Benítez - Celan's work as an interpretation of negative theology-2009

7/28/2019 Bentez - Celan's work as an interpretation of negative theology-2009

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CEL AN'S W ORK AS AN INTERPRETATION OF NEGATIVE THEOLOGY

A ThesisPresented

to the Faculty ofCalifornia S tate University Dom inguez H ills

In Partial Fulfillmentof the Req uirements for the D egree

Master of Artsin

Humanities

byEliot Alejandro Benitez Camarena

Spring 2009


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UMI Number: 1472199

Copyr ight 2009 byBeni tez Camarena, E l io t A le jandro

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TABLE OF CONTENTSPAGE

APPROV AL PAGE iiTABLE OF CONTE NTS iii

ABSTRACT ivCHAPTER1. INTRODU CTION 1

Purpose 2Background 3The Question of Cultural Context 4On the Notions of Poem and Interpretive Model 6Negative Theology as an Interpretive Model 9

2. REVIEW OF LITERATUR E 153. METHODOLOGY 204. INTERPRETATION OF CELAN'S THE MERIDIAN. 235. BASIC NOTION S OF NEGA TIVE WRITING 366. THE PROPHET IC UTOPIA 457. CONCLUDING REMAR KS 53WORKS CITED 58

in


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ABSTRACTThis study purports to make a philosophical interpretation of C elan's work

starting with his writing of Speech-G rille. Based on the fact of his familiarity withnegative theology, an interpretive m odel is configured based on Ad orno 's concept ofvariation. Celan's The Meridian is explored, as it provides insights both into his reasonsfor adopting negative theology as a framework for the preservation of poetry andlanguage in the context of the post-Auschwitz crisis of intellectual life, and also on keysto understanding his incorporation of philosophical notions into poetic creation. Theconcept of'n eg ativ e writing' is introduced to describe the various rhetorical mechan ismsimported from negative theology into Celan 's poetry which have resulted on its beingseen as unexplainably hermetic. Finally, it is suggested, a somewhat less hermetic andalmost prophetic vision is offered in poems such as Etched-Away, a particularly poignantturn in view of C elan's eventual suicide.


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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Contempo rary philosophical writing on the work of exemplary poets includesHeidegger's reading of Holderlin's poetry, Derrida's studies on Celan, and, mostrecently, Alain Badio u's interest in "the age of poets" {Man ifesto for Philosophy 69), andLaco ue-Lab arthe's w ork on Celan. Following Lacoue-Lab arthe, I believe Celan is one ofthe most im portant poets and thinkers of our time, a post-Auschw itz thinker, and alsoasume his work is informed by ph ilosophical concerns as during the 1950 's he readGerman p hilosophers and writers Hegel, Schlegel, Fichte, Holderlin, Buber, H ermannCohen, Gershom Sholem, Rilke, and Walter Benjamin.

The central purpose of this work is to make a philosophical interpretation ofCe lan's po etry, particularly in terms of negative theology. Ce lan's main inspirationwithin negative theology is the thought of Meister Eckhart and Pseudo-D ionysius. I willdemo nstrate, through the interpretation of specific poem s and prose texts, that Cela n'spoetry uses a particular transformation of negative theology w hich I call 'negativewritin g', and that in Celan 's poetry can be discerned a coherent thought developed in thecontext of the post-Auschw itz intellectual crisis. The term 'negative w riting' has beenused before only once and with a very specific meaning. I believe a wider notion ofnegative writing is warranted in the case of C elan because there is in his work afundamentally humanistic concern that cannot fully express itself without entering the


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

PurposeAs stated earlier, one of the main goals of this study is to determine how

the meaning of Cela n's w riting could be characterized in philosophical terms. Theultimate essence of the poem remains within but at the same time we cannot really graspit as it is beyond the lim its of language and rea son, so that even the powerful evocation o fthe Yo u in Ce lan 's poetry will be seen initially as entirely o^er-re fere ntial and self-transcending, leading from the ephemeral grasp to a de-reified indeterminacy, that whichis without, of necessity pretending in turn to declare what humanity is . We find a goodexample of this in "POEM-CLOSED, POEM-OPEN/ here come the colors / toward thenon-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 radicallydefined by a color (poem-closed), comes looking for m e, wondering and vulnerable as I


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am, immersed in a tradition of rigid and complex laws (poem -open), yet he and I remainsomething more than this eternally recurring scene.

Celan seems to refer to this in The Meridian: "a poem is the language-become-form of a single person... following its nature, presentness, and presence" {SelectedPoems and Prose 409). The poe m is not reduced to language or to reason, but they arenecessary to reach a position from which its essence is intuited in some o ther way. Theremay never be a final reification of the 'po etic ' nor of the 'hu m an ' but there alwaysremains a need to propose one. Yet once again, philosophy is here sketching out its ownunsurmountable limitations and trying to suggest a truth that is beyond philosophicalthought: "No one/ bears w itness/ 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 C elan'spoetry, a human subject which cannot be philosophically reified is nevertheless p roposeda path to hope and salvation.

BackgroundThis study w ill limit itself to analyzing the work of C elan starting from his book

entitled Sprachgitter ('Spee ch-G rille') and the works that followed. T he reason for this isthat Sprachgitter is a reaction to Adorno's declaration of 1955 that "it is barbaric to writepoetry after Auschwitz" (Notes to Literature II87), which, Felstine r's biography of Celantells us, "was taken to refer to 'Tod esfuge' - a stricture that pained and angered Celan(though Ad orn o... probably did not know Celan's p oem )" (Felstiner, Poet 139).Abandoning the lyric an d musicality of horror and irony, Celan, from Sprachgitteronwards, strove to show that poetry, culmination of all art, is the distilled exteriorization


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of the essence of language, itself a survivor of the spiritual exhaustions of recent historyand mem ory. Poetry is the hollow in which language -th e one thing that remained "in themidst of the losses" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 39 5) - may maintain itself in itsbeing. For Celan now, the truest notion of "life" will be the life of the sacred. This iswhat drives C elan 's later poetic thinking, and mo st likely, his very life.

The Question of Cultural ContextA philosophical revision of Ce lan's w ork entails diverse problems that require a

unified theoretical understanding: at issue is the status of Celan as poet and thinker andalso a truthful interpretation, cautiously delineating what is to be understood as 'truth' inthe case of his poem s, with their multiplicity of underlying them es and logics: death, life,language, the sacred and the divine, cultural heritage, contemporary cultural conflict, justto 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 aJew from Buko vina who wrote poems in German, what are the conditions forunderstanding them from our own entirely different background?

This question was taken up by G adamer in his study of Celan, and his attemptedsolution is that Cela n's poem s must be viewed as "som ething intended for... a world inwhich 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-effectiveposition... and thereby entering into the effective event of the work" (146). The first partof this phrase will be taken here to mean that the reader m ust be prepared to be able tounderstand the 'w orld ' which is now shared with this poet who died by suicide in 1970.


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Certainly C elan 's work itself encompasses such a complicated context in its variousculturally nuanced u ses of motifs and symb ols: in the poem "Te neb rae," a poetical

revision of C hrist as a "Jewish Je sus " is encountered (Felstiner, Poet 104) -"blood, it was/ what you shed, Lord" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 103); in the poem "W hicheverStone You Lift" (71), Celan "alludes to the harrowing New Testament story of theresurrection of Lazarus at the hand of Christ" (Baer, Remnants of Song 111), specially inthe verses "Whichev er word you speak / you owe to / destruction" (Celan, SelectedPoems and Prose 71); the ancient Greek term "pne um a" is used with decisivesignificance, as a dislocation of m eaning, in the poem "Be nedic ta" (Celan, SelectedPoems and Prosell5); the poem "Todtnauberg" (Celan, Lightduress, 63), a reference to ameeting with the unapologetic "thinker of National Socialism" Martin Heidegger,(Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry 83), in which Celan expresses hisdisappointment in the verse ".. .dampness, / m uc h.. ." (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 weshare the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman 'world' with Celan, and that this "historicalhorizon" (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 306) is still the "historical-effective po sition "(Gadamer, Who Am I?, 146), projected towards past and future, that outlives the SecondWorld W ar - and this includes the yet-presencing (past) life-world realities effected unto'our present': German Nazism, Neo-Nazism, and Auschwitz. From this, it follows thatthe 'com mo n w orld ' of us and the poet offers substantial footholds of culturalcommunication, and thus of hermeneutic community.


