Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Celan: testimonies of the disaster

Abstract

This paper presents the productivity of the notion of writing of the disaster - from the perspective of Maurice Blanchot (loss of the star) - for reading the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Celan. Initially, we demonstrate how Mallarmé radically differentiates a text that informs about everyday events at a speed that can’t be grasped (the newspaper), and a text that resists to take a closed form, proposing (itself to) the cadence of the look and reading, constellating the signs - disastrating them, causing the text itself to collide permanently. That is a text that presents itself as a disaster: poetry. Then, it starts from a text by Shoshana Felman to think about the testimonial dimension of Mallarmé and Celan's poetry, inseparable from the “breaking of a world”.