Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
“Today, everywhere … remaining reality is disappearing
in the mire of a ‘globalised’ world. Nothing, not
even the most obvious phenomena, not even the purest,
most wrenching love, can escape this era’s shadow: a
cancer of the subject”.
This is not a conspiracy of others but a runaway
part of our need to live in the world rather than be
imprisoned by autism. Selflessness, of course, while
admirable in most cases, can also descend into what
we called inhumanity. One of the terrible ironies of this
story is Heidegger’s own descent. In the early 1930s,
he saw the Nazi party as a political movement capable
of mediating the needs of the modernity with authentic
existence, making Germany a modern-day equivalent
of ancient Greece. In 1933, the Rector of Freiburg
University, where Heidegger was a renowned young
professor, resigned in protest at Hitler’s anti-Semitic
laws. Heidegger took his place after an election among
the Aryan lecturers. He soon resigned in disaffection
but never revoked his party membership and referred
to his regret for the Holocaust only in what Maurice
Blanchot called “scandalously inadequate” fashion.
Such facts make Celan’s interest in his work more
compelling. Heidegger represents the dangers inherent
in the Romantic project. Another example would be
the terror following the French Revolution. What does
this mean for poetry? Well, in his isolated time after
the war, during his denazification, Heidegger came to
BUY Paul Celan books online from and
believe poetry was the means to open up the world; it
could rouse the revelation of things in the clearing. In
fact, it was the revelation itself. His intense meditations
on Hölderlin’s poetry is summarised by an essay title
taken from a poem: “… poetically man dwells …”
Elsewhere he wrote that “Language is the house of
Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and
those who create with words are the guardians of this
home.” If that is the case, and poets tend to feel it is, then
it means, following the catastrophe of the Holocaust,
language would have to change in order to rebuild the
tainted home.
In the post-war era, this was an imperative for Celan
as he was now living in Paris as a translator and tutor,
physically and metaphorically exiled from his homes:
Czernowitz, under Soviet rule, and German, under the
weight of “murderous speech” as he called it. It was an
imperative because, as his Paris contemporary Samuel
Beckett put it: one writes not in order to be published,
one writes in order to breathe. Celan could not breathe
in the old language. The old language was saturated
with the conditions by which an entire culture was able
to produce the greatest art and thought in history and
then produce death camps with the efficiency of a factory.
No wonder Adorno said that to write lyric poetry
after Auschwitz was itself barbaric.
What Adorno didn’t say, and this has been ignored
too often, is that poetry could still be written only not
153
More
Spike
email
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z