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How ever, besides the issue of the remo teness of cultural context and its possibleimpediment to understanding, it is necessary to define the thought-matrix w hich makes itpossible to interpret Ce lan's poem s in a specific w ay. In this study, it is negative theologywhich provides the specifically philosophical lens of interpretation -not as an ideologicalinstrument, especially since this study could never profess a belief in negative theology.

On the Notions of Poem and Interpretive M odelHere we return to the citation of the poem as an "effective event" (Gadam er, W ho

Am I? 146), and its theoretical meaning and function. Gadamer remarks that: "allinterpretation is sp eculative" (473) and that this thought-determination cancels out andsees "through the dogmatism of a 'meaning in itself" (473). Gadamer tries to conveywith this notion of the effective event of poetry that language abandons all forms ofutilitarian functionality and is laid bare as an as-yet unqualified, bu t truly substantialpotentiality of meaning, waiting for the reader's effective-historical and knowledge-active situational engagement of thought, which will make concrete the full actuality ofthe poem 's mean ing. In short, Gaddamer suggests that poetry is much more thanutilitarian language , but Celan goes even further a nd, for him, poetry is much m ore thanlanguage: it is also, in particular, dialogue, and sometimes, prayer.

The fixation of a 'w hatn ess' that is to be obtained in the interpretive working-through of the literal and the imm ediate definition of the poem cannot be accomplisheddirectly. A s Alexander h as suggested, definitions require to be preceded by concepts andmo dels, and indeed, a specific notion of 'm od el' must be established, because from itssimilarity to 'system' there arise "arguments about the [noetic] freedom allowed by [the]


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element of theory [which is] a certain type of m ode l" (Alexander, Theoretical Logic I56). The model must receive its full philosophical import if it is to bear the tensionbetween thought-freedom and thought-system. Fu rthermore, it is assumed here that the'mo del' is, along w ith the other elements of our theoretical platform, a "two-directionalcontinuum" {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 delineation s of the 'm od el' as category also shed light on the eveftf-characterof the poem, but an urgent qu estion remains to be posed to the Gadamerian reification: inwhat sense is the poem an 'event'. It is an ideal event, certainly drawing its force frommaterial events, as if its truth as a being-an-event w ere individuated in each poem as aresponse to the event of a life: one material event that may be cited as unique amongevents is Cela n's ex perience of the Shoa. This experience is so intense that it seems thatpoetic thought, in C elan 's case, is indissoluble from the heaviness of this material fate,but even if poetic thought is situationally grounded, the resulting poem cannot be reducedto thought or language. T hus the transcendental event of the poem is such that it may beconceived as "the spiritual act par excellence" (Celan: From Being to the Other 46), asLevinas qualifies Celan's poems.

Moving on to the question of an interpretive model, it will be taken fromAd orno 's use of this term. J. M Bernstein writes: "mo dels ... are another of the forms ofwriting Adorno identifies as a critical successor to the system" {Disenchantment andEthics 371). A normative notion of 's yste m ' m ust be identified, in such a way that its


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differentiation and rejection from out of 'dialectics' may be recognized as necessary,rather than merely nom inal. Heidegger defines 'sys tem ' as "the inner jointure of what iscomprehensible in itself, its founding development and orde ring" (Schelling 's Treatise28) - the 'jointure' is 'being' [Sein/Seyn] in Heidegg er's sense. It must be taken intoaccount that Cela n's thought and work are clear of any doctrine of being and the positive-reified construal of reality and the real that it entails - Celan, a reader of He idegger, wasvigilant of even the implicit and unconscious insinuations of the over-constituted 'bein g'notion. Thus 'sys tem ', while having a well-determined aim in every philosophy thatespouses it, is inimical to the study of C elan 's thought, and, as if in theoretical alignment,is incompatible with the formal theoretical instruments - taken, to a large extent, fromAdorno - which are central to this study.

Adorno formulated his notion of'model' thus: "...conjoined with development,variation serves the production of universal, concrete, nonschematic relationsh ips...[Variation] undoubtedly continues to cling to its initial materia l... called the 'm od el'; allis identical 'the same'. But the meaning of this identity is reflected as nonidentity. Theinitial material is fashioned so that holding it fast means at the sam e time transforming it"(Philosophy of New Music 46). Jameson co mm ents on this passage that, for Ad orno, theapplication of the 'm od el', the thinking that does its work within it, means that "thecon cept... precedes the philosophical text, which then 'thin ks' about it, criticizes andmodifies it" (Late Marxism 61), although ultimately, in accordance with the innercoherence of 'm od el', "the concept or problem w ill not be independent of the Darstellung[presentation], but already at one with it" (62). The applications that Adorno himself used


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of the 'm od el' are found in Negative Dialectics, which includes the ground-breakingphilosophical commentary concerning Auschwitz.

For Adorno, each model is a mental experiment in which vast concepts coincidewith historical phenomena; the differences between one application and another areincommensurable. 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 succeededby the Roman and the Napoleonic empires, but the true agent at the core of thisconditioning and its synthetic possibilities is not 'variation', which is merely the intra-theoretical name postulated by Adorno, but rather 'interpretation'.

Negative Theology as an Interpretive M odel.It must be noted how, wh ile retaining Ad orno 's notion of m odel, the crucial

element of 'variation' inherent to it is understood in this study as 'interpretation', havingin mind that every new variation of a model, be it produced by the theorist himself or anepigonist, constitutes a re-evaluation of the whole model. This provides the possibility ofa specific application of Adorno's notion of model as interpretive m odel, whose historicalground is negative theolog y, and who se van'arioft-determination is obtained in the event-character of C elan's poem s, effected in reading. Partly then, Ce lan's experience of theShoa - "the most real of realities" (Lyotard, Differend 58) - and its expression in hispoems may be understood as the material aspect of eve^-character of the poems and alsoas the first rem ote, yet eminen tly historical expression of negative theology in itsconcrete negativity.


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The two poles of negative theology, Eckhart and Pseudo-D ionysius, constitute a'm od el' in Adorn o's sense because they give voice to a recurring philosophical pathosthat both precedes and succeeds them: the radical certainty that the world is reified, andthat only a constant process of de-reification of the entire horizon of thought may stripreality of its thing-like quality, leaving only the purity of affective truth-content. This isone of the points at which negative theology and Celan 's work coincide with themainstream of philosophical tradition. Negative theology also displays the 'variation'element that is made possible by the shifting w hole of the 'm od el': de-reification is neveruniform, but is rather constantly affirming the intricate and productive possibilities ofdenial, negation, and silence. As an interpretive model, negative theology magnifies theconsequences of meaning that are latent within C elan's thoug ht, precisely because it isalready at work in the main corpus of his work.

The choice of this model -negativ e th eolo gy- is not arbitrary, but ratherdetermined by Celan's work itself. We know from Felstiner's biography, that thanks tohis acquaintance with Middle High German, C elan "was studying Eckhart" {Poet 249).We also learn from Felstiner that the poem "You be like you" (Celan, Lightduress 197) isa poetic transmutation of "Meister Eckha rt's medieval German version of Isaiah"(Felstiner, Poet 248). Lacoue-Labarthe also discusses Celan's "re-use" of Eckhart'swriting, stating that "the poem arrives in the pray er's stead, in its place" {Poetry asExperience 86). If, in poetry, pure meaning is the residue of the sacred, then Eckhart'sideas must have a decisive influence not only on a systematic understanding of C elan'swork, but also on what Lacoue-Labarthe and Gadamer have retained of it. Eckhart


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inaugurates the German philosophical tradition w ith a 'negative th eology ', that is, amanner of discourse which safeguards the sacred, and thus preserves the divine, bynegating the reifying tendencies of language by the refusal to use some key terms, names,and word s. Reification, speech and w riting, are themselves conceived as the sacrilegioussubstantialization of the sacred.

