Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths): ‘The Wounded Archive: Derrida Reading Celan’

Drawing from Jacques Derrida’s readings of both the poetry and writings on the subject of poetry of Paul Celan, this paper argues that a thinking of poetry is indispensable for a productive thinking of the archive, insofar as the archive and the poem are constituted by signatures, proper names, dates, anniversaries and testimony; all of which present a paradox in terms of the singularity of the present-now and the unrepeatable event. Whilst an unceasing attempt to think the singular event underlies Derrida’s entire oeuvre, the focus here lies, firstly, on the consequences, for Derrida’s thinking, of Celan’s poetic mise-en-oeuvre of the date (a setting to work and experience of the date that is rooted in a ‘today’), leading Derrida to propose that the paradox of the necessarily singular, yet repeatable, self-exposing and self-effacing date announces something like the essence of the poem, today, and that the date can only be poetic.

Secondly, having outlined Derrida’s reading of the poetic date in Celan’s work, and the manner in which Celan’s poetry displaces the limit between the supposedly ‘external’ date (the calendrical, archivable, historical date) and the more essential incorporation of the non-conventional date within the poetic text, the date is subsequently addressed in terms of what Derrida names ‘the law of caesura,’ with caesura here being understood in terms of wounding, incision, interruption and discretion in the body of both the word, the poetic text and the archive (as generalised text). For Derrida, wherever a date takes place, there is, a priori, the experience of a wound. Just as the date must be effaced in order to be preserved and to commemorate, all experience of singularity (including the concept of the archive in general) must necessarily undergo the pain of this self-wounding; an experience that is exemplary in the poetic of Celan. In terms of the archive, it is demonstrated that it is only through the ageless dating, wounding and self-effacement of the body of the word or (poetic) text, as mark or trace, that the possibility of the historical, archivable inscription is opened.

Finally, the paper moves to a consideration of Celan’s 1960 ‘Meridian’ address, in which Celan’s ‘effort of trumping sovereignty,’ in Derrida’s words, is aligned with ‘the poetic act’ –or simply ‘poetry’ itself – as an act of freedom. Here a consideration of Celan’s re-conceptualisation of sovereignty (what Derrida calls the ‘hyper-majesty of poetry), through his thinking of the punctual present-now of the poem, is woven back into Derrida’s prioritisation of the caesura in Celan’s poetry, and presented alongside Derrida’s own deconstruction of sovereignty and mastery through a generalised thinking of the caesura, demonstrating how the caesura at work in Celan’s poetry informs the caesura of the Derridean event.