Gadamer on Celan: Who Am I and Who Are You? and Other Essays (SUNY (SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy) [Paperback]

Hans-Georg Gadamer (Author), Richard Heinemann (Translator), Bruce Krajewski (Translator), Gerald L. Bruns (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy | Publication Date: February 20, 1997

Gadamer on Celan makes all of Hans-Georg Gadamer's published writings on Paul Celan's poetry available in English for the first time. Gadamer's commentaries on Celan's work are explicitly meant for a general audience, and they are further testimony to Celan's growing importance in world literature since the Second World War. Celan's poetry has attracted the attention of many well-known figures, including Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jabe's, Otto Poggeler, and George Steiner. As Steiner has said, "It will take a long time for our sensibilities to apprehend poetry of these dimensions and this radicality". Gadamer's commentaries will help readers to listen to Celan's poetry, and to become acquainted with his only book-length commentary on a poet, using the best example of Gadamer's thinking on the relationship of philosophy and poetry. This book also contains a translation of Who Am I and Who Are You? the centerpiece of Gadamer's most important philosophical project since the publication of Truth and Method (1960). Who Am I and Who Are You? demonstrates Gadamer's continual engagement with the key figures of twentieth-century thought, and his responsiveness to the challenges of modernist art and its various affronts to hermeneutics.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Hans-Georg Gadamer is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Heidelberg. Richard Heinemann received his PH. D. in German Studies and Social Thought from the University of Chicago, and is a freelance translator. Bruce Krajewski is Associate Professor of English and Film at Laurentian University. Author of a number of books on philosophical hermeneutics including Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, Gerald L. Bruns is William and Hazel White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

Product Details

• Paperback: 206 pages
• Publisher: State University of New York Press (February 20, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791432300
• ISBN-13: 978-0791432303
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,424,558 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Academic hubris has its way with a noble poet, September 23, 2004

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Campbell Roark "tri-zeta" (from under the floorboards and through the woods...) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gadamer on Celan: Who Am I and Who Are You? and Other Essays (SUNY (SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy) (Paperback)

Either you get Gadamer or you don't. Either you understand/respect/follow him out of the Heideggerian 'Clearing' or you start hacking therough the dense and tangled undergrowth and make your own path. I've never felt much affinity for his magnum opus, 'Truth and Method,' but then, all of Heidegger's belabored philosophical children leave me a tad cold... Hannah, Karl, Hans... The only one I felt had something new to say was Levinas. So let's just say that, 'ideologically' I'm not an enemy- just a contender.

You buy this- you get jargon juggling. Lots of jargon juggling. Little substance. I wonder what Celan would have made of this, as he too was very influenced by H's opus, Being and Time, he kept an annotated copy with him. This 'engagement,' as it is described, is another shred of soulless, brittle, and all-too obscurantist work that drains the lifeblood of Celan, page by page. The essay, "Who Am I and Who Are You?" Didn't seem to get anywhere on that topic. Endlessly tangential. Painfully dry.

It's strikes me as odd that Celan seemd able to draw upon Heidegger more deeply and interestingly than Lowith, Gadamer, et al... Most academic reformulation, elaborations of the H-ian legacy come off as tendentious posturing- weilding academic lingo as a blunt plank with which one beats one's readers into unconsciousness.

Beware. Get the Felstiner work, if anything. Or better yet... Let Celan speak for himself.