Paul Celan - Carmelo Bene. Due corpi a corpo con i significanti

In this paper, I try to identify some traits that Paul Celan and Carmelo Bene seem to share in their poetics. Even if they probably never met, and though they moved from very different theoretical premises, their artistic developments appear sometimes to converge on common grounds, nonetheless with a great distance caused by the aesthetic forms they use, how they relate to history, the way they express their linguistic, political, psychological and representational conflicts. Starting from a vision of the Ego as a fragmented and inconsistent entity, an empty signifier, and coming to the impossibility of producing meaning except on the edge of the unspeakable, I tried to investigate similarities and differences in their artistic journeys. In particular, through Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization, their struggle against language leads towards some comparable conclusions behind the image of the Jew killed in the snow, the character of Lorenzaccio de’ Medici, the theorization of the «macchina attoriale», the poet who throws himself into the Seine from the Mirabeau Bridge.