Review: "AN EXTREME THOUGHT OF DIFFERENCE": POETRY AS EXPERIENCE

Reviewed Work(s): Poetry as Experience by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Andrea Tarnowski

and Phippe Lacoue-Labarthe
Review by: Jeff Fort
Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 1999), pp. 165-177
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686102
Accessed: 28-05-2017 01:57 UTC

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BOOK REVIEW

"AN EXTREME THOUGHT OF DIFFERENCE":

POE TRYAS EXPERIENCE'

Phippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, translated by Andrea

Tarnowski
Standford: Stanford University Press, 1999
144 pages $14.95 (paperback)

The story, in its broad outlines, is well known. In the spring or

summer of 1967 Paul Celan paid a visit to Martin Heidegger at his
chalet (the "Hutte") in the Black Forest, apparently with high expec
tations, but also with high anxiety. Celan, perhaps the most impor
tant German language poet of the post-war years, a Jew who had
survived the Holocaust and whose work often evokes it, had been
deeply influenced by Heidegger's thought, although the latter had
compromised himself with Nazism and had never said a word to
acknowledge (much less to think through) the catastrophe that was
carried out in its name. It is difficult to know just what the poet may
have expected from the philosopher, but we do know that, for Celan
at least, the meeting did not go well. His disappointment, his aver
sion to Heidegger, are recorded in a poem whose title refers to the
region where Heidegger lived, "Todtnauberg." In it he mentions
having written in the Heideggers' guest-book a hope for a "th inking
man's / coming / word / in the heart"2-a word which, apparently,
did not come. The rest of the poem evokes the unpleasant atmo
sphere of a marsh.

Qui Parle vol. 11, No. 2 Fall/Winter 1999

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166 BOOK REVIEW

It would be inaccurate to say that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's

Poetry as Experience (ably translated by Andrea Tarnowski and re
cently published by Stanford University Press) is a commentary on
this encounter, or even that it takes its point of departure from it.
Lacoue-Labarthe's book does not seek to place Celan's poetry in a
biographical or social context-though it certainly does not try to
sever it from its context-and it refuses the easy fascination of anec
dote. It does not provide any new information about Celan, nor
does it clarify any of the obscure allusions to be found in his diffi
cult poetry. It is not a particularly "scholarly" work, though it is
informed by Celan scholarship (especially that of Bernhard
B6schenstein and Peter Szondi). Lacoue-Labarthe's purpose is rather
to situate Celan's poetry in the element of its thought, and this ele
ment-marshy, ashen, or crystalline-is undeniably one that is
haunted by Heidegger and by the disappointment to which
"Todtnauberg" attests. Lacoue-Labarthe is himself a profound reader
of Heidegger, and while his reading of Celan maintains a constant
reference to Heidegger's thought, there can be no doubt that his
own relation to the philosopher is marked by a disappointment per
haps as sharp as that which he attributes to Celan.3 This may well be
why he wrote this book.
In relation to Celan in particular, this disappointment may lie,
among other things, in the fact that Heidegger never wrote on Celan.
It is not stretching the point to say that, in every sense, he should
have. He had a philosophical and probably even an ethical obliga
tion to do so. In terms of his own philosophical-poetic project, Celan
was something of an inevitability for Heidegger. Already by the late
sixties Celan's work was well established as a recent and brilliant
moment in the tradition of German lyric poetry going back to
H6lderlin and passing through George, Rilke and Trakl-precisely
the poets Heidegger turned to in developing his thought on poetry
(especially H6lderlin, who also shows up frequently in Celan's po
etry). To write on Celan might also have given Heidegger the oppor
tunity to break his silence on the Holocaust. It would have been
impossible not to say something about it, and one cannot help won
dering if this may have been the major obstacle.4 It is also not stretch
ing things to say that, in a certain sense, Celan "wrote on Heidegger."

