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Affect and the Organs in the Anatomical Poems of Paul Celan: Encountering Medical Discourse

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New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies

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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.

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Acknowledgments

Research for this paper is indebted to the postdoctoral fellowship I was awarded by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Υποτροφία Αριστείας 2014), under the guidance of Professor Yiannis Stavrakakis. I am mostly grateful to Dr. Michalis Kardamitsis for sharing his expertise in Paul Celan’s poetry with me.

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  1. Open University of Cyprus, Latsia, Cyprus

    Vasiliki Dimoula

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  1. Vasiliki Dimoula
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Correspondence to Vasiliki Dimoula .

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  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA

    Stephanie M. Hilger

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Dimoula, V. (2017). Affect and the Organs in the Anatomical Poems of Paul Celan: Encountering Medical Discourse. In: Hilger, S. (eds) New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51988-7_8

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