In his “Letter on Humanism,” Martin Heidegger conveys the importance he attributes to poetry when he states: “Language is the house of being” (“Letter” 239). In response to his early Jesuit education, he developed a secular alternative to theology with his existential phenomenology. Theology, poetry, and phenomenology share the basic concern of explaining the foundations of being. For Heidegger, ownership characterizes being in a fundamental way; in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), he establishes the “Ereignis” (“event of appropriation”) as the foundation of being. Ownership lies at the core of being in his thinking following Being and Time. Yet his philosophy ignores the material circumstances of ownership. By way of a materialist critique of Heidegger’s Idealist phenomenology, I expose how property-relations are encoded in the modern poetry and philosophy of dwelling with the question: who owns the house of being? The answer lies in “self-possession,” which represents historical subjectivity as the struggle for the means of production. Paul Celan, T. S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Valéry are all poets who address the relationship between being and ownership in expressing what Marx and Engels call the “language of real life” in The German Ideology (26). In 1927, Eliot converted to Anglicanism and found solace in the realm of faith; by opting for the theology of dispossession, he surrendered his historical subjectivity. Rilke thought that he could find refuge from the marketplace in aesthetic beauty and pure philosophy but eventually disabused himself of his illusion. Similarly, Valéry sought refuge in the space of thought; basing reality in the mind, he forsook the social realm as the site of contestation for gaining ownership over being. As a poet who distinguished himself from the Idealism of his predecessors, Celan developed a structure of dialogue based upon shared exchange on common ground. A materialist approach to the poetry and philosophy of dwelling exposes property-relations as the foundation of the house of being.

In his “Letter on Humanism,” Martin Heidegger conveys the importance he attributes to poetry when he states: “Language is the house of being” (“Letter” 239). In response to his early Jesuit education, he developed a secular alternative to theology with his existential phenomenology. Theology, poetry, and phenomenology share the basic concern of explaining the foundations of being. For Heidegger, ownership characterizes being in a fundamental way; in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), he establishes the “Ereignis” (“event of appropriation”) as the foundation of being. Ownership lies at the core of being in his thinking following Being and Time. Yet his philosophy ignores the material circumstances of ownership. By way of a materialist critique of Heidegger’s Idealist phenomenology, I expose how property-relations are encoded in the modern poetry and philosophy of dwelling with the question: who owns the house of being? The answer lies in “self-possession,” which represents historical subjectivity as the struggle for the means of production. Paul Celan, T. S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Valéry are all poets who address the relationship between being and ownership in expressing what Marx and Engels call the “language of real life” in The German Ideology (26). In 1927, Eliot converted to Anglicanism and found solace in the realm of faith; by opting for the theology of dispossession, he surrendered his historical subjectivity. Rilke thought that he could find refuge from the marketplace in aesthetic beauty and pure philosophy but eventually disabused himself of his illusion. Similarly, Valéry sought refuge in the space of thought; basing reality in the mind, he forsook the social realm as the site of contestation for gaining ownership over being. As a poet who distinguished himself from the Idealism of his predecessors, Celan developed a structure of dialogue based upon shared exchange on common ground. A materialist approach to the poetry and philosophy of dwelling exposes property-relations as the foundation of the house of being.

xi, 182 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation develops an interpretation of Martin Heidegger's philosophical project in On the Way to Language and some of his earlier works that pave the way for this text and offers criticism of Heidegger's project in light of this interpretation. On the Way to Language stands apart from most twentieth century philosophy in arguing that, although human beings are within language in one sense, our relationship to language is nevertheless an estranged one. Heidegger often describes this condition as "lacking the word for the word." Because we are constantly speaking, we rarely if ever stop to wonder about the nature of language itself. Heidegger calls this our "entanglement" within language, a concept rooted in Being and Time 's exposition of the human being's thrownness. Read in terms of language, thrownness describes how we inherit concepts and find ourselves entangled in words prior to our reflection upon them. Heidegger presents what motivates us to bring the word to word in two ways. First, this need is rooted in the human being's fundamental structure of thrownness. Second, the need makes itself manifest through translation. My reading expands upon these two explanations of how we come to experience this entanglement, arguing that everyday communication regularly offers such experiences and demands that we modify, therefore temporarily distancing ourselves from, given language inheritances. The dissertation employs three other theorists, Roman Jakobson, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva, to flesh out how this need naturally arises in ordinary language development. Though he underestimates the extent to which everyday communicative situations require ongoing transformations of ordinary language, Heidegger nevertheless considers social encounters to be an important vehicle for language transformation. In this way, the goal of bringing our thrownness into language to word is not to disentangle ourselves from social relations, as some commentators have suggested. The last chapter shows how Paul Celan's poetics, in its inheritance of Heidegger's project, expands upon the role of social relations in language entanglement. / Committee in charge: Scott Pratt, Co-Chairperson, Philosophy; John Lysaker, Co-Chairperson, Philosophy; Beata Stawarska, Member, Philosophy; Peter Warnek, Member, Philosophy; Jeffrey Librett, Outside Member, German and Scandinavian

