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).

שיבולת‎

In Judges 12, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. The text itself has to substitute a different Hebrew letter, the samekh, in order to convey the point of the story. The episode is preceded by the judge Jephthah’s sacrifice of his own daughter, as a result of a rash vow to God. These and other aspects of the text suggest that the shibboleth story points to an autoimmune disorder afflicting both text and social text, both patriarchal speech acts and their linguistic medium.

S(c)hibboleth

Language, Celan says, is the only thing that remains un-lost (unverloren) in the wake of the Holocaust. Celan opens language to this un, rendering as poetic thought what Derrida calls the monolingualism of the other. Shibboleth is the mark of the (m)other-tongue-speaker that is the other of and in language. It is the mark of an otherness that, as a close reading of the Tower of Babel story suggests, inheres in language even before the Lord descends to mix it. The Pentecost story in Acts provides a similar lesson: the New Testament story that redeems Babel introduces another kind of confusion. Poetry bears witness to the survival of language in withdrawing into its secret, speaking of, to, and from the dead, as an early draft of Celan’s “Schibboleth” affirms.

Schibboleth

The word shibboleth appears in two poems of Celan’s: “Schibboleth” and “In eins.” Both poems seem to bring this word close to the semantic field of slogan, refusing it the meaning of test-word as phoneme, though a close reading of “In eins” reveals that the poem multiplies possible referents for this word within the poem, through and as multiple citations in multiple languages. The poem addresses itself to and declares itself for an international socialism, yet also holds itself open to a shibboleth-to-come. Shibboleth would be this exposed word, the breath-turn or Atemwende evoked in Celan’s Meridian, an in-eins (in-one) irreducible to identity.

Shibboleth

In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign; it has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The word thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. It is therefore useful to examine closely the inherited meaning of shibboleth as test-word. A relatively rare word, it figures powerfully at a crucial moment in William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! and above all in poems by Paul Celan and in Jacques Derrida’s study of Celan. Subsequent chapters will read these texts carefully, together with the Biblical narrative.

S(h)ibboleth

The shibboleth test supplements ordinary discourse where the difference between self and other threatens to become illegible. It is performative in the radical sense of producing the difference between friend and enemy that opens the space of politics in Carl Schmitt’s sense and produces a target through which sovereign force can realize itself. As test-word, shibboleth has no semantic content; it tests a performance irreducible to cognition. Yet it must be iterable in Derrida’s sense. This allows it to become the concept of this kind of testing, yet also inscribes possible failure as the test’s condition of possibility. Hence the explosive aggressivity of the shibboleth story. For in fact the shibboleth test, despite being a technic of sovereign power, radically undermines sovereignty and identity.