Sprach-Exil und „Haus des Seins“. Zum Status dichterischer Rede bei Bachmann und Celan in der Auseinandersetzung mit einem Topos Martin Heideggers

* Acknowledgments * List of Abbreviations * Introduction 1. Wittgenstein on Philosophical Problems: From One Fundamental Problem to Particular Problems * The Tractatus on philosophical problems * Wittgenstein's later conception of philosophical problems * Examples of philosophical problems as based on misunderstandings * Tendencies and inclinations of thinking: philosophy as therapy * Wittgenstein's notion of peace in philosophy: the contrast with the Tractatus 2. Two Conceptions of Clarification * The Tractatus's conception of philosophy as logical analysis * Wittgenstein's later critique of the Tractatus's notion of logical analysis * Clarification in Wittgenstein's later philosophy 3. From Metaphysics and Philosophical Theses to Grammar: Wittgenstein's Turn * Philosophical theses, metaphysical philosophy, and the Tractatus * Metaphysics and conceptual investigation: the problem with metaphysics * Conceptual investigation and the problem of dogmatism * Wittgenstein's turn * The turn and the role of rules * Rules as objects of comparison * Rules, metaphysical projection, and the logic of language 4. Grammar, Meaning, and Language * Grammar, use, and meaning: the problem of the status of Wittgenstein's remarks * Wittgenstein's formulation of his conception of meaning * The concept of language: comparisons with instruments and games * Wittgenstein's development and the advantages of his mature view * Examples as centers of variation and the conception of language as a family * Avoiding dogmatism about meaning * Wittgenstein's methodological shift and analyses in terms of necessary conditions 5. The Concepts of Essence and Necessity * Constructivist readings and the arbitrariness/nonarbitrariness of grammar * Problems with constructivism * The methodological dimension of Wittgenstein's conception of essence * The nontemporality of grammatical statements * Explanations of necessity in terms of factual regularities * Wittgenstein's account of essence and necessity * Beyond theses about the source of necessity 6. Philosophical Hierarchies and the Status of Clarificatory Statements * Philosophical hierarchies and Wittgenstein's leading principle * The (alleged) necessity of accepting philosophical statements * The concept of agreement and the problem of injustice * The criteria of the correctness of grammatical remarks * Multidimensional descriptions and the new use of old dogmatic claims 7. Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy, Everyday Language, and Ethics * Metaphysics disguised as methodology * The historicity of philosophy * Philosophy and the everyday * Notes * Index

The translator and essayist Klaus Reichert is a scholar in English and American studies (especially a renowned expert on James Joyce), editor of Hans Carl Artmann’s poetical works, and former President of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (2002-2011). From 1965 to 1969, he served as Paul Celan’s first reader at Suhrkamp. His book Paul Celan. Erinnerungen und Briefe (2020) is the testimony of the last contemporary who knew both the poet and the man. His many notes on personal matters and aesthetic debates testify to a close bond with the sensitive, often reserved, sometimes even irritable Celan. In response to his uncomprehending interlocutors, critics, and the literary establishment in general, Celan’s vehement clarifications shed new light on his conception of language, poetry and the poet in the face of “that which happened” (das Geschehene).

In recent years scholars have increasingly explored the relationship between the Holocaust and other instances of genocide and political trauma. However, within this transnational shift in memory studies little attention has been paid to the interrelatedness of Holocaust memory and another of the twentieth century’s histories of atrocity: the Colombian conflict. Seeking to fill this gap in scholarship, this chapter explores the use of Holocaust discourses in Colombia, specifically through an analysis of how Colombian women intellectuals and artists have engaged with the work of Paul Celan – seen as the paradigmatic example of “poetry after Auschwitz” – as a means of thinking through the philosophical questions raised by the conflict and the role of art in representing the violence. Whilst Celan’s influence on Colombia’s most famous contemporary artist, Doris Salcedo, has been widely noted, this has largely been read as reproducing a certain interpretation of the Holocaust poet, one defined by mourning, absence and the impossibility of representation and witnessing. In contrast, as numerous scholars have noted, Celan’s difficult, ‘hermetic’ poetry can also be read as engaged in an ontological task, in a quest for transcendent meaning and urgent communication with another. This chapter therefore builds upon such analyses, alongside new academic work on Celan’s dialogical influence in the Spanish-speaking world (Martin Gijon and Beneitez Andres 2017), to show how Celan has been taken up by Colombian artists not solely as an example of an anti-representational posture but as enacting an ontological conception of poetic language and the possibility of encounter with those victimised by the violence. I do so through reconsidering Salcedo’s constant dialogue with Celan, alongside analysing the intertextual dialogue between his poetry and Colombia’s foremost twentieth century female poet, Maria Mercedes Carranza, as well as placing this engagement with Celan within broader Colombian intellectual history.

