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This essay engages with Derrida's Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan through readings of selections from Celan's poetry, together with philosophical analyses and commentary. It points out, in conclusion, that one of the avenues that Sovereignties opens up is that of re-thinking and calling into question certain Heideggerian thought-structures, and that indeed the question of how Derrida has transformed the reading of Heidegger must pass through his engagement with Celan.
Now that Derrida's texts on Paul Celan-texts ranging from "Shibboleth: for Paul Celan" of 1986 to late seminars and interviews-have been collected in a single volume, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, the time is right to revisit his sustained engagement with Celan. Celan himself addresses questions concerning poetics and, more fundamentally, what Heidegger calls "the essence [Wesen] of poetry," chiefly in his 1960 address "Der Meridian" ("The Meridian"), which Derrida turns to in "Majesties" (135-63), and also in the much shorter 1958 Bremen address (Celan 3: 187-202, 185-86). Beda Allemann, in his "Postscript" to a collection of Celan's works published in 1968, notes that few of Celan's poems "let themselves be grasped in the sense of an immediate poetological-programmatic self-assignation" (151).He goes on to select one of these few, Sprich auch du (Speak, you also), contained in Celan's 1955 collection Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold) to serve as a "guiding thread" to enable him to explore certain themes and structures of Celan's poetry.1 Derrida does not address this poem as such, but some of its motifs (such as keeping life and death unsplit, or the in-decision of language) do inform his reflections (Derrida 104, 145).
I propose here to re-read this poem, in conversation with both Allemann and Derrida, while remaining mindful, in particular, of Derrida's repeated distinction between a hermeneutic-exegetical reading (a reading that cannot be dispensed with, but that also cannot advance a claim to a decisive interpretation of the poem) and a disseminated or disseminative reading. Derrida characterizes the latter as a listening to the poem that is attuned to "something I cannot hear or understand, [being] attentive to marking the limits of my reading in my reading." He considers this approach to constitute an ethics or politics of reading that, in leaving...