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Walter Benjamin's literary, phenomenological, and analytical reflections on the concept of attentiveness reveal how distinctly his critical thinking was attuned to new forms of perception that arose from the cultural and aesthetic transformations taking place in the early twentieth century. Challenging existing distinctions between different modes of attentiveness-mainly absorption and concentration-he explores a radical form of attentiveness that enlists unexpected components, such as distraction or the power of habit. Tracing the development of a critical approach to the concept from the early to the late works, this article provides insights into Benjamin's alternative idea of attentiveness, one that emerges from a dialectics of opposites and is aligned with a 'physical presence of mind' ('leibhaftige Geistesgegenwart').

Even though Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot count among the most important literary critics of the past century and shared many concerns, they have rarely been considered together. There is, however, evidence that Blanchot read parts of Benjamin's writings and was inspired by them. Blanchot's most extensive references to Benjamin appear in a text entitled Translating. This essay was composed on the basis of notes that Blanchot took while reading Benjamin's essay Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers and that have remained unpublished. These notes, which consist mainly of translations of passages from Benjamin's essay are a rich source of insight into Blanchot's reading process, which resulted in a powerful affirmation as well as a radical transfiguration of Benjamin's theory of translation. They also shed light on the similarities and differences between the two thinkers' respective theories of translation, their philosophies of language, and the divergent traditions in which their thinking is embedded.

When the French philosopher Sarah Kofman committed suicide in 1994 she left behind an impressive oeuvre in which both the autobiographical genre and the treatment of women play a central role. Her theoretical reections on both topics situate themselves in the interstices between psychoanalysis, feminism and deconstruction and share a common concern: the respect of alterity in all its guises. Kofman's resistance to the authoritative claim of the retrospective closure underlying traditional autobiographies is closely related to her celebration of an e ®criture parricide, a mode of writing which undoes the repression of multiplicity and otherness. Shortly before her death Kofman published an autobiographical account of her own childhood years after the deportation and death of her father in a concentration camp. This article addresses the striking discrepancies between the theoretical positions Kofman defends throughout her philosophical writings and the autobiographical turn of her own last words.

