Vertieftes Sein: Wahrnehmung und Körperlichkeit bei Paul Celan and Maurice Merleau-Ponty by Frank König (review)

Chernivtsi-born German-language poet Paul Celan and French phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, born in the maritime town of Rochefort on the Atlantic Ocean, came to the centers of their respective dominant cultures from the margins. Their position as intellectuals reflects this circumstance. Celan, who left Romania for Vienna and then Paris, remained peripheral to German postwar literature, notably the Gruppe 47, and Merleau-Ponty’s career developed in the shadow of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Husserl, and Heidegger. In the monumental study Vertieft es Sein, originally a dissertation project at the fu Berlin, Frank König examines affinities between Celan and Merleau-Ponty in depth by way of key categories that shed light on the problematic of translating experience based in the body into the metaphors language has available. Set apart in age by more than a decade, by their native languages, and biographies defined by specific sites and history, the French World War II veteran Merleau-Ponty and the near Holocaust victim Celan shared, as König maintains, fundamental concepts expressed by the former in poetic texts, by the latter in philosophical prose. At times, it seems, the parallels and correspondences between the two authors are drawn too close. Analyzing more closely the differences between the two authors who worked in different genres and were informed by distinct discursive and intellectual traditions could have added depth to the study at hand, as would closer attention to Celan’s Jewishness and the idiosyncrasies ingrained in his language, a German idiom associated with his place of origin, the Bukovina, and characterized by a usage and tonality that come to light in Celan recordings. Also his grammatical peculiarities such as his use of auxiliary verb foms and his choice of words, for the most part Austrian rather than German, should have been addressed in a study looking at material and intellectual unity.

König’s comparative study centers on issues of experience and perception as they play out in Celan und Merleau-Ponty. The fact that in the 1950s Celan had considered as a project a study of the phenomenology of poetics provides access to the work of the poet as philosophy. In the absence of a systematic study by Celan, König explores poems and prose works to tease out a blueprint of implied philosophical claims. More fascinated by the philosophical correspondences between the ways the two authors construct a body-mind identity, the aesthetic and literary aspects of Celan’s writings as poetic texts are largely ignored. This is already the case in studies that, similar to those of Dietlind Meinecke, approach Celan’s works in a comprehensive way moving away from close textual analyses of individual works. The tendency of examining Celan’s oeuvre as a totality de-emphasizes chronology and the autonomy of individual texts and is dominant in König’s book as well.

A discussion of the categories of language, the physical and the ethical lay the foundation of the following analysis of Celan and Merleau-Ponty. Celan, as König documents, was familiar with and drew inspiration from major works by the French philosopher. The following pair of concepts involves language and the scope of possibilities, giving rise to a discussion of the position of Celan’s work at the boundaries between the spheres of social/collectivity and of subjectivity with reference to his language body damaged by the Shoah in conjunction with language related singularity, which connects him with Merleau-Ponty. An exploration of the physical by way of word and eye follows, leading to the category of the ethical and the foundation of the poem. At the center of König’s study are the modalities of the fundamental human experience, the modality of perception, of feeling, and the modalities of history, language, art, and orientation. The discussions include extensive references to individual works by Celan and Merleau-Ponty and to authors...