Episode 16: Towards Another: Na’ama Rokem on Hannah Arendt and Paul Celan
Description
In episode 16, I talk with literary scholar Na’ama Rokem about her work-in-progress, Dispatches in Translation: A German-Hebrew Epistolary Network, which studies the correspondences between mid-century Jewish intellectuals writing in and between German and Hebrew. The project focuses on ambivalences and debates surrounding Zionism from the 1930s through the early 70’s. We discuss and read from Hannah Arendt’s correspondences with Gershom Scholem and James Baldwin, and Paul Celan’s exchange with Yehuda Amichai. We get into two of Celan’s poems, “Discus” and “Mandorla,” as we think about the ethics of orienting “towards another,” of dwelling in the dynamic between presence and absence, or between something-ness and nothingness.
Discus,
starred with premonitions,
throw yourself
out of yourself.
- Paul Celan, trans. Washburn & Guillemin
Texts and events mentioned and discussed
The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, edited by Marie Luise Knott, translated by Anthony David
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, On Revolution
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism
James Baldwin, Letter from a Region in my Mind
Paul Celan, “Mandorla” and “Discus” in Breathturn Into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Pierre Joris
Paul Celan, “Discus” in Last Poems: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin
Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, translated by Philip Boehm
David D. Kim: Arendt’s Solidarity: Antisemitism and Racism in the Atlantic World
Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Sean Hand
Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”
United States
