Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

(Greg DeLong) #1

titled “Who Am I and Who Are You?” But whereas Gadamer
pictures Celan’s difficult poetic texts asking questions of the
reader and the reader answering back, Derrida underlines the
self-sufficiency of Celan’s hermetic language: the poet’s barbed
challenge to anyone who would presume to understand his
work fully. Otherness for Derrida is not shared as in Gadamer
but instead utterly foreign, frustrating the reader.
In Derrida’s reading of Celan, then, the self remains
cryptic and unspoken. The difference between Gadamer and
Derrida on Celan sums up the gap between these two thinkers.
Gadamer prizes understanding even in the most difficult cir-
cumstances; Derrida favors an avant-garde opacity that defeats
us. Celan may let us into his work, but only to a degree, Der-
rida asserts. He uses his tough combination of foreign tongues,
made-up words, and crystalline, spiky images as a shibboleth:
a way of strictly controlling how, and to what degree, he may
be read. Gadamer, by contrast, emphasizes the ways in which
Celan reaches toward his reader. We grapple with shared
hermeneutic tasks as we work in the bleak shadows that loom
over Celan’s poetry: the unprecedented devastation of World
War II and the Shoah. What seems to be the relentless obscu-
rity of Celan is, for Gadamer, actually an effort to speak and to
be heard.
Gadamer seems to know Celan’s sense of his own diffi-
culty better than Derrida does. For Celan, difficulty is para-
doxically an effort to connect to the world. Celan remarks in
his Meridian lecture that the poem is like an individual, “alone
and on the road”: “The poem wants to reach the Other, it
needs this Other, it needs a vis à vis. It searches it out and ad-
dresses it. Each thing, each person is a form of the Other for
the poem, as it makes for this Other.”^4
Finally, Gadamer is truer than Derrida to the basic im-


Gadamer, Celan, de Man, Heidegger 189

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