Eckhart adopts negative theology in his treatment of the traditional issues ofreligious philosophy: "Being is so high and pure that God cannot be more than be ing"(Eckhart, A Modern Translation 171). Here, the 'neg ative' practice of d iscourse, theactive negation of God as a way of vanishing the Deity into the protection ofindeterminateness is not yet active. Further on in this sermon, Eckhart adds that "God andthe Godhead" (178) - a distinction which he often used - cannot be "abstracted frombeing" (178). Being, and w ith it the Godhead, m ust be understood, howev er, as intimatelyunited, and in fact, indistinct, from 'non-being'. We find this idea expressed in thefollowing statement, in which Eckhart appears to contradict himself, when he is in factcompleting the vision of his negative theology: "the soul reaches into non-being andfollows G od, who acts in non-being" (221).

It will be the all too conscious thing that is thought, the one that is made present asan idea, that will be repudiated in negation, and it is this thought-act that is the core of thediscourse of negative theology. The most famous of Eckh art's negative-theologicalstatements is: "Therefore I pray God that he m ay quit me o f god, for [his] unconditionedbeing is above god and all distinctions" (A Modern Translation 231). Along this samevein, Eckhart also states, 'negatively', that: "Truth is something so noble that if God


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could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go " (240). Another exam ple ofthis same kind of assertion is: "W ho is Jesus? He has no nam e" (233). Other statements

by Eckhart seem to dissolve negativity into a kind o f pantheism of the souls: "w hereverthe soul is, there is God " (214). And he adds, quoting A ugustine: "Go d is nearer to thesoul than the soul its el f (214). A variation of these notions is Eckh art's assertion thatthere is a "spiritual birth of G od in man" . In this vein, Klossowski refers to E ckha rt'sconception of the soul as "Hoc hheim 's [Eckhart] thesis... according to which intelligenceis of itself inc reate" (Roberte 39), where Klossowski seems to insinuate that Eckhartequates intellect with the soul.

One particular idea places Eckhart in surprising proximity to He raclitus ': "One setagainst itself," as quoted in the Fink-Heidegger text, Heraclitus Seminar (113); Eckhart'sidea is expressed thus: "The One [God] is a negation of negations... he is a not-god, a not-ghost, a-personal, form less" (A Modern Translation 246-247). The nearly sacrilegiousnature of these statements is nevertheless an undeniably strong influence ov er C elan'spoetry as a negative writing in correspondence to negative theology. Just as Eckhartinserts denial by w riting about the "not-god ," so too will Celan use it in writing thesacred, in the "not-yo u" that is mentioned by Lacou e-Labarthe (Poetry as Experience 81).

Eckhart's thought owes also to Pseudo-Dionysius, as exemplified in Eckhart'ssermons: "[Pseud o] Diony sius says: 'To be buried in God is nothing but to be transportedinto the uncreated life '" (A Modern Translation 201). In Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius begins by m entioning the "divine darkness... the deepest sh adow... the hiddensilence" (Works 135). He goes on to say that "the divine shadow is above everything that


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is" (135), and that people are mistaken w hen they believe that "by their ow n intellectualresources they can have a direct knowledge of him who has made the shadows his hiding

place " (136); since "the C ause of all beings... surpasses all being " and is thus "beyo ndevery denial, beyond every affirmation". Pseudo -Diony sius' neg ative theology is farmo re radical than Eck hart's in that it avoids using the term "G od " in any affirmative way,and keeps to the "divine n am es," which are acceptable utterances about the divine. Asimilar silence will be noticed in C elan's poem s. Pseudo -Dion ysius' radicalism is alsoepistemological, since he believes that the attempt to render the divine thinkable is amistake that calls for the thought-act of entering "the my sterious darkness of unknow ing," effectively "renoun cing all that the mind may conceive, wrapp ed entirely inthe intangible and the inv isible"; by determining thought as being "neither o neself norsomeone else, one is suprem ely united to the completely unkno wn by an inactivity of allknowledge, and knows beyond the mind, by knowing nothing" (137). Thomas A .Carlson, who wrote a study on the extensive tradition of negative theolog y has termedthis negational aspect which is specific to Pseudo-Dionysius "n egative langu age"{Indiscretion 158) and "hy per-negation (160). The poetic imp lications of this line ofthinking are explored extensively by Celan's writing.

Negative theolog y had great significance for C elan in his production of a poetrythat seems to be entirely about the soul and the concrete and spiritual violence thatsubjugates it in life, and about its restoration in language and writing. This is made clearwhen Celan declares, in his Bremen speech, his reasons for writing poetry: "to orientmyself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to g o, to sketch out reality for


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m y se l f {Selected Poems and Prose 396). This declaration gives an inkling into thecharacter of his poetry as a duty to thought and to life.

Celan experienced the same distance that any other contemporary thought mayhave regarding the negative theology of Meister Eckhart and Pseudo-Dionysius. Celanwas, as much as we a re, in a position to discern and differentiate the "subject-matter[Sachgehalt]," which requires a comm itment to a specific faith -Chris tianity, in Eck hart'scase- from the "truth-content [Wahrheitsgehalt]" (Agamben, Infancy and History 134), apure historical remna nt o f negative theology. From our situation, how ever, it will beCelan's intentions and their results that will be sought, that is, the truth-content specific tohis work which cannot be C hristian, nor entirely Jewish, but rather em inently poetic andspeculative - which is to say, un-reified. Negative theology is intervoiced within C elan'swriting, especially his p oetry and his prose, especially The Meridian.


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CHAPTER 2

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Among the most salient contributions to the philosophical reception of Celan'spoetry, is Ado rao 's work in Aesthetic Theory, whose statements merit extensivequotation: "In the work of the most important contemporary represen tative of Germanhermetic poetry, Celan, the exp eriential content of the hermetic w as inverted. His poetryis permeated b y the sham e of art in the face of suffering that escapes both experience andsublimation. C elan 's poem s want to speak of the most ex treme horror through silence.Their truth content itself becomes negative. They imitate a language ben eath the helplesslanguage of huma n bein gs, indeed beneath all organic language: It is the language o f thedead speaking of stones and stars..." (Aesthetic Theory 322). The inversion of thehermetic is qualified as a cessation of'experience and sublimation', because these

notions are associated for Ado rno with the merely apparent "pos itivity of ex istence"{Negative Dialectics 361) which is encountered by experience after Auschwitz - thus thecogency of experience itself is henceforth plunged into doubt. In the same vein, forAdorno, sublimation is denounced because the radical event of Auschwitz makes"meaning radiated by an affirmatively posited transcend ence" (36 1), an intellectualpredisposition which must be suspended. Through these denunciations, Adorno attemptsto accelerate a process of sublation that turns against itself, or, an upheaval thatilluminates a new , cruder and yet truer, relief of thought w hich, as poetry, is "delivered


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from the lie of being [positive-existential] truth" (Minima Moralia 222). In the evaluationof Celan's thought by Adorno, the 'extreme horror' whose voice is silence in Celan'spoem s, is also a measure taken for the conditioning of negative truth-content, a historicalpresence-situation where poetry becom es the existence and emergence of the "power ofthe uncontradictable [which is actually] the power of contradiction [itself]" (Adorno,Against Epistemology 3-4). Wh at is left to be effected is the interpretation of this silence,this horror, and the con tours of the negative in the truth-content in C elan's thought.

In Poetry as Experience, Lacoue-Labarthe interprets Celan's conceptual-affectivity as an unfixity and meaninglessness that double-back upon themselves as the"dizzine ss" (31) and "vertigo" (106) of the thought-experience of "in-occurrence" (21).'In-occurrence' is a not-Ereignis -th e H eideggerian term that refers to the event of "thetruth of be -ing" (Vallega-Neu, Heidegger's Contributions 31) -that construes for thereserve 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 inCelan the willing of the "destructuring [Destruktion]" (Heidegger, Being and Time 20) ofthe philosophy of Ereignis as occurring in a way that transcends any possible interventionin thought. The thoughts that are made available in attunement to the Ereignis are thoseof "be-ing historical thinking (seynsgeschichtliches Denizen)" (31), in a sense that revealsthe originary mo men ts of being, even as above hum an encounters and sufferings - forexample as leaving behind the raw torments of Ausch witz. It is for this reason thatLacoue-Labarthe reads Celan from a post- and anti-Heideggerian platform. In opendialogue with Lacoue-Labarthe, Lyotard seems to extract an alternative conclusion from


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Poetry as Experience: "'C ela n' is neither the beginning nor the end of Heidegger; it is hislack: what is missing in him, wh at 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 inVeronique M. Foti 's Heidegger and the Poets, which distinguishes between "[the]essencmg [of] Ereignis" (90) and C elan's denial of such an 'esse ncin g', yet also findsaffinities between "[C elan's] 'poison -stilled' silencing [and the] Heideggerian tropes asthe resounding of s tillness... or the stilling of ma n's u nprotectedness" (90). Foti alsostates that "Celan's effort to resituate poetry turns and eventually founders on...Heid egg er's ow n crucial problematic of tec/we" (112) and the possibility of the poeticfalling into "annexation by techne" (113). The certainty of these asseverations, theirinterpretation of the techne of modernity, is something that is ultimately labeled "amissed interlocution" (78) between Heidegger and Celan. This characterization is used asground for James Lyon's historiographically documented Celan & Martin Heidegger: AnUnresolved Conversation, which attempts to clarify the details of what "both connectedand separated them" (218).

