This dissertation argues that Paul Celan’s poetry should be read not simply as a poetics of silence or aporia in the aftermath of the Holocaust, but as a poetics of the singular universal, in the sense developed by Alain Badiou. Following the genocides and industrialized exterminations of the twentieth century, the concept of the universal has been regarded with deep suspicion. Celan has often been interpreted—especially within French poststructuralist thought, Heideggerian philosophy, and Adorno’s aesthetics—as a paradigmatic figure of radical singularity, bearing witness to the limits of language and representation and thus a refusal of universals. This project challenges such readings by engaging Badiou’s conception of the universal not as totality, but as a rupture with the existing order—a truth-event that founds a new way of speaking and thinking. I argue that Celan’s formal innovations, far from retreating into the ineffable, instantiate such poetic truth-procedures.