Submitted by Fabiano Vassallo (fabianovassallo2127@gmail.com) on 2017-05-10T17:37:19Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Nó de ar - Paul Celan leituras destinos. Tese de Thiago Ponce de Moraes.pdf: 1762465 bytes, checksum: c9f55df1306e9f90183ab871985d5529 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Josimara Dias Brumatti (bcgdigital@ndc.uff.br) on 2017-05-15T15:36:16Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Nó de ar - Paul Celan leituras destinos. Tese de Thiago Ponce de Moraes.pdf: 1762465 bytes, checksum: c9f55df1306e9f90183ab871985d5529 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-15T15:36:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Nó de ar - Paul Celan leituras destinos. Tese de Thiago Ponce de Moraes.pdf: 1762465 bytes, checksum: c9f55df1306e9f90183ab871985d5529 (MD5) / A presente tese aborda abrangentemente a obra poética e em prosa do poeta romeno Paul Celan, tendo como objetivo pensá-la a partir de uma reflexão sobre escrita e leitura, que acaba por se encaminhar para uma reflexão mais ampla sobre a linguagem. Nesse sentido, a própria forma de escrita deste trabalho – que parte da leitura de discursos e de textos em prosa de Celan, bem como da leitura de seus poemas – é um problema fundamental para a tese. Tal problema se constitui, em última análise, como interrogação metodológica fundadora do modo vacilante e indecidível pelo qual a leitura se desempenha ante as palavras do poeta. Dividida em duas partes principais – e, posteriormente, repartida outras várias vezes: como meridianos –, a tese ambiciona provocar as instâncias estáveis de qualquer escrita que se proponha a dialogar com poemas. Sendo assim, a tese busca a todo tempo pensar a possibilidade de relação com o outro – sentido e destino da arte –, relação tão indissociável quanto a de escrita e de leitura, repensando o próprio papel da escrita que se queira crítica / This thesis comprehensively approaches the poetry and prose works of the Romanian poet Paul Celan, aiming to think about them from a reflection on writing and reading, which ultimately moves toward a broader reflection on language. In this sense, the very form of writing of this work – that departs from the reading of Celan’s speeches and prose, as well as of his poems – is a fundamental problem for the thesis. This problem is, at last, a methodological questioning that founds the faltering and undecidable way through which the reading performs before the poet’s words. Divided into two main parts – and subsequently distributed other several times: as meridians – the thesis aims to provoke the stable instances of any writing that proposes to establish a dialogue with poems. Thus, the thesis intends to think thouroughly the possibility of relation with the other – art’s way and destiny –, a relation that is as inseparable as the one concerning writing and reading, at the same time rethinking the very role of a writing that longs to be critic

This dissertation examines the writings of three seminal twentieth century thinkers, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Jacques Derrida, through the lens of their encounter with the post-Shoah poetry of Paul Celan. These thinkers are associated with influential, competing movements in twentieth century literary theory: philosophical hermeneutics, critical theory, and deconstruction. The three philosophers have disparate biographies and political orientations, yet each championed the ambiguity of literary language as a bulwark against the problematic, even violent, certainties of quotidian language. Additionally, each of them regarded Celan as an exemplar of a salutary literary ambivalence. This project clarifies how the critics’ approaches to literature, honed through consideration of a survivor-poet, represent an attempt to come to terms with the catastrophic violence of the Holocaust. While perceptive in their readings of Celan’s poetry, each sought to secure trans-historical insights into the nature of human language, a task that risks effacing the ‘real’ historical and experiential specificity of Celan’s writing. Celan readings are thus a case study for understanding philosophical contemporaries’ treatment of literary texts and their relationship to contemporaneous history. By looking at these varied theorists in tandem and by showing how Celan’s poetry both informs and resists their ideas, this dissertation cultivates a method of reading that is adaptable and not beholden to one tradition. Treating what the thinkers neglect, new readings emerge that explore Celan’s allusions to the Hebrew Bible, Jewish ritual, and antisemitism. Celan’s poetry animates multiple, conflicting interpretive traditions, yet questions, in its testimonial character, the adequacy of a theoretical approach to literature.