The Place, the Poem, and the Jew: Levinas, Blanchot, Hölderlin, Celan

Abstract

The Place, the Poem, and the Jew: Levinas, Blanchot, Hölderlin, Celan Vivian Liska (bio) Translated by Ashraf Noor The thought of Emmanuel Levinas is often—and justifiably—associated with suspicion with regard to visual art, aesthetics, and literature, which he considers as secondary if not antagonistic to ethics. It is thus all the more significant that he maintains a constant interest in the work of a rare few writers and poets, particularly, in the early 1970s, that of the Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan, whose mother tongue was German. What is at stake in Levinas’s reading of Celan goes far beyond a simple commentary on this major oeuvre of post-war European literature. It aims at the heart of the relation between poetry and philosophy and of a frequently controversial interrogation in which important figures of modern Western philosophy participate. In the following remarks, the traces of this debate in Levinas’s writings, particularly in those relating to Judaism, will be delineated in view of a central motif: the question of place. Levinas’s rare writings on poetry configure the place and the non-place at the intersection—or rather at the locus of interaction—of history, philosophy, and poetry between Greek and Jew. A reflection on Emmanuel Levinas’s approach to poetry leads to a constellation of the following names: Levinas, Blanchot, Hölderlin, Celan. These four figures conjoined paratactically form a chiasm as to the relationship between the poem, the place, and the Jew. Levinas and Celan meet at the outer poles of this figure of thought, at extremities whose relation is illuminated by the other two names, Blanchot and Hölderlin, which both unite and separate them. At the center of the chiasm is a name that is not expressed explicitly, but which nevertheless [End Page 699] constitutes the axis of this poetico-philosophical constellation: Martin Heidegger. This chiasm will be deployed in terms of a central motif: the question of place, more particularly the conceptual pairs of exile and Heimat, errancy and rootedness, homelessness and dwelling, all considered in respect to the poem, to poetry. In his essay titled “Paul Celan. De l’être à l’autre” (Paul Celan: From Being to the Other), first published in La Revue des Belles Letters in 1972, shortly after the poet’s suicide, Emmanuel Levinas implicitly retrieves and illustrates a central idea formulated in his earlier essay “La Trace de l’Autre” (The Trace of the Other). In this essay, Levi-nas distinguishes between Greek and Jew via the opposition between Ulysses’ and Abraham’s respective relations to place. Presenting a stark dichotomy, Levinas writes: “To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we wish to oppose the story of Abraham who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land” (1986, 348).1 Ulysses’ journey is directed towards the eventual return to his native land, his Heimat; for Levinas, this orientation signifies a turning in upon oneself and contrasts with Abraham’s departure, which is oriented solely towards a foreign destination, a territory that is, so far, nothing but a promise. Between Ulysses and Abraham, as envisaged by Levinas, the fundamental difference between Greek and Jew, between Homer and the Hebrew Bible is at stake. The Greek route remains that of Ulysses, whose protracted, adventure-laden journey through the world is in fact nothing other than a return to himself, to his native island—“complying with the Same, misapprehending the Other” 2—as opposed to “the Biblical movement of the Same towards the Other” (Levinas, 1996a, 51). The closure and totality re-established through the return homewards as final destination in the Greek experience contrast with the Jewish destination, which corresponds to an incessant movement towards the other. Levinas describes this movement, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically, as an indifference to land and soil: “Judaism has always been free with regard to place” (1990, 231).3 With this laudatory statement, Levinas seems to not only support the traditional idea of the Jew as the eternal wanderer, but also to affirm [End Page 700] exile as both a positive mode of existence and, metaphorically, as an ethical modality of thought opening towards a non-retrievable alterity. Levinas’s claim would...