish, but rather eminently poetic and speculative - which is to say, un-reified. Negative theology is intervoiced within Celan's writing, especially his poetry and his prose, especially The Meridian.

15

CHAPTER 2 REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Among the most salient contributions to the philosophical reception of Celan's poetry, is Adorao's work in Aesthetic Theory, whose statements merit extensive quotation: "In the work of the most important contemporary representative of German hermetic poetry, Celan, the experiential content of the hermetic was inverted. His poetry is permeated by the shame of art in the face of suffering that escapes both experience and sublimation. Celan's poems want to speak of the most extreme horror through silence. Their truth content itself becomes negative. They imitate a language beneath the helpless language of human beings, indeed beneath all organic language: It is the language of the dead speaking of stones and stars..." (Aesthetic Theory 322). The inversion of the hermetic is qualified as a cessation of'experience and sublimation', because these notions are associated for Adorno with the merely apparent "positivity of existence" {Negative Dialectics 361) which is encountered by experience after Auschwitz - thus the cogency of experience itself is henceforth plunged into doubt. In the same vein, for Adorno, sublimation is denounced because the radical event of Auschwitz makes "meaning radiated by an affirmatively posited transcendence" (361), an intellectual predisposition which must be suspended. Through these denunciations, Adorno attempts to accelerate a process of sublation that turns against itself, or, an upheaval that illuminates a new, cruder and yet truer, relief of thought which, as poetry, is "delivered

16

from the lie of being [positive-existential] truth" (Minima Moralia 222). In the evaluation of Celan's thought by Adorno, the 'extreme horror' whose voice is silence in Celan's poems, is also a measure taken for the conditioning of negative truth-content, a historical presence-situation where poetry becomes the existence and emergence of the "power of the uncontradictable [which is actually] the power of contradiction [itself]" (Adorno, Against Epistemology 3-4). What is left to be effected is the interpretation of this silence, this horror, and the contours of the negative in the truth-content in Celan's thought. In Poetry as Experience, Lacoue-Labarthe interprets Celan's conceptualaffectivity as an unfixity and meaninglessness that double-back upon themselves as the "dizziness" (31) and "vertigo" (106) of the thought-experience of "in-occurrence" (21). 'In-occurrence' is a not-Ereignis -the Heideggerian term that refers to the event of "the truth of be-ing" (Vallega-Neu, Heidegger's Contributions 31) -that construes for the reserve of thought a negative overturning of Ereignis, or the event of "be-ing [Seyn]... [that] holds sway as refusal" (Heidegger, Mindfulness 84). Lacoue-Labarthe reads in Celan the willing of the "destructuring [Destruktion]" (Heidegger, Being and Time 20) of the philosophy of Ereignis as occurring in a way that transcends any possible intervention in thought. The thoughts that are made available in attunement to the Ereignis are those of "be-ing historical thinking (seynsgeschichtliches Denizen)" (31), in a sense that reveals the originary moments of being, even as above human encounters and sufferings - for example as leaving behind the raw torments of Auschwitz. It is for this reason that Lacoue-Labarthe reads Celan from a post- and anti-Heideggerian platform. In open dialogue with Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard seems to extract an alternative conclusion from

17

Poetry as Experience: "'Celan' is neither the beginning nor the end of Heidegger; it is his lack: what is missing in him, what he misses, and whose lack he is lacking" (Lyotard, Heidegger and "the Jews " 94). An example of a still-Heideggerian philosophical reception of Celan is found in Veronique M. Foti's Heidegger and the Poets, which distinguishes between "[the] essencmg [of] Ereignis" (90) and Celan's denial of such an 'essencing', yet also finds affinities between "[Celan's] 'poison-stilled' silencing [and the] Heideggerian tropes as the resounding of stillness... or the stilling of man's unprotectedness" (90). Foti also states that "Celan's effort to resituate poetry turns and eventually founders on... Heidegger's own crucial problematic of tec/we" (112) and the possibility of the poetic falling into "annexation by techne" (113). The certainty of these asseverations, their interpretation of the techne of modernity, is something that is ultimately labeled "a missed interlocution" (78) between Heidegger and Celan. This characterization is used as ground for James Lyon's historiographically documented Celan & Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, which attempts to clarify the details of what "both connected and separated them" (218). Derrida's programmatic essay Shibboleth for Celan, opens the possibility of interpreting Celan as a secular thinker of "the affirmation of Judaism" as the "reappropriation of an essence" (49); this too is characterized as an event -the postHeideggerian remnant of Ereignis of cultural identification that "must take place once, precisely, each time one time, the unique time... [that] remains to come, always" (63). This perennial deferral, reminiscent of the Talmudic "belief that the Messianic era will

18

not dawn until all [the] unborn souls have had their term of existence on earth" (Cohen, Talmud 78), is tempered by the avowal of fmitude in which "Jewish essence... promises itself only by dis-identification [and] non-essence" (Derrida, Shibboleth for Celan 62). Within this dilemma, Derrida imagines Celan asking: "How are we to transcribe ourselves into a date?" (63), the 'date' being the differed event of essence; for Derrida, the necessary consequence of the question is the writing of poetry and sustaining of an unfulfilled longing. Following Derrida's interpretation, Hent de Vries' The Shibboleth Effect: On Reading Celan states: "...the structure of all prayer... reveals itself in the elusiveness of the poetic utterance, in the invocation of rest 'without being'... in Celan's words: a 'singable remainder' singbarer Rest" (195). The 'without being' of the spiritual element of the poem, itself the consequence of unfulfilled essence, gives voice to a tentative grasp of fragmented essentialities and singularities termed "Judeities" (194), prismatic visions of Jewish essence. Hent de Vries also states: "In Celan's poems, 'thou' (Du) becomes a spectral 'thou', an Aber-Du... as elusive... as the faith in 'no one and No One' (niemand und Niemand)" (207). Beth Hawkins' book Reluctant Theologians places him even more fully within the Jewish tradition. She sees Celan as trying to establish a new covenant with the Deity after the Shoa: the basis of it would be "the Ich-Du relation" (143). However, Hawkins finds that the I-You relation is constantly threatened by the "[merging] into one" (143) of both terms, and by the silence of the relation: "Celan's final volumes suggest how deeply he held to the hope for a covenantal structure suitable for a world coming to terms with a silent God" (151). Silence is posited as a terrifying prospect in the relation to the other.

19

Edmond Jabes also seems to express uneasiness before the presence of silence in Celan's thought - he commented concerning Celan: "At any given moment, the silence is so strong that the words express only it alone" (The Memory of Words 219). It will be our task to bring to the fore another, more optimistic, significance of silence in the reading of Celan within the model of negative theology. Maurice Blanchot's interpretation of Celan focuses on the finite concern for death as it insinuates itself into the essence of life. For Blanchot, Celan's poetry comports itself "as if the destruction of the self had already taken place so that the other is preserved or so that a sign borne by obscurity is maintained'' (A Voice from Elsewhere 57). This is an 'obscurity' which rather than being the negativity of thought is the presence of death in thought - in other words, Blanchot does not think Celan's thought with determinate negations, but rather by a substantial negation: death. Blanchot's 'dark' negativity has a counterpart in Levinas' reading of Celan, which unlike the former, shuns interpretation as being death-affvcmmg. Levinas' Celan: From Being to the Other states that Celan's thought is: "a seeking, dedicating itself to the other in the form of the poem... the one-for-the-other, the signifying of signification. A signification older than ontology and the thought of being, and that is presupposed by knowledge and desire" (46).

