»Denn Ich ist ein Anderer«

Abstract

Rimbaud’s formulation in his Lettre du voyant to Paul Demeny, »Car Je est un autre,« which has become famous in German as »Denn Ich ist ein Anderer« [For I is an Other/For I is someone else] (Rimbaud 1997, 20–21) can, in its formulaic nature, be read as a motto for various practices which effect a dissociation between the addressee and the author of lyric texts. In this text, these dissociation processes are referred to as practices of dereferentialization. The first thesis of this article is that an ambiguization of the addressee reference – not only by means of epitextual authorial poetological statements according to the abovementioned reasoning, but indeed from within the texts themselves – can manifest itself as a strategy in poetry production which leads to a poem becoming ambiguous, that is, allowing for more possible interpretations and as a consequence acquiring a positive quality. That dereferentialization has also proved to be a strategy of literary reception (and more specifically within the practice of interpretation) whose goal is to secure a property that is considered constitutive of poetry forms the second thesis presented here. Both theses are based on the assumption that ambiguity is an axiological value within the social practice of ›lyric poetry‹. The article concludes with a discussion of whether the reception-side dereferentialization is sometimes performed too uncritically, with a view towards Till Lindemann’s Undank und Wenn du schläfst.