ARTICOLI / 9 / Lisa Block de Behar /
Dramatic, enigmatic, the work of Paul Celan ciphers and reveals a poetics of catastrophe, a disaster that overturns or turns upside-down a world that is coming to an end. Celan resigns himself to writing in German, his own language, a language occupied by the enemy, but in his – or this – world of words, he turns down everything that is established, and whenever he evokes discourse it is only to revoke it. As if words were facing a broken mirror, he shatters the world and its images, confusing diction and contradiction. With the fragments of his fractured words he challenges words to a duel to the death, a macabre struggle that threatens things, thoughts and dreams. This catastrophe unveils in each case the aporia of representation that says and denies at the same time, just to rescue absence, emptiness, the ambivalent and melancholic nature of poetry. Living under the anagram of his own name, Celan subscribes to a literal disorder, a verbal dispersion that engages language at its limits in an agony bursting borders, destroying them to the point of enabling a limitless space of disappeareance, where recollections and illusions vanish under the same smoke shapes.
