Throughout his work, German philosopher, literary theorist, and translator Werner Hamacher was profoundly engaged with the poetry of Paul Celan which he viewed as a way of tapping into the fundamental occurrence of language. Under the title “Keinmaleins,” a collection of Hamacher’s reflections on Celan was published earlier this year in which especially Celan’s relation to what is called “philosophy” is at stake: in his essays, Hamacher discusses Celan’s appropriation of Benjamin and Parmenides, his missed encounters with Heidegger and Adorno, his poetic reworking of Husserl’s phenomenology.
This roundtable will deliver a series of responses to Hamacher and Celan—and their (missed) encounter—in order to assess the relationship between thought and poetry, and ask about the future of literary criticism: a coming word.
Featuring:
Judith Kasper
Professor, Goethe University Frankfurt
Michael Levine
Professor, Rutgers University
Kristina Mendicino
Associate Professor, Brown University
Dominik Zechner
Artemis A.W. and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown University
Moderated by Ian Fleishman, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania.
Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of German, the NYU Department of Comparative Literature, Department of German Studies, Brown University, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University, & Department of German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures, Rutgers University.