Since his very first poems, such as the famous “Death Fugue” (Todesfuge), Paul Celan develops a contrapuntal writing, which, far from being a search for harmony, emphasizes, on the contrary, a radical dissonance, an impossible euphony, a poetics of the irreconcilable. Indeed, this poetry seems to pertain to an art of the against, something he will call, in his Meridian speech, the counter-word (Gegenwort). It is the assertion of a necessary contra-diction. In counterpoint to a disastrous recent history, this writing stands against: against German, against lyricism, against an entire poetic tradition. But how can a unity be nevertheless given to the contradictory ? How can disparate and necessarily polysemic elements be coagulated into a poem, elements that assert themselves while revealing some oppositions, some breaks ? We must redefine what a poem is and reassess the distance which separates it from its reader: indeed, Celan’s art of counterpoint consists of involving the reading “process” within the poem. It is up to the reader (to the other) to make the (finite) unity of the poem resound inside the (infinite) magnitude of its contra-diction – to turn disharmony into harmony.