Derrida's programmatic essay Shibboleth for Celan, opens the possibility ofinterpreting 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 post -Heideggerian remnant of Ereignis of cultural identification that "must take place once,precisely, each time one time, the unique tim e.. . [that] remains to come, alway s" (63).This perennial deferral, reminiscent of the Talmudic "belief that the Messianic era will


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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 es sen ce... promisesitself only by dis-identification [and] non -essen ce" (Derrida, Shibboleth for Celan 62).Within this dilemm a, Derrida imagines Celan asking: "How are we to transcribeourselves into a date ?" (63), the 'da te' being the differed event of essence; for Derrida,the necessary consequence of the question is the writing of poetry and sustaining of anunfulfilled longing. Following De rrid a's interpretation, Hent de Vr ies' The ShibbolethEffect: On Reading C elan states: "...t he structure of all pray er... reveals itself in theelusiveness of the poetic utterance, in the invocation of rest 'withou t be in g' ... in Celan 'swords: a 'singable remainder' singbarer Rest" (195). The 'without be ing' of the spiritualelemen t of the poem , itself the consequ ence of unfulfilled essen ce, gives voice to atentative grasp of fragmented essentialities and singularities termed "Judeities" (194),prismatic visions of Jewish essence. Hent de Vries also states: "In C elan's po ems, 'tho u'(Du) becomes a spectral 'thou', an Aber-Du... as elusive... as the faith in 'no one and NoOne' (niemand und Niemand)" (207).

Beth Hawkins' book Reluctant Theologians places him even more fully within theJewish tradition. She sees Celan as trying to establish a new covenant with the Deity afterthe Shoa: the basis of it would be "the Ich-Du relation" (143). However, Hawkins findsthat the I-You relation is constantly threatened by the "[merging] into one" (143) of bothterms, and by the silence of the relation: "C elan's final volum es suggest how deeply heheld to the hope for a covenantal structure suitable for a world coming to terms with asilent God " (151 ). Silence is posited as a terrifying prospect in the relation to the other.


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Edmond Jabes also seems to express uneasiness before the presence of silence in C elan'sthought - he comm ented concerning C elan: "At any given moment, the silence is sostrong that the words express only it alone" (The Memory of Words 219). It will be ourtask to bring to the fore another, more optimistic, significance of silence in the reading ofCelan within the model of negative theology.

Maurice Blanchot's interpretation of Celan focuses on the finite concern for deathas it insinuates itself into the essence of life. For Blanchot, Celan's poetry comports itself"as if the destruction o f the self had already taken p lace so that the other is preserved orso that a sign borne by obscurity is maintained'' (A Voice from Elsewhere 57). This is an'obscu rity' w hich rather than being the negativity of thought is the presence of death inthought - in other words, Blanchot does not think C elan's thought with determinatenegations, but rather by a substantial negation: death.

Blan chot's 'dar k' negativity has a counterpart in Levinas' reading of Celan, whichunlike the former, shuns interpretation as being death-affvcmmg. Levinas' Celan: FromBeing to the Other states that Celan's thought is: "a seeking, dedicating itself to the otherin the form of the poem... the one-for-the-other, the signifying of signification. Asignification older than ontology and the thought of being, and that is presupposed byknowledge and desire" (46).


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CHAPTER 3

METHODOLOGY

The manner in which negative theology is shaped into an interpretive model is adetermining factor in the understanding and selection of philosophical m ethods andinstruments for this study. The interpretation of C elan 's poetry mu st yield to the"immanent logicality" (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 136) of the poem which may or maynot accommodate itself to established philosophical procedures, and so methods andinstruments will at times be modified slightly.

It is partially in this sense that Habermas w rites of "desublimation of the spirit"{The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 131). 'Desublimation' names a retraction inthe essentialisation of a concept, the dissolution of its 'whatness' [quidditas] into itsinitial not-yet-combined constituents. Adorno has called these 'desublimated' elementsthe "constellation" in which "w hat is indissoluble in any previous thought contexttranscends its seclusion in its own, as nonidentical. It comm unicates w ith that from whichit was separated by the concep t" {Negative D ialectics 163). Both bas es for hermeneuticdefinition 'desublimation' and 'constellation' will be concepts used in this interpretationon Celan.

Another philosophical instrument akin to 'constellation' will be taken fromDerrida. In his book , Of Spirit he writes: "it is on the basis of flame that one thinkspneuma or spiritus or... ruah" (112) - this passage is quoted to illuminate the way in


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which Derrida first identifies a constellation that is necessary and explicit to establish theconcept of a term such as H eideg ger's "Ge ist" (100): certainly it is flame, pneuma, andspiritus - yet also a suppressed element, unm entioned, om itted, and most likely evenunthought: "ruah" (101). In OfGrammatology, Derrida described this method clearly:"[In] the entire constellation of concepts that shares in [a] system, the word supplementseems to account for the strange unity of [reappropriation and ind ictmen t]" (144). Derridaadds "substitution" (145) and "already-thereness" (161 ), and thus suppression, withnum erous intentions, as characteristics made present in a thought-entity by thesupplement-detection. 'Sup plem ent', once recogn ized, is also an upheaval and atransformation of the intended and presumed thought-entity.

From more conventional hermeneutic methods, Schleiermacher's idea of the"divinatory [speculative] objective an d subjective reconstruction of [utterances]"(Hermeneutics 23) will also be used. Schleiermacher explains: "Objectively divinatorymeans to conjecture ho w the utterance itself will become a point of development for thelang uag e" (2 3), that is, of the emb edded who le of th e //zowg/z^-structure of the p oem .W hile "subjectively divinatory m eans to conjecture how the thoughts con tained in themind w ill continue to have an effect in and on the utterer" (23). Schleiermacher's notionof reconstruction is crucial regarding the philosophical und erstanding of a poem; theinterpretation becomes alert to the fact that reification is an essential element in theconstitution of the poem, and thus also, that re-reification is to take place, sometimes inthe form of de-reification, yet always with an awareness of the ingredient of "truth in


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


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CHAPTER 4

INTERPRETATION OF CELAN'S THE MERIDIANThe 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 b y a poetical "keryg ma ," orproclamation, (Bultmann, Demythologizing 1961 163); these d eclarations, being prose,nevertheless involve a "claim to inter-subjectively consensual truth" (A pel,

Transcendental-Semiotic 173). How ever, a proclamation of co mm unicative truth is notThe Meridian's final purpose, and in this it coincides with poetry. The Meridian is self-proclamative, even if it itself is not a (human) self. In this way, consensual truth becomesnormatively subjected to the self of the proclamation of the text, and thu s, for the sake ofits regional consensuality, dependent on the text's truth-content, which is to say, on thetex t's self-driven and "self-suspendable logicality" (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 128). Thisterm alludes to elements of presentation which are indiscernible in terms ofcomm unicability and incomm unicability, since the se/f-proclamation of The Meridianalways runs the risk of a breakdow n of its own dia-\ogic, which is to say, its mediatelogic, its argument, account and statement.

This text requires the comm itment of the writer to the point of non-

contemporane ousness, because it seeks to define the work of a thought which is de factobut not deliberately set forth from an 'own' thought. In other words, texts like TheMeridian, where poets seek to track the finality of their thought, hardly ever muster


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enough objectivity to constitute psychological self-awareness. Only the opportunity oftruth-content [Warheitsgehalt] remains in them, as analyzed by A dorno: "G rasping truthcontent postulates... [that] the historical development of works through critique and thephilosophical development of their truth content have a reciprocal relatio n... [theseworks] are enigmatic in that they are the physiognomy of an objective spirit that is nevertransparent to itself in the m oment in which it appears" (Aesthetic Theory 128). Thedissipation of the opacity relating to the 'objective spirit', will be of essential interest inanalyzing and thus developing the truth-content of C elan's Meridian, within theframework of the interpretive model of negative theology as postulated abov e.

