Paul Celan at 100

Snow.

'The issue for me has always been that I can feel it.'

'Surely this is at the heart of the mock confession—the social failure of catharsis in a society in which mercy has been replaced by the bureaucracy of punishment.'

'… the cynic believes he will at least escape being disappointed by the world, although the misery and poison he carries around with him can make one wonder how effective an escape it really is.'

'… life, the inconnectable.'

'Human rights will not make us bless capitalism. A great deal of innocence or cunning is needed by a philosophy of communication that claims to restore the society of friends, or even of wise men, by forming a universal opinion as 'consensus' able to moralize nations, States, and the market. Human rights say nothing about the immanent modes of existence of people provided with rights. Nor is it only in the extreme situations described by Primo Levi that we experience the shame of being human. We also experience it in insignificant conditions, before the meanness and vulgarity of existence that haunts democracies, before the propagation of these modes of existence and of thought-for-the-market, and before the values, ideals, and opinions of our time. The ignominy of the possibilities of life that we are offered appears from within. We do not feel ourselves outside of our time but continue to undergo shameful compromises with it. This feeling of shame is one of philosophy's most powerful motifs. We are not responsible for the victims but responsible before them. And there is no way to escape the ignoble but to play the part of the animal (to growl, burrow, snigger, distort ourselves): thought itself is sometimes closer to an animal that dies than to a living, even democratic, human being.'

'The fact that we are now in an ironic phase of literature largely accounts for the popularity of the detective story, the formula of how a man-hunter locates a pharmakos and gets rid of him.'

'J'envoie quelqu'un faire des courses. Je lui donne une feuille de papier où se trouvent inscrit les signes « cinq pommes rouges ». Il porte cette feuille au marchand.…'