The Sense of Semblance: Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust Art

1. Mandelshtam’s Meridian: On Paul Celan’s Aesthetic-Historical Materialism

This chapter considers the influence of the Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam's writings on the poetry and programmatic prose of Paul Celan against the background of two philosophers who read the latter's poetry as illustrating their respective theories of meaning and understanding: Jacques Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Against Derrida, and drawing on Wittgenstein and Gareth Evans, the chapter argues that Celan's poems propose a historically contingent model of understanding that relies on collective name-using practices. Against Gadamer, it claims that Celan's poems bear intrinsically evanescent and personal references that cannot be discounted from the meaning of the poems. Celan's poems thus invoke the Holocaust by highlighting the precariousness of the communities of understanding upon which the poems themselves rely, by inscribing existential references within aesthetic semblance.