Howard Caygill (Goldsmiths): ‘Word and Image in Celan’s Atemkristall’
The paper approaches Celan’s Atemkristall as a joint work between poet and graphic artist, in this case the wife of the poet, Giselle Celan-Lestrange. It begins by showing how the philosophical readings that focused on Atemkristall – Bevilacqua, Gadamer, Poggeler and to lesser extent Derrida – obliterate the graphic dimension of the work. It is suggested that in complex ways this obliteration repeats the act by which the poems that emerged in proximity with the graphic works were separated from them when published in the canonical collection Atemwende. This obliteration is related to the issues of censorship and the archive and the tension between visual and verbal archives. It is shown that the philosophical and art-historical readings of Atemkristall are dependent upon and continue this originary act of archival censorship. The proposed readings of the poems and images return to the performances of the poems in the presence of the graphic work and show the mutual implication between the visual and verbal registers and the difficult place each occupies with respect to their respective archives – post-war poetry in German and modernist engraving.
Archiving Cultures
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© 2012 Archiving Cultures
[...] Howard Caygill (Goldsmiths): ‘Paul Celan’s Visual Archive’ Matthew Charles (Middlesex): ‘The Snow Line of the Archive: Benjamin On the Trail of Old Letters’ David Cunningham (Westminster): ‘Abstract Times: Benjamin, Kafka and the Modernism of Tradition’ Rebecca Dolgoy (Montreal/ FU Berlin): ‘The Work of Art as Archive: Adorno’s Zeitkern as Time Capsule’ Sami Khatib (FU Berlin): ‘The Messianic and the Archive: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Politics of Time’’ Nicholas Lambrianou (Birkbeck): ‘Figures of Interruption: Philosophical Dramas of Temporality & History in Benjamin and Rosenzweig’ Nitzan Lebovic (Tel Aviv / Sussex): ‘Paul Celan: Language of Loss at the Heart of Time’ Manu Luksch (London): ‘Moonwalking in Real Time’ Reut Paz (Humboldt University Berlin): ‘The Legal Transcendentalism of Hans Kelsen as a Hole in Time’ Leena Petersen (Sussex): ‘Messianic Libertarianism and Linguistic Philosophies of History in Benjamin and Related Writings of His Time’ Wesley Phillips (Independent): ‘On the Concept of Counter-Tradition’ Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths): ‘The Wounded Archive: Derrida Reading Celan’ Dan Smith (Chelsea School of Art and Design): ‘Overlooking Bloch: Contemporary Art and Utopia’ Tommaso Speccher (FU Berlin): ‘The Hole in Space: Fragmenting and Re-piecing the Archive between Walter Benjamin and Daniel Libeskind’ Elina Staikou (Goldsmiths): ‘Vigil of the Archive: On Derrida Dreaming Benjamin’ [...]
[...] Howard Caygill (Goldsmiths): ‘Paul Celan’s Visual Archive’ Nitzan Lebovic (Tel Aviv / Sussex): ‘Paul Celan: Language of Loss at the Heart of Time’ Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths): ‘The Wounded Archive: Derrida Reading Celan’ [...]