The Singular and the Other at the Limits of Language in the Apophatic Poetics of Edmond Jabes and Paul Celan

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4888959
AutoresWilliam Franke (0000-0003-1309-9145, autor correspondente)
Ano2005
Volume36
Fascículo4
Páginas621-638
Data de publicação2005-09-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoNew Literary History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X
EditoraProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/nlh.2006.0005
OpenAlexW2058925951
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas5
Referências citadas3

Postmodern writers and artists of all sorts have evolved radical new poetics based preeminently on the secret resources of silence. Poets have focused particularly on silences become audible in the tearing of language and the rending of sense. To a significant degree, this is a rediscovery of the oftentimes repressed resources in Western tradition of apophatic discourse, discourse on what cannot be said. Jewish writers have been particularly important in this revival, partly because the biblical interdiction on representations of the divine, denounced as idolatrous ("graven images"), gave Jewish tradition a peculiar attunement to the limits of representation and a special sensibility for the Unrepresentable. Edmond Jab s and Paul Celan, emerging almost contemporaneously out of widely divergent cultural backgrounds in Egypt and Romania respectively, nevertheless share these coordinates in common. Writing as post-Holocaust Jews, each in a different way lends language to silence in order to give voice to the unspeakable. An attempt is made, furthermore, to distinguish between two different traditions of apophatic thinking, one based on the ineffability of being or existence and the other on the ineffability of language itself. These strands are traced back to Neoplatonism and the Bible and are aligned primarily with Celan and Jab s respectively

Aesthetics · Art · Attunement · Eulogy · Idolatry · Judaism · Literature · Order (exchange) · Poetics · Poetry · Representation (politics) · Silence · Theology · Digital Media and Philosophy · Literature and Cultural Memory · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism