Graduate Colloquium Series: Alexander Crist (PHIL) – 3/23/2021
"Paul Celan and the Possibilities of Interpretation in Carnal Hermeneutics: Pneuma, Handwerk, and ‘Seelenblind’”
Meeting ID: 914 3700 4440
Password: Crist
“Paul Celan and the Possibilities of Interpretation in Carnal Hermeneutics: Pneuma, Handwerk, and ‘Seelenblind’”
Zoom Meeting information:
Meeting ID: 914 3700 4440
Password: Crist
https://tamu.zoom.us/j/91437004440?pwd=QVdmYlZ6UVdHMzBXdnJKeDBmb2RpZz09
Alexander Crist
Ph.D. candidate| Department of Philosophy, 2020-2021 Glasscock Graduate Research Fellow
Abstract: This paper emerges out of dissertation research conducted in the summer of 2019 at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, Germany. While much of the material in this paper will be incorporated into a later chapter of my dissertation, the paper as it stands is currently being revised to submit for review/publication as a journal article. Here, Crist turns to the works of Paul Celan in order to further a dialogue between the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and a ‘carnal hermeneutics,’ introduced in 2015 by Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor. Traditionally, hermeneutics following Hans-Georg Gadamer has focused on language or ‘linguisticality’ as the condition for the possibility of interpretation, one that has often neglected the body, or embodiment, as interpretive. A carnal hermeneutics, however, explores the possibility of the body as an originary site of interpretation. Crist claims that Celan’s comments on poetry as ‘pneumatic’ and as Handwerk (craft) call for an embodied interpretation that goes beyond, or deeper than language itself. However, in reading his late poem, “Seelenblind,” Crist claims that Celan likewise points to the body as a site of interpretive failure.
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