20

CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY

The manner in which negative theology is shaped into an interpretive model is a determining factor in the understanding and selection of philosophical methods and instruments for this study. The interpretation of Celan's poetry must yield to the "immanent logicality" (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 136) of the poem which may or may not accommodate itself to established philosophical procedures, and so methods and instruments will at times be modified slightly. It is partially in this sense that Habermas writes of "desublimation of the spirit" {The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 131). 'Desublimation' names a retraction in the essentialisation of a concept, the dissolution of its 'whatness' [quidditas] into its initial not-yet-combined constituents. Adorno has called these 'desublimated' elements the "constellation" in which "what is indissoluble in any previous thought context transcends its seclusion in its own, as nonidentical. It communicates with that from which it was separated by the concept" {Negative Dialectics 163). Both bases for hermeneutic definition 'desublimation' and 'constellation' will be concepts used in this interpretation on Celan. Another philosophical instrument akin to 'constellation' will be taken from Derrida. In his book, Of Spirit he writes: "it is on the basis of flame that one thinks pneuma or spiritus or... ruah" (112) - this passage is quoted to illuminate the way in

21

which Derrida first identifies a constellation that is necessary and explicit to establish the concept of a term such as Heidegger's "Geist" (100): certainly it is flame, pneuma, and spiritus - yet also a suppressed element, unmentioned, omitted, and most likely even unthought: "ruah" (101). In OfGrammatology, Derrida described this method clearly: "[In] the entire constellation of concepts that shares in [a] system, the word supplement seems to account for the strange unity of [reappropriation and indictment]" (144). Derrida adds "substitution" (145) and "already-thereness" (161), and thus suppression, with numerous intentions, as characteristics made present in a thought-entity by the supplement-detection. 'Supplement', once recognized, is also an upheaval and a transformation of the intended and presumed thought-entity. From more conventional hermeneutic methods, Schleiermacher's idea of the "divinatory [speculative] objective and subjective reconstruction of [utterances]" (Hermeneutics 23) will also be used. Schleiermacher explains: "Objectively divinatory means to conjecture how the utterance itself will become a point of development for the language" (23), that is, of the embedded whole of the //zowg/z^-structure of the poem. While "subjectively divinatory means to conjecture how the thoughts contained in the mind will continue to have an effect in and on the utterer" (23). Schleiermacher's notion of reconstruction is crucial regarding the philosophical understanding of a poem; the interpretation becomes alert to the fact that reification is an essential element in the constitution of the poem, and thus also, that re-reification is to take place, sometimes in the form of de-reification, yet always with an awareness of the ingredient of "truth in

22

reity" (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 375), that is, of the truth-content in the alreadymaterialized thought and that which is proper to and/or exceeds the subjective act.

23

CHAPTER 4

INTERPRETATION OF CELAN'S THE MERIDIAN The Meridian presents the directives as to what poetry is to Celan and how it should be read: it is a succession of prose declarations haloed by a poetical "kerygma," or proclamation, (Bultmann, Demythologizing 1961 163); these declarations, being prose, nevertheless involve a "claim to inter-subjectively consensual truth" (Apel, Transcendental-Semiotic 173). However, a proclamation of communicative truth is not The Meridian's final purpose, and in this it coincides with poetry. The Meridian is selfproclamative, even if it itself is not a (human) self. In this way, consensual truth becomes normatively subjected to the self of the proclamation of the text, and thus, for the sake of its regional consensuality, dependent on the text's truth-content, which is to say, on the text's self-driven and "self-suspendable logicality" (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 128). This term alludes to elements of presentation which are indiscernible in terms of communicability and incommunicability, since the se/f-proclamation of The Meridian always runs the risk of a breakdown of its own dia-\ogic, which is to say, its mediate logic, its argument, account and statement. This text requires the commitment of the writer to the point of noncontemporaneousness, because it seeks to define the work of a thought which is de facto but not deliberately set forth from an 'own' thought. In other words, texts like The Meridian, where poets seek to track the finality of their thought, hardly ever muster

24

enough objectivity to constitute psychological self-awareness. Only the opportunity of truth-content [Warheitsgehalt] remains in them, as analyzed by Adorno: "Grasping truth content postulates... [that] the historical development of works through critique and the philosophical development of their truth content have a reciprocal relation... [these works] are enigmatic in that they are the physiognomy of an objective spirit that is never transparent to itself in the moment in which it appears" (Aesthetic Theory 128). The dissipation of the opacity relating to the 'objective spirit', will be of essential interest in analyzing and thus developing the truth-content of Celan's Meridian, within the framework of the interpretive model of negative theology as postulated above. The first thematic basis for an approach of The Meridian through the interpretive model of negative theology is the scission between art and poetry: "[Must] poetry... go the way of art? [This] would actually mean the road to Medusa's head and the automaton!" (Celan, Collected Prose 44). Let us understand: 'Medusa's head' is, seemingly, the opaqueness and immobility of stone and, simultaneously, the petrifying and petrified gaze of a deadened thought: something "eternal" as Celan calls it (38). The 'automaton' is the mechanicism that would accompany this deadened thinking. Celan declares that art, understood as 'mechanical', is "puppet-like" (Collected Prose 37): this is an allusion to the "automaton" which is also a "puppet" that plays the game of history as "historical materialism" in Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History (Reflections 253). Through this hint, Celan's automaton, like Benjamin's may be understood to be the figuration of an automaton of history.

25

It must be asked: why would art 'go the way' of this 'automaton' of history, if art is declared "eternal" {Collected Prose 38). The answer is found by returning to the allusion to 'Medusa's head': part of this gesture seems to confirm the impossibility of 'looking into the eyes', so to speak, of art. This impossibility is not due to the status of art as idea, but rather to its being that which transcends the idea as being: a site where history and the eternal meet undifferentiated. The eternal, once spoken and written, is transformed into history, into a falsely "preservable Yesterday" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 403); yet history too is sublated into the eternal because the eternal is merely an entity of participation -in the sense of "methexis" (Adorao, Aesthetic Theory 133)- in eternity itself, and is thus subject to involvement in historicity. This indifferentiation of the eternal and the historical, terms which mutually cancel themselves out, cannot be thought affirmatively; both terms become indistinguishable, and thus null, as vessels of art. In this way Celan prepares an unreachable withdrawal of 'art' as a thing that is thought, evocative of the first hypothesis and dialectical exercise in Plato's Parmenides, where the 'one' is ontologically withdrawn. The remoteness of art is alluded to in lines that run correlatively with Plato's 'one' - explicitly when Celan quotes Buchner stating: ".. .one might wish to be a Medusa's head, so as to turn such a group [of girls] into stone," {Selected Poems and Prose 404), and comments feverishly: '"One might wish...' to grasp... the natural as natural by means of art! One might wish to, it says, not: /might. This means stepping out of what is human, betaking oneself to a realm that is uncanny yet turned toward what's human - the same realm where... art seems to be at home"

