Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

El presente trabajo ensaya una crítica a las críticas más usuales al situacionismoen la teoría y la filosofía contemporáneas, fundamentalmente en las figuras de Lacoue-Labarthe y Rancière, centradas en la crítica situacionista de la representación, a nivel estético y político. Mostramos que el lugar de la "reapropiación" de la "presencia" al que estas críticas quieren llevar al situacionismo no se corresponde con los conceptos troncales de esta tradición, centralmente los de détournement y juego. Sugerimos finalmente que esta sintomática deslectura del situacionismo en la teoría contemporánea señala la tarea de un marxismo improductivo como tarea central de nuestro tiempo.

Loin de se cantonner à être un simple concept géographique, la notion d'Europe est également un concept spirituel, qui lie son destin au développement de la philosophie. Si elle être semble le symbole d'un élargissement intellectuel et politique, apte à construire une logique commune à différents Etats, elle n'en est pas moins elle-même aussi le produit intellectuel d'une certaine configuration nationale. L'oeuvre de Lacoue-Labarthe propose ainsi une étude du contexte allemand de production d'une certaine idée de l'Europe, essentiellement dans les textes de la tradition conservatrice. Ainsi la « détresse allemande» (die deutsche Not), dépeinte notamment par Hölderlin et Nietzsche, constitue le terreau idéel d'une compréhension d'une identité allemande à conquérir au moyen de l'imitation des Anciens, et bien plus encore de la Grèce. Dans la tradition théorique étudiée par Lacoue-Labarthe, l'Occident serait alors le nom que prend cette filiation spirituelle entre Athènes et Berlin, et l'Europe le nom d'un projet : celui d'une homogénéisation forcenée, sous bannière allemande, d'une hypothétique communauté spirituelle. Mais loin de se limiter à ce seul contexte allemand d'émergence d'une certaine idée de l'Europe, c'est la nature hégémonique et impérialiste d'une telle notion qu'il est possible de faire surgir. L'essence spirituelle de l'Europe que met en évidence Lacoue-Labarthe, tout à la fois philosophique et religieuse, dévoile alors dans Auschwitz le tragique d'une telle condition.

Deleuze, Lacoