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August 25, 2005
In romanticism and modernism there is an undercurrent that tries to reach toward the "unthought," or the "inexpressible." This kind of thinking presupposes that language is an imperfect tool; that our received vocabularies and categories are inadequate; that there is an experienced gap between the categories supplied by language and felt reality; and that the inadequacy of our categories need to be signaled even as we use the words we have inherited.
A Celan poem expresses this:
"Should
should a man
should a man come into the world, today, with
the shining beard of the
patriarchs: he could,
if he spoke of this
time, he
could
only babble and babble
over, over
againagain"
(Trans: Michael Hamburger)
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