Affect and the organs in the anatomical poems of paul celan: Encountering medical discourse

Abstract

This chapter explores issues of affect and subjectivity in neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and poetry, with special focus on the poetry of Paul Celan. Celan’s poetry, and mainly his later work, explicitly draws on the discourse of anatomy and neurology. In his 1968 collection Fadensonnen (Threadsuns), the vocabulary of anatomy and neurology is of central importance; references to the nervous system and parts of the brain are an essential part of his poetic exploration of art and language. However, Celan not only refers to the organs of the body in ways that transcend their mere physiological or neurophysiological dimension, but he also invents organs that do not exist on any biophysiological map. This poetic anatomy inverts or contradicts the materialist implications of medical thinking, on which Celan nevertheless draws, and opens up new possibilities for appreciating his notion of the “encounter” in corporeal terms that transcend the contingencies of the somatic.