Twentieth Century Heterotaxies: from Benjamin’s Apple to Celan’s Snow-meal

Abstract

This work analyses the contribution of Walter Benjamin and Paul Celan to the deconstruction of the idealized image of European civilization. Their production as German Jewish writers testifies of a view of creative processes able to unmask prejudices based on ontological assumptions resulting in the denial of pivotal ethical questions. The “snapshot-aesthetic” of Benjamin’s childhood in prewar Berlin - before the Nazi seized power in 1933 - confront us with the voice of Infans in the adult man coping with distress, disconsolation, suffering and pain. The unfulfilled images deriving from these enchanting short proses hold the paradox of the omnipresence of a primary, necessary absence without resolving it or finding substitutes. Benjamin’s imagery and imaginary of the threshold and of the “passage” disclose places where truth falters and unconscious processes shine out producing illuminations. The transference of nameless horror in consequence of the destruction of most European Jews gives rise by Paul Celan to an obsessive attention paid to the shape and sound of words, to the rhythm of verse, to the measure of caesurae and pauses. Celan’s poetics of snow and ice, of drips and stones etches an astonishing, upsetting phonemic, landscape in which rests produced by the sliding down and drifting away of metonymic connexions disclose a lack, a blank, a hole at the very core of European Kultur. Celan’s poetry and poetics – as a survivor - helps highlighting the paradoxical situation of German speaking Jewish writers, whose working out of traumatic experiences turns out to be particularly tormented, so that the reader is confronted with his own impossibility to represent and metaphorize. Tracing the unfurling of recklessness and collusive criminal negligence of the world in which he had to live, Celan signifies European self-representation of humanitas as hollow and senseless at the core.