Sounds of Void: Paul Celan’s and John Zorn’s Hopeful Horizons

According to Daniel Libeskind, the task of the Jewish Museum in Berlin “requires the incorporation of the void of Berlin back into itself, in order to disclose how the past continues to affect the present and to reveal how a hopeful horizon can be opened through the aporias of time.” Paul Celan’s poetry and John Zorn’s music not merely address the Holocaust but they are also affirmative practices that, on the one hand, resist sovereign violence and the voice of the sovereign, and, on the other hand, open hopeful horizons here and now. In Celan’s and Zorn’s works we hear “yes, yes.” This sometimes silent and still voice is the affirmation of the excess of life and living well.