Francesco, Adriano Clerici

This paper addresses the question of the ‘non-­human’ from a literary perspective, analysing the works of Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan. Although both living in Paris for the most part of their adult life (in different years they both taught at the École normale supérieure as well) Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett never met personally. A last chance presented in 1970, as Franz Wurm, a mutual friend, invited Celan to meet Beckett. Yet, the meeting never took place; few weeks after, on April 20th, 1970, Celan took his life, drowning unobserved in the Seine.

In many different ways, the works of Beckett and Celan echo and call each other from the distance, as if they were actually preparing that encounter which could never take place, creating bridges by means of words at the threshold between worlds and languages. Celan was surely aware of the profound affinity between their works: he considered Beckett as probably ‘the only man he could have an understanding with’ (as John Felstiner also noticed). Beckett was not only aware of Celan’s poetry, but surely knew his work.

Arguably Adorno first observed how Beckett and Celan embodied in their works an attempt to write literature not only after Auschwitz, but also “under the sign” of Auschwitz. That is, writing radically questioning the relationship between culture and barbarism, at the threshold between (non-­)human (in-­human and post-­human), representation and the absence of representation, literature and testimony, silence and the possibility to speak for and in the name of an otherness.

Analysing passages from Beckett’s 'The Unnamable' and a selection of poems from Celan’s 'Atemwende' ('Breath-­turn', 1967) and 'Fadensonnen' ('Threadsuns', 1968), my paper explores the complexity of Beckett’s and Celan’s representational strategies in the effort to write literature not only after or beyond the human, but most importantly after and beyond ‘humanism’. If the anthropic is often absent, if not exiled, from their works, what remains of the human in Beckett’s and Celan’s writings? What is the purpose of writing after and ‘under the sign’ of Auschwitz? What remains of literature and poetry? Is it still possible to give form to an ethic of literature after "das, was war" (Celan) and World War 2?

For many European Jewish thinkers, writers, and artists, the question "What Remains?" represented not only a red thread throughout their intellectual adventures. Far before and beyond the turning point of 1945, such an issue rather embodied an inexhaustible confrontation with the question of tradition and transmission in terms of a cultural and transcultural survival problem. Particularly between 19th and 20th Century, a new generation of “Jewish sons” experienced, through the emancipation process, a crisis that would have had deep influences on the transformation of Judaism facing the challenge of modernity as well as the after-war years. To this generation of “Jewish sons” belonged Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Gershom Scholem (1897-1982). 

The paper sketches my on-going Ph.D. research on “the work of the Negative” (le travail du négatif, André Green) in the writings of Kafka and Scholem. In my contribution, I will especially expose reflections regarding the renewal of Judaism before and after War World II, focusing on new construction dynamics of subjective and collective narratives. Furthermore, I will contextualize and examine the intellectual and cultural importance of Kafka’s and Scholem’s writings in the frame of the project of a Jewish territorial nation in Palestine.

Conference for The Utopian Studies Society
500 Years of Utopias: Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia, Lisbon, 5-9 July 2016 
Closed Panel together with Sara Di Alessandro, Università degli Studi di Milano and Elena Putignano, Università degli Studi di Milano

Title of the Panel: Hunger Wor(l)ds (on Franz Kafka, Johannes I. Auerbach and Knut Hamsun)

Chair: Francesco Adriano Clerici (Freie Universität Berlin)

Keywords: Franz Kafka; Johannes Ilmari Auerbach; 20th Century Judaism; work of the Negative; utopian and dystopian writing; irony and sarcasm.

The present paper introduces a so far never attempted comparative analysis between two short-proses by German speaking Jewish authors, i.e. Franz Kafka’s "Ein Hüngerkünstler" ("An Hunger Artist", 1922) and the almost unknown Johannes Ilmari Auerbach’s "Der Selbstmörderwettbewerb" ("The Suicide Competition", 1921, then republished in 1927). 
The former one, Kafka’s "Ein Hüngerkünstler", first published in the magazine "Die Neue Rundschau" and then included in the homonymous post-mortem collection in 1924, belongs to one of the most important proses of the late work of the author. The latter, is one of the few literary testimony of the figurative and plastic artist Johannes Ilmari Auerbach. Unpublished and untranslated in many European countries, this short-prose anticipates peculiar elements of the great 20th Century dystopic narrations. 
In Auerbach’s short-prose, we can read of the sadistic competition of 12 suicides, struggling for the “monumentalization” of their own death in front of audience, cameras and judges. On the other hand, in Kafka’s "Ein Hungerkünstler", a solitary artist, once popular and admired, wrestles against a persecuting adversary – that seems to be hunger itself – thus investigating the possibilities of the body, of representation of absence, and beyond.
Moving from a stylistic and linguistic analysis of the two texts, I will focus on the representational strategies of utopia, dystopia, hunger, humour and sarcasm, and, nevertheless, of the relationship between body, writing and the process of creative sublimation. I will claim that the creative efforts proposed by the two authors, although different in many aspects, can be analysed as critical questioning of utopia and of the limit of representation in literature.

