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TEXT AS PALIMPSEST: ANTHOLOGY OF TRACES AND POETICS OF THE INVISIBLE IN ANSELM KIEFER’S ART // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2022. Issue 3 (33). P. 53-72

The article examines the theoretical issue of the palimpsest by looking at the art of the German neo-Expressionist painter Anselm Kiefer. In the context of semiotics and cultural semantics, the palimpsest is a new text written over the erased previous version, with the old meaning shining through the new. In an attempt to provide a semantic description of the palimpsest, the author finds crucial tools for its study in the notions of the stratification and intensity of the palimpsest as a multi-layered hybrid text, in which the logical structure of the text forms the basis for convergence of various microtextures and authorial utterances. Palimpsest texts have a certain narrativity of their own: it turns the reader or viewer towards finding textual references and quotes, searching for traces of the invisible and accounting for other existing discourses – thus revealing links between text and subtext, the visible and the invisible, form and content. The textual space of the palimpsest moves along a certain trajectory and features a certain kind of anaphora, as a combination of semantic constructs which differ in their level and structure. The author sees the palimpsest both as a research method which harks back to hermeneutics and to interpreting traces of past culture. At the same time, the palimpsest remains an artistic device. The narrative logic mandates removing layers of superimposed texts, one by one in a fixed order. The article focuses on studying such tropes as “trace”, “labyrinth”, or intertext. In the study of visuality in the palimpsest texts by Anselm Kiefer, the author emphasizes the morphology of artistic texts and shows how the verbal context can be interpreted on various structural levels, and how allusions and reminiscences can be discovered in the depths of the text, and the topoi of cultural memory can be marked. In the analysis of Anselm Kiefer’s Varus (1976) and Margarete (1981), the author concludes that, throughout the many decades of his work, Kiefer polemically assaults the nationalist rhetoric. He deals with important historical events and topoi of the traditional German mythology, trying to find true examples of heroic past and reconstruct the historical truth. Textual layers, seen as multiple borrowings, allusions and reminiscences, open the door into a new space of visual optics and interpretation zones. The mythologem of the palimpsest is closely linked to the narrative and its features, where textual references and direct quotes reveal new connections, which previously remained invisible.

Keywords: palimpsest, Postmodernism, trace, intertextuality, visible/invisible, Anselm Kiefer, German mythology, cultural memory, Holocaust, Paul Celan, hybrid text