26

(404-405); and adds: "art... retains something uncanny... among the oldest forms of the uncanny" (405) and it has a privileged vantage point of the human, one which, paradoxically, is its own home. Lacoue-Labarthe wrote that, partially at least, "The Meridian' is a response to Heidegger" {Poetry as Experience 45). It has been hinted here that it is also Celan's reaction to Benjamin, and to a somewhat esoteric slant in Plato's thought, in the Parmenides, that prefigured negative theology. Yet Celan names the 'uncanny' or unheimlich, knowing, Lacoue-Labarthe states, that is also "the word used by Holderlin, then Heidegger, to translate the Greek deinos with which Sophocles names the essence of techne in Antigone" (45). It might be still more precise, given the divisions between the human and the non-human sketched in The Meridian, to focus on unheimlich in Holderlin's Hymn "The Ister," in which Heidegger underscores the homelessness, the "alienating" and "frightening" (71) essence of the human being. We also find a similar notion in Heidegger's interpretation of Antigone: "Sophocles' word [8sivov] speaks of the human being as the most uncanny being" (71). From this perspective, the unheimlich as homelessness is deliberately confounded by Celan: if art is that which is unheimlich, it finds its home in the most remote, the most negatively unreal domains of the 'one'. Thus there can be no reification of art, not even as homelessness, and so it is 'outside' human thought-grasp and remains vaguely intelligible because it is "turned toward the human" (Selected Poems and Prose 404). The last threads of art's reality are in this sense dependent on human thought's turning art toward itself as human, while simultaneously turning art away, into the unknown, merely

27

signaled, divine site. Celan seems to demand the instauration of distance from art - a new order of respect for an aspect of art that is sublated into the unreachable, and the morethan-human. Celan sees art "stepping out of what is human" {Selected Poems and Prose 404), and this expedience meets with the all too real, "super-representation [of the] death camps" (Nancy, Forbidden Representation 29). The Platonic 'one' becomes in Celan's word the symbolization of "pure identity as death" (Adorao, Negative Dialectics 363). Such a coincidence is what Adorno formulated as the instance of truth: ".. .the surplus over the subject, which a subjective metaphysical experience will not be talked out of, and the element of truth in reity - these two extremes touch in the idea of truth" (375). It is in this line of thought that the unheimlich remains eerie, terrifying, uncanny, and yet the Heideggerian connotation of the homeless, is made insufficient. Thus 'stepping out of what is human', is humanity's stepping into something devoid of humanness, a step only accomplished symbolically in the synchronized divinization and annihilation of art, expressed as poetry. Emphasis must be placed on the de-realization of the human present within art as its active sublating of the truth, understood within the coincidence-criterion cited in Adorno, above. For certainly in Celan's thought there is a forceful "search for truth," as Clarise Samuels writes in her study of Celan, Holocaust Visions (7). It might be added, however, that sublating as a negative constituent in Celan's writing allows for an inquiry into the multiple senses of truth, most assuredly in the sense that yet remains for truth its sublated state. If, using the coincidence-criterion of truth taken from Adorno, it may be

28

said that, in The Meridian, art and truth 'coincide', and yet, also, that truth is surpassed and taken over into another horizon, it may now be asked: after art, where may the site of truth be found in Celan's thought. The answer is: in the similarly divided and negative condition of poetry and the poem, or, more precisely in the division and difference, encountered in The Meridian, between poetry and poem. This difference begins with the metaphorization of poetry and the poem, terms that serve different functions in The Meridian. The 'poem' is a thought-vessel, in which Celan deposits the events of thought in their actuality as ways of engaging the many instances of 'the real' such as the human and the divine. The crucial difference between poetry and the poem in The Meridian is ultimately inferred from the markedly divergent discursive uses that Celan makes of each term. For example, Celan can write about poetry that "it can signify an Atemwende, a Breathturn" (Selected Poems and Prose 407), in the sense that "Breath... is direction and destiny" (402). One must notice the allencompassing nature of the substantives involved: the naming of destiny involves the movements of the life-world as a whole - the one that was Celan's and still is our own. Yet, as metaphor, it suggests movement and life, for it also recedes into doubt, questioning, meditation, and for Celan this self-activity of the condition of poetry suggests the kernel of subjectivity: "Perhaps - 1 am only asking - poetry... is going with a self-forgotten I toward the uncanny and the strange... setting itself free?" (Selected Poems and Prose 406). Celan's presentation of the "I" of poetry -and its seemingly willed selfforgetfulness as a way of orienting itself toward freedom- is an echo of Eckhart's idea that "to be free of self' is mastery of self (A Modern Translation 237), and thus freedom.

29

In Celan's case, it has to be freedom from itself as poetry. Ceasing to be poetry it becomes, perishes and is preserved, returning as poem. In the poem, however, Celan places the meaning of freedom under the condition of the 'strange', or the 'uncanny', or unheimlich, in its aspect of being "turned toward what's human," rather than turned away from its being 'one', that which is "out of what is human" {Selected Poems and Prose 404-405). So it may be inferred that the concept of consciousness begins to emerge out of the cultural hyle as expression of freedom, in the form of conceptual Gestalten, or to use Deleuze's term, "conceptual personae" {What is Philosophy 66): "the glorious stranger" by Novalis and "the holy stranger" by Trakl (Esselborn, Blaue Blume 209), all of which, for Celan, prefigure his poetic persona of "the lonely one" {Selected Poems and Prose 13). The ideas that first strive to be freedom, are also the now defunct notions of individuality. The previous statement must be kept in mind if it is to be understood that always, in Celan's thought, there looms a much greater, non-individuated human subjectivity and conceptuality that seeks one freedom or another: the still-passed, pained T of the historical entity of the Shoa. The specificity of freedom for Celan finds its site "here, with the I - the estranged I set free here and in such wise - [where] perhaps yet some Other becomes free" {Selected Poems and Prose 408). The "perhaps yet some Other" (408), is the vague, yet recognizable figure of the disappearing dead millions of the Shoa - which is to say, those who, in Celan, are sacred because they are becoming-forgotten. The freedom of the becoming-estranged, forgotten, that is, the freedom of bQcommg-entirely

30

other, however, is transferred by Celan as voice and as silence, and'both as the same: "from here on the poem is itself... art-less, art-free" (408). Yet freedom is also expressed as the need for the other; or the need for existence as encounter, in the poem and as the poem. For Celan, the poem's thought-emergence, its "existence" opens the possibility for "the mystery of an encounter" {Selected Poems and Prose 409), a negative indirect "conversation" (410) with the "Other" and/or the "Wholly Other" (408). For Gadamer, Celan's other "bears the face of a neighbor" and the "Wholly Other [that] of the divine" (Who Am I? 89). Yet for Gadamer it is difficult to accurately distinguish in Celan the 'other' from 'wholly other', for "the poem does not decide" (96), although, he states, what is common to both is that "what happens to them is time" and transformation (89). Edmond Jabes gives us another key to understanding Celan' constellation of 'freedom-other' with his own sentence "God, [is] the absolute Other of others" (The Book of Margins 165) because in fact Celan is affirming, in a negative-theological mode, that the other is, and at the same time is not God (the wholly other); the other is the You, and at the same time it is the 'not-you' (Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience 81). The divine dissolves into the human and the human into the divine. The finite nature of these two instances, guarantee for Celan both the sacred utterance of the poem and the withdrawal of the divine, irrespective of whether the divine is or is not God, following Eckhart. Celan makes this clear in The Meridian, when he states: "I am speaking about... the absolute poem... that can't exist... but there is in every real poem... this unheard-of demand" (Selected Poems and Prose 410). Celan might as well have declared that the

