Encounters with Paul Celan's Poetry

Book excerpt: Encounters with Paul Celan's Poetry: The Other's Time consists of encounters: with poetry, with its readers, and with the other that poetry seeks to encounter. What does it mean, when Celan insists that every real encounter, every true encounter happens in memory of the poetic encounter, the secret of the encounter? This book presents close readings of various poems, often attempting textual and intellectual dialogue with philosophers who read Celan or who were read by Celan, such as Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, Edmund Husserl, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.