“A Gigantic Sacrifice to the Obscure Gods”: Slavoj Žižek’s and Paul Celan’s Visions on Evil, Darkness and an Absconding God in the Aftermath of the Shoah

Abstract

The present paper establishes a dialog between Paul Celan’s poetry and Slavoj Žižek contemporary thought, centered on the Shoah and its repercussions as its focal point. By means of the analysis of three aspects in particular —the notion of evil, the sense of darkness and the idea of an absconding God— it also approaches questions of the poetic representability of the Shoah and the aesthetic accessibility of Celan’s poetry, which eventually leads to a slightly broader conclusion on the role and importance of aestheticization of trauma, in the Lacanian sense, in general

Keywords

• Paul Celan, Slavoj Žižek, Shoah, representability, hermetic poetry, German poetry, lacan, contemporary philosophy.