LITURGICAL POLITICS IN THE POETRY OF PAUL CELAN*

Abstract

Drawing on Celan's conception of poetry as a means of orienting the individual towards the ‘completely Other’, this paper emphasises poetry's ability to create community without reproducing exclusionary group identities. The analysis reveals a latent politics in Celan's poetry, emphasising its ability to gather disparate individuals into a community. Through close readings of each poem, I argue that in ‘Tenebrae’ and ‘Psalm’, Celan's use of inversion empties religious imagery of positive religious claims while preserving its form and structure. In ‘Tenebrae’, for example, the poem instructs the ‘Lord’ to pray to the anonymous collective ‘us’, implicitly constituting a community by using the collective pronoun. Similarly, in ‘Psalm’, Celan's inversion of traditional liturgical form creates a space for collective mourning and also subverts the positive religious content. Engaging with previous scholarship on Celan's poetics, the article offers a new perspective on the political dimensions of his work, arguing that religious imagery plays a significant role in forming political imagination through his poetry. I conclude by emphasising the importance of Celan's poetry in bringing about a community of readers, thereby suggesting that poetry can bind individuals into a collective endowed with political agency.