Abstract

This study was prompted by the ethical de-legitimation ensuing the historical disasters of the twentieth century, a symptom of which has been the obsoleteness of poetry. Thus, my analysis concentrates on the understanding of the notions of disaster and of the possibility of an ethics after the disaster. Inspired by Blanchot's thinking of the disaster as an ontological rather than experiential category and by Adorno's preoccupations with "poetry after Auschwitz," I explore poetic figurations of the disaster and through them the responsibility and possibility of a future ethos of poetry. The study extends from the historical events of disaster to the ways they have been translated within modern poetry and criticism: for instance, whether the disaster can be conceived as a thematic, or whether it signals the dissolution of themes and figures. Such an inquiry demands the examination of limits, of what it means to write poetry "after" a liminal state has been reached and traditional ethics is shaken to its foundations. The readings of the two poets lead me to propose that poetry's promise lies in its very multiple deaths, its anachronistic existence which, I argue, is exemplary of a profound structural anachronism of writing in general. ;My choice of Paul Valery and Paul Celan is motivated both historically--since they represent prewar and postwar conceptions of the disaster, respectively--and thematically, since they both have thought systematically the position of poetry in a world of crisis. ;Whereas the ethical impetus of this project can be traced back to the historical occurrence, the methodology remains formal. However, this choice is not itself without an ethico-political motivation. In fact, I have engaged the historically inclined criticism of Theodor Adorno along with post-structuralist textual analyses, to demonstrate that the methodological preference for formalism does not necessarily contradict the sense of ethical urgency. To the contrary, language becomes indispensable in reframing the question of ethics and of urgency. As the practice of immediate intervention has historically led to tragic losses, I conclude that ethics must be rethought not in terms of decision and action, but of contemplation and undecidability.