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This paper deals with three kinds of poetical nihilism: the annihilation of the poetic subject in Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic writing; the apophatic definition of the divine demiurge and its repercussion on the poet considered as a substitute of the demiurge in Paul Celan’s poetry; and the gradual disappearance of the poetical word in Edmond Jabès cycle “The Book of Questions.” It is an attempt to connect this three-fold process of annihilation with cultural-contextual (mostly linguistic) factors in the case of Pessoa; with philosophical-pragmatical principles in Paul Celan’s work, and with the poetics of the blank and silence in the case of Edmond Jabès. In spite of this compartamentalization, some overlapping between the nihilist paradigms may occur: Jabès occasionally indulges in a kind of parodic heteronymy, whereas Pessoa’s subjective nihilism reaches an objective dimension through a metaphoric equation between the void of the poetical Self and the non-existence of the Book.
January 2012: Cyril Aslanov is Associate Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Department of Romance and Latin American Studies). He is a linguist, specializing in the diachrony of Romance languages and in the study of languages in contact. Besides his interest in linguistic studies, he occasionally applies linguistic tools to the analysis of literary texts in an attempt to bridge the gap between linguistics and poetics. Since 2006, he is counselor-member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. His main publications are: Pour comprendre la Bible: La leçon d’André Chouraqui (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1999); Le provençal des Juifs et l’hébreu en Provence: Le dictionnaire Sharshot ha-Kesef de Joseph Caspi (Leuven-Paris: Peeters, 2001); Evidence of Francophony in Mediaeval Levant: Decipherment and Interpretation of MS. BnF. Copte 43 (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Magnes Press, 2006); Le français levantin jadis et naguère: À la recherche d’une langue perdue (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006), Parlons grec moderne (Paris, L'Harmattan, 2008), and Sociolingüística histórica de las lenguas judías (Buenos Aires: Lilmod, 2011).