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 BOOK REVIEW 167

Lacoue-Labarthe puts it thus: "It would be an understatement to say

that Celan had read Heidegger. Celan's poetry goes beyond even an
unreserved recognition of Hiedegger; I think one can assert that it
is, in its entirety, a dialogue with Heidegger's thought. And essen
tially with the part of this thought that deals with Holderlin's po
etry" (33). While this assertion might be seen as passing from
understatement to overstatement, it is in essence correct. The mark
Heidegger left on Celan's poetry (going well beyond the explicit
reference in "Todtnauberg") is pervasive and unmistakable. Perhaps
it would be more accurate to say, as Lacoue-Labarthe does, that
Celan wrote to Heidegger, that his poetry addresses his thought. For
numerous reasons, Heidegger should have responded to Celan, but
he never did so publicly.
Lacoue-Labarthe is well-qualified to approach Celan's work
in the wake of this silence, and he is well aware of the problems
represented by this constellation of writers. He has written exten
sively on Heidegger and on H5lderlin, and is particularly sensitive
to the issues at hand in Celan's relation to them, not only in terms of
the metaphysical tradition each of these writers confronts in his own
way, but also with respect to the historical stakes of Germany's in
vestment in this tradition. In previous work, Lacoue-Labarthe has
shown the very complex relation between this tradition and its Ger
man appropriation to be one hinging on a faltering identity, a "dis
tress" (Not), both national and metaphysical, which led-though
this was not inevitable-to the political solution we are well aware
of.5 In the first pages of Poetry as Experience he reminds us that "the
question of the relation between Modern and Ancient, and of the
possibility of uniqueness or identity for a whole people, has never
been so much a question as it has been in Germany" (7; author's
emphasis). In this sense, Germany's (and Europe's) history is deeply
metaphysical, for the momentousness of its modernity, and of its
most modern catastrophe, derives essentially from a metaphysical
problem and can be seen as a response to it: put in Heideggerian
terms, the technification of "Being" and the historical destiny of a
people. "Who are we?" asks Heidegger at certain key moments
and one cannot help but hear a somewhat sinister ring in his posing
of this very legitimate question. It is no doubt ironic (and yet per

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168 BOOK REVIEW

haps perfectly "logical") that Heidegger's thought provides one of

the most profound articulations of the problem with which the phi
losopher himself is most insidiously implicated. This "irony" is cer
tainly not lost on Lacoue-Labarthe, who is at pains to keep this
question open and who recognizes that it was, in an urgent and
painful way, Celan's question too.
Perhaps no poet more than Celan has borne witness to the
disastrous historical and individual experience to which the Ger
man "solution" gave rise. Born Paul Antschel (or Ancel) in Czerno
witz, Bukovina, in 1920, Celan (who changed his name into an
anagram) had a Jewish upbringing in a German speaking house
hold and, in the heterogeneous milieu of southeastern Europe, was
exposed to many languages and cultures (Romanian, Yiddish, Rus
sian...). (One thinks of Kafka, whose situation was similar in some
respects.) Both of his parents died in a concentration camp, while
Celan, having been separated from them, was subjected to forced
labor. He survived the war and eventually settled in Paris, where
most of his major work was written. In 1970, suffering psychologi
cally and spiritually, he took his own life by throwing himself into
the Seine.
The poetry he left behind is rife with the tensions and conflicts
that marked this life, beginning with the-very language it was writ
ten in. German was his mother tongue, and as such was linked with
the family and the past (Celan's mother is present in several of his
poems). But this family had been destroyed, along with countless
others, and German had become "the language of the murderers";
yet Celan insisted on writing in this language, saying that "only in
one's mother tongue can one speak one's own truth. In a foreign
language the poet lies."6 He also claimed that "Poetry is a fateful
and unique instance of language."7 In his work, Celan did inhabit
the German language in a fateful and unique way, and it could be
said that his entire poetic project was an attempt to push this unique
ness to its ownmost extremes, extremes that are undeniably full of
pain and anguish. In a speech Celan gave in 1958, he said: "Only
one thing remained reachable, close and unloseable amid all losses:
language. Yes, in spite of everything, language remained unloseable.
But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying

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 BOOK REVIEW 169

silence, through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.

