Collapsing the Absolute: Early Celan and the Post-Romantic Strangeness

If the yearning for the Absolute — the unconditioned — initiates and to a large extent defines the Romantic gesture, then post-Romantic imagination seems to stretch this yearning towards the Absolute to such a degree that it could readily destroy any unity of the concept, including that of the Absolute itself. Skeptical of any immediate relation between word and object, Celan in his early stage was deeply involved in what could only be described as a “striving” against Hegelian discourse that aims to crown the concept through dialectics. Celan’s effort at permanently doubling and overflowing the Idea has arguably launched a strange, perhaps the strangest, poetic project since Romanticism — a poetics that cuts off the self-relation of the object, turns sense certainty against itself, and puts the phenomenal world in a nearly unintelligible order (yet not chaos). In a hidden dialogue with the works of Hegel, Novalis, and Hölderlin who postulated and sought the Spirit as the Absolute, Celan’s early work opens doors to those modes of being that manifest themselves as the destructive aporia of the concept of the Absolute rather than its sublime or beautiful representations.