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A close reading of three poems written in the aftermath of the Holocaust Paul Celan's 'Vor einer Kerze', Nelly Sachs' 'Die Stimme Israels' and Marie Luise Kaschnitz' 'Zoon Politikon' discloses different positions assigned to the child that are paradigmatic for poetry 'after Auschwitz'. The three poems invoke the child as carrier of memory and continuity, and therefore as a link between past and future. However, the temporal modes in which this link is inscribed in each case could hardly be more different. These modes correspond to temporalities associated with the child in traditional respectively Jewish, romantic, 'enlightened' discourses. While Celan's figure of the child is bent on eternally holding a wake over the past, Sachs poetically conjures up a reawakening in the guise of a child resurrected in the poetic present. In Kaschnitz' poem, which addresses the perpetrators, the child is evoked as the voice awakening an as yet somnolent conscience to responsibilities to be taken up in the future. Words, in poetry, are less protected than in prose, by meaning, context, syntax and perspective, and therefore resonate with more intensity, immediacy and further reach. Earth, sky or rose, in verse, suffice to call up life, infinity or beauty, but also nothingness, death and transience. A child in verse is not just this one little man or woman but is, immediately, exposed mankind, nostalgia of bygone times or open hopes, is innocence and speechlessness, or else a creature using words like poets do, as sounds and building blocks for song and play. Appealing to what has been lived by each and every reader and what he or she carries in him or herself as memory, the child in poetry transforms the now into the future of that past. Beyond ultimate vulnerability and frailty, the child becomes the carrier of continuity between the former and the present self, between one generation and the next, between the darkest recollection and the furthest hopes. Holocaust poetry invoking children conjures up, no matter what its content, the abyss between what man could be and what he has become in blackest * Vivian Liska is professor of German Literature and director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp (www.ua.ac.be/ijs). Her research focuses mainly on Modern German literature and literary theory. Book publications include Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe (with Thomas Nolden), 2007; and When Kafka Says We. Uncommon Communities in German Jewish Literature (Indiana University Press, 2009) European Judaism Volume 42, Number 1, Spring 2009: 107-120 doi: 1 0.3 1 67/ej. 2009.420 110 ISSN 0014-3006 (Print), ISSN 1752-2323 (Online) This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 05:24:49 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms In the Wake of the Child times. It is in this sense that the title of this essay 'In the Wake of the Child' plays on two different meanings and origins of this English word. 'Wake' in the sense of 'track left by the passage of a ship' comes from Old Norse, where 'vok' meant 'hole in the ice', of the sort left by a moving ship. From there it metaphorically turned into an expression of a trace, of remnants in the aftermath of destruction. This sense is present still when 'wake' refers to watching over a dead person, but here the other meaning of the word as in 'awakening' or 'waking up' is also heard. Deriving from the ancient IndoEuropean root 'wog' or 'weg', it has the meaning of 'to become or stay alert'. When held over a dead body, the wake, in many cultures, means the vigil over something that is held in the precarious state between the actual death and the concluding burial meant to restore the shattered surface of the earth after the closing of the grave. 'In the Wake of the Child' points both to watching over and to waking up, to caring over the weak child and to the wake-up call of vigilance that emanates from its potential future. This essay will present a reading of three poems written in the aftermath of the Holocaust Paul Celan 's 'Vor einer Kerze' (Celan 2003, 73-74; 'Before a Candle' in Celan 2002, 55), Nelly Sachs' 'Die Stimme Israels' (Sachs 1965, 106-107) and Marie Luise Kaschnitz' 'Zoon Politikon' (Kaschnitz 1981, 406). I will read them 'in the wake of the child', evoking 'wake' as keeping watch over the dead, as reawakening to life and as waking up to watchfulness itself. Paul Celan's 'Vor einer Kerze9 ('Before a Candle9) In his seminal talk 'The Meridian' (Celan 1999), Paul Celan describes the effect of his poetry as a 'crossing through' (ein Durchkreuzen) of the traditional tropes and metaphors of the poetic tradition. This process is defined by the simultaneous invocation and negation of the traditional semantic connotations evoked in the language of his poetry. In 'Before a Candle' the figure of the child as carrier of continuity is drawn into this process; its traditional thrust towards the future is halted, turned towards the past and arrested in that position. Celan 's poem is a commemoration of the dead that transforms a collective ritual into a radically private poetic act. In a crossing of dialogue and meditation, prayer and blasphemy, quotation and secret language it develops a poetic conjuration Beschworung in all the dimensions and meanings of the word: as oath (Schwur), as entreaty, as mystical spell.1 In the kindling of memory the poem probes the possibilities of the poetic word to return the present towards the past, collapse the 'then' and 'now' into each other and, 108 European Judaism Volume 42 No. 1 Spring '09 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.211 on Mon, 08 Aug 2016 05:24:49 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The veil is one, it divides into two, it occupies the place of a third, and offers the observer the position of a fourth. But is the veil one? Does it partition in two, since it generates relations as much as it divides? Not taking up much space, it surely does not occupy a place, be it a “third.” And does it allow for an observer’s “fourth” position, or any position at all?

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(2003). Introduction: The Instance of Trauma. European Journal of English Studies: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 247-255.

Le but de cet article est de comparer deux objets culturels et géographiques à première vue incomparables, à savoir la Galice et la Galicie. Alternativement indépendant et annexé à d’autres royaumes de la péninsule Ibérique, le royaume de Galice fut notamment administré par la Couronne de Castille (1490-1715) puis par la Couronne d’Espagne (1715-1833). Divisée en quatre provinces (La Corogne, Lugo, Orense et Pontevedra) avec la division territoriale espagnole de 1833, la Galice sera reconnue comme une «communauté autonome» et une «nationalité historique» par la constitution de 1978. De son côté, la Galicie d’Europe de l’Est, autrefois royaume de Galicie-Volhynie et plus tard terre de la couronne d’Autriche-Hongrie et de l’Empire russe, a cessé d’exister en tant qu’entité géographique en 1918, lorsque la monarchie austro-hongroise a été dissoute, et chevauche aujourd’hui la frontière entre la Pologne et l’Ukraine. The purpose of this article is to compare two cultural and geographical objects that at first glance seem to be incomparable, namely Galicia and Galicia. Alternatively independent and annexed to other kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, the kingdom of Galicia was administered by the Crown of Castile (1490-1715) and then by the Crown of Spain (1715-1833). Divided into four provinces (A Coruña, Lugo, Orense and Pontevedra) with the Spanish territorial division of 1833, Galicia will be recognized as an "autonomous community" and a "historical nationality" by the 1978 constitution. For its part, Eastern European Galicia, once the Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia and later land of the Austro-Hungarian Crown and the Russian Empire, ceased to exist as a geographical entity in 1918, when the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was dissolved, and today straddles the border between Poland and Ukraine. VERSION BEFORE PUBLICATION BUT AFTER EXPERTISE &nbsp

Memoria collettiva e memoria sociale: ricordo e dimenticanza nella prospettiva della teoria dei sistemi