The doubling of sound: radical address in Paul Celan and Jean-Luc Nancy

This article studies the radicalisation of address as a relational force in the work of Paul Celan and Jean-Luc Nancy. It simultaneously analyses and revalues the place literature holds in Nancy’s political ontology, and argues that Celan defines the poetic event around sending and reception, but also questions legibility. The article claims that, for both writers, the only way to expose the otherness of being is through a type of communication that privileges the very movement of sending, and the resonance of voice and sound, over the construction and transmission of a message. At the end, the article includes a close reading of Celan’s poem ‘Line the Wordcaves’.