The Image that Was in the Blood

Abstract

After Adorno stated that write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric he changed his mind. This change was due, in large part, to Paul Celan. For Adorno, Celan's poetry is a non-barbaric, after-Auschwitz poetry. More precisely, it overcomes a devastating problem faced by all poetry after Auschwitz. This is that, as after Auschwitz, it must express horror-indeed, in Adorno's words, most extreme Expressing any other content would be a flight from historical reality. However, as poetry, in order to express this horror, it must use aesthetic form, and, specifically, aesthetic But this has the effect, not of expressing horror, but of concealing it. For example, a poem cannot express the horror of the Holocaust through beautiful, pleasure-inducing images. For Adorno, this problem threatens to shipwreck all poetry after Auschwitz-indeed, all art after Auschwitz. It suggests that it cannot express what, due to its historical circumstances, it must.According to Adorno, Celan's poetry overcomes this problem. It does this because of its specific aesthetic form, which Adorno understands as hermetic. As I will discuss, by this, Adorno means that it refuses aesthetic It does not provide any images of anything. Now, Adorno suggests that, by virtue of this refusal, it expresses horror. Specifically, it expresses the horror of the Holocaust-whose very content is that it refuses aesthetic representation, or is beyond all images. (Analogously, one might think of how the empty space in a church expresses the infinite presence of God. By showing nothing, it shows everything.) However, Adorno suggests, while it expresses this horror, it does not conceal it. For it refuses precisely that aesthetic form-aesthetic representation-responsible for this concealment. In this way, Celan achieves a non-barbaric, after-Auschwitz poetry. And his poetry-his hermeticism-is the possibility of a non-barbaric, after-Auschwitz poetry, and art.Adorno's interpretation of Celan's poetry has been widely influential. One can find it in the majority of literary and philosophical interpretations of Celan (although, to be sure, Adorno's name is not always mentioned). An example of this is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Poetry as Experience, a text on Celan which has been widely influential in its own right. Lacoue-Labarthe gives an interpretation of two poems, Todtnauberg, and Tubingen, January, from a Heideggerian perspective. This is a perspective which, for a number of reasons, is foreign to Adorno's. However, after completing his interpretation, Lacoue-Labarthe writes: rereading these last pages, I became aware that they may indeed secretly have only one object: the interdiction against representation. And he refers to the destruction of metaphor or image that seems to draw in Celan's poetry as its final conquest.1In the following, my intention is to question Adorno's interpretation, as well as some of the philosophical ideas involved in it. In this, I follow, in part, Shira Wolosky,2 as well as Celan himself, who told Michael Hamburger that his poetry is completely and absolutely not hermetic (ganz und gar nicht hermetisch).5 I will look at one poem by Celan-Tenebrae, from his 1959 collection Sprachgitter. (Of course, by focusing on one poem, I will not be able to make any general claims about Celan's poetry; however, this is not my intention.) expresses horror-the horror of the Holocaust, but also, and primarily, the horror of the death of God. I will try to show three things. First, Tenebrae uses aesthetic representation in order to express this horror; second, this use expresses, and does not conceal, that horror; and third, in light of this, the refusal of aesthetic representation emerges as a way of concealing, and not expressing, that horror. In this respect, I will question both Adorno's particular interpretation of Celan's poetry, as well as his privileging of the refusal of aesthetic representation, over its use, in order to express horror. …