Before Heidegger, the thinker —the German thinker—, Celan, the poet —the Jewish poet—comes with a single but precise request: that the thinker [...] pronounce a word, only one: a word about pain. From which, perhaps, everything could still be possible. Not so much "life" (it is always possible, it is well known, even in Auschwitz), as existence, poetry, speech. Language. That is, the relationship with others.

I don't know what word Celan was expecting. I don't know. Something tells me, however, that it is the humblest word, the most difficult to pronounce; of the one that precisely demands "to go out of one's mind"—that word that the entire West, with its redemptive pathos, has not been able to pronounce, and that we still have to learn to say, since without it we are condemned to disappear: the word forgiveness.

Philippe lacoue-Labarthe
The extermination has inaugurated —in its impossible possibility, in its immense and untenable banality— the after-Auschwitz (in the sense in which Adorno interpreted it). Celan: "Death is a teacher who comes from Germany." It is about the impossible possibility, the immense and untenable banality of our time, — of this time (dieser Zeit). One may permanently mock "misery", but we are the contemporaries of that: the culmination of what Nous and ratio, as Logos —framework, still today (heute), of what we are— could not have avoided meaning: that murder is the first thing to reckon with; that deletion is the most secure form of identification. On this gloomy background, although of "light", rises everywhere the reality that does not reach more than the filth of a world that is now global. Leaving aside the most obvious events, nothing, not even the simplest, the most devastating of love stories, can escape this dark condition of the time: cancer of the subject, ego or masses. Denying it on the pretext of not falling into pathos is pure somnambulism. Transforming it into pathos, to make "still" art (feeling, etc.) is inadmissible.

The question I want to pose – the most brutal possible, perhaps hateful – is the following: Could Celan not so much situate himself, but rather situate us in front of "it"? Was poetry—and if so, what poetry, what as an act of poetry—still capable of doing so? It is still a way, in retrospect (and now going back a large number of steps, falling back on the very thing that was at its origin), of repeating Hölderlin's question: Wozu Dichter...? Indeed, for what?