The first thematic basis for an approach of The Meridian through the interpretivemodel of negative theology is the scission between art and poetry: "[Mu st] poetry ... gothe way of art? [This] would actually m ean the road to Med usa's head and theautomaton!" (Celan, Collected Prose 44). Let us understand: 'Medusa's head' is,seemingly, the opaqueness and imm obility of stone and, simultaneously, the petrifyingand petrified gaze of a deadened thoug ht: something "e ternal" as Celan calls it (38). The'autom aton' is the mechanicism that would accompany this deadened thinking. Celandeclares that art, understood as 'mec han ical', is "puppet-like" (Collected Prose 37): thisis an allusion to the "automato n" which is also a "pup pet" that plays the game of historyas "historical materialism" in W alter Benjam in's Theses on the Philosophy of History(Reflections 253). Through this hint, Celan's autom aton, like Benjam in's m ay beunderstood to be the figuration of an automaton of history.


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It must be asked : why would art 'go the w ay ' of this 'au tom aton ' of history, if artis declared "etern al" {Collected Prose 38). The answer is found b y returning to theallusion to 'M ed us a's h ead ': part of this gesture seems to confirm the impossibility of'looking into the e ye s', so to speak, of art. This impossibility is not due to the status of artas idea, but rather to its being that which transcends the idea as being : a site where h istoryand the eternal me et undifferentiated. The eternal, once spoken and w ritten, istransformed into history, into a falsely "preservable Yes terday" (C elan, Selected Poemsand Prose 403 ); yet history too is sublated into the eternal because the eternal is merelyan entity of participation -in the sense of "methexis" (Adorao, Aesthetic Theory 133 )- ineternity itself, and is thus subject to involvement in historicity. This indifferentiation ofthe eternal and the historical, terms which m utually cancel themselve s out, cannot bethought affirmatively; both term s become ind istinguishable, and thu s null, as vessels ofart.

In this way C elan prepares an unreachable withdrawal of 'ar t' as a thing that isthought, evocative of the first hypothesis and dialectical exercise in P lato's Parmenides,where the 'o n e' is ontologically withdrawn. The remoteness of art is alluded to in linesthat run correlatively with Plato 's 'on e' - explicitly when C elan quotes Buchner stating:".. .one might w ish to be a Me dus a's head, so as to turn such a group [of girls] intostone," {Selected Poem s and Prose 404), and comments feverishly: '"O ne m ight wis h.. . 'to gras p... the natural as natural by means of art! One might wish to, it says, not: /m igh t.This means stepping out of what is human, betaking oneself to a realm that is uncannyyet turned toward w hat's human - the same realm w here ... art seems to be at hom e"


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(404-405); and adds: "art... retains something uncanny... among the oldest forms of theuncann y" (405) and it has a privileged vantage point of the hum an, one w hich,paradoxically, is its own home .

Lacoue-L abarthe wrote that, partially at least, " T h e M eridian' is a response toHeidegger" {Poetry as Experience 45). It has been hinted here that it is also Ce lan'sreaction to Benjamin, and to a somewhat esoteric slant in Plato 's thought, in theParmenides, that prefigured negative theology. Yet Celan names the 'uncanny' orunheimlich, know ing, Lacoue-Labarthe states, that is also "the word used by H olderlin,then Heidegger, to translate the G reek deinos with which Sophocles names the essence oftechne in Antigone" (45). It might be still more precise, given the divisions between thehuman and the non-human sketched in The Meridian, to focus on unheimlich inHolderlin's Hym n "The Ister," in which Heidegger underscores the homelessness, the"alienating" and "frightening" (71) essence of the human b eing. W e also find a similarnotion in He ideg ger's interpretation of Antigone: "Sophocles' word [8sivov] speaks of thehuman being as the m ost uncanny being" (71).

From this perspective, the unheimlich as homelessness is deliberately confoundedby Celan: if art is that which is unheimlich, it finds its hom e in the most rem ote, the mostnegatively unreal dom ains of the 'o ne '. Thus there can be no reification of art, not even ashomelessness, and so it is 'outside' human thought-grasp and remains vaguely intelligiblebecause it is "turned toward the hum an" (Selected Poem s and Prose 404). The lastthreads of art's reality are in this sense dependent on human thou ght's turning art towarditself as human, while simu ltaneously turning art away, into the unknown, merely


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signaled, divine site. Celan seems to dem and the instauration of distance from art - a neworder of respect for an aspect of art that is sublated into the unreachable, and the more-than-human.

Celan sees art "stepping out of what is human " {Selected Poem s and Prose 404),and this expedience m eets with the all too real, "super-representation [of the] deathcamps" (Nancy, Forbidden Representation 29). The Platonic 'on e' becom es in Celan'sword the symbolization of "pure identity as death" (Adorao, Negative D ialectics 363).Such a coincidence is what Ad orno formulated as the instance of truth: ". . .the surplusover 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 o f truth" (375). Itis in this line of thought that the unheimlich remains eerie, terrifying, uncanny, and yetthe Heideggerian co nnotation of the homeless, is made insufficient.Thus 'stepping out of what is human', is humanity's stepping into something devoid of

human ness, a step only accomp lished symbolically in the synchronized divinization andannihilation of art, expressed as poetry.

Em phasis m ust be placed on the de-realization of the human p resent within art asits active sublating of the truth, understood within the coincidence-criterion cited inAdorno, abo ve. For certainly in Cela n's thought there is a forceful "search for truth," asClarise Sam uels writes in her study of Celan, Holocaust Visions (7). It might b e added,however, that sublating as a negative constituent in C elan's w riting allows for an inquiryinto the multiple senses of truth, most assuredly in the sense that yet remains for truth itssublated state. If, using the coincidence-criterion of truth taken from Adorno, it may be


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said that, in The Meridian, art and truth 'coin cide', and yet, also, that truth is surpassedand taken over into another horizon, it may now be asked: after art, where may the site oftruth be found in Celan's thought. Theanswer is: in the similarly divided and negativecondition of poetry and the p oem, 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, termsthat serve different functions in The Meridian. The 'poem' is a thought-vessel, in whichCelan deposits the events of thought in their actuality as ways of engaging the manyinstances of 'the real' such as the human and the divine. Thecrucial difference betweenpoetry and the poem in The Meridian is ultimately inferred from the markedly divergentdiscursive u ses that Celan makes of each term. For example, Celan can write about poetrythat "it can signify an Atemwende, a Breathturn" (Selected Poems and P rose 407), in thesense that "Breath... is direction and destiny" (402). One must notice the all-encompassing nature of the substantives involved: the naming of destiny involves themovements 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, m editation, and for Celan this self-activity of the condition of poetrysuggests the kernel of subjectivity: "Perhaps - 1 am only asking - poetry... is going with aself-forgotten I toward the uncanny and the strange... setting itself free?" (Selected Poem sand Prose 406). Cela n's presentation of the "I " of poetry -and its seemingly willed self-forgetfulness as a way of orienting itself toward freedo m- is an echo of Eckhart's ideathat "to be free of self' is mastery of self (A Modern Translation 237), and thus freedom.


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In Celan 's case, it has to be freedom from itself as poetry. Ceasing to be poetry itbecom es, perishes and is preserved, returning as poem.