31

poem is possible only in a finite measure that is, as negative writing, as the writing that deliberately puts more weight on what remains unstated. The secret to the finitude or near-absoluteness of Celan's idea of the poem is found in another of Eckhart's sentences: "Ego, the word T , is proper to no one but God alone in his uniqueness... [the] pure abyss of God... forever unique" (Eckhart, A Modern Translation 191). This translates into a preservation of the absolute of the poem by virtue of its inescapable finitude. Thus when Gadamer constantly asks concerning Celan's work "the question of who I and You are" {Who Am I? 88), he does not realize that, by turns, Celan's poem's oscillates conceptually between, I, you, and God, and their negatives, so that, through reasoned indeterminateness, the absoluteness of the poem is kept always just out of reach of the intellectual grasp. Gadamer can only point to the manifest form of these thoughtdeterminations, "the difference between the I... and the you... is blurred" (69) but not to their meaning and does not suspect their organic coherence as negative writing. It is by conceptual oscillation, by the withholding of words, by the "concealment of meaning" (Gadamer, Who Am I? 167), by "anti-meaning" (93), and the various procedures of negative writing that Celan not only negates the reifying tendencies of language but also, by the use of poiesis, he often puts forth in writing that which seems to be actively sacrilegious, as a way of exorcizing the materiality of horror by its vanishing presentation. This is why Lacoue-Labarthe can remark that for Celan "there is no longer a God", rather than that "there is no God" {Poetry as Experience 86), and that Celan is not an atheist with a positive disbelief in God, but rather is in the situation he calls "a-theos" (31, 77), that is of "lacking a god" (25). Gadamer too perceives in Celan

32

the "theology of a self-withholding heaven" (Who Am I? 79). These perspectives, however, fail to recognize the full absorption of negative theology by the poet, as well as that which may be called the sacred duty that Celan seems to give himself as poet, his true task which is to maintain the separation between the worlds of the human and the divine since "the intimacy of the breach is sacred", as Blanchot writes concerning Holderlin in The Space of Literature, (21 A). The seriousness of Celan's thought, its poetic duty to life as the subsistence and renewal of the dead, and to the sacred as the true life, always involves the sacredness of the "true Word", as Gadamer calls it (Who Am I? 82). The sacredness of poetic language is never in Celan a simple disjunctive between the "metaphysical and [the] literal", as Olshner perceives it (Poetic Mutations 382). It has already been made manifest that the relations of the sacred, the profane, the sacrilegious, the named and the withheld utterance, form a complex discursive practice, and it is this very complexity which Celan mobilizes for his poetics of negative writing, the artistic equivalent of negative theology. Our theme returns here to the notion that poetry and its essence, that is, in the poem "can signify an Atemwende, a Breathturn" (Selected Poems and Prose 407), and that "Breath... is direction and destiny" (402). Celan states that the poem acts - upon the individual and the life-world, upon us - "telling strangeness from strangeness" (408), for the sake of the becoming free of "yet some Other" (408). The poem's concretion as act is to "speak in the cause of an Other [perhaps] of a wholly Other" (408). This is also the poem's "selfmost cause" (408). Celan seems to suggest that the difference within the 'strangenesses', may only be discerned through the conditions which constitute, from

33

another viewpoint, the event of the poem and its se/^activity: this event is the primordial instance of intuition. Only as intuition could the poem be said to subjectively discern judge and separate- the Platonically inspired 'one' of art in The Meridian, from the freedom that breaks through the integrity of art by poetry and the poem. Also, only as intuition could the poem discern its 'selfmost' strangeness as heterogeneously inherent to itself, drawing this strangeness from a remote core in the unheimlich aspect of art, from the self-willed estrangement which is also its ownmost self: that of being for the other, trying to intuit its double, the 'wholly Other'. This constant discernment that withdraws back into the doubling of terms, affirmations which cancel each other out with each dialectical movement are typical negative writing. In all these intellectual exercises, the poet is left with the conclusion that: "It was... myself I encountered". Celan seeks the "mystery of an encounter" {Selected Poems and Prose 409), in every inquiry he undertakes in The Meridian: to encounter himself he had to encounter language first, for him, the great survivor "in the midst of the losses" {Selected Poems and Prose 395); within language he encounters, "set free under the sign of a radical individuation", that the "poem [is] the language-become-form of a single person" (409) and simultaneously that "each human being is a form of [the] Other" {Selected Poems and Prose 409), and these discoveries and answers come to Celan with an already painful ordeal suffered, the bludgeon of history having fallen on him as an allencompassing misfortune, in the form of the Shoa. With this doom in mind, Celan once wrote, in a letter: "Perhaps I am one of the last who must live out to the end the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe" (Felstiner, Poet 58).

34

In encountering himself, in the effort of reclaiming history and simultaneously accepting its enmity, Celan finds "a kind of homecoming" {Selected Poems and Prose 412) - this is an affirmation of the possibility that his thought and his poetry, which is to say, "his project", as writes Hawkins of Celan, "enacts tikkun olan, the mending of the world" {Reluctant Theologians 71); at the same time, however, this 'mending' must heal itself as well, through the covert workings of negative writing, the defense against the threat that "there is never a document of culture that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism", as Susan Buck-Morss quotes Benjamin {Dialectics of Seeing 288). Celan's weapon is the writing of poems that aspire to represent the "emancipatory cognitive interest" (Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests 198) of a discipline and a body of thought. This is called, in The Meridian, the "Atemwende, [or] Breathturn" {Selected Poems and Prose 407), the "Breath [that] is direction and destiny" (402) that designates, the passage from the 'other' to the 'wholly other', and back; that is, the oscillation that maintains thought, and human consciousness, free from the entirely reified character of culture. In this way, destiny is freedom in Celan's thought, since destiny is meaning. In the appearing and disappearing of himself toward himself, in mediation, Celan lays the platform on which he will erect sacred meaning, both as the same, and as different. The human being, wasted and ruined after Auschwitz, is never again conceived in the same way by Celan; rather, each one of his poems proposes to signal, not signify, the hard dignity that lies invisible in the turn of the Breath, of the ruah and/or the pneuma. In Celan, as in Adorno, there is a ruah or "spirit" of art {Aesthetic Theory 118) for Celan it is held within the poem. In The Meridian, art and its being 'one', its

35

predisposition to being ruptured into the freedom of poetry, into releasing a turn in destiny, stands up to the cultural spirit as another spirit, and in its inner encounters and secret dialogues conceals the subsistence of an anthropomorphic entity, negatively withheld, only known in the rarified structure of the language of the poem.

36

CHAPTER 5

BASIC NOTIONS OF NEGATIVE WRITING Derrick once stated: "There is nothing outside of the text (there is no outside-text; iln'y a pas de hors-texte)" (Of Grammatology 158). In the context of this study, such a statement should be qualified with another by the same writer: "Just as there is a negative theology, there is a negative atheology... [the latter] still pronounces the absence of the center, when it is play that should be affirmed" (Derrida, Ellipsis 297) - this play is "the time of writing [and] the deferral within the now of writing" (300). For Derrida, this writing plays within meaning. Through a shimmering materiality of writing, a shadowy non-God inhabits the text, and its name -always-already deferred- is 'meaning'. From Celan's perspective, this style of search for meaning and for the meaning of meaning is a luxury for those that have always been free. Unlike that realm of traces and 'negative atheologies', Celan's negative writing is driven by the idea of building the Sprachgitter ("Speech-Grille") (Selected Poems and Prose 86-87). The 'grille' is at the same time a screen and the fence of a prison which makes language abandon functionality, rendering it undecipherable in terms of traditional poetry. It is not the screen of mediation, but of "mouthfuls of silence" (Selected Poems and Prose 107), which nevertheless, in the written poem, permits speech to be 'heard' under the burdensome sign of silence. Silence imposes itself over poetry by sheer semantic effect and it is seldom addressed as an issue but its force is always felt.

