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Collapsing the Absolute: Early Celan and the Post-Romantic Strangeness

  • Feng Dong

Date Published:

2 June, 2018

Abstract:

 

 

If the yearning for the Absolute — the unconditioned — initiates and to a large extent defines the Romantic gesture, then post-Romantic imagination seems to stretch this yearning towards the Absolute to such a degree that it could readily destroy any unity of the concept, including that of the Absolute itself. Skeptical of any immediate relation between word and object, Celan in his early stage was deeply involved in what could only be described as a “striving” against Hegelian discourse that aims to crown the concept through dialectics. Celan’s effort at permanently doubling and overflowing the Idea has arguably launched a strange, perhaps the strangest, poetic project since Romanticism — a poetics that cuts off the self-relation of the object, turns sense certainty against itself, and puts the phenomenal world in a nearly unintelligible order (yet not chaos). In a hidden dialogue with the works of Hegel, Novalis, and Hölderlin who postulated and sought the Spirit as the Absolute, Celan’s early work opens doors to those modes of being that manifest themselves as the destructive aporia of the concept of the Absolute rather than its sublime or beautiful representations.

 

June 2018: Feng Dong is Associate Professor of English at Qingdao University, China. He is particularly interested in finding out how poetry helps us access alternative realities (possible modes of being) by working through both Freudian and Heideggerian versions of the uncanny toward a new conception of the poetic, which is based on continuous, deep transactions with psychic and political potentials of the contemporary subject. He has published essays on Alexander Pope, W. B. Yeats, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Celan, and W. S. Merwin. He is the author of Desire and Infinity in W. S. Merwin’s Poetry (2017). At present, he is working on a book on Paul Celan’s poetics and its epistemological and ethical consequences.

 

 

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 04/12/2020