Catastrophic Belatedness (Celan, Darwish, Derrida)

Peter Makhlouf's (postdoctoral fellow at University of Notre Dame) offers a lyricological reflection on how the poem as such possesses a contemporaneity each time we, as readers, engage with it, actualize its demands in the present, and answer its call to refuse the catastrophic nature of temporality: the division of exterminative violence into before/during/after that renders that violence a fait accompli immune from contest.