Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

(Un)Timely Meditations

John McKeane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351191173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

"Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940-2007) was a professor of philosophy, and also a poet, a translator and a playwright. His life and work were dedicated to the philosophical and political movements of the post-1968 era, from his communal life together with Jean-Luc Nancy to his collaborations with Jacques Derrida. These movements also carried him towards disparate modes of writing such as poetry and theatre. The tension between Lacoue-Labarthe's timely and untimely meditations governs the approach in this study, the first to attempt an accessible and comprehensive account of this forceful thinker."

Part I

❖

Timely Meditations

Chapter 1

❖

Avant-garde

On an initial reading of the thinkers to whom Lacoue-Labarthe is most dedicated, it appears that he is drawn to solitary figures: Hölderlin and his four decades of confinement, Heidegger and his Black Forest hut, Blanchot and his decade as a recluse in Èze. But on looking more closely at Lacoue-Labarthe’s trajectory, it soon becomes apparent that much of it was spent working in close collaboration with other writers and thinkers. These range from the Situationist and soixante-huitard groupings of his early years in Strasbourg to numerous theatre projects with the director Michel Deutsch, and from his philosophical collaborations with Derrida, Kofman, Nancy and others in the mid-1970s to those with Mathieu Bénézet in a literary arena at the end of that decade. And providing as it were a constant base note to all of these enterprises was his relationship with Jean-Luc Nancy, which is important and complex in equal measure.

This chapter sets out to measure the importance of these various contemporary collaborations—or engagements with ‘the timely’, to use to Nietzsche’s term—in Lacoue-Labarthe’s thinking. It does not do so simply via a historicized account, but links on the one hand Lacoue-Labarthe’s dedication to contemporaneity, and on the other the underlying reflections that drove it. This is to say that the notion of collaboration or community was not simply a reality in Lacoue-Labarthe’s career, but part of his discourse on modern thought and on the relations between philosophy, literature, and politics. Beyond the groupings he was part of, others inform his horizons in significant ways. For instance, in an interview, Nancy spoke to me of role-plays that he and Lacoue-Labarthe would perform: each would adopt the role of a historical thinker, with Lacoue-Labarthe adopting the role of Schelling or Hölderlin to Nancy’s Hegel.¹ The three German figures were of course friends at the Tübingen seminary in the early 1790s, suggesting that this represented a model for the community Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy formed in Strasbourg. The early German Romantic group at Jena and the contemporary 1970s group Tel Quel provide other models and counter-models in this same vein. As Lacoue-Labarthe later stated, ‘1976 était encore une époque où nous cherchions à nous déprendre des mouvements d’avant-garde, Tel Quel et tous ses succédanés—tout ce qui avait occupé la scène pendant les dix ou quinze dernières années’ [‘1976 was still an era when we were trying to free ourselves of the avant-garde movements, Tel Quel and all the imitations of it—everything that had occupied centre-stage for the previous ten or fifteen years’].² In short, these groups are taken to represent the modern avant-garde: Jena Romanticism as its first and definitive appearance, and Tel Quel as the major contemporary example of the genre. The metaphor employed when calling a group of writers or thinkers an ‘avant-garde’ is of course a military one: they are presented as the advance troops of a larger armed force. Lacoue-Labarthe repeatedly distanced himself from this metaphor and from the notion of a small, closed group. For instance, in 1979 he and Bénézet wrote that:

[L’]avant-garde ne nous intéresse pas. Ladite avant-garde, ou du moins ce qui en reste: parce que le mouvement s’essouffle, c’est certain […]. Pourquoi, cela dit, l’avant-garde ne nous intéresse-t-elle pas ? Tout simplement parce que nous en avons assez de ‘théorie’ […]. Nous ne voulons pas dire par là: trop de théorie étouffe la littérature. C’est le vieil argument, mettons ‘poujadiste’; il n’a aucune pertinence.³

[[T]he avant-garde does not interest us. This so-called avant-garde, or at least what remains of it: because the movement is running out of steam, that much is certain […]. Why then does the avant-garde not interest us? Quite simply because we have had enough of ‘theory’ […]. By this we do not mean that too much theory smothers literature. That is the old, ‘poujadist’ argument; it is not relevant at all].