It went through. It gave me no words for what happened, but it went
through this happening. Went through and was able to re-emerge,
'enriched' by it all."8 It is precisely the radical singularity and
"answerless-ness" of this "going through" of poetic language that
Lacoue-Labarthe calls "experience."
Celan's poetry is indeed a language without answers. It is a
poetry concerned with its own peculiar "idiom," as Lacoue-Labarthe
puts it, but, precisely in all its "difficulty" and "obscurity," it is a
poetry of experience. This means that it bears a necessary relation
to the life of the poet, its events and particularities; but it does not
mean that the poetry consists simply of "private" references or veiled
self-references. Certainly such references can be found in Celan,
but they are secondary. The essential is what remains even after
these references-all references as such-are explicated (assuming
this were possible). The opacity and difficulty of Celan's poems do
not lie so much in the unavailability of a code as in the constant
movement towards an element that resists coding, reference, and
signification. Lacoue-Labarthe asks:. "What is a work of poetry that,
forswearing the repetition of the disastrous, deadly already-said,
makes itself absolutely singular? What should we think of
poetry... that must refuse, sometimes with great stubbornness, to
signify? Or, simply, what is a poem whose 'coding' is such that it
foils in advance all attempts to decipher it?" (14). Isn't such a poetry
hermetic and obscurantist, overly "personal" and disdainful of its
reader? Celan denied that his poetry was hermetic, and Lacoue
Labarthe takes seriously the notion that the opacity of this poetry
has a different aim, one that is more "objective" and yet that cannot
be exhausted in the search for meanings and the decipherment of
references. He puts it this way: "My question asks not just about the
'text', but about the singular experience.coming into writing; it asks
if, being singular, experience can be written, or if from the moment
of writing its very singularity is not forever lost and borne away by
the very fact of language (its impossible intransitivity) or by the de
sire for meaning (for universality). . .?" (15). One might be surprised
at this question, which seems to point, to an experience entirely
independent of language, but this.is no naive wish for some pre

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170 BOOK REVIEW

verbal plenitude; it points rather to a kind of destitution (Lacoue

Labarthe speaks of Celan's "sublime of destitution" [89]), which is
also simply the question of silence, or of solitude, that is, of experi
ence in its impossible "ownness," that which in experience cannot
be directly shared or shared out. And experience, in this sense, is
dangerous. Lacoue-Labarthe's notion of experience is in fact located
from the beginning at the edge or extreme limit of experience (in
the more familiar sense), and he clarifies this first of all with refer
ence to the etymology of the word: ex-periri, in Latin, means "a
crossing through danger." "Erfahrung, then," he writes, "rather than
Erlebnis."9 Experience, in this sense, is not co-extensive with "what
is 'lived,' the stuff of anecdotes" (18). It is rather precisely the outer
edge (or perhaps the central hole) of "personal" experience, about
which there is in the end really nothing to say, but from which all
singular speech takes its point of departure.
How is it possible for experience in this sense to pass into the
impersonal ("signifying" and "universalizing") element of language?
And how could such a passage avoid the facile temptations of en
crypted self-reference?
Lacoue-Labarthe has a deceptively simple name for this pas
sage: translation. The book's first essay, "Two Poems by Paul Celan,"
is entirely an essay on translation.10 The two poems in question are
"Todtnauberg" and (especially) "Tubingen, January." Not only does
Lacoue-Labarthe discuss different translations of these poems, he
offers one of his own." Through all of this, Lacoue-Labarthe's essen
tial point is that these poems are fundamentally untranslatable. Their
singularity necessarily calls for translation (perhaps through the fa
miliar desire to hear what is strange in one's own language, the lure
of translation as elucidation) even as the translations themselves
reveal the futility of this particular form of interpretation. The trans
lated poems-and anyone who has read Celan both in German and
in translation can attest to this-do not "clarify" the originals, ren
der their sense or eliminate their elusiveness. As the versions prolif
erate, so do their enigmas.
But at another more essential level, Lacoue-Labarthe shows
that Celan's poems themselves are engaged in a form of translation,
a frustrated but compelled movement from experience (its unspeak

