Indeed. Nothing. Not the slightest. I act in a void. Paul Celan in a letter to the editor of Tagesspiegel in October 1959 1 Without doubt Martin Heidegger was the most influential and controversial...

Rien, c’est ce qu’il faut: supporter l’insupportable rien. Maurice Blanchot Subjectivity is undoubtedly a central area of philosophical investigation. In 1984 Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) described h...

The decisive moment of human development is continually at hand. This is why those movements of revolutionary thought that declare everything preceding to be an irrelevance are correct – because at yet nothing has happened.In his Meridian speech Paul Celan pays homage to a dissident tradition, speaking of himself as one “who grew up with Peter Kropotkin’s and Gustav Landauers’ writings” .1 In his biography John Felstiner briefly mentions Celan’s affiliation, noting that the poet soon relinquished his communist sympathies but (...) stood loyal to the ethoi of socialism and anarchism . This holds true as a point of departure, but a detailed analysis of Celan’s anarchistic impulse is lacking .. (shrink)

Name is a powerful sign, and name-giving is also calling one intolanguage. Name identifies, summons and subjects. Paul Celan wasfamiliar with all these uses of name and addresses them in his poeticsand poetry. This article will discuss how poetry like Celan’s, which is heavily influenced by so many philosophical readings, could form a critique of naming,on a poetical basis towards philosophical concepts that underline problematics of name-giving in poetic text in particular.