Thus the resistance to the rhetoric of the avant-gardes was not based in a conservative return to ‘literature’ at the expense of ‘theory’, here labelled as ‘poujadist’ i.e. parochial, bourgeois, and reactionary. Instead, in discussing such avant-garde groups, Lacoue-Labarthe attempts to glimpse an alternative way of interacting with his contemporaries: one that remains undetermined, open to the what is to come, without presenting that à-venir as a predetermined future heralded by marching jackboots.

Community is a fraught term, meaning very different things in contemporary Anglo-Saxon and French discourse; and Nancy’s interest in the term is in a communauté désœuvrée, i.e. a community based around our most irreducible existence, rather than on particular values or identities. But these observations notwithstanding, it is the term that he and others use to refer to his relationship with Lacoue-Labarthe. We can note that in French one connotation of communauté is the small-scale alternative societies that were in vogue in the 1970s. In English these are referred to less often as ‘communities’ than as ‘communes’, and we should remain open to this resonance when thinking Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s project for a communauté. In any case, the two figures often refer to this project as one influenced by the counter-cultural atmosphere of May ’68 and following years, and in time it will perhaps come to be seen as an important after-effect of the événements within French thought; certainly it places them closer to the student revolts than major contemporary figures such as Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, or Levinas, who all adopted a certain distance. Indeed, the first of these figures, who would go on to collaborate on many occasions with Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, expressed his reservations regarding their mode of community. He wrote that:

Cette écriture ou cette pensée à deux, trois ou quatre mains a toujours été pour moi une apparition fascinante, admirable, énigmatique, mais aussi impensable et impossible aujourd’hui encore. Rien ne me paraît aussi inimaginable, et je le ressens comme ma propre limite, aussi inimaginable que, dans la vie privée qui fut indissociable des expériences publiques dont je parle, leurs liens de communauté familiale.⁴

[This two-, three-, or four-handed writing or thought has always been a fascinating apparition for me, one that is admirable, enigmatic, but also unthinkable and impossible, even today. Nothing seems to me quite so unimaginable, and I feel that this is my own limit, just as unimaginable as, in the private lives which were indissociable from the public experiences I am talking about, their links in a family community].

By referring to these ‘links in a family community’, Derrida nods to the shared living arrangements of the pair and their families (these arrangements are the subject of many anecdotes, which it is not my role to repeat). More generally, this seems an important statement: the figure often taken to be amongst the major representatives of French thought in the late 1960s and 70s is distancing himself from Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s mode of writing almost as responding too fully or too promptly to the demands of the age: namely what in 1968 Blanchot had called ‘un communisme d’écriture’ [‘a communism of writing’].⁵ It is worth noting that Lacoue-Labarthe (here with Nancy) had the capacity to be disruptively contemporary and timely, just as elsewhere—for instance with his work on Hölderlin’s theatre or on poetry—he could be radically untimely.

This chapter is concerned primarily with this version of timeliness as it drove his work within collaborations and communities of thought. I thus begin by looking at the mode of his relationship with Jean-Luc Nancy and the various forms this dialogue takes, whether explicit or implicit, playful or serious. We then move on to L’Absolu littéraire, their jointly prepared critical anthology of Jena Romanticism: this work is examined both in itself and in light of its contemporary targets, namely the discourse of a theoretical avant-garde which was greatly prominent in the 1970s

—Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde was published in German in 1974 —, and especially in a French context with the group Tel Quel. The chapter then closes by examining Lacoue-Labarthe’s displacement of the modern, which forms the impulse behind his rejection of a certain version of Wagnerian opera (see chapter 4c) and of Blanchot’s post-romantic fragmentary writing (see chapter 5), both of which he sees as too intricated within a modernist aesthetic.

Community in Strasbourg

The collaboration between Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, which Derrida refers to as ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unimaginable’, occupies a place in the work of each that is both fundamental and strangely under-emphasized. The dozens of books, articles, translations, conferences, research seminars and teaching projects they undertook as a pair make only rare references to the fact that these collaborations are the product of two minds. And yet throughout these same projects there is a striking insistence on thematics of the group, of the communal and the political. We shall come to see that these two facts are not unrelated.

