ABSTRACT
Paul Celan's poems enact with peculiar intensity the paradox which lies at the heart of Jacques Derrida's sense of literature: each one is imbued with a quality of uniqueness, while at the same time owing that quality to the cultural and linguistic crossroads that constitute it. Shibboleth was first given as a lecture at an international conference on the work of Celan at the University of Washington, Seattle, on October 14, 1984. Derrida generalizes the shibboleth to include "every insignificant, arbitrary mark" as it "becomes discriminative, decisive, and divisive." Shibboleth is the shibboleth for the right to the poem which calls itself a shibboleth, its own shibboleth at the very moment that it commemorates others. Shibboleth marks the multiplicity within language, insignificant difference as the condition of meaning. In a language, in the poetic writing of a language, there is nothing but shibboleth.
