Schibboleth

Derrida’s study of Celan analyzes shibboleth through the figures of date and circumcision. Celan’s poetic statement in The Meridian offers hospitality to this approach: the poem inscribes and seeks to remain mindful of its date. Derrida elicits the aporia that a date must efface itself, as singular event, to become legible, and notes that in Celan, the poem’s orientation toward an other may be thought as the future anteriority of date. The date can also be effaced or counterfeited, as Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! dramatizes by phantasmatically effacing the Haitian Revolution as part of its exploration of the threat and promise of the potential illegibility of the shibboleth of race. In Celan, however, shibboleth names the poem’s holding itself open to repetition and to otherness, the otherness of language(s).