In the poem , however, Celan places the mean ing of freedom under the conditionof the 'strange', or the 'u ncan ny', or unheimlich, in its aspect of being "turned towardwhat's human," rather than turned away from its being 'one', that which is "out of whatis hum an" {Selected Poem s and Prose 404-40 5). So it may b e inferred that the concept ofconsciousness beg ins to em erge out of the cultural hyle as expression of freedom , in theform of conceptual Gestalten, or to use Deleuze's term, "conceptual personae" {What isPhilosophy 66): "the glorious stranger" by Novalis and "the holy stranger" by Trakl(Esselborn, Blaue Blume 209), all of which, for Celan, prefigure his poetic perso na 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 mu st be kept in mind if it is to be understood that always,in Celan's thou ght, there looms a much g reater, non-individuated hum an subjectivity andconceptuality that seeks one freedom or another: the still-passed, pained T of thehistorical entity of the Shoa. The specificity of freedom for Celan finds its site "here, withthe I - the estranged I set free here and in such wise - [where] perhaps yet som e Otherbecomes free" {Selected Poems and Prose 408). The "perhaps yet some Other" (408), isthe vague, yet recognizable figure of the disappearing dead millions o f the Shoa - whichis to say, those w ho, in Celan, are sacred because they are becoming-forgotten. Thefreedom of the becoming-estranged, forgotten, that is, the freedom of bQcommg-entirely


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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 existenceas encounter, in the poem and as the poem. For C elan, the poem 's thought-emergence, its"existence" op ens the possibility for "the mystery of an encounter" {Selected Poems andProse 409), a negative indirect "conversation" (410) w ith the "Other" and/or the "WhollyOther" (408). For Gadamer, Celan's other "bears the face of a neighbor" and the "Who llyOther [that] of the divine" (Who Am I? 89). Yet for G adamer it is difficult to accuratelydistinguish in Celan the 'other ' from 'wholly oth er', for "the poem does not decide" (96),although, he states, what is common to both is that "what happens to them is time" andtransformation (89).

Edmon d Jabes gives us another key to understanding Celan' constellation of'freedom-other' with his own sentence "God, [is] the absolute Other of others" (The Bookof Margins 165) because in fact Celan is affirming, in a negative-theological mo de, thatthe other is, and at the same time is not God (the wholly other); the other is the You, andat the same time it is the 'not-you ' (Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience 81). Thedivine dissolves into the human and the hum an into the divine. The finite nature of thesetwo instances, guarantee for Celan both the sacred utterance of the poem and thewithdrawal of the divine, irrespective of whether the divine is or is not God, followingEckhart. 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-ofdemand" (Selected Poems and Prose 410). Celan might as well have declared that the


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poem is possible only in a finite measure that is, as negative writing, as the writing thatdeliberately puts m ore weight on w hat remains unstated. The secret to the finitude ornear-absoluteness of Cela n's idea of the poem is found in another of Eckh art's sentences:"Ego, the word T , is proper to no one but God alone in his uniqueness... [the] pure abyssof God... forever u niqu e" (Eckhart, A Modern Translation 191). This translates into apreservation of the absolute of the poem by virtue of its inescapable finitude. Thus whenGadamer constantly asks concerning Celan's work "the question of who I and You a re"{Who Am I? 88), he does not realize that, by turns, Celan 's po em 's oscillates conceptuallybetween, I, you, and God, and their negatives, so that, through reasonedindeterminateness, the absoluteness of the poem is kept always just out of reach of theintellectual grasp. Gadamer can only point to the manifest form of these thought-determinations, "the difference between the I... and the you... is blurred" (69) but not totheir meaning and does not suspect their organic coherence as negative w riting.

It is by conceptual oscillation, by the withholding of words, by the"concealment of meaning" (Gadamer, Who Am I? 167), by "an ti-meaning" (93), and thevarious procedures of negative writing that Celan not only neg ates the reifying tendenciesof language but also, by the use of poiesis, he often puts forth in writing that which seemsto be actively sacrilegious, as a way of exorcizing the materiality of horror by itsvanishing presentation. This is why Lacoue-Labarthe can remark that for Celan "there isno longer a God", rather than that "there is no G od" {Poetry as Experience 86), and thatCelan is not an atheist with a positive disbelief in God, but rather is in the situation hecalls "a-theos" (31 , 77), that is of "lacking a god" (25). Gadamer too perceives in C elan


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the "theology of a self-withholding h eaven " (Who Am I? 79). These perspectives,however, fail to recognize the full absorption of negative theology by the poet, as well asthat which may be called the sacred duty that C elan seems to give himself as poet, histrue task which is to maintain the separation between the worlds of the human and thedivine since "the intimacy o f the breach is sacred", as Blanchot w rites concerningHolderlin in The Space of Literature, (21 A).

The seriousness of Celan's thought, its poetic duty to life as the subsistence andrenewal of the dead, and to the sacred as the true life, always involves the sacredness ofthe "true W ord", as Gadam er calls it (Who Am I? 82). The sacredness of poetic languageis never in Celan a simple disjunctive between the "metaphysical and [the] literal", asOlshner perceives it (Poetic Mutations 382). It has already been made manifest that therelations of the sacred, the profane, the sacrilegious, the named and the withheldutterance, form a complex discursive practice, and it is this very complexity which Celanmobilizes 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, inthe poem "can signify an Atemwende, a Breathturn" (Selected Poems an d Prose 407), andthat "Breath... is direction and destiny" (402 ). Celan states that the poem acts - upon theindividual and the life-world, upon us - "telling strangeness from strangeness" (408), forthe sake of the becoming free of "yet som e O ther" (408). The poem 's concretion as act isto "speak in the cause of an Other [perhaps] of a wholly Other" (408). This is also thepo em 's "selfmost ca use" (408). Celan seems to suggest that the difference within the'strange ness es', may only be discerned through the conditions which constitute, from


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another viewpoint, the event of the poem and its se/^activity: this event is the primordialinstance of intuition. Only as intuition could the poem be said to subjectively discern -judge and separate- the Platonically inspired 'one' of art in The M eridian, from thefreedom that breaks through the integrity of art by poetry and the poem. Also, only asintuition could the poem discern its 'selfmost' strangeness as heterogeneously inherent toitself, drawing this strangeness from a remote core in the unheimlich aspect of art, fromthe 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 withdrawsback into the doubling of terms, affirmations which cancel each other out with eachdialectical movem ent are typical n egative writing.

In all these intellectual exercises, the poet is left with the conclusion that: "Itwas... myself I encountered". Celan seeks the "mystery of an encounter" {SelectedPoems andProse 409), in every inquiry he undertakes in The M eridian: to encounterhimself he had to encounter language first, for him, the great survivor "in the midst of thelosses" {Selected Poem s and Prose 395); within language he encounters, "set free underthe sign of a radical individuation", that the "poem [is] the language-become-form of asingle person " (409) and simultaneously that "each human b eing is a form of [the] Other"{Selected Poem s andProse 409), and these discoveries and answers come to Celan withan already painful ordeal suffered, the bludgeon of history having fallen on him as an all-encompassing misfortune, in the form of the Shoa. With this doom in mind, Celan oncewrote, in a letter: "Perhaps I am one of the last whomust live out to the end the destiny ofthe Jewish spirit in Europe" (Felstiner, Poet 58).


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In encountering himself, in the effort of reclaiming history and simultaneouslyaccepting its enmity, Celan finds "a kind of home com ing" {Selected Poem s and Prose412) - this is an affirmation of the possibility that his thoug ht and his poetry, which is tosay, "his project", as writes Hawkins of Celan, "enacts tikkun olan, the mending of theworld" {Reluctant Theologians 71); at the same time, however, this 'men ding ' m ust healitself as well, through the covert workings of negative writing, the defense against thethreat that "there is never a document of culture that is not simultaneously a document ofbarbarism", as Susan Buck-M orss quotes Benjamin {Dialectics o f Seeing 288). Celan'sweapon is the writing of poe ms that aspire to represent the "em ancipatory cognitiveinterest" (Haberm as, Knowledge and Human Interests 198) of a discipline and a body ofthought. This is called, in The Meridian, the "Atemwende, [or] Breathturn" {SelectedPoems and Prose 407), the "Breath [that] is direction and destiny" (402) that designates,the passage from the 'o the r' to the 'wholly other', and back; that is, the oscillation thatmaintains thought, and human consciousness, free from the entirely reified character ofculture. 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, Celanlays the platform on which he will erect sacred meaning, both as the same, and asdifferent. The human being, wasted and ruined after Auschwitz, is never again conceivedin 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 thepneuma. 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 'on e', its


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


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CHAPTER 5

BASIC NOTIONS OF NEGATIVE WR ITING

Derrick on ce stated: "There is nothing outside of the text (there is no ou tside-text;iln'y a pas de hors-texte)" (Of Grammatology 158). In the context of this study, such astatement should be qualified with another by the sam e writer: "Ju st as there is a negativetheology, there is a negative atheo logy ... [the latter] still pronounces the absence of thecenter, when it is play that should be affirmed" (Derrida, Ellipsis 297) - this play is "thetime of writing [and] the deferral w ithin the now of w riting" (300). For D errida, thiswriting plays within meaning. Through a shimmering materiality of writing, a shadowynon-God inhabits the text, and its name -always-already deferred- is 'meaning'.

