Intimate Strangeness: Gadamer on Celan, Dialogue, and the Other

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Notes

1. For a recent translation of the poet’s late work see Celan, Breathturn into Timestead.

2. I have pursued this inquiry elsewhere. See Tate, “The Verge of Silence.”

3. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, 67, 181.

4. Nancy warns that philosophers have discarded listening for understanding. By contrast, Gadamer transforms understanding into listening. See Nancy, Listening, 1-2.

5. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, 67.

6. Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, 66. (Italics original).

7. Celan, Collected Prose, 35.

8. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, 69.

9. Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, 64.

10. Ziarek, Inflected Language, 146. Interestingly, Ziarek effectively rescinds this denial in the final chapter (“Coda,” 181-205) where he returns to the notion of dialogue in a discussion of Heidegger.

11. Gadamer, Gadamer Reader, 163.

12. Ibid., 219-220.

13. Gadamer, Relevance of the Beautiful, 23.

14. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 103.

15. Ibid., 378.

16. Ibid., 470.

17. Gadamer, Gadamer Reader, 350.

18. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 465. For Heidegger too poetry lets the essence of language appear. (See Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, 46.)

19. Steiner, Real Presence, 198.

20. Gadamer, Gadamer Reader, 132-155.

21. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 57-58.

22. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, 71.

23. Ibid., 167.

24. Gadamer, Gadamer Reader, 37.

25. This emphasis on the poetic text as a conversation partner independent of the author’s experience and intentions is notably resisted by Bollack, who, drawing upon Szondi’s “materialist” poetics, criticizes Gadamer. See Bollack, The Art of Reading, 353-365.

26. Gadamer, Gadamer Reader, 163-164.

27. Ibid., p. 64.

28. Risser decisively delineated the role of the other in Gadamer’s thought over two decades ago. See Risser, Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other.

29. Gadamer, Gadamer Reader, 158.

30. Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, 107.

31. Characterizing his work as a “message in a bottle,” Celan expresses the hope, perhaps forlorn, that it would “wash up on the shoreline of a heart” (Collected Prose, 35).

32. Ziarek, Inflected Language, 146.

33. Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, 66. In the context of this passage Lacoue-Labarthe makes clear his refusal of a Levinasian reading of Celan that seeks the Other “beyond being.” This entails that the alterity of the you sought in Celan’s poems is seen as being-other and not as absolute exteriority. (See ibid., 60-61).

34. Celan, Collected Prose, 50. The relevant passage reads: “Only the space of this conversation can establish what is addressed, can gather it into a you around the naming and speaking I.” He continues, saying that this “you,” who comes forth by being named and addressed, brings its otherness into the present (the here and now) of the poem.

35. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 347-350

36. Gadamer, Gadamer Reader, 163.

37. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 355.

38. Gadamer, Gadamer Reader, 371.

39. Buber, I and Thou.

40. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 358.

41. Ibid., 361. Elsewhere he writes “there must be a readiness to allow something to be said to us. It is only in this way that the word becomes binding […]; it binds one human being to another. This occurs whenever we […] enter into a genuine dialogue with one another” (Gadamer, Relevance of the Beautiful, 106).

42. Gadamer, Education, Poetry, and History, 78.

43. Celan, Collected Prose, 34-35.

44. Ziarek finds that “this word [Ent-sprechung] encodes the Heideggerian ‘hermeneutics’ of otherness, not as interpretation but as letting-be […]” (Inflected Language, 39).

45. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, 24.

46. Ibid., 181.

47. Celan, Collected Prose, 34. “The poem intends another, it needs this other […]. It goes toward it, bespeaks it.”

48. Ibid., 49.

49. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, 69.

50. “[T]he poem is not the representation of a reality, but is itself reality.” (Szondi, Celan Studies, 52.)

51. Celan, Collected Prose, 50.

52. Gadamer, Gadamer Reader, 147. Also see Tate, “Hermeneutics and Poetics”.

53. Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, 83.

54. Ziarek, Inflected Language, 201.

55. Celan, Collected Prose, 48

56. Ziarek, Inflected Language, 184.

57. I borrow this apt phrase from Karmen MacKendrick, “The Hospitality of Listening,” 104.

58. For a discussion of “listening-to” as a “basic trait” of Gadamer’s poetics see Tate, Hermeneutics and Poetics.”

59. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, p. 147.

60. In Being and Time the silent call of conscience is a mode of discourse that issues from Dasein in its ownmost potentiality for being to Dasein in its fallen condition among worldly beings where it calls Dasein forth to assume responsibility for an authentic manner of existence. (See Heidegger, Being and Time, 267-284.) For the later Heidegger, however, the call issues from Being which calls forth thought. Thinking that responds to this call corresponds to Being. He describes this response as a listening that attunes itself to the grant (Zusage) and the address (Zusprache) of language. (See Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 75-76.)

61. Theunnissen, The Other, 339.

62. Steiner, Real Presence, 143.

63. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 123.

64. Gadamer, Gadamer Reader, 212.

65. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, 131.

66. Celan, Collected Prose, 35.

67. Theunnissen, The Other, 313.

68. Theunissen insists that the “ontological” priority of the between conflicts with the “epistemological” priority accorded the other. (See The Other, 285.) I rather see a contrast between a phenomenological account of what is first in experience – the other – and an ontological account of what is first in being – the between.

69. Celan, Collected Prose, 51.

70. “The meeting is, however, the occurrence of an event that discloses the between in all its concretion and in such a way that it is itself the event and not simply something that takes place” (Theunnissen, The Other, 280).

71. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 295. “The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between” (Italics original). For the broader hermeneutical significance of the “in-between” see Davey, Unquiet Understanding.

72. Quoted in Theunnissen, The Other, 288. Consider the last line of Celan’s poem “I Know You:” “I – wholly, wholly illusion; You – wholly real.” (Cited in Gadamer, Gadamer, on Celan, 122).

73. “[D]ialogue […] only lives in reciprocal turning toward” (Theunnissen, The Other, 319).

74. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, 83.

75. Ibid, 84.

76. Ibid, 85.

77. For Gadamer, the vocation of poetry is to bring nearness to language (Relevance of the Beautiful, 79).

78. Where this distance is acknowledged Gadamer speaks of “discretion” including the “infinite discretion” by which Rilke describes his relationship to God (Gadamer on Celan, 88). “Discretion” refers to the awareness of the untraversable distance – the irreducible otherness – inherent in the proximity of even the closest relationship.

79. Ibid.

80. Ibid, 89.

81. Ibid.

82. Ibid, 88.

83. Ibid, 27.

84. Ibid.

85. Lacoue-Labarthe,Poetry as Experience, 64.

86. I am suggesting that otherness both inhabits intimacy and enables it.

87. I adopt this phrase from Desmond, but adapt it to a somewhat different purpose. (See Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being.)

88. Gadamer, Gadamer on Celan, 122.