The concurrence of different languages is one of the tenets of Rosenzweig Sprachdenken and of his translation activity which finds its main theoretical explication in the afterword to his ‘Zweiundneunzig Hymnen und Gedichte des Yehuda Halevi’ (Konstanz, Wöhrle, 1924). In the afterword to the translation of ha-Levi’s lyrical corpus, Rosenzweig outlines a translation model which, trying to convey all the morphological, syntactic and lexical traits of the source language into the target language, gives way to a real linguistic fusion which defies the limits and boundaries of expression and opens onto a redemptive perspective. On the basis of this concluding note and of some passages from ‘The Star of Redemption’, the article tries to analyse Rosenzweig’s idea of language and of its nexus with the idea of redemption with reference to Walter Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ and, as a point of convergence, with Paul Celan’s conception of poetic language.

The concurrence of different languages is one of the tenets of Rosenzweig Sprachdenken and of his translation activity which finds its main theoretical explication in the afterword to his ‘Zweiundneunzig Hymnen und Gedichte des Yehuda Halevi’ (Konstanz, Wöhrle, 1924). In the afterword to the translation of ha-Levi’s lyrical corpus, Rosenzweig outlines a translation model which, trying to convey all the morphological, syntactic and lexical traits of the source language into the target language, gives way to a real linguistic fusion which defies the limits and boundaries of expression and opens onto a redemptive perspective. On the basis of this concluding note and of some passages from ‘The Star of Redemption’, the article tries to analyse Rosenzweig’s idea of language and of its nexus with the idea of redemption with reference to Walter Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ and, as a point of convergence, with Paul Celan’s conception of poetic language.

Hobbes’ education in the literary culture of English Renaissance humanism has been overlooked as an important tradition in understanding his position in Early Modern Philosophy. Against the traditional readings of Hobbes’ conception of language as a sequel to Medieval nominalism, I will argue that Hobbes’ education in the literary culture of Renaissance humanism and his subsequent developments in this tradition would have allowed him to consider philosophical problems raised by new science in an original way and, thus, to introduce his innovative conception of language as the core of his solution to the problem of social and natural orders.

ABSTRACT“Time-consciousness” (Zeitbewusstsein) constitutes the core of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Extending from a project of reviving the comparative method, we develop Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of time as a method of literary comparison. Three views of time set the stage: the quatrain “Luán’s Fall” (⟪欒家瀨⟫) by the eighth-century Chinese poet Wang Wei, a stanza from the poem “Etched off‌” (Weggebeizt‌) by Paul Celan, the quintessential post-war poet in German language, and the haiku “Walking, on and on” (歩きつづける…) by the Japanese itinerant monk and free-verse haiku pioneer Santoka Taneda. What makes these poems relevant is not merely their superficially shared theme of time, but an intrinsic affinity, manifested in different poetic “time-objects” (Zeitobjekte), to the very notion of time-consciousness. Through poetic analysis in the context of Husserl’s philosophy of time-consciousness, these poetic experiences, embodied in a phenomenological concept of “walking,” emphasize time as being.

Paul Celan, Europe's most compelling postwar poet, was a German-speaking, East European Jew. His writing exposes and illumines the wounds that Nazi destructiveness left on language. John Felstiner's sensitive and accessible book is the first critical biography of Celan in any language. It offers new translations of well-known and little-known poems-including a chapter on Celan's famous Deathfugue-plus his speeches, prose fiction, and letters. The book also presents hitherto unpublished photos of the poet and his circle. Drawing on interviews with Celan's family and friends and his personal library in Normandy and Paris, as well as voluminous German commentary, Felstiner tells the poet's gripping story: his birth in 1920 in Romania, the overnight loss of his parents in a Nazi deportation, his experience of forced labor and Soviet occupation during the war, and then his difficult exile in Paris. The life's work of Paul Celan emerges readings of his poems within their personal and historical matrix. At the same time, Felstiner finds fresh insights by opening up the very process of translating Celan's poems. To present this poetry and the strain of Jewishness it displays, Felstiner uncovers Celan's sources in the Bible and Judaic mysticism, his affinities with Kafka, Heine, Holderlin, Rilke, and Nelly Sachs, his fascination with Heidegger and Buber, his piercing translations of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandelshtam, Apollinaire. First and last, Felstiner explores the achievement of a poet surviving in his mother tongue, the German language that had passed, Celan said, through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech.

