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published on March 28, 2017
Beau Shaw
The Image that Was in the Blood
Adorno and Celan's "Tenebrae"
This paper critiques Adorno’s interpretation of Paul Celan’s poetry, as well as some of the philosophical ideas that motivate it. For Adorno, Celan’s poetry is “hermetic”—it refuses aesthetic representation; and, by virtue of this hermeticism, it expresses the horror of the Holocaust—a horror whose content is that it refuses aesthetic representation. I give a reading of Celan’s “Tenebrae,” from his 1959 collection Sprachgitter, and show that it uses aesthetic representation; that this use expresses the horror of the Holocaust; and that, in comparison to this, Adorno’s concept of hermeticism is a way of concealing this horror.