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 BOOK REVIEW 171

able extreme) to language. The focus of this demonstration is the

poem "Tubingen, January." Like "Todtnauberg" it names a place
and evokes an encounter, this time a visit to the H6lderlinturm, the
tower on the Neckar river where the poet spent the last thirty-six
years of his life in a state of babbling madness (though some of the
poems he wrote during this period show that his poetic gift had not
entirely faded). This poem begins: "Eyes talked into / blindness" ("Zur
Blindheit Ober- / redete Augen"), and refers to "their / memory of /
Holderlin towers afloat, circled / by whirling gulls." It goes on to
pronounce a kind of "message" or moral, which as such can be
paraphrased: If someone were to come today, someone in the man
ner of a prophet or a biblical patriarch, who wished to speak of
these times, he could only do so in a pitiful, repetitive stutter. If this
is a message, it also announces the breakdown of messages, and is
in any case, Lacoue-Labarthe claims, secondary to what is essential
in the poem-the experience of which it is itself a translation. This
experience, which can be reduced neither to a message nor to the
facts or occurrences of the poet's visit toTubingen, is indicated rather
in the "eyes talked into / blindness," the lapse and the "dizziness"
attested to both by H5lderlin in his madness and by Celan in the
peculiar "idiom" of his poetry. In "Tubingen, January," Lacoue-La
barthe writes, "the idiomatic poem contains its own translation,
which is a justification of the idiomatic" (18). What is dangerous in
the idiom emerges here as its potentially isolating strangeness, its
proximity with the madness or vertigo it would attempt to say.
(Lacoue-Labarthe speaks of the "wreckage" of the poem.) Celan ends
his poem with two strange words in quotation marks, "Pallaksh.
Pallaksh," which, we are told, are nonsense words Holderlin would
often repeat to himself.2
"Dizziness" (or "vertigo") is experience when what happens
is that nothing happens. It is to this nothing, in its purest form, that
poetry would bear witness (that it would translate) by finding in it
what Celan calls in one poem a "singbarer Rest," a singable resi
due, a remainder, often painful, that subsists and insists in language,
beyond all the allusions and the anecdotes. The danger in this (soli
tude, "solipsism" perhaps) is obvious, but Lacoue-Labarthe also
points out its necessity as a task, and the rigors it imposes on Ian

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172 BOOK REVIEW

guage. As he writes in another of the book's essays ("Catastrophe"),

devoted to Celan's prize speech "The Meridian":

Such is, in sum, the "solitude" of the poem, and what

obliges it, with as rigorous an obligation as the obliga
tion to speak, not to "invent" a singular language or build
an idiolect from start to finish, but to undo language (se
mantically and syntactically); disarticulate and rarefy it;
cut it up according to a prosody which is neither that of
spoken language nor that of earlier poetry; to condense
it until one comes to the hard center, the muted resistence
where one recognizes a voice that is singular, that is to
say, separated from language, as is a tone or a style. (56)

This is the strait through which Celan's poetry would navigate, be

tween the deadliness and ossification of established forms and the
"mute" wreckage of absolute singularity.
In his reading of "The Meridian," Lacoue-Labarthe makes clear
that what saves poetic experience from the wreckage it risks-what
saves the idiom from being "idio-tic" in the strict sense (though the
abjection implied by this term is a propos)-is its fragile relation to
the other. As Celan puts it, "The poem wants to reach the Other, it
needs this Other, it needs a vis-a-vis. It searches it out and addresses
it." The poem is alone, but it is essentially an address. This paradox
is the central point of "Catastrophe," the place where the most sin
gular (the most poetic) language is made possible only by the strange
ness, and otherness, always already inhabiting it. Linking art,
mimesis, and the estrangement of the Unheimliche (uncanny)-all
very present in Celan's speech-Lacoue-Labarthe guides us through
territory that is (if one can say this here) very familiar to him, and
sheds much light on the deeply philosophical concerns behind
Celan's approach to the question of the other-poetry's Other, its
intimate but unassignable addressee. The longest, and perhaps the
richest and most "profound" essay in Poetry as Experience, "Catas
trophe" points to the "intimate difference" (64) that makes of poetry's
"loneliness" also necessarily a relation, an encounter, a dialogue
("-it is often despairing dialogue," writes Celan), that seeks to make
of the poetic act "an act of thought" (64) and that gives rise, in the

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 BOOK REVIEW 173

end, to what Lacoue-Labarthe calls "an extreme thought of differ

ence" (63)-an acknowledgment of difference as the very possibil
ity of sameness and relation. The obscurity of the poem has an
unexpected function in this dialogue: "The paradox here," writes
Lacoue-Labarthe, "is that obscurity originates in taking the encoun
ter into consideration, and not in the demand for solitude...
[OJbscurity is...a mark of attention-even respect-with regard to
the encounter" (57). Poetry, however alone, is in the end a seeking
and attentive "going out of the self" (32), one which requires atten
tion in its turn.