37

For Celan, in the post-Auschwitz-condition, speech is ossified language but the 'grille' even cleanses the undeniable "facticity" (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 136) of the materially written poem. It is the grille from a Catholic confessionary, converting poems into confessions not unlike those demanded by a police state. They are presented in riddle-like ways, forced to be anti-confessions in an attempt to survive and be free. Whose confessions? Here again one may only hearken to the self-canceling oscillation of the "who I and You are" (Gadamer, Who Am I? 88). Celan's poetry very often involves a negative projection of meaning, sometimes unannounced - an event and a decision of meaning-essence that is behind the layer of words, necessarily written in the poem as signs that do not necessarily signify in a strict manner, but rather signal indirectly, in the way that "indirectness involves something direct that would be transmitted" (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 171) This indirectness and the bitter confinement of language are represented in Celan's phrase "conversations from smokemouth to smokemouth" (Breathturn, 161). Indirectness, as defined by Adorno, is one of the central notions implicit in Celan's negative writing: it involves spiriting away unwanted semantic residues fighting, using words or hiding them, "the anti-spiritual side of the spirit" (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 202) - unnecessary suffering and "superfluous evils", to use Adi Ophir's term (The Order of Evils 325). Negative writing reconfigures and distorts words with a tendency for pseudo-mythic sense, in the use of new, perplexing fibers of text, and indeed, with new terms and compound-words. It also involves relieving words of secret connotations that may or may not be known by any reader, as well as presenting

38

simulacra of words and ideas as indirect substitution for others. The aim of Celan's negative writing, like Eckhart and Pseudo-Dionysius before him, is to shield and guard the forever transcending sense-meanings and essences that must never fall into the generalized reifications of culture, of the "deathbringing speech" of the German language (Felstiner, Poet 40). Celan strives, through negative writing, "to seize the conscience and purify the spiritual landscape" (Felstiner, Poet 95). For Celan, the redemption of language is one of the labors evoked, through the term Atemwende as "Breath [that] is direction and destiny" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 402); for the unnamed ruah, besides being "breath" (Cohen, Talmud 11), is also "the spirit, the power of speech" (Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism 188) in Jewish thought. The book Sprachgitter conforms faithfully to these delineations and functions of Celan's negative writing, in a way that cannot be found in his previous books, one of which contained the remarkable poem "Todesfuge", or "Deathfugue" (Selected Poems and Prose 30-31); in this poem, Celan strove to make "the leap from fact to verse" in an immediate "psychic actuality" (Felstiner, Poet 34), with direct allusions to the horrors of Auschwitz, and the poet's own pain at the loss of his family. Sprachgitter represents, in Celan's work, the turning away from immediacy, into the subtle defenses of his many traditions. It was written at a time when Celan was reading "Hegel (in 1952)", Schlegel, Fichte, Holderlin, Buber, Hermann Cohen, Gershom Sholem, Rilke, and "Walter Benjamin (in 1959)" (Felstiner, Poet 96). It is only regarding these interests that Celan's declaration -quoted by Pierre Joris- may be understood literally: "I see my alleged abstractness and actual ambiguity as moments of realism" (Polysemy without mask 35).

39

The 'realism' of negative writing involves the systematic dialectical destruction of every reality-principle, and the desublimation of every reification, in order to affirm the real that cannot be divided between noun and adjective, except through denial and negation. Sprachgitter, as we mentioned above, was also a response to Adorno's indictment that "it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz" {Notes to Literature II87), which Celan wrongly believed referred to the "Todesfuge". It may be said, using Adorno's term "micrology [which is] a haven from totality" {Negative Dialectics 407), that as with the micrology "called 'After Auschwitz'" (Lyotard, Differ end 58); the interpretive model of negative theology leaves "no word tinged from on high not even a theological one, that has any right unless it underwent a transformation" (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 367). And if it is a transformed 'right' aspiring to signaling the human and the sacred- then it is to be read as a poetry that, in writing, seeks to hear and give voice to "the scream that never falls silent" (Felstiner, Poet 93). In "Your Being Over There", from the book Die Niemandsrose, it is in the negative understanding of meaning that the recognition of a poetic simulacra of the divine can be found. Manifestations of the horrible face the reader as a means of distraction from the true intention - emancipation as discernment and, above all, cleansing: in that poem Celan mentions an imaginary situation that has thrust itself at his attention: "God, so we've read, is / one part and a second, dispersed: / in the death / of all who've been reaped / he grows whole" {Selected Poems and Prose 145). As the negative schematics from which we've endeavored to understand Celan indicate, the divine cannot

40

have any reification, and thus, neither can it have an image, nor any parts, nor any wholes. Yet in a realistic deference to the undeniable reading of the world as it presents itself-very often as horrible - whether this reading is taken from a book or from the reading -"experience for Celan was legible, first and last" (Felstiner, Poet 96) - of the sensibilities of the life-world. Celan accepts this self-presentation of the real but he does not forego the need to interpret the manifestation, and the negative understanding of the divine imposes a negative en-framing of that which is read. This interpretation is placed in the last stanza: "Our gaze / leads us there / it's this / half/ we deal with" (145). Here, Celan makes it plain that this reading, being as inevitable as perception itself, must be "dealt with", that it has to be interpreted in its own terms. The reification of the divine as part/whole is named then a "half that is "there", an image of the divine, as true as reality, yet as imperfect as any reified thought of the divine can be: all thoughts of the divine are simulacra, and this terrible "God" is no exception: this is the "half that contemporary humanity reads, and the one that the poet is made to read. Yet the poet remains silent concerning the other half, the one that we've not read, and have not been made to read; the other half that remains^ree is finally the absent Divinity, something akin to Luther's
l

Deus absconditus'. Another of Celan's devices in negative writing is the metaphoric substitution of

one term for another: rather than being a pure metaphor, which, according to Hayden White, "asserts that a similarity exists between two objects in the face of manifest differences between them" {Metahistory 34), Celan's metaphoric substitution also includes a negational drive in it that alerts the reader to the ironic element in the

41

substitution, because it is only a partial semantic negation that alludes to a broader conceptual negation that retains similitude; this is why it is a metaphorical substitution, because of the quasi- or pseudo-identification involved between the word presented and the word repressed. The perfect example of metaphoric substitution can be detected in the following stanza in the poem "Benedicta" from the book Die Niemandsrose ('The NoOne's-Rose'): "Hast / thou hast drunken, / what came to me from our fathers / and from beyond our fathers: / Pneuma" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 175). The

most striking substitution is the sacred word that "came... from our fathers": this word is made out to be 'pneuma', the ancient Greek word for 'breath' that was translated into Latin as 'spiritus'; yet in its being presented so explicitly in Greek, and, at the same time, in its having come "from our fathers", that is, from a patriarchal past, not just a filial past, Celan is suppressing the Hebrew word 'ruah', which, with many other different connotations, also means 'breath' and was also translated into Latin as 'spiritus'. The hidden word is evoked by the emphatic, capitalized manifest word. Yet this same word 'pneuma' is also "from beyond our fathers", thus retaining some degree of literality. In Celan's metaphoric substitution however, one cannot imagine the written term "reduced [nor] sublated" into the other, as Derrida writes concerning Celan's work in general {Shibboleth 43). On the other hand, Celan does not share the will to the indifferentiation of terms that Derrida seems to display in his book Of Spirit where he writes: "it is on the basis of flame that one thinks pneuma or spiritus or... ruah" (112). Celan's practice of hiding the word by writing another one is always meant to preserve the first's uniqueness, its integrity and its sacredness.