This article considers Holocaust testimonies and the question of translation, understood here as both exchanges between languages within a text and renditions of a text into another language. According to Imre Kertész, Holocaust has no language that could express its meaning, and no national language has been able to coin words and expressions capable of conveying its catastrophic dimension. Since Holocaust survivors must express themselves in one of the national languages, Holocaust testimony is always a form of translation, even in the case of writers who wrote their memoirs in their native tongues (such as Kertész, Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Paul Celan, Ida Fink, and Hanna Krall, whose work is discussed here). The choice of language in which survivors’ memoirs (as well as other literary forms) were written had a profound impact on their authors’ sense of self-identity, their ability to heal, and the way they remembered the past. The largest number of memoirs appeared in English, the survivors’ second tongue, whose neutrality enabled them to overcome associations with the language in which they experienced traumatic events. Others, such as Elie Wiesel and Isabella Leitner, translated their initial accounts written in their native tongues (Yiddish and Hungarian, respectively) into smoothed-out versions in the languages of their adopted country (France and the United States). 
\nThe article examines selected instances of important translatory exchanges taking place in Holocaust testimonies. Some of them (Primo Levi’s narratives in particular) demonstrate that, during the Holocaust, translation was a crucial survival strategy, allowing the victim to navigate the incomprehensible “Babel” of the events. Other works, however, such as translation sequences in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah or Hanna Krall’s story of Izolda Regensberg (in Król kier znów na wylocie), disclose a failure and treachery of translation. The study employs Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical conception of language and Walter Benjamin’s reflection on translation in “The Task of the Translator” (both thinkers were also translators and their lives were profoundly affected by the Holocaust). Drawing attention to an affinity between Benjamin’s conception of “pure language” and Levinas’ “Saying”, it concludes that – considering the centrality of translation in Holocaust testimony – translation should be acknowledged as a modality of bearing witness in its own right. While Holocaust translations reveal the abyssal, Babelian condition of post-Holocaust speech, they also hope for the renewal of communication and for the tikkun olam of language.

The Next Word (or something like it) Jan Mieszkowski (bio) Das Nächste zu greifen ist offenbar schwer. —Rainer Nägele, Hölderlins Kritik der poetischen Vernunft The Next Word (or something like it) Reflecting on what it would mean to describe Paul Celan’s work as “Freudian,” Rainer Nägele suggests that some of his poems “speak syntactically, like a dream.”1 This brief simile encapsulates a host of complications. In Celan’s texts, the synthetic authority of the proposition or predicative judgment is confronted by signifying dynamics that cannot readily be assimilated to the standard paradigms of logic or grammar. If such verses are “like a dream,” it is because Freud’s study of the unconscious has revealed that the dream work forces a similar rethinking of our conceptions of language, representation, and experience. Of course, in aligning Celan—or any author—with Freud, we must remember that one of the central concerns of Freud’s theory of dreams is how juxtapositions of words, images, and ideas may produce constellations of relations that supplant or even negate the designs of the programs that first articulated them. Deeming Celan’s work “Freudian” potentially calls into question the legibility of [End Page 606] Freud’s own oeuvre as much as it helps us understand the singularity of Celan’s verse. Ultimately, what is at stake is the nature of comparison itself. “Das Gleichwie,” argues Freud, makes its presence felt in dreams more than in any other discourse, meaning that to speak or write “like a dream” is to participate in a challenge to the authority of self-sameness that dreams undertake when they align different terms or elements with one another. What happens, then, when Freud privileges a particular simile as crucial to understanding the unique signifying forces of the unconscious? In the following essay, I will look at one of his favorite figures for explaining correspondences between the conscious and unconscious registers. The resulting insights, I will argue, offer us a new way of exploring a poem—or something “like” a poem—by Friedrich Hölderlin, an author whose works, like Celan’s, “speak syntactically, like a dream.” At the start of the programmatic Chapter Six of the Traumdeutung, Freud famously declares: “Traumgedanken und Trauminhalt liegen vor uns wie zwei Darstellungen desselben Inhaltes in zwei verschiedenen Sprachen.”2 In this complex network of concepts—Gedanken, Inhalt, Darstellung, Sprache—it is the unassuming wie that stands out, casting a long shadow over both the immediate claim and the chapter as a whole as it reappears time and again to align different propositions and descriptions with one another. As Freud repeatedly likens psychic phenomena to various discursive modes and forms, it becomes increasingly difficult to regard the constant invocation of language as an accident. The correlations and resemblances threaten to become similes in name alone, as if they were perpetually about to cast off their figurative trappings and reveal themselves to be assertions of the near or total identity of psychic and linguistic dynamics. Still, it is by no means obvious precisely what notion of language predominates here, much less whether the different conceptualizations of writing and speech Freud presents are mutually compatible. One simile is of particular interest. In a number of the texts he composed around the turn of the century, Freud stressed a methodological point that has since become a central part of the lay understanding of psychoanalysis, where it usually arises in discussions of “free association”: substantive connections or relationships hidden in the unconscious often manifest themselves in the simultaneous appearance of elements that seem to be only contingently related. [End Page 607] “In einer Psychoanalyse,” Freud writes, “lernt man die zeitliche Annäherung auf sachlichen Zusammenhang umdeuten; zwei Gedanken, die, anscheinend zusammenhanglos, unmittelbar aufeinander folgen, gehören zu einer Einheit, die zu erraten ist” (GW II–III: 253). The claim is echoed in the contemporaneous Dora case: “In der Technik der Psychoanalyse gilt es nämlich als Regel, daß sich ein innerer, aber noch verborgener Zusammenhang durch die Kontiguität, die zeitliche Nachbarschaft der Einfälle kundtut” (GW V: 198). Each time Freud avers that what appears to be an instance of contingent contiguity is anything...

