Logos and Pallaksch. The Loss of Madness and the Survival of Poetry in Paul Celan's “Tübingen, Jänner”

Abstract

This paper argues that Celan's Hölderlin poem Tübingen, Jänner is a critical poetic exploration of the concept of poetic madness associated with Hölderlin's life and work. I attempt to demonstrate that the poem moves between two poles, logos/techne/reflexion and madness i.e. the “pallaksch” recorded as Hölderlin's mad “unword.” While poetry itself seems to collapse under the pressure of “this time,” it also reasserts itself as the medium that recovers speaking, that moves, however tentatively, to reunite the solitary words of mad unlanguage to the fragile structure of poetic speech ‐ a process during which poetry disintegrates into mad babble at the same time as it turns this mad babble back into poetry. This reading introduces a kaddish into the pallaksch, mourning, not last of all, the fragmentation of mourning itself, its parenthetical character, its decomposition from ritual high speech into incomprehensible prattle. The brackets around the double “pallaksch” at the end both protect and isolate mad language from its poetic frame ‐ at the end, madness remains part of poetry, but poetic writing must contain it in the very act of citing it as one of its grounds.