Lichtzwang

Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts is the first book-length study that examines Celan’s impact on visual culture. Exploring poetry’s relation to film, painting and architecture, this study tracks the transformation of Celan in postwar German culture and shows the extent to which his poetics accompany the country’s memory politics after the Holocaust. The book posits a new theoretical model of the Holocaustal uncanny – evolving out of a crossing between Celan, Freud, Heidegger and Levinas – that provides a map for entering other modes of Holocaust representations. After probing Celan’s critique of the uncanny in Heidegger, this study shifts to the translation of Celan’s uncanny poetics in Resnais’ film Night and Fog, Kiefer’s art and Libeskind’s architecture.

The passage of time and the reality of an aging survivor population have made it increasingly urgent to document and give expression to testimony, experience, and memory of the Holocaust. At the same time, artists have struggled to find a language to describe and retell a legacy often considered "unimaginable." Contrary to those who insist that the Holocaust defies representation, Image and Remembrance demonstrates that artistic representations are central to the practice of remembrance and commemoration. Including essays on representations of the Holocaust in film, architecture, painting, photography, memorials, and monuments, this thought-provoking volume considers ways in which visual artists have given form to the experience of the Holocaust and addresses the role that imagination plays in shaping historical memory. Among works discussed are Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, Morris Louis's series of paintings Charred Journal, photographer Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall, and Mikael Levin's series Untitled. Image and Remembrance provides a thoughtful site for personal reflection and commemoration as well as a context for reconsidering the processes of art making and the cultural significance of artistic images. Contributors: Ernst van Alphen, Monica Bohm-Duchen, Tim Cole, Rebecca Comay, Mark Godfrey, Reesa Greenberg, Marianne Hirsch, Shelley Hornstein, Florence Jacobowitz, Berel Lang, Daniel Libeskind, Andrea Liss, Leslie Morris, Leo Spitzer, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Janet Wolff, Robin Wood, James Young, and Carol Zemel.

The best introduction to the work of Paul Celan, this anthology offers a broad collection of his writing in unsurpassed English translations along with a wealth of commentaries by major writers and philosophers. The present selection is based on Celan's own 1968 selected poems, though enlarged to include both earlier and later poems, as well as two prose works, The Meridian, Celan's core statement on poetics, and the narrative Conversation in the Mountains. This volume also includes letters to Celan's wife, the artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange; to his friend Erich Einhorn; and to René Char and Jean-Paul Sartre—all appearing here for the first time in English.

Proposes that a distinct strain of literary modernism emerged in Europe in response to historical catastrophe.

In the aftermath of poststructuralist debates, Inflected Language proposes to rethink the ontological and ethical dimensions of language by rereading Heidegger's work, more specifically his reflection on poetry, and by engaging Levinas' ethics and contemporary poetics. Building on the readings of Heidegger, Levinas, Stevens, and Celan, the author contends that, against common misinterpretations, their approach to language forces us to reexamine the very basis of relations to alterity, whether that of the world, things, or people. According to the new view of language offered in these works, thought's job is not, first and foremost, cognition in the sense of understanding, calculations, and definition, but in securing alterity against cognitive assimilation instead. In this context, Inflected Language reshapes the current philosophico-literary debate about language by showing how the apparently neutral differential play of signification is already invested with ethical and worldly signification. In order to avoid obliterating this elusive signification in theorizing language, Ziarek proposes following a new mode of reading—a post-Heideggerian "hermeneutics of nearness," which foregrounds the poetic element in language and its ways of figuring the other.

Lightduress was written between June and December 1967 and appeared approximately three months after the poet's suicide in 1970. 1967, the year in which he composed most of this book, had been a difficult year for Celan. He was accused of plagiarism, attempted suicide, was interned in a psychiatric hospital and also separated from his wife. During this same period, on the other hand, Celan wrote more than half of the poems of Threadsuns and a major part of this volume, and in July he lectured at a German university. Translated by noted poet Pierre Joris.