Today is the 100th year anniversary of Paul Celan’s birth. Celan was very fond of memory and its meaning. He was obsessed with dates. He understood how we all live through these dates and relive them in language. The Holocaust is a date that lives on and through his poetry. Language, he says, in the […]
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the schlemiel character is usually located on the edge of the world. Her place is something people overlook. S/he stands at the limit. Whether it is Mendel Mocher Sforim’s Sendrl, Sholem Aleichem’s Motl or Menachem Mendel, I.B. Singer’s Gimpel, Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog, […]
At the outset of a reflection on Don Quixote, Carlos Fuentes cites Michel Foucault’s claim that Don Quixote is a “symbol of the modern divorce between the word and object”(This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life, 203). The subject of Quixote’s movement (pilgrimage) is the “search for similarities” and “Foucault observes how […]
I am a(n) (c)academic (as the post-Holocaust writer Raymond Federman used to quip). One of the things that I am astonished by is the pride some of my colleagues take in showing how intelligent they are. Few of them will admit to “becoming” or “being” stupid. But I would suggest that with people like NYU […]
As Jacques Derrida noted several times in his celebrated essay on Paul Celan entitled “Shibboleth,” Paul Celan wrote several poems dedicated to anniversaries. For Derrida, these repetitions of important dates operate to have us think about the tension between a date’s unique character and how, through its repetition, a date can also be effaced. This […]
We like to repeat ourselves. And oftentimes we forget what we said before and are reminded by our friends that “we already said that.” Nonetheless, people being people, we forget and do it again. The people most susceptible to this blindness are older people. However, sometimes repetitions – which are seemingly absent-minded – are full […]
At the very least, John Felstiner – in Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew – acknowledges that Paul Celan’s “Conversation in the Mountains” has a comic aspect to it: “Conversation in the Mountains,” brief yet gabby, humorous yet fateful, reflects on selfhood, language, perception, God, and nature by way of a journey into the mountains. What […]
As a Jew, I can assure you that Jews love to talk. In their work on the schlemiel, Ruth Wisse and Sidrah DeKoven Ezrahi see the schlemiel’s speech as a kind of “substitute” sovereignty. Ezrahi tells us that before Israel, speech, not action, was the best defense. And for centuries there was a historical principle […]
Although Celan’s “major” language was German (a language he was raised with and wrote his poetry in), Celan’s work was also influenced by “minor” languages. The contrast between major and minor languages comes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. In the book, the proposal is made that we rethink […]
I ended the last blog entry by drawing a limit or threshold between Kafka’s conversation and Nietzsche’s singing. To be sure, Kafka, at the end of his piece, wonders why his group of nobodies isn’t singing. Their conversation in the mountains is “free” like the winds but it doesn’t break into song, while Nietzsche’s speech […]
Schlemiel Theory 