Beyond Thought’s Limits: Celan, Heidegger, and the Crooked Path of Art

Abstract In this article I contend that Paul Celan’s poem, “Todtnauberg,” written as a follow up to his visit to Martin Heidegger’s Berghütte, should be read not only as a challenge to Heideggerian philosophy’s fundamental assumptions – primarily the notion of dwelling in the world via poetic language – but also to the very structure of philosophical thought, with its biases and inadequacies. Drawing on Celan’s idiosyncratic use of the term Verjudung I show its centrality in understanding the poem’s deconstructive move, as it applied to the binaries inherent to Heideggerian thought: pure/impure, indigenous/foreign, rooted/uprooted, and authentic/inauthentic. Posing the deconstructive qualities of the poetic against the crude decisiveness of philosophical thought, I argue that “Todtnauberg” ‘catches’ Heideggerian thought unprepared, as it presents it with its own blind spots, misconceptions, and loose ends, and thus rattles the very ground in which it seeks to ground itself.