In "The Meridian" Celan recalls Benjamin's use (in his Kafka

essay) of a quote from Malebranche: "Attention is the natural prayer
of the soul," and goes on to speak not only of the Other, but of the
wholly Other, a term which it is tempting to simplify and reduce to
"God." Lacoue-Labarthe is careful to point out that there is nothing
to justify this reduction, but he takes seriously the religious dimen
sion of Celan's invocation and of his work in general (especially in
the sections entitled "Prayer" and "Sky"). It is a delicate question: in
his poetry, Celan is often derisory and even distinctly bitter when it
comes to the promises of religion, which, it is safe to say, he saw as
irreparably broken. But it does not suffice simply to speak of Celan
as an atheist or, even less, as a secular poet with contempt for reli
gion. This is true not only because of his position, often paradoxical
in any case, as a non-believing Jew, but also because of the con
stant attention that he gives to religion and the strange earnestness
with which he wields his irony, so to speak. Lacoue-Labarthe writes
that "the question of God. ..haunts Celan's poetry, perhaps to the
very end" (111), and reminds us that "'God does not exist' is not a
declaration of atheism. At most, it would be only if 'God does not
exist' meant 'God has never existed" (74). Celan's poetry does not
say that. If God is dead, it is because we have killed him, and this
too has left a residue (in which Nietzsche himself finally drowned,
as in a puddle). Lacoue-Labarthe goes so far as to say that "Psalm"
a poem that prays literally to "No one'"-is a "real prayer." But he is
careful, here too, not to attribute to the poet a kind of negative the
ology, or a nostalgic relation to an absent god-in Celan's poetry,
God really does not exist, his prayer really prays to no one at all.

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174 BOOK REVIEW

And yet it really does pray. "Praised be your name, no one." In Celan,
God is radically (and irreversibly) anonymous, but this anonymity
structures the poem as an indefinite address, an address to no one,
to you. "0 one, o none, o no one, o you."13 The wholly other is the
poem's addressee insofar as the other is wholly unnamable.

Part II of the book (which contains everything except "Two

Poems by Paul Celan") is entitled "Remembering Dates." In addi
tion to "Catastrophe" and "Prayer" it consists of short sections, all of
which are dated and marked with a place name. In almost all of
them Lacoue-Labarthe refers, by their initials, to friends and col
leagues with whom he has had conversations (as anyone does who
is writing a book).14 These references, which echo Celan's gestures
towards the Other in "The Meridian" and his injunction to "remain
mindful of all our dates," are a simple reminder that all writing,
even "philosophy" or "literary criticism," has its occasion. Or that a
work, whatever its state of completion, is always "in progress," is
always in greater or lesser proximity to its own process of coming to
be, and to its own most proper inspiration. In many of his writings,
Lacoue-Labarthe includes, often somewhere near the beginning, a
caveat concerning the "in progress" state of his work, as though it
could only be presented as an interruption, or rather as though pre
sentation came about as the constant call to and of interruption.
Some of the sections in "Remembering Dates" can be seen in this
light. Lacoue-Labarthe admits that many of them are simple notes
"deliberately left as they are,"15 quotes accompanied by brief re
marks, fragments. But even in these shorter pieces (especially "The
Power of Naming," "Pain" and "Ecstasy"), Lacoue-Labarthe presents
provocative suggestions, indications, points that are developed just
enough to evoke, to call for thought, before being abandoned. It
will be noted also that a form of interruption occurs also in the
longer pieces, especially around the question of "commentary." For
example, at one point in the first essay, already after substantial
developments and readings: "Here, according to standard proce
dure, I should begin my commentary. But I have said I will refrain"
(22). (He then indicates the path such a commentary would take.)
Elsewhere, he writes, "Had I been capable of it, I would have shown