From Ce lan's p erspective, this style of search for mea ning and for the meaning ofmeaning is a luxury for those that have always b een free. U nlike that realm of traces and'negative athe olog ies', Cela n's negative writing is driven by the idea of building theSprachgitter ("Speech-Grille") (Selected Poems and Prose 86-87 ). The 'gril le' is at thesame time a screen and the fence of a prison which makes language abandonfunctionality, rendering it undecipherable in terms of traditional poetry. It is not thescreen of med iation, but of "mouthfuls of silence" (Selected Poems and Prose 107),which nevertheless, in the written poem , permits speech to be 'he ard ' u nder theburdenso me sign of silence. Silence imposes itself over poetry by sheer semantic effectand it is seldom addressed as an issue but its force is always felt.


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For Celan, in the post-Auschwitz-condition, speech is ossified language but the'grille ' even cleanses the undeniable "facticity" (Ado rno, Negative D ialectics 136) of thematerially written poem. It is the grille from a Catholic confessionary, converting poemsinto confessions not unlike those demanded by a police state. They are presented inriddle-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 ofthe "who I and You are" (Gadamer, Who Am I? 88). Celan's poetry very often involves anegative projection of meaning, som etimes unannounced - an event and a decision ofmeaning-essence that is behind the layer of words, necessarily written in the poem assigns that do not necessarily signify in a strict manner, but rather signal indirectly, in theway that "indirectness involves som ething direct that would be transm itted" (Adorno,Negative D ialectics 171) This indirectness and the bitter confinement of language arerepresented in Celan's phrase "conversations from smokemouth to smokemouth"(Breathturn, 161).

Indirectness, as defined by Adorno, is one of the central notions implicit inCe lan'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 D ialectics 202) - unnecessary suffering and "superfluous evils", to use AdiOphir's term (The O rder of Evils 325). Negative writing reconfigures and distorts w ordswith a tendency for pseudo-mythic sense, in the use of new, perplexing fibers of text, andindeed, with new terms and com pound-wo rds. It also involves relieving wo rds of secretconnotations that may or may not be know n by any reader, as well as presenting


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simulacra of words and ideas as indirect substitution for others. The aim of Ce lan'snegative writing, like Eckhart and Pseudo-Dionysius before him, is to shield and guardthe forever transcending sense-meanings and essences that must never fall into thegeneralized reifications of culture, of the "deathbringing speech" of the German language(Felstiner, Poet 40). Celan strives, through negative writing, "to seize the conscience andpurify the spiritual landscape" (Felstiner, Poet 95). For Celan, the redemption oflanguage is one of the labors evoked, through the term Atemwende as "Breath [that] isdirection and des tiny" (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 ofCela n's negative w riting, in a way that cannot be found in his previous books, one ofwhich contained the remarkable poem "Todesfuge", or "Deathfugue" (Selected Poemsand Prose 30-31); in this poem, Celan strove to make "the leap from fact to verse" in animmediate "psych ic a ctuality" (Felstiner, Poet 34), with direct allusions to the horrors ofAuschw itz, and the po et's own pain at the loss of his family. Sprachgitter represents, inCe lan's work, the turning away from immediacy, into the subtle defenses of his manytraditions. It was written at a time when Celan was reading "Hegel (in 1952)", Schlegel,Fichte, Holderlin, Buber, Hermann Co hen, Gershom Sholem, Rilke, and "W alterBenjamin (in 1959)" (Felstiner, Poet 96). It is only regarding these interests that Celan'sdeclaration -qu oted by Pierre Jo ris - may be understood literally: "I see my allegedabstractness and actual ambiguity as mom ents of realism" (Polysemy without mask 35).


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The 'realism ' of negative writing involves the systematic dialectical destructionof every reality-princip le, and the desublim ation of every reification, in order to affirmthe real that cannot be d ivided between noun and adjective, except through denial andnegation. Sprachgitter, as we mentioned above, was also a response to A dorn o'sindictment 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 Ad orn o's term "m icrology [which is] a haven from totality"{Negative D ialectics 407 ), that as with the micrology "called 'After Au schw itz'"(Lyotard, Differ end 58); the interpretive model of negative theology leaves "no wordtinged from on high not even a theological one, that has any right unless it underwent atransformation" (Adorno, Negative D ialectics 367 ). And if it is a transformed 'rig ht' -aspiring to signaling the human and the sacred- then it is to be read as a poetry that, inwriting, seeks to hear and give voice to "the scream that never falls silent" (Felstiner,Poet 93).

In "Your Being O ver There", from the book Die Niemandsrose, it is in thenegative un derstanding of m eaning that the recognition of a poetic simulacra of thedivine can be found. Manifestations of the horrible face the reader as a means ofdistraction from the true intention - emancipation as discernment and, above all,cleansing: in that poem Celan mentions an imaginary situation that has thrust itself at hisattention: "God, so we've read, is / one part and a second, dispersed: / in the death / of allwho 've been reaped / he grows wh ole" {Selected Poem s and P rose 145). As the negativeschematics from which we 've endeavored to understand Celan indicate, the divine cannot


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have any reification, and thus, neither can it have an image, nor any parts, nor anywholes. Yet in a realistic deference to the undeniable reading of the w orld as it presentsitself-very often as horrible - whether this reading is taken from a book or from thereading -"exp erience for Celan w as legible, first and last" (Felstiner, Poet 96) - of thesensibilities of the life-world. Celan accepts this self-presentation of the real but he doesnot forego the need to interpret the manifestation, and the negative understanding of thedivine imposes a negative en-framing of that which is read. This interpretation is placedin 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 aspart/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 canbe: all thoughts of the divine aresimulacra, and this terrible "God " is no exception: this is the "half that contemporaryhumanity reads, and the one that the poet is made to read. Yet the poet remains silentconcerning the other half, the one that we've not read, andhave not been made to read;the other half that remains^ ree is finally the absent Divinity, something akin to Luther'slDeus absconditus'.

Another of Celan's devices in negative writing is the metaphoric substitution ofone term for another: rather than being a pure metaphor, wh ich, according to HaydenWh ite, "asserts that a similarity exists between two objects in the face of manifestdifferences between the m" {Metahistory 34), Celan 's metaphoric substitution alsoincludes a negational drive in it that alerts the reader to the ironic element in the


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substitution, because it is only a partial semantic negation that alludes to a broaderconceptual negation that retains similitude; this is why it is a metaphorical substitution,because of the qu asi- or pseudo-identification involved between the w ord presented andthe word repressed. The perfect example of metaphoric substitution can be detected in thefollowing stanza in the poem "Be nedicta" from the book Die Niemandsrose ('The No-On e's-R ose '): "Hast / thou hast drunken, / what came to me from our fathers / andfrom beyond our fathers: / Pneum a" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 175). Themost striking substitution is the sacred word that "came... from our fathers": this word ismade out to be 'pn eu m a', the ancient Greek word for 'bre ath' that was translated intoLatin as 'spiritus'; yet in its being presented so explicitly in Greek, and, at the same time,in its having com e "from our fathers", that is, from a patriarchal pas t, not jus t a filial p ast,Celan is suppressing the Hebrew word 'ru ah ', which, with many other differentconnotations, also means 'breath ' and was also translated into Latin as 'spirit us'. Thehidden 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 Cela n's metaphoric substitution how ever, one cannot imagine the written term"reduced [nor] sublated" into the other, as Derrida writes concerning Ce lan's w ork ingeneral {Shibboleth 43). On the other hand, Celan does not share the will to theindifferentiation of term s that Derrida seems to display in his book Of Spirit where hewrites: "it is on the basis of flame that one thinks pneuma or spiritus or... ruah" (112).Ce lan's practice of hiding the word by writing another one is always m eant to preservethe first's uniqueness, its integrity and its sacredness.


