Language as Remnant: Survival, Translation and the Poetry of Paul Celan

This paper is an attempt to explore the relation between poetry and survival taking as a point of focus the poetry of the post-war European poet Paul Celan. By drawing attention to the French thinker Jacques Derrida's several influential studies of Celan's poetry on the problems of "witnessing", "testimony" and the "idiomatic" this paper finally examines the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben's notion of the "remnant" to understand a poetics of survival.