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 BOOK REVIEW 175

that in this sense [as the task of pulling "the essence of pain, and
thus of language, away from its its negative, laborious and servile
definition"], Celan's poetry is a poetry of pain; I would have shown
that that is lyricism" (99).
Such gestures of abandon, of refraining from developments as
they begin to approach their essential points, could be considered
an omission, even a fault, or at the very least a faltering ("Had I
been capable..."). And in a certain sense that is exactly what they
are-but it is precisely in this default and faltering that Lacoue
Labarthe attempts to open the way to thought, to inspire it and evoke
its beginning point (much more so, I would say, than many writers
whose work appears so seamless, fluent and continuous, but who
are blinded by their own unfaltering eloquence ["Zur Blindheit uber
/ redete Augen"] into a sense of endless capacity). It indicates what
could be called the pointof thought. This point is a faltering, a point
of non-capacity, a breach that remains faithful to what it breaks
with'6; and, as Lacoue-Labarthe has pointed out elsewhere, this fal
tering ("d6faillance") speaks in the closest proximity to the "il faut"
of obligation, and makes of writing a task all the more imperative
for being groundless and treacherous.
These features give Lacoue-Labarthe's work a strange sense of
incompletion, but it is also to this that we owe what is most singular
and forceful in his writing: its disarming frankness and earnestness,
its insistent approach to the essential, its. refraining, also, from po
lemics,17 its probity. Which is also, very much in the sense he lays
out in this book, what is poetic in it, its unsteady, syncopated rhythm.
Lacoue-Labarthe's thought is, in this sense, deeply evocative and
poetic; it is aesthetically sensitive-not simply about art but informed
by it. It is fundamentally a thought of experience, and places the
disruption of art (in both senses) at the heart of experience. Poetry,
as experience, is finally the name for the point of origin common to
both art and philosophy, and is what gives Lacoue-Labarthe's work
its fragile and singular authority.

-Jeff Fort

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176 BOOK REVIEW

1 A translation of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La podsie comme experience (Chris

tian Bourgois, 1986, 2nd edition, 1997), trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford Uni
versity Press, 1999).
2 Trans. M. Hamburger, from Poems of Paul Celan (Persea Books, 1988), 292.
3 This is most obvious in Lacoue-Labarthe's longest work on Heidegger, La fiction
du politique (Christian Bourgois, 1987), translated by Chris Turner as Heidegger,
Art and Politics (Basil Blackwell, 1990). There Lacoue-Labarthe writes that
Heidegger's engagement with National Socialism "is neither an accident nor an
error" (18), in the sense that it was rather a programmatic involvement, following
from certain aspects of his previous writing, which Heidegger allowed himself to
pursue. If anything, Heidegger himself experienced his own disappointment. "In
1933, Heidegger is not mistaken. But he knows in 1934 that he has made a mis
take. Not about the truth of Nazism, but about its reality" (20).
4 Did Heidegger ever write on or teach a Jewish thinker or writer? (The glaring
absence of anything on Spinoza points to some serious questions.) Certainly only
very rarely, and at no great length did he write on anyone who was not either
German or Greek.
5 In addition to Heidegger, Art and Politics, see "The Nazi Myth," coauthored with
Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. B. Holmes, in Critical lnquiry, Winter 1990, vol. 16, no. 2,
291-312. On Holderlin, see especially "H6lderlin and the Greeks" and "The Cae
sura of the Speculative," in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. C. Fynsk
(Harvard, 1989).
6 Cited in Israel Chalfen, Paul Celan, A Biography of his Youth, trans. M. Bleyleben
(Persea Books, 1991), 184. In 1948 he wrote to a friend, "There is nothing in the
world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the
language of his poems is German." (Cited by John Felstiner in Paul Celan: Poet,
Survivor, Jew [Yale University Press, 1995],.56.).
7 "Dichtung-das ist das schicksalhaft Einmalige derSprache" (Gesammelte Werke,
III [Suhrkamp, 19831), 175.
8 "Erreichbar, nah und unverloren blieb inmitten der Verluste dies eine: die Sprache.
Sie, die Sprache, blieb unverloren, ja, trotz allem. Abersie mu&te nun hindurchgehen
durch ihre eigenen Antwortlosigkeiten, hindurchgehen durch furchtbares
Verstummen, hindurchgehen durch die tausend Finsternisse todbringender Rede.
Sie ging hindurch und gab keine Worte her fir das, was geschah; aber sie ging durch
dieses Geschehen. Ging hindurch und durfte wieder zutage treten, zangereicherta
von all dem." From the Bremen speech (ibid, 185-6).
9 In a note, Lacoue-Labarthe cites Roger Munier's explanation of this etymology,
which is worth giving here in full (it contains the kernel of Lacoue-Labarthe's thought
on poetry): "Experience comes from the Latin experiri, to test, try, prove. The radi
cal is periri, which one also finds in periculum, peril, danger. The Indo-European
root is per, to which are attached the ideas of crossing and, secondarily, of trial,
test. In Greek, numerous derivations evoke a crossing or passage: peird, to cross;
pera, beyond; pera6, to pass through; perain6, to go to the end; peras, end, limit.
For Germanic languages, Old High German faran has given us fahren, to trans
port, and fuhren, to drive. Shoud we attribute Erfahrung (experience] to this origin
as well, or should it be linked to the second meaning of per, trial, in Old High

