Collapsing the Absolute: Celan, Hegel, and the Philosophy of German Romanticism

Locating early Celan within the concept of "Romantic absolute," this essay examines how Celan has problematically yet interestingly forced what German Romantics conceive as "the unconditioned" or "the absolute" into the process of "deabsolutization." I will engage the Hegelian moment or "speculative thinking" in Celan's early works to see how the absolutized concept has been contorted, set into self-contradiction and hence "deconstructed" in the poetic process. Celan' s efforts at piercing and rewriting some of the major concepts of German Romanticism and Idealism reveal his deep concern with the epistemological assumptions of the dialectical/Hegelian understanding of the Concept. The second part of this essay unfolds Celan's fiercely concealed strife with the idea of "infinity." Contra Kantianism, in Hegelian philosophy the finite and the infinite are caught in the process .. of eternal becoming or what Hegel calls mutual "transition" (Ubergang). The foaming of the absolute spirit is activated by nothing else but the self-transcendence of finitude. Celan is similarly drawn to the infinite's digesting or annihilation of the finite and the "foaming-up" (schaumen) of the finite towards infinity. The theoretical import of early Celan's "inverted world," as will be shown in this essay, consists in his poetic critique of the ultimate ground of these concepts and their various embodiments.