42

The 'no-one' is a special way of the protecting the sacred some-one, the human and/or divine other. This is found in "Psalm" from the book Die Niemandsrose: "Praised be your name, No one / For our sake / we shall flower / Towards you / A nothing / we were, are, shall / remain flowering: / the nothing-, the / No one's rose" (Celan, Poems 153). However the event of the other is 'nothing', an even more sacred event than Heidegger's Ereignis, in which "be-ing [Seyn] holds sway as refusal" (Mindfulness 84) and "withdrawal" (Contributions 340); for Celan, on the other hand, it is humanness and divinity that simultaneously withdraw into their own determinate 'nothing', not as Seyn, but each as itself and also as the other. Lacoue-Labarthe has proposed the term 'inoccurrence' (Poetry as Experience 21) to qualify Celan's 'nothing': in-occurrence is a kind of not-Ereignis which is nevertheless, negatively, an event. Despite its negativity, this not-Ereignis is sacred because it is the occurrence of divine and/or human inoccurrence. Lacoue-Labarthe comments on an example already cited above (from another translation), concerning an instance of Celan's "re-use" of Eckhart in book Lichtzwang: "...cast from the throne, he turns inwards / speaks among brows on the shore: / clear of death, clear / of God" (Poetry as Experience 85). Lacoue-Labarthe stresses that Celan does not mean the death of death, but rather that, given a freedom from death with a meaning, we are now free from God. The affirmation of the annulment of the meaning of death - as resurrection or as eternal life - can be agreed with, if the poem is read like a simple syllogism. However, a more succinct way of expressing this notion of the possibility of a death without meaning, avoiding the symbolic mediation of 'resurrection'

43

is stated by Adorno as: "a death that is deprived of all meaning" (Aesthetic Theory 322), and this is more akin to the core of Celan's thought. It could be added that for Celan, there is a reified unreality in the substantive 'death', where 'death' would correspond to an ideal being, and the moment of dying -the end-of-living- and 'the dead' would be concrete entities. Celan's thought of insufficient meaning would guarantee death and life's aura, their sacredness and mystery. The unreality of death, a notion of epistemological origin, would have ontological significance, since, for negative writing, just as for negative theology, the unreality of things guarantees their superiority to 'real' -reified- things. Death does not need to be 'real' in order for it to be sacred. Along this same train of thought, one could say the same concerning the sacredness of meaning: the essence of meaning is usually passed over in silence, and only the linguistic aspect is affirmed; such a lapse in the life of meaning and of significance, would excite Celan's rejection of affirmed meaning in favor of negated meaning as doubly affirmed significance. With "You be like you, ever" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 323), Celan is saying that the you is not self-identical. In fact it is not a self at all: the you, being always other, must be like something else: itself as its double, or its reified version. This also hides the fact that, viewed in a realistic manner, the you is as much a universalizing-reifying term as the I, and it is thus empty; or, in negative-theological terms, sacred. From the book Fadensonnen: "You were my death / you I could hold / while everything slipped from me" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 297). Here the word death is the inversion of the word life; however, even if one were to understand

44

'you were my life', then what is meant by the 'you' is death. Celan is claiming that a you that is one's death is a you that is deeply spiritual and 'unreal', and thus sacred, almost to the point of being divine. To hold on to a you that is one's death, as everything dies, is to adhere to the way of the world, to the tendency towards death of a world. However this last reading has its interpretation too, since a world leading to universal death might be, in a way, leading, painfully, to the divine. When Celan writes, in "Great, glowing vault": "The world is gone, I have to carry you" (Breathturn 251), the poet takes the place of the world, as ground for the you; it might also mean that, in the manner of Eckhart, here Celan's soul is "godlike" (Eckhart, A Modern Translation 237); but god-like also means, for Celan as for Eckhart, not-god-like, and to be the ground of the world, in the manner of God, also means to be "[the] pure abyss of God" (191), that is, the groundless.

46

The poem continues to describe other attributes of this fierce 'wind': "the motley gossip of pseudo- / experience the hundred-tongued My- / poem, the Lie-noem" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 247). It is my pseudo-experience itself- this is the unnamed presence that is being battered by this 'radiant wind of your speech'. It is also the experience of'the poem that is being compromised, the false 'My' poem - it cannot belong to anyone in particular, being 'hundred-tongued', replicating itself, in numerous simulacra, beyond the grasp of an offended imagination. Simultaneously, it is a 'Lienoem', and, in truth, not a poem at all. Clearly, one condition for a poem being a poem, is that it may be experienced. Here, "Etched Away" (247), tells us that this cannot be the case. The poem surrenders and cancels itself, suggesting that its essence is not to be a poem, nor a manifestation of an ideal Poetry, but rather a posited 'noem', which refers to the already-there potentialcontent of the entities of thinkable reality, waiting to be made "senseful" (213), by active, positing (213). Things that are thought have an "immanential", independent sense of their own - Adorno has termed this the "noematic core" (Against Epistemology 166). Yet, without the noesis, such supposed independent pure noematic core remains senseless. Thus, the noema can never be thought of as a thinkable correlate of pure thought, unless subjective agency has already grounded it. Adorno had already decried the unreality of the noema, stating that it is "hypostatized [and] construed as something unreal and yet objectual" (Against Epistemology 163). Somewhat differently, Celan is capable of almost imperceptibly

46

The poem continues to describe other attributes of this fierce 'wind': "the motley gossip of pseudo- / experience the hundred-tongued My- / poem, the Lie-noem" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 247). It is my pseudo-experience itself- this is the unnamed presence that is being battered by this 'radiant wind of your speech'. It is also the experience of'the poem that is being compromised, the false 'My' poem - it cannot belong to anyone in particular, being 'hundred-tongued', replicating itself, in numerous simulacra, beyond the grasp of an offended imagination. Simultaneously, it is a 'Lienoem', and, in truth, not a poem at all. Clearly, one condition for a poem being a poem, is that it may be experienced. Here, "Etched Away" (247), tells us that this cannot be the case. The poem surrenders and cancels itself, suggesting that its essence is not to be a poem, nor a manifestation of an ideal Poetry, but rather a posited 'noem', which refers to the already-there potentialcontent of the entities of thinkable reality, waiting to be made "senseful" (213), by active, positing (213). Things that are thought have an "immanential", independent sense of their own - Adorno has termed this the "noematic core" (Against Epistemology 166). Yet, without the noesis, such supposed independent pure noematic core remains senseless. Thus, the noema can never be thought of as a thinkable correlate of pure thought, unless subjective agency has already grounded it. Adorno had already decried the unreality of the noema, stating that it is "hypostatized [and] construed as something unreal and yet objectual" (Against Epistemology 163). Somewhat differently, Celan is capable of almost imperceptibly carrying out the accusation, in the poetic thematization of poiesis and the "phantasm"

47

(Klossowski, Vicious Circle 133) of its incapacity for being experience in-itself, as well as the experience of poetry. Thus, for Celan, the noema must be written in an incomplete manner: 'noem'. A further indictment is that the noema is a 'lie-noem'. By itself, this term is an oxymoron, because the final sense that may be intuited of the noema is guaranteed only by the identity of the noetic intention that schematizes it. When an announced lie is compounded with the noema, all intention is made impossible. And yet, whether the lie is announced or unannounced, Celan poetically suggests that it is the product of a rational positing, and thus, at bottom, the devastation brought to experience with the "radiant wind of your speech" makes of this stanza a somewhat secret and negative image of reason. Only the drive interpreted as reason is capable of "a// species ofpositings [such as with] the ideas [of] Truth, Reason, Consciousness" (Husserl, Ideas 340). Celan, for the sake of experience, joins Adorno in the "denunciation of reason" {Against Epistemology 162). However, for Adorno, this critical, almost autoculpable awareness obtains in the primacy of the "indissoluble something" {Negative Dialectics 135) over 'being', and results in the reconfiguration of philosophy as 'negative dialectic'. Differently, from the concise stanzas of "Etched Away" {Selected Poems and Prose 247), Celan, using negative writing, rethinks the meaning of the auto-critical intensity of reason against reason. This is done first by giving a complex name to reason: the "radiant wind of your speech", and then explaining the devastation that this force wreaks in seemingly explicit determinations of its untruth that is done in the first verse. Yet the second verse inverts the sense of the first, with its own: "Whirl- / winded, / free, /

