with its mouldering crusts
of delusion bread [Wahnbrot].
Drink from my mouth.
Paul Celan
Celan’s unnamed poem that begins ‘The broached year’ might be approached as a condensed iteration of his famous holocaust poem Todesfuge or Deathfugue where the command given is to drink the blackmilk of daybreak. The figure of the mouth appears in Celan as the last site of pleasure, and indeed of ethics, in a post-apocalyptic world. If the broached year only offers delusion bread or literally ‘crazy bread’, then drink from another’s mouth. Thus Celan inverts Adorno’s infamous dictum, no poetry after Auschwitz. From now on, there is only poetry, only the figure of the mouth. Edia Connole and Scott Wilson in MOUTH follow this ethical demand, drink from my mouth, as the only possibility of love. We are sure you will love what they offer to you if you manage to open your mouth and hear them…
Simon Critchley & Jamieson Webster