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 BOOK REVIEW 177

German fara, danger, which became Gefahr, danger, and gefahrden, to endanger?
The boundaries between one meaning and the other are imprecise. The same is
true for the Latin periri, to try, and periculum, which originally means trial, test,
then risk, danger. The idea of experience as a crossing is etymologically and se
mantically difficult to separate from that of risk. From the beginning and no doubt
in a fundamental sense, experience means to endanger" (128).
10 This is true beginning with the title itself, which echoes that of Benjamin's 1915
essay on Holderlin, "Two Poems by Friedrich Holderlin." It might seem presump
tuous to borrow the title of Benjamin's difficult and groundbreaking essay, but it is
indeed simply a question of translation, and in more ways than one. First of all,
Benjamin's essay focuses on Holderlin's own revision of one of his poems, a revi
sion which is in every way, according to Benjamin, a translation into an idiom
more proper to the poetic task. And the central notion of the essay, "the poet
ized"-or, as Lacoue-Labarthe translates elsewhere, "the dictamen" ("das
Gedichtete")-is itself a notion closely linked to translation. Put simply (too sim
ply), according to Benjamin the dictamen is the imperative of the poem, the pas
sage from the poet's "spiritual life" into the language of the poem itself. In this
sense, "experience" is nothing other than Lacoue-Labarthe's translation of
Benjamin's notion of "the dictamen."
11 These are all included in the French and translated individually into English. Like
wise, quotations from Celan's poems are given in German, then followed by the
English translation-a helpful inclusion for those who want to keep Celan's Ger
man in mind.
12 Felstiner, op. cit., 173.
13 From "Es war Erde in ihnen..." ("There was earth inside them..."): "O einer, o
keiner, o niemand, o du." Gesammelte Werke, I (op. cit.), 211.
14 In one of several incidental but inexplicable omissions, Lacoue-Labarthe's "Je
remercie" ("My thanks to") at the end of the book is not included in this transla
tion. The list contains all the names to which the initials in the text refer (plus a few
others). The presence of these names as an addendum seems important in order to
dispel the sense one might have (precisely) of a private, coded idiom, or some
kind of coy guessing game, accessible only to those in the know. Lacoue-Labarthe
has no such intentions. These are the names as they appear there: Bernard
Boschenstein, Martine Broda, Didier Cahen, Jacques Derrida, Michel Deutsch,
Christopher Fynsk, Werner Hamacher, Roger Laporte, Jacques Le Rider, Jean
Frangois Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell. The other omissions include
Lacoue-Labarthe's short preface, to which he added a second short note when the
book was reprinted in 1997, and the date and place name subtitling "Catastro
phe": "October 21, 1983 (Irvine)."
15 This is in the first preface, omitted in the English. (See previous note.)
16 At the same time, one wonders how much this question of style, this renunciation
of a certain kind of commentary, has to do with the looming figure of Heidegger,
his example (textual, not personal) as a "masterful" commentator.
17 One exception is a moment of impatience with .Levinas (66-7), in whom, I think,
Lacoue-Labarthe sees a frustrated attempt to escape from (or go "beyond")
Heidegger by means of (a mere denegation of) Heidegger.

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