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The 'no -on e' is a special way of the protecting the sacred som e-one, the humanand/or divine other. This is found in "Psalm" from the book Die N iemandsrose: "Praisedbe your nam e, No one / For our sake / we shall flower / Tow ards you / A nothing / wewere, are, shall / remain flowering: / the nothing-, the / No o ne 's ro se" (Celan, Poems153). How ever the event of the other is 'not hin g', an even more sacred event thanHeidegger'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 anddivinity that simultaneously withdraw into their own determinate 'no thin g', not as Seyn,but each as itself and also as the other. Lacoue-Labarthe h as proposed the term 'in-occurrence' (Poetry as Experience 21) to qualify Celan's 'nothing': in-occurrence is akind 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 in-occurrence.

Lacoue-Labarthe comm ents on an example already cited above (from anothertranslation), concerning an instance of Celan 's "re-u se" of Eckhart in book Lichtzwang:"...cast from the throne, he turns inwards / speaks among brows on the shore: / clear ofdeath, clear / of God" (Poetry as Experience 85). Lacoue-Labarthe stresses that Celandoes not m ean the death of death, but rather that, given a freedom from death w ith ameaning, w e are now free from God. The affirmation of the annulment of the meaning ofdeath - as resurrection or as eternal life - can be agreed w ith, if the poem is read like asimple syllogism. How ever, a more succinct way of expressing this notion of thepossibility of a death without meaning, avoiding the symbolic mediation of 'resurrection'


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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 C elan's thought. It could be added that for Celan,there is a reified unreality in the substantive 'de ath ', where 'd eath ' wo uld correspond toan ideal being, and the mom ent of dying -the end-of-living- and 'the dead' would beconcrete entities. Celan's thought of insufficient meaning wou ld guarantee death andlife's aura, their sacredness and mystery.

The unreality of death, a notion of epistemological origin, would have ontologicalsignificance, since, for negative writing, just as for negative theology, the unreality ofthings guarantees their superiority to 're al' -r eif ied - things. Death does not need to be'real' in order for it to be sacred. Along this same train of thought, one could say thesame concerning the sacredness of meaning: the essence of meaning is usually passedover in silence, and on ly the linguistic aspe ct is affirmed; such a lapse in the life ofmeaning and of significance, would excite Celan's rejection of affirmed meaning in favorof 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 auniversalizing-reifying term as the I, and it is thus empty; or, in negative-theologicalterms, sacred. From the book Fadensonnen: "You w ere my death / you I could hold /while everything slipped from m e" (Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 297). Here theword death is the inversion of the word life; however, even if one were to understand


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'you were my life', then what is meant by the 'y ou ' is death. Celan is claiming that a youthat is one's death is a you that is deeply spiritual and 'u nre al', and thus sacred, almost tothe point of being divine. To hold on to a you that is on e's death, as everything dies, is toadhere to the way of the world, to the tendency tow ards death of a w orld. However thislast 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 wo rld is gone, I have to carry you " (Breathturn 251), the poet takes the place of theworld, as ground for the you; it might also mean that, in the manner of Eckhart, hereCelan's soul is "godlike" (Eckhart, A Modern Translation 237); but god-like also m eans,for Celan as for Eckhart, not-god-like, and to be the ground of the world, in the manner ofGod, also means to be "[the] pure abyss of God" (191), that is, the groundless.


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The poem continues to describe other attributes of this fierce 'w ind ': "the motley

gossip of ps eudo- / experience the hundred-tongued M y- / poem, the Lie-noem"(Celan, Selected Poems and Prose 247). It is my pseudo-experience itself- this is theunnamed presence that is being b attered by this 'radiant wind of your speech'. It is alsothe experience of the poem that is being com promised, the false 'My' poem - it cannotbelong to anyone in particular, being 'hundred-tongued', replicating itself, in numeroussimulacra, beyond the grasp of an offended imagination. Simu ltaneously, it is a 'Lie-noem', and, in truth, not a poem at all.

Clearly, one condition for a poem being a poem, is that it may b e experienced.Here, "Etched Away" (247), tells us that this cannot be the case. Thepoem surrendersand cancels itself, suggesting that its essence is not to be a poem, nor a manifestation ofan ideal Poetry, but rather a posited 'noem', which refers to the already-there p otential-content 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 theirow n - Adorno has termed this the "noematic co re" (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 thoug ht, unlesssubjective 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" (AgainstEpistemology 163). Somewhat differently, Celan is capable of almost im perceptibly


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The poem continues to describe other attributes of this fierce 'w ind ': "the motleygossip of pseudo- / experience the hundred-tongued My- / poem, the Lie-noem"(Celan, Selected Poems andProse 247). It is my pseudo-experience itself- this is theunnamed presence that is being battered by this 'radiant wind of your speech'. It is alsothe experience of'the poem that is being compromised, the false 'My' poem - it cannotbelong to anyone in particular, being 'hundred-tongued', replicating itself, in numeroussimulacra, beyond the grasp of an offended imagination. Simultaneously, it is a 'Lie-noem' , 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 A way " (247), tells us that this cannot be the case. The poem surrendersand cancels itself, suggesting that its essence is not to be a poem, nor a manifestation ofan ideal Poetry, but rather a posited 'noem', which refers to the already-there potential-content of the entities of thinkable reality, waiting to be made "senseful" (213), by active,positing (213). Things that are thought have an "imm anential", independent sense of theirow n - Adorno has termed this the "noematic co re" (Against Epistemology 166). Yet,without the noesis, such supposed independent pure noem atic core remains senseless.Thus, the noema can never be thought of as a thinkable correlate of pure thought, unlesssubjective 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" (AgainstEpistemology 163). Somewhat differently, Celan is capable of almost imperceptiblycarrying out the accusation, in the poetic thematization ofpoiesis and the "phantasm"


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(Klossowski, Vicious Circle 133) of its incapacity for being experience in-itself, as wellas the experience of poetry. Thus, for Celan, the noema must be written in an incompletemanner: 'n oe m '. A further indictment is that the noema is a 'lie-no em '. By itself, thisterm is an oxymoron, because the final sense that may be intuited of the noema isguaranteed only by the identity of the noetic intention that schematizes it. When anannounced lie is compound ed w ith the noema, all intention is made impossible.

And yet, whether the lie is announced or unannou nced, Celan poetically suggeststhat it is the product of a rational positing, and thus, at bottom, the devastation brought toexperience with the "radiant wind of your speech" m akes of this stanza a som ewhatsecret and negative image of reason. Only the drive interpreted as reason is capable of"a// species ofpositings [such as with] the ideas [of] T ruth, Reason, C onsciousness"(Husserl, Ideas 340). Celan, for the sake of experience, joins A dorno in the "denunciationof reason" {Against Epistemology 162). However, for Adorno, this critical, almost auto-culpable awareness obtains in the primacy of the "indissoluble som ething" {NegativeDialectics 135) over 'b ein g', and results in the reconfiguration of philosophy as 'negativedialectic'.

Differently, from the concise stanzas of "Etched Away" {Selected Poems andProse 247), Celan, using negative w riting, rethinks the meaning of the auto-criticalintensity 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 forcewreaks in seemingly explicit determinations of its untruth that is don e in the first verse.Yet the second verse inverts the sense of the first, with its own: "Whirl- / winded, / free, /


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a path through hu man- / shaped snow , / through penitent cow l-ice, to / the glacier's /welcoming ch ambers and table s" (247). By a strange destiny, the malevolent 'w ind ' isalso the only possibility for freedom from the very positings and reifications that thoughtrecoils from in its desire for experience. And, in an implacable irony, the only escapefrom inauthentic positings and reifications is the power that posits the removal of humanerror, falsehoods, and the attempt to com mit evil: this is what Celan has named "human -shaped snow " - the folly of cruelty, the 'sn ow ' that accumu lates over the dirt and mixeswith it, is enacting crimes as all-encompassing as the Shoa itself and only reason m ay cutthrough the seemingly resolute constitution of such crimes, or 'penitent cow l-ice'. Thesame "radiant wind" {Selected Poem s and Pro se 247) that had made experience areification now -as 'whirl-winded, free'- clears a path through the wilderness towardsanother experience, reconciled with its share of reification.

The turn of sense in Celan's poem may be explained by the struggle and desirewithin a still site-less expanse of thought. Bataille gave m any descriptions of this longingof thought: "ecstatic, breathless, experience thus opens a bit more every time the ho rizonof God" {Inner Experience 104-105). The named site is 'God', and the experience of it is,admit

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Benítez - Celan's work as an interpretation of negative theology-2009

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