To Negin Shiraghaei. May the horror of barbarism never reach you; may your voice be the dawn of Eram in Shiraz, the azadi of your time.
The Mies Van der Rohe Pavilion, of Barcelona, The Necessary Mirror and the Anthology of Memory
We could trace a meridian of form and silence by following the spectral image of the monument to Rosa Luxemburg destroyed by the Nazis in 1936 and the Barcelona Pavilion reconstructed in 1986, through the invoked silence of Celan as the only possibility of the logos
For Derrida a ghost is not something that simply was, but something that returns to demand justice; the specter of the Rosa Luxemburg memorial is a lost future, it represents the possibility of a socialist Germany that never came to be. This meridian is a spectral superposition, a solid work of travertine and an ethereal image of the destroyed monument, this is visual hauntology, the coexistence of what is there and what is only an archival photograph. This specter gazes at us and we cannot capture the image, but its image alters our perception of the beauty of the place. It is however a beauty that is no longer innocent, it is haunted by historical trauma. The Barcelona Pavilion is the host that welcomes and offers hospitality to the ghost of the silenced monument. Thus the concept of hauntology of Jacques Derrida acquires a unique relevance in the pavilion, given that the current building is a faithful reconstruction from 1986, we are standing before an architecture that has returned from the past, which is in essence, an apparition. Justice for Derrida resides in our capacity to engage in a dialogue with that which is not physically present but persists in its ideal. The reconstruction of the Pavilion was an act of historical justice. And its dialogue with the Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg as a latent image or the figure of Celan is to complete that circle of justice.
Celan the Meridian of Form and Silence
If beauty is redemption, in Mies and Celan it reached the absolute. It is the indwelling of silence, For Celan the poem was a message in a bottle thrown with the hope of an encounter, the Meridian, the pavilion is the perfect bottle, crystalline, transparent and eternal, under the serene gaze of Georg Kolbe’s sculpture Dawn. The pool as a mirror of the tongue, a German tongue washed of all impurity and reduced to its crystalline essence.
The meridian of Celan is completed in the work of the Monument to Rosa Luxemburg by Mies as a metaphor for a burnt page, it is the Silence of Celan as the Degree Zero of Reflection that is the only possibility for the development of the Logos. After the aporia of the word following the catastrophe where the logos is no longer just word, but also gathering or collection (from the Greek legein). After the Second World War, language was left scattered and empty of truth. This corrupted language found the only way to “gather” (Logos) a new meaning in Celan by practicing a reductio ad absurdum of language through a silence that acts as a filter.
The Celanian Meridian, The Word after the Fire
The axis that traverses the poetics of Paul Celan is that of a survivor of the catastrophe, he developed a language north of the future, a word that dwells in the passage of silence. His Meridian is the invisible line that joins the poem with its other, with that which is far away in time or space; I see this meridian that joins Berlin, Paris and Barcelona. Berlin the origin of the trauma, the brick monument, the murder of Rosa; Paris, the place of Celan’s exile and the end of language at the Mirabeau bridge; and Barcelona, where the Mies Pavilion is the necessary mirror, it is the building that has learned to exist after its own death. Its reconstruction in 1986 was an act of faith in memory. This Meridian passes from the reconstruction of form to the reconstruction of meaning through Luxemburg and Celan in this space, not only as a secular liturgy of reparation. Allowing Mies, the architect of a work in silence, to dialogue with the silences that were imposed by the violence of history in an architecture of ethical reparation. In the Pavilion, that silence is philologically necessary, nothing new or true can be said using the old rhetoric. The purity of Mies’s lines forces the word to be just as pure, or to remain silent. The Atemwende or Breathturn in the poem is a moment in which the breath stops to change direction. The logos can only develop if there is a change of rhythm. Celan’s philology demonstrates that the poem occurs in the respiratory pause. Without that pause, that silence, there is only automatic discourse, the silence of Celan provides the breath pause allowing thought to begin again from zero.
The Invoked Silence of Celan as the only possibility of the logos
The Barcelona Pavilion is situated on this Meridian not only as an architectural object, but as an epistemological laboratory. Within a contemporary world with a hyper-communicated phenomenology and semantic noise, the silence of Paul Celan, framed in the clarity of Mies, is not a negative vacuum, but the condition of possibility the a priori so that the true logos and reflection may happen, this silence is the climate of reception of the logos, no longer as word, reason, or discourse, but as a space of apparition. Where the exhaustion of language after barbarism, the worn and contaminated words, need a prior Silence that cleanses them. This silence of stone and glass is the only place where reflection is not a reaction to noise, but a sovereign act of thought.