Incontro con uno dei massimi poeti tedeschi contemporanei, il cui impegno per la libera circolazione dei saperi e per l’abolizione di tutti i muri di pietra, di filo spinato e nella mente è testimoniato dalla produzione poetica e saggistica che ne fa, a tutti gli effetti, un cittadino dell’Europa unita che si apre al mondo.

Con l’occasione la Città di Milano conferirà al poeta un riconoscimento per la forza performativa di una parola capace di superare pregiudizi e steccati nell’ascolto di un’alterità presente e a venire.

30 Jahre nach dem Mauerfall wird der Dichter Durs Grünbein eine Lesung in Aula Magna von Universitä degli Studi di Milano halten, wobei die Gemeinde ihm wegen seines poetischen, künstlerischen und gesellschaftlichen Engagements gegen alle Mauern ein Pergament der Città di Milano als Auszeichnung und Anerkennung verleihen wird.

Rosalba Maletta und die Recherchegruppe "Utopie in Dialogo":
"Tendenzen der deutschsprachigen Germanistik in Dialog mit den Utopien unseres Digitalen Zeitalters"

Am Dienstag, dem 2. April 2019, um 11.30 Uhr - SALA MALLIANI via Festa del Perdono 3 - wird Prof. Dr. Matthias N. Lorenz, Professor für Neuere Deutsche Literatur an den Universitäten in Bern und Hamburg sowie Extraordinary Professor an Stellenbosch University (Sudafrika) anhand von poetologischen und kulturwissenschaftlichen Materialien auf den „Fall“ Christian Kracht eingehen, der die deutsche Gesellschaft und Kulturindustrie im letzten Jahrzehnt am anschaulisten gekennzeichnet hat.

Il presente lavoro riflette sul concetto di transgenerazionale attraverso l’analisi di alcuni testi di Osip Mandel’štam (1891-1938), Paul Celan (1920-1970) e Durs Grünbein (1962). Il proposito è di mostrare come l’«inconscio testuale» (André Green) di questi autori sia pervaso da un lavoro attorno alle dinamiche di trasmissione: la poesia diviene perciò spazio di preservazione di un’assenza che costituisce una fonte di risignificazione del possibile incontro tra generazioni distanti nel tempo e nello spazio.

Prendendo le mosse da una analisi di Alpine Architektur (1919) di Bruno Taut (1880, Königsberg – 1938, Istanbul) e di alcune poesie dalla raccolta Schneepart (pubblicata postuma nel 1971) di Paul Celan (1920, Czernowitz – 1970, Parigi) questo contri-buto propone di riflettere sul processo di sublimazione e sul ruolo dell’irrappresen-tabile quale residuo insolubile e continuamente slegato del rappresentare. Residuo irrappresentabile della rappresentazione che viene qui letto non tanto nel senso di una “ineffabilità”, bensì quale elemento per pensare quanto non si lascia ridurre a una dimensione architettonica e urbana tangibile, a una politica memoriale o, anco-ra, a una cristallizzazione monumentale della città. È in tal senso il concetto stesso di sublimazione a inquadrare, al centro della mia indagine, tanto l’inconscio, quanto il piano del “sociale”, associandoli in una moltitudine di registri. Taut e Celan, un architetto e un poeta le opere dei quali risultano, a prima vista, assai distanti tra loro, rivelano, a un esame più attento, non solo un’assonanza di elementi e stilemi: esse compongono uno spazio di riflessione attorno al rapporto tra cultura e distruzione – le devastazioni della Prima guerra mondiale per Taut e lo sterminio degli ebrei in Europa per Celan. Proprio questi cortocircuiti tra modi della rappresentazione, tempi e spazi decantati attraverso il processo creativo, permettono di focalizzare la nostra attenzione sulla questione della pulsione di morte insita nella civiltà e nel suo emergere nei glaciali paesaggi urbani delle loro opere.

Il presente lavoro riflette sul concetto di transgenerazionale attraverso l'analisi di alcuni testi di Osip Mandel'štam (1891-1938), Paul Celan (1920-1970) e Durs Grünbein (1962). Il proposito è di mostrare come l'«inconscio testuale» (André Green) di questi autori sia pervaso da un lavoro attorno alle dinamiche di trasmissione: la poesia diviene perciò spazio di preservazione di un'assenza che costituisce una fonte di risignificazione del possibile incontro tra generazioni distanti nel tempo e nello spazio.

