"Into without image": Paul Celan reading the moving image

McGuinn, Jacob (2021) "Into without image": Paul Celan reading the moving image. MLN, 136 (5). pp. 1237-1260. ISSN 1080-6598

Abstract

Paul Celan’s poetry from the late-1960s writes through scenes and images of political protest, but centers on the insurgent way such politics resist articulating imagery. Celan’s poetic image of politics is, paradoxically, an insurgent movement ‘without image’. In order to identify this movement of images through his poetry, this essay reads Celan inside (and outside) the cinema, plotting his poetics of imagery against developments in theories of the moving image that similarly picture cinema as an apparatus for organizing images’ insurgency. I argue that, in parallel to those theories, Celan stages the legitimizing spaces of images’ movement in poetic space. Reading Celan through a Kantian aesthetics of imagery, and through the mechanics of reading, the essay both identifies the centrality of a space ‘without image’ to Celan’s imaginary of sites of protest, and the politics of insurgency in the moving image.

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Official URL:	https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2021.0087
Item Type:	Article
Disciplines:	Humanities > English
Depositing User:	Jacob Mcguinn
Date Deposited:	02 Oct 2023 13:51
Last Modified:	17 Apr 2024 16:15
URI:	https://nul.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/1165

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