Their joint work originated in 1967 when Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy were introduced to each other at the University of Strasbourg by Lucien Braun. The experimental community they went on to share for many years then fed their written production, they and their families living together (from 1970 to the late 1980s) at a time of aspiration towards political, intellectual, and sexual freedom. They lectured on philosophy as a pair, as well as leading numerous research seminars and conferences, for instance Les Fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida (1980; [The Ends of Man: Beginning from the Work of Jacques Derrida]) at Cerisy-la-Salle, and the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique (1980–84; [Centre for Philosophical Research into the Political]).⁶ The cross-fertilization between their thought also gave rise to many publications: from Le Titre de la lettre: une lecture de Lacan (1973; [The Title of the Letter: a Reading of Lacan]) to L’Absolu littéraire (1978), from texts in the collective volume Mimesis: des articulations (1975; [Mimesis: (Dis) Articulations]) to those recently re-edited as La Panique politique (1979–80 / 2013; [Political Panic]) and Scène suivi de Dialogue sur le dialogue (1995, 2002 / 2013; [Stage/ Scene followed by Dialogue on Dialogue]). A wide range of topics and of modalities of thought is thus present in their work, meaning that it cannot be defined as predominantly literary or philosophical, for instance, but instead as resolutely installing itself in the zones of slippage between such disciplines.

The relationship between the two thinkers is so symbolically charged that it is sometimes hard to remember that it originated in reality. This symbolic charge can be seen in various areas: for instance, their work together was largely carried out in Strasbourg, a town on the edge of France whose university has strong German roots. More than this, much of the thinkers’ careers was dedicated to German literature and philosophy, from Hegel to Nietzsche, but most of all Heidegger, who was professor just across the border at Freiburg (he died in 1976).⁷ The notion of comparative thought was therefore a lived reality for Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, and Strasbourg’s de-centered situation proved a spur for them to address the notion of Europe beyond fixed national identities. Nonetheless, the pair do not play equal roles in acting as passeurs between national discourses: theirs is not a community of sameness facing the foreign. For, whilst both atheists, culturally-speaking they come from different religious backgrounds, Nancy’s Catholic and Lacoue-Labarthe’s, via his mother, Calvinist. Since Lacoue-Labarthe’s death, Nancy has addressed this situation—‘d’un côté, le protestant, de l’autre, le catholique’ [‘on one side the Protestant, on the other the Catholic’] —, arguing that the distinction counts for more than ‘du biographisme’ [‘mere biographism’].⁸ Another axis of difference exists concerning the modes of thought privileged by one or the other thinker. In other recent texts, Nancy has identified Lacoue-Labarthe as leaning more towards literature, indeed as someone whom he initially understood to be primarily a poet or a writer. We read: ‘Pour Philippe, le rapport à la littérature—c’est-à-dire à la mimesis—était prégnant, tandis que pour moi c’était le mode, disons, de l’abord métaphysique, la “question de l’être” d’un côté et de l’autre la “différance” comme transformation de la différence ontologique’ (AN 107; [‘For Philippe, the relation to literature—which is to say to mimesis—was a pregnant one, whereas for me it was more a question of the metaphysical approach, the “question of being” on one hand and on the other, that of “differance” as a transformation of the ontological difference’]).⁹ We are even treated to the revelation that Nancy had to teach Lacoue-Labarthe how to use a typewriter, which is pushed beyond the realm of the anecdotal: ‘Lui l’écriture et le poème, moi le concept et la machine’ (AN 109; [‘Him writing and the poem, me the concept and the machine’]). The attractive simplicity of such a relationship between the two should be cause for some hesitation, however, particularly when placed in the context of their work’s extensive investigation into the relations between philosophy and literature. This investigation demonstrates an aversion on the one hand to identifying themselves as philosophers (philosophy being too closely associated with metaphysics), and on the other hand, to champion literature in and of itself, given that such a literature would be merely the reverse side of philosophy, a reversal of Plato’s hierarchy without displacement of it. And indeed, these important nuances are addressed by Nancy when he discusses his collaboration with Lacoue-Labarthe in terms of a role-play: ‘Quels rôles? En un sens, peu importe. De toute évidence ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: TIMELY MEDITATIONS
• PART II: UNTIMELY MEDITATIONS
• Conclusion: Mimesis
• Primary Bibliography
• Secondary Bibliography
• Bibliography of Translations into English
• Index