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Title
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The place, the poem, and the Jew : Levinas Blanchot, Hölderlin, Celan
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Author
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Abstract
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| Taking Levinas’s essay “Paul Celan: From Being to the Other” (1972) as point of departure, this article explores the relationship between Celan and Hölderlin along the conceptual pairs of exile and Heimat, wandering and rootedness, homelessness and dwelling. Two well-known verses by Friedrich Hölderlin constitute the subtext of Levinas’s essay on Celan. The first, “Why poets in times of distress?” addresses the task of the poet in modernity, the second, “Poetically man dwells on earth,” defines this task in terms of the relationship of the human being to place. Both verses play a major role in Martin Heidegger’s late collection of essays, Holzwege (1950), where the German philosopher, invoking Hölderlin, articulates his poetics in terms of the poet’s task to provide modern man with a home on earth. Levinas’s essay polemically questions this poetics through a juxtaposition of Hölderlin and Celan in light of the idea that the Jew is “free with regard to place,” a condition opposed to a pagan attachment to native soil. This juxtaposition opens up a series of far-reaching questions concerning Jewish extraterritoriality as a praiseworthy opposition to a politics of “blood and soil” and the potential of poetic language to capture both the attraction and the precariousness of substituting territorial rootedness with a Jewish attachment to the word. |
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Language
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English
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Source (journal)
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Modern language notes. - Baltimore, Md, 1962, currens
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Publication
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Baltimore, Md
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2020
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ISSN
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0026-7910
[print]
1080-6598
[online]
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DOI
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10.1353/MLN.2020.0038
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Volume/pages
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135
:3
(2020)
, p. 699-718
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ISI
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000544295200008
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Full text (Publisher's DOI)
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Full text (open access)
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Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
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