Sovereignties in question: the poetics of Paul Celan ISBN: 9780823224371 Platform/Publisher: ACLS / Fordham University Press Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Ten pages at a time; Download: Ten pages at a time Subjects: Philosophy;
Contents * Shibboleth: For Paul Celan * "A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text": Poetics and Politics of Witnessing * Language Does Not Belong: An Interview * The Majesty of the Present: Reading Celan's "The Meridian" * Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue--between Two Infinities, the Poem This book brings together five powerful encounters. Themes central to all of Derrida's writings thread the intense confrontation between the most famous philosopher of our time and the Jewish poet writing in German who, perhaps more powerfully than any other, has testified to the European experience of the twentieth century. They include the date or signature and its singularity; the notion of the trace; temporal structures of futurity and the "to come"; the multiplicity of language and questions of translation; such speech acts as testimony and promising, but also lying and perjury; the possibility of the impossible; and, above all, the question of the poem as addressed and destined beyond knowledge, seeking to speak to and for the irreducibly other. The memory of encounters with thinkers who have also engaged Celan's work animates these writings, which include a brilliant dialogue between two interpretative modes--hermeneutics and deconstruction. Derrida's approach to a poem is a revelation on many levels, from the most concrete ways of reading --for example, his analysis of a sequence of personal pronouns--to the most sweeping imperatives of human existence (and Derrida's writings are always a study in the imbrication of such levels). Above all, he voices the call to responsibility in the ultimate line of Celan's poem: "The world is gone, I must carry you," which sounds throughout the book's final essay like a refrain. Only two of the texts in this volume do not appear here in English for the first time. Of these, Schibboleth has been entirely retranslated and has been set following Derrida's own instructions for publication in French; "A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text" was substantially rewritten by Derrida himself and basically appears here as the translation of a new text. Jacques Derrida's most recent books in English translation include Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida (with Catherine Malabou). He died in Paris on October 8, 2004. Thomas Dutoit teaches at the Université de Paris 7. He translated Aporias and edited On the Name, both by Jacques Derrida.
Jacques Derrida was born in El-Biar, Algeria on July 15, 1930. He graduated from the École Normal Supérieure in 1956. He taught philosophy and logic at both the University of Paris and the École Normal Supérieure for around 30 years. His works of philosophy and linguistics form the basis of the school of criticism known as deconstruction. This theory states that language is an inadequate method to give an unambiguous definition of a work, as the meaning of text can differ depending on reader, time, and context.
During his lifetime, he wrote more than 40 books on various aspects of deconstruction including Of Grammatology, Glas, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, and Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce. He died of pancreatic cancer on October 9, 2004 at the age of 74.