48

a path through human- / shaped snow, / through penitent cowl-ice, to / the glacier's / welcoming chambers and tables" (247). By a strange destiny, the malevolent 'wind' is also the only possibility for freedom from the very positings and reifications that thought recoils from in its desire for experience. And, in an implacable irony, the only escape from inauthentic positings and reifications is the power that posits the removal of human error, falsehoods, and the attempt to commit evil: this is what Celan has named "humanshaped snow" - the folly of cruelty, the 'snow' that accumulates over the dirt and mixes with it, is enacting crimes as all-encompassing as the Shoa itself and only reason may cut through the seemingly resolute constitution of such crimes, or 'penitent cowl-ice'. The same "radiant wind" {Selected Poems and Prose 247) that had made experience a reification now -as 'whirl-winded, free'- clears a path through the wilderness towards another experience, reconciled with its share of reification. The turn of sense in Celan's poem may be explained by the struggle and desire within a still site-less expanse of thought. Bataille gave many descriptions of this longing of thought: "ecstatic, breathless, experience thus opens a bit more every time the horizon of God" {Inner Experience 104-105). The named site is 'God', and the experience of it is, admits Bataille himself, "impossible" (104). Maintaining the hope of an encounter of reason with this experience, the clearing away of the "penitent cowl-ice" towards the site of "the glacier's / welcoming chambers and tables" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 247), does not amount to Celan's promise of a reason as the intellectual intuition of pure experience. It is, however, the signaling of reason's power to enable poetic experience, both in its de-reifying drive and its

49

postulation of a direction. Experience becomes finite, as reason leads towards the divine site that, in the deepest longing of thought, would be the deity's site. Celan manages to conceive a situational image as powerful as, and in some ways similar to, Moses' standing at the threshold of the divine site. Moses hears the divine decree: "I have let you see it [the promised land] with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there", following which, "Moses, servant of Hashem, died there" (Torah 513). Likewise, Celan acknowledges a threshold of reason to something less than a true poetic experience that merely paves the way to a domain accessible only to poetic intuition - something which may or may not be obtained. Through the possibilities of finite rational intuition afforded by negative writing, whose essential "meaning effects" (Lacan, Feminine Sexuality 43) double-back on themselves, Celan finds the paradoxical restriction of putting an end to poetic experience at its limit, since it is precisely by rational positing that such an experience reaches the condition of possibility. The negative turn of sense in "Etched Away" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 247), gives reason a sacred task: to constitute the awaiting divine site, "the glacier's welcoming chambers and tables" (247), the promise of the cleansing purity of water that was given an architectural form. The last verse of the poem "Weggebeizt" ('Etched Away') unravels, by the mediations of its non-literality, its full negative focus: the figure of the glacier in the second verse had established, not merely the cold effectiveness of the disposal of the superfluous and the false, but also the configuration of readily comprehensible everliving purity, a glacier with "welcoming chambers and tables" (Celan, Selected Poems

50

and Prose 247), that may be conceived as 'welcoming' because it mirrors Thales' dpxn of water. Celan writes at the end of "Weggebeizt" ('Etched Away'), as from the grip of the glacier-image, a prelude to the divine sight: "Deep / in the time crevasse, / by / honeycomb-ice / there waits, a Breathcrystal, / your unannullable / witness" (247). This is not an ephemeral and unpossessed fire in a bush but a precinct that already and permanently belongs to us, the creation of a new topos for the thought of the divine, not as the radical, fleeting otherness of a fire that refers to a radical beyond, but as the iced stronghold that invites and welcomes us. Once again, the shelter of 'honeycomb-ice', sweet vitality within the purest water, is the sanctuary where, rather than the 'breathless', awaits the plenitude of the poetic experience, as "Ruah...the spirit" (Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism 188), and "Pneuma", (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 175), and Geist, all in the form of a single "agalma, the inestimable treasure... the marvel" (Lacan, Ecrits 699), that is perceived precisely because it is not named as what it is: the "Breathcrystal" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 247), the deity. The 'breath' is frozen in crystal, or again, in ice, and inside this form of water it lives, kept safe in the divine site, the chamber. Retaking now the description of the need for the work of reason: the agalma of the Atemkristall (Breathcrystal) is found with the plough of a derivative, finite intuition that is at the heart of all reason. This guarantees the negative reality of the poetic experience of the Atemkristall - for to join it with faith might lead to its betrayal. In this sense, Adorno wrote: "...one who believes in God cannot believe in God" (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 401). Likewise, it could never -should never- be said of the

51

Atemkristall that it 'is\ for "the copula says: It is so, not otherwise" (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 147). The negativity of Celan's writing safeguards the freedom of'whirlwind' -reason- that makes poetic experience possible. To reading, the Atemkristall manifests its essence outwardly by being -in Felstiner's translation- "your unannullable witness" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 247), intact and out of reach to the "human-shaped snow" (247) of Auschwitz, Nazism, hatred, and crime. The certainty and non-nihilizable aspect of the 'Breathcrystal', retains its experiential integrity as an entity, this is one 'world' of experience made possible by the positing of reason. In Jorris' translation, 'dein unumstofiliches Zeugnis' is translated as "your unalterable testimony" (Celan, Breathturn 107), rather than as Felstiner's "your unannullable witness" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 247). The 'testimony', which may be understood concretely as 'text', affords reading an entirely different poetic experience -indeed, an entirely different 'world', perhaps grounded, before being constituted- discovered by reason, in the Jewish tradition of sacred texts. What does not change in either translation is the you alluded to in the 'dein' ('your'). It might be asked who this you is, and the answer is any single human willing to try to effect the experience of reading, of intuiting, individually, its own 'world' centered in the agalma of the 'Breathcrystal'. Celan offers, in this poem, the possibility of rational constitution, the condition of intuiting -finitely- a divine site in which a poetic experience of the highest agalma may be sought. This condition, once set by the poem, is the condition of a poetic/prophetic Utopia, not religion. This is because the deity

52

encountered in the 'Breathcrystal', if it is at all encountered, may be fashioned after the sacredness, thought, and reason of any human being. In this sense, the outward glancing 'Breathcrystal', the unannullable witness, would seek to, poetically and individually, restore and enliven the life-world and the historical condition of Western thought, using the humanism of an experience-for-everyone, an affirmation, like the key word, Fadensonnen, Threadsuns' (Celan, Breathturn 97), that there is still a greater life to be wrought for humankind.

