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Sovereignities in Question. The Poetics of Paul Celan, by Jacques Derrida

“Shibolleth. For Paul Celan” was the first text Jacques Derrida wrote on the poetics of Paul Celan in 1986. Three more followed, of which the last one “Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue – Between Two Infinities, the Poem” also was a eulogy to Hans-Georg Gadamer (himself an experienced reader and interpreter of Paul Celan) delivered as a public lecture on February 5, 2003 at the University of Heidelberg. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen gathered theses texts, together with two excerpts from interviews, in a volume for which Jacques Derrida provided the title in August 2004, some weeks before his death. The carefully edited volume moves between three languages, the original texts in French on the poems of Paul Celan in German and the translation into English. The extensive apparatus of footnotes refers to multiple senses of French idiomatic formulations; it offers variants of translations from French and German and gives the original version of Paul Celan’s poems, if they are not already in the text. The English translation of Paul Celan’s speech on the occasion of being awarded the Büchner Preis on October 22, 1960 in the appendix is very useful for the understanding of the texts and the interviews, as Jacques Derrida frequently refers to this speech. By assembling these disseminated and seemingly marginal texts on Paul Celan the volume allows us to make out a certain poetics of Jacques Derrida, which inscribes – as a sort of testament – a specific gesture into his non-concept of écriture. The text turns around certain central notions of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy and puts them to work anew: dissemination, linguistic difference, undecidability, untranslatability, spectrality, circumscription, the body, responsibility, otherness, testimony, signature, excess. The starting point for these philosophical poetics is the obvious problem of the translation of poems, namely that the body of the poem built by the graphemes of a specific language – in Paul Celan’s case German – cannot be transferred to another language. Jacques Derrida makes clear that this question of the body of the poem is the core problem of every interpretation – even those which ‘translate’ inside one and the same language. What resists interpretation due to the undecidability between the multiple possibilities, aims at that which is most proper to a poem. Jacques Derrida suggests that in Paul Celan’s work it is the holocaust which is at the heart of the poetic work. The question: How to testify for Auschwitz? is an answer to Theodor W. Adorno’s well known statement that there can be no more poetry after Auschwitz. What then is the status of Paul Celan’s poems? The title of the volume, Sovereignities in Question, refers especially to the third of the collected texts with the title “Majesties”. Derrida reflects here on Heidegger’s definition of man in the Introduction to Metaphysics. In contrast to the traditional definitions of man as rational and political being, Heidegger defines man as “das Unheimlichste des Unheimlichen” (the most uncanny of the uncanny) (127). Taking this definition of man into consideration, it is only through a poetics which pays homage to the majesty of the absurd – as Paul Celan says – that one can bear witness to the presence of humanity after the holocaust. Derrida’s readings of Celan’s poems testify themselves for this absurd presence of humanity. The focus on writing and reading as a form of testifying implies a certain nonrepresentational conception of sense, which Derrida developed throughout his work.