The paper investigates from a literary perspective the question of the missed encounter’ between two crucial authors of 20th century: Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan. Although both living in Paris for the most part of their adult life, sharing acquaintances and friendships, Beckett and Celan never met in person. A last chance presented in March 1970, as the poet and translator Franz Wurm, a mutual friend, invited Celan to come along and meet Beckett. The meeting never took place; few weeks thereafter, Celan drowned unobserved in the Seine. In this paper, I propose a retrospective reading of the ‘missed’, or ‘failed’ encounter between Beckett and Celan within a psychoanalytic framework. I will analyse it as a negative event, re-elaborating thus an expression used by André Green in his interpretation of Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle (1903). What Green calls negative event does not provide a patho-biographical category. On the contrary, it bridges the reverberations of the psychic work on absence with the creative process of writing and the dynamics of sublimation. Shifting the attention from the bare biographical data to the textual dimension of such ‘missed encounter’, I aim to show how the writings of the two authors may be read as an articulation of an après-coup of a non-encounter which, instead of taking place in ‘real life’, opens new margins of representation of an alterity within the ‘life of writing’. As such, writing becomes—between poetry and psychoanalysis—that ‘thirdness’ harbouring the very possibility of an encounter beyond phenomenological categories, bearing testimony for an unknown transgenerational reader.

The paper explores the question of utopia in the work of Peter Sloterdijk from a narratological and meta-poetic perspective. The analysis focuses on a relatively new text by the German thinker, published in 2018 as postface to the German edition of Thomas More’s Utopia, translated from the original Latin by Jacques Laager. In the paper I will present the postface contextualizing it in the complexity of Sloterdijk’s work. Furthermore, I will examine some of its thematical and stylistic features which allow to disclose the deep interplay between storytelling, space, and writing in the construction processes of the concepts of subjectivity, otherness, and community in Sloterdijk. Such an interplay becomes in such way a key in order to read the space of writing as a place of meta-reflection through which the author, by rethinking and rewriting the (hi)story of mankind from different conceptual prisms, rethinks and rereads also the peregrination of a new philosophical subject in the landscape of writing.

The question of a Jewish utopia forms a complex and ambivalent matrix. In the first half of the 20th century, as Europe was preparing the most terrifying of all “utopias” – a non-lieu where the other is not only exiled, but also annihilated – two very different authors wrote works which allow now a new, retrospective study of the question of utopia. Analysing Franz Kafka’s An Hunger Artist and Johannes Ilmari Auerbach’s The Suicide Competition, this paper investigates the question of utopia from the cultural context of European German speaking Jewry.
Exploring the representational strategies that Kafka and Auerbach develop in their writing, this contribution highlights how the poetic (H. Meschonnic) articulated by the two authors offers a new critical approach to reconsider the complex question of utopia from the perspective of its failure. The failure of utopia becomes for Kafka and Auerbach the starting point of a deflection from utopia itself, towards something which goes beyond it: the work of sublimation. Kafka and Auerbach, I suggest, were thus able to translate by means of writing
that evenement négatif that, according to André Green, does make “nothing” happen in real life, yet makes of that “nothing” the indefinitely repeated event of the life of writing.

Threshold of Voices and the “Incréable”. The Work of the Negative in Kafka and Beckett. 

The paper proposes a comparative analysis of the question of limit in its connections with the work of the Negative (Le Travail du négatif, A. Green) in two great proses of the 20th Century: Samuel Beckett’s Company (1980) and Franz Kafka’s Der Bau (The Burrow, 1923/24). The contribution articulates in two main moments: within the specificity of a psychoanalytical approach, I reconsider the problem of the Work of the Negative in literature, discussing how, in Kafka’s and Beckett’s works, the Negative represents a radical alterity to a philosophical perspective. In a second moment of the paper, I analyse the complexity of the representational strategy of the limit in Kafka’s and Beckett’s writings, investigating thus the question of subjectivity and the relationship with an Otherness through the writing, the question of memory, its construction processes by means of writing, the work of mourning, and the development of poetics of irreducibility and unrepresentability towards an ethics of literature.

The paper analyses Kafka’s fragment as one of the first trace of the author’s creative journey. I will read Man darf nicht sagen in the complexity of Kafka’s literary work, investigating the recurrence of stylistic features such as negation, irony, uses of subjunctive and indicative verbal moods, as well as the semantic nuances of the German modal verb dürfen. Nevertheless, I won’t reduce such stylistic peculiarities to a mere linguistic exercise. I argue that Franz Kafka inscribes in Man darf nicht sagen the seeds, the signals of a never ending subjective confrontation with the question of transmission, memory, subjectivity, and testimony in name of an Otherness: in a word, with the question of the Law.

Utopia come possibilità di vita della specie umana consociata ma pure utopia come inganno e smentita di questa scelta obbligata. Umorismo come dispositivo atto a frenare le derive totalizzanti e polarizzate di un pensare tendente all’auto-idealizzazione. Utopia e umorismo quali ingredienti indispensabili del poetico e della letteratura per superare la miseria neotenica degli inizi senza fughe nel narcisismo di morte.
Il volume offre al lettore una panoramica su splendori e miserie di quell’utopia che è la condizione umana, temperata dall’umorismo che la rende commedia.