53

CHAPTER 7

CONCLUDING REMARKS Celan, thinker of the Auschwitz-condition, whose poetry is not only philosophically relevant, as has been seen, is also philosophically translatable with the lens of negative theology as interpretive model. This model, has permitted us to see Celan's shadowing of Pseudo-Dionysius' "negative language" {Indiscretion 158), and his inspiration in Eckhart, and even, perhaps more remotely, in Plato's Parmenides, to create poetry as negative writing. Our analysis has moved within a negative-theological modelvariation as neither purely Christian, nor Greek, nor Jewish, but in a conciliatory way, all at once. Thus our analyses have also provided approximations to still-secular experiences of truth in poetry as an event of thought. The formation of negative writing began with Sprachgitter ('Speech-Grille'), a reaction to Adorno's declaration "it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz" {Notes to Literature II87). Celan conceived poetry, as the synthetic culmination of all art, a voice from towards history, and an expression of philosophy - and thus as a presence that is yet active within the current world, still shared with the poet. The event-character notion of Celan's poems and prose and its intended consequences pertain to consciousness-emancipatory experiences. These experiences are grounded in Celan's intellectual labor of the lived-experience of Auschwitz, the fate that prompted Celan's rejection of all positivity inherent to the notion of 'being'. Thus, all of

54

Celan's work seeks the negative speculative intuition -the poetic experience- of the human, the sacred, and the divine, conceived as different from 'being'. A significant response to Celan's work is Adorno's declaration in Aesthetic Theory: "In the work of the most important contemporary representative of German hermetic poetry, Celan, the experiential content of the hermetic was inverted. His poetry is permeated by the shame of art in the face of suffering that escapes both experience and sublimation. Celan's poems want to speak of the most extreme horror through silence" (322). For Adorno, the unacceptability of "meaning radiated by an affirmatively posited transcendence" (361), is an epistemological objection shared with Celan, although the latter substitutes it with optimistic, negatively discerned experiences of truth. Attempting to extract the "Wahrheitsgehalt" (Adorno, Negative Dialektik 198), or truth-content from Celan's poetry, this work has endeavored to explicate the liberation of the poem from the instrumentality of language and exposed it - "poetry exposes itself, Celan declared {Collected Prose 29) - to the intellectual workings that function within it, such as reason. Throughout the analysis of The Meridian, a line of thought was traced from Adorno's "Atem" (Asthetische Theorie 195), or 'breath', to Celan's own 'Atemwende' as "Breath [that] is direction and destiny" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 402), and then to "Ruah...the spirit" (Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 188), and "Pneuma", (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 175). This yielded a notion of 'spirit', thought negatively, as singularity, and also as a kind of non-individuated entity the human spirit.

55

Levinas informs us that Celan once wrote, in a letter: "I cannot see the difference... between a handshake and a poem" {Celan: From Being to the Other 40). This is then, for Celan, the most essential, most important site of human communication whose medium is voice and silent reading. The poem is the negative and indirect "conversation" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 410) with the "Other" and/or the "Wholly Other" (408). Celan underscores this way the ambiguity and indifferentiation between the human and its other, and the human and the divine - between these extremes is the sacred. As Gadamer expresses it: "the difference between the I... and the you... is blurred" {Who Am I? 69) and the other "bears the face of [a] "Wholly Other" (89), which is to say, the divine. Thus the experience of the divine may only be a secular poetic experience, for Celan. Never fully denying the realism of the "truth in reity" (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 375), Celan arduously fights the reifying tendencies of language using the resources of negative writing, such as with the poiesis of a self-negating sacrilege, a manner of "nihilating" (Sartre, Being and Nothingness 57) the power of horror. There is in Celan's thought, a profound duty to truth-life as the subsistence and renewal of the dead, and to the sacredness of the "true Word", (Gadamer, Who Am I? 82) - as if, in Celan's thought, truth could be born from out of the human, just as, in Eckhart, "man gives birth to the eternal Word" (Schurmann, Wandering Joy 20). Celan wrote: "Perhaps I am one of the last who must live out to the end the destiny of the Jewish spirit in Europe" (Felstiner, Poet 58). In pulling himself from out of the Shoa, in the exertion to redeem history, while also willing himself towards realism,

56

Celan found a "homecoming" {Selected Poems and Prose 412). This is why each of his poems sought to present a possible poetic experience for the dignity that lies invisible in 'the turn of the Breath' - that is, for the hope that he held for every individual. Sprachgitter is Celan's initial turn toward negative writing, and Atemwende ('Breathturn') marks the ultimate achievement of this poetic form, active till the end in his work. In "Etched Away" {Selected Poems and Prose 247), through the grounding of poetic experience, Celan rediscovers the auto-critical phantasm of reason set against reason. Under the sign of the Atemwende as "Breath [that] is direction and destiny" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 402), Celan poetically recognizes the path toward the secular-poetic experience of the divine. This is done at the end of "Weggebeizt" ('Etched Away'), where Celan, makes the prophetic/poetic announcement, in the various twists and turns of negative writing, of the eternal purity of a glacier, whose indirect meaning lies in the poetic Utopia of "welcoming chambers and tables" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 247), a new topos for the imagination of the sacred and divine. Here, Celan sets the condition for intuiting finitely- the divine place where the highest agalma and its experiential mise en scene might be found. In poetic experience, this agalma may or may not give itself to be known - it awaits the right ground for self-engendering in the singularity of each human being. At the end, Celan seems to have been comforted by a simple human faith: the hope, always generously present when dreaming the possibility of a new life, a child:

57

In the seed's sense the sea stars you out, innermost, for ever. An end to the granting of names, Over you I cast my fate. (from the poem "Black" - Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 255).

WORKS CITED

59 WORKS CITED

Adomo, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1997. Asthetische Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003. . Against Epistemology: A Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies. Trans. Willis Domingo. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982. . Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005. . Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 2000. Negative Dialektik / Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003. . Notes to Literature: Volume Two. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. . Philosophy of New Music. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2006. Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and History. Trans. Liz Heron. London: Verso, 2007. Alexander, Jeffrey C. Theoretical Logic in Sociology. Volume One: Positivism, Presuppositions and Current Controversies. Berkeley: California UP, 1982.

Apel, Karl-Otto. From a Transcendental-Semiotic Point of View. Ed. Marianna Papastephanou. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998. Badiou, Alain. Manifesto for Philosophy. Trans. Norman Madarasz. Albany: New York UP, 1992. Baer, Ulrich. Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Celan. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000. Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience. Trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany: New York UP, 1986. Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. 253-264. Bernstein, J.M. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Blanchot, Maurice. A Voice from Elsewhere. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Albany: New York UP, 2007. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Bultmann, Rudolf. "On the Problem of Demythologizing (1961)." New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings. Trans. Schubert M. Ogden. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989. 155-163. Carlson, Thomas A. Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. Celan, Paul. Breathturn. Trans. Pierre Joris. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006. . Lightduress. Trans. Pierre Joris. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005.

61 Poems of Paul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New York: Persea Books, 2002. Selected Poems and Prose of Celan. Trans. Felstiner. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Cohen, Abraham. Everyman's Talmud. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. "Ellipsis." Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1978. 295-300. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: Chibago UP, 1991. "Shibboleth for Celan." Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Celan. Ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. 1-64. De Vries, Hent. "The Shibboleth Effect: On Reading Celan." Judeities. Ed. Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith. New York: Fordham UP, 2007. 175-213. Eckhart, Johannes. Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation. Trans. Raymond B. Blakney. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. Esselborn, Hans. '"Blaue Blume' or 'Kristallene Tranen'?: Trakl's Poetology and Relation to Novalis." Trans. Robert Firmage and Eric Williams. The Dark Flutes

62 of Fall: Critical Essays on Georg Trakl. Ed. Eric Williams. Columbia: Camden House, Inc., 1991.201-232. Felstiner, John. Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. Fink, Eugen, and Martin Heidegger. Heraclitus Seminar. Trans.Charles H. Seibert, Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993. Foti, Veronique. Heidegger and the Poets: Poiesis/Sophia/Techne. Amherst: Humanity Books, 1992. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Gadamer on Celan: "Who Am land Who Are You? " and Other Essays. Trans. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski. Albany: New York UP, 1997. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1997. Habermas, Jiirgen. Knowledge and Human Interests. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Hawkins, Beth. Reluctant Theologians: Kafka, Celan, Jabes. New York: Fordham UP, 2003. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: New York UP, 1996. Mindfulness^ Trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. New York: Continuum, 2006.