The Image in Celan's Poetics

Abstract

This article explores Paul Celan's poetics of the image. Beginning with a close analysis of his text ‘Edgar Jené. Der Traum vom Traume’, the article seeks to demonstrate that Celan's conception of the image is informed by a long theological and philosophical tradition of thinking about the image as constituted by ‘Urbild’ and ‘Abbild’. The article then traces attenuated elements of this discourse, as reformed by Celan's translation of the painter Jean Bazaine's writing on painting, and his own readings of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, in his later poetological writings on the image surrounding his ‘Meridian’ speech.