Znacze//nie wiersza

Overview & Synopsis

The idea behind the book The (Non)Meaning of the Poem. Apophases of Paul Celan is to be found in its title. This is because it is about reading the poetry of Celan, one of the most prominent post-war poets of the German language and a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, from a perspective aiming not so much at a hermeneutic deciphering of his poems’ hidden meanings, but more so at demarcating atopical non-places of the lost presence of meaning and names in the world after Shoah, marked by a radical absence of language signifieds. One determinant of the analyses of Piszczatowski is the idiom of Jewish and Christian mysticism, establishing the apophatic interpretation of Celan’s semantic inversions, constituting the key to reading his poetry as a medium of individual memory of the victims of the Holocaust.