Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts

by Eric Kligerman

Overview

Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts is the first book-length study that examines Celan’s impact on visual culture. Exploring poetry’s relation to film, painting and architecture, this study tracks the transformation of Celan in postwar German culture and shows the extent to which his poetics accompany the country’s memory politics after the Holocaust. The book posits a new theoretical model of the Holocaustal uncanny – evolving out of a crossing between Celan, Freud, Heidegger and Levinas – that provides a map for entering other modes of Holocaust representations. After probing Celan’s critique of the uncanny in Heidegger, this study shifts to the translation of Celan’s uncanny poetics in Resnais’ film Night and Fog, Kiefer’s art and Libeskind’s architecture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783110191356
Publisher:	De Gruyter
Publication date:	08/20/2007
Series:	Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies , #3
Pages:	341
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Eric Kligerman, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     ix
List of Illustrations     xi
Introduction: Facing the Holocaust     1
Positioning the Spectator     1
Empathic Imagination: Identification and the Other     6
"All Poets are Yids": Translating the Holocaust     10
Poetry as Flaschenpost     17
A New Category: the Holocaustal Uncanny     23
Specular Disruptions-The Sublime, the Uncanny, and Empathic Identification     31
Elements of Kant's Sublime: Subreption, Negative Presentation and Shudder     34
"To see a hundred corpses lie side by side, or five hundred or a thousand..."     37
Friedlander and the Historian's Unease     42
Haidu and the "strangely familiar" of Himmler's Posen Speech     46
Dominick LaCapra: Empathic Unsettlement and Compulsive Repetition     49
Crossing from the Sublime into Trauma: The Holocaustal Uncanny     55
The Uncanny Ethics of Levinas and Celan     62
Catastrophe and the Uncanny in Heidegger's Fetishized Narrative     74
A Missed Encounter: Heidegger and Celan     74
Heidegger and Narrative Fetishism     79
Fear and Anxiety in Heidegger's Being and Time     84
Antigone: The Uncanny, History, and Loss of the Ethical     88
Memorial Address     95
Broken Meridians-From Heidegger's Pathway to Celan's Judengasse     104
Bremen's Ghost     105
Freud's Uncanny: Doubles, Repetitions, Ghosts, Blindings and the Medusa's Head     113
Following the Path of Art: Poetry and the Uncanny     116
Translations: The Ethics of an Encounter     122
Departing From Heidegger's Feldweg     127
Mourning and Translation     132
Celan's Cinematic-Anxiety of the Gaze in Nuit et Brouillard and "Engfuhrung"     138
Resnais and the Visual Arts     146
Celan and the Visual Arts     151
Van Gogh's Cornfield with Crows: Crossing Film and Poetry     154
"Beide Welten": Inside the Camps     158
The Face and the Trace     164
Going into the Narrows: Celan's "Engfuhrung"     172
Re-figuring Celan in the Paintings of Anselm Kiefer     187
Textual Mourning for Celan In Bachmann's Malina     187
The Return of Paul Celan     195
Kiefer's Reception in Germany     199
Kiefer's Act of Decathexis: Lost Objects and Landscapes     202
Remembering Celan, Remembering the Holocaust     209
Coda: Lichtzwang     227
Ghostly Demarcations-Translating Paul Celan's Poetics in Daniel Libeskind's Architectural Space     233
Trauma and the Forming of Cultural Identity     233
Translating Anxiety into Architecture     239
Entering The Jewish Museum in Berlin     244
Inscribing the Void in Architecture     250
Void and Breathturn     255
Architectural Melancholia     268
Cartography and Ruins     275
Conclusion: Mnemosyne and the Ruins of History     290
Paul Celan in Tubingen     290
Martin Walser in Frankfurt     296
Bibliography     313
Index of Names     327