statt aller / Ruhe’: Divine Dispossession in Celan’s Critique of Eckhart

Paul Celan’s poem “Wirk nicht voraus” (“Work Not Ahead”) silently exploits the writings of the late-medieval mystic Meister Eckhart to show, against Eckhart, that even the divine needs the other in order to be what it is. Tracing the poem’s allusions and connections not just to Eckhart, but to the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, to philosophers such as Plato, Augustine, and Heidegger, and to the Lurianic Kabbalah, I argue that “Wirk nicht voraus” depicts the divinity’s dawning recognition of its need for the other and its sudden decision to compromise itself, or rather its putative self, for the sake of the other. The poem thereby provides an extreme, perhaps the most extreme, example for ethical imitation, not exactly of Christ in extremis, nor even of the Father, but of what Eckhart calls the Godhead beyond the Trinity. I conclude with some reflections on the significance of “Wirk nicht voraus” for speculative philosophy and for ethics today.