Paul Celan, Europe's most compelling postwar poet, was a German-speaking, East European Jew. His writing exposes and illumines the wounds that Nazi destructiveness left on language. John Felstiner's sensitive and accessible book is the first critical biography of Celan in any language. It offers new translations of well-known and little-known poems—including a chapter on Celan's famous "Deathfugue"—plus his speeches, prose fiction, and letters. The book also presents hitherto unpublished photos of the poet and his circle. Drawing on interviews with Celan's family and friends and his personal library in Normandy and Paris, as well as voluminous German commentary, Felstiner tells the poet's gripping story: his birth in 1920 in Romania, the overnight loss of his parents in a Nazi deportation, his experience of forced labor and Soviet occupation during the war, and then his difficult exile in Paris. The life's work of Paul Celan emerges through readings of his poems within their personal and historical matrix. At the same time, Felstiner finds fresh insights by opening up the very process of translating Celan's poems. To present this poetry and the strain of Jewishness it displays, Felstiner uncovers Celan's sources in the Bible and Judaic mysticism, his affinities with Kafka, Heine, Hölderlin, Rilke, and Nelly Sachs, his fascination with Heidegger and Buber, his piercing translations of Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandelshtam, Apollinaire. First and last, Felstiner explores the achievement of a poet surviving in his mother tongue, the German language that had passed, Celan said, "through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech."

How did the concept of language come to dominate modern intellectual history? In Language Alone, Geoffrey Galt Harpham provides at once the most comprehensive survey and most telling critique of the pervasive role of language in modern thought. He shows how thinkers in such diverse fields as philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and literary theory have made progress by referring their most difficult theoretical problems to what they presumed were the facts of language.Through a provocative reassessment of major thinkers on the idea of language-Saussure, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Rorty, and Chomsky, among them-and detailed accounts of the discourses of ethics and ideology in particular, Harpham demonstrates a remarkable consensus among intellectuals of the past century and beyond that philosophical and other problems can best be understood as linguistic problems. And furthermore, that a science of language can therefore illuminate them. Conspicuously absent from this consensus, he shows, is any consideration of contemporary linguistics, or any awareness of the growing agreement among linguists that the nature of language as such cannot be known.Ultimately, Harpham argues, the thought of language has dominated modern intellectual history because of its singular capacity to serve as a proxy for a host of concerns, questions, and anxieties-our place in the order of things, our rights and obligations, our nature or essence-that resist a strictly rational formulation. Language Alone will interest literary critics, philosophers, and anyone with an interest in the uses of language in contemporary thought.

Two books by Piaget were recently published on the problem of “awareness,” each of them the result of a year’s work at the Centre d’Epistemologie Genetique: the first is called La prise de conscience (1974a)--literally translated “On becoming aware”--and the second is called Reussir et comprendre (1974b). Personally I think there are good reasons to be surprised at the choice of the topic “becoming aware.” On the one hand, this title could lead us to think that the work deals with the philosophical problem of “conciousness” for which introspection was supposed to provide the basic data. Would Piaget take introspection as a subject of experimental study? On the other hand, all Piaget’s work on cognitive development can be seen as the study of the child’s progress towards higher levels of conceptualization, and conceptualization at whatever level would seem to imply at least some degree of awareness. So why devote a number of experiments and a theoretical discussion to the specific problem of awareness?

This article intends to analyze, in general, the romantic roots of Wittgenstein thought and, specifically, what could have been the position of Wittgenstein, especially the second Wittgenstein, on the philosophical problem of the language-reality relationship. No doubt it is a bold exercise, since Wittgenstein did not openly deal with this question, and would have considered it nonsense. However, its elucidation- the idea that Wittgenstein was committed to antirealism- seems to make his conception of language more understandable, and in particular how private languages would not be possible.

Previous articleNext article No AccessDiscussionControlling Autonomic ProcessesMichael SchleiferMichael Schleifer Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 84, Number 4Jul., 1974 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/291933 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1974 University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.