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

The poetry of Paul Celan, particularly his late work, offers a considerable challenge to hermeneutics. Stammering on the verge of silence, these poems expose understanding to its own limits. Yet, for Hans-Georg Gadamer, this is the point: to enter into an experience with the poem where one stands exposed before the other. His own commentary on Celan’s poem-series Atemkristall responds to the hermeneutic demand “to keep listening” as a summons “to let the poem speak.” 3 By listening closely to the language of the poem one allows the other’s voice to be heard. Hermeneutically conceived, understanding the poem means nothing else. This accords with Celan’s own description of the poem as underway toward the other. Indeed, the poet risks falling silent for the sake of such an encounter. Mindful that Celan’s work increasingly moves “toward the breathless stillness of muted silence,” Gadamer attends to the way that his poetry turns language against itself in an often desperate effort to find a word that bears witness to the other. Here, Celan avers, poetry becomes dialogue, even where it despairs of reaching the other. Lacoue-Labarthe writes: “Certainly [Celan’s] poetic questioning begins with a singular address: to the other, in fact envisaged as a ‘you.’” Addressing the other as you, his poems exhibit a dialogical relation of address and response. Here Gadamer’s emphasis on dialogue converges with Celan’s understanding of poetry. In fact, his encounter with Celan’s work reveals a deeper dimension of dialogue than we find in Truth and Method. Yet it is odd that the word “dialogue” is scarcely mentioned in Gadamer’s commentary, especially since Celan describes his own poetry as “essentially dialogue.” And yet dialogue is importantly implicit in its titular question, “Who am I and Who are You?” But this does not ask after their identity; as he observes, “I” and “you” remain undetermined in Celan’s poems where each is pronounced in changing ways. Instead, they must be understood from their relation to each other where I am the addressor and you are the addressee. With this question Gadamer underscores the dialogical relation that opens the space wherein I and you come to be who they are. I propose to conceive this dialogical relation as a correspondence of address and response in which I and you are correlated. Addressed by the other, I respond in turn by addressing the other as you. In “the mystery of an encounter” (Celan) I enter into relation with your ineradicable otherness (as you do mine) which remains concealed even in our presence to one another. Because the dynamic structure of correspondence is essential, Gadamer will insist on the reciprocity of dialogue in which I and you, each turning toward the other, enter into mutual relation. At the heart of dialogue thus lies the intimacy of being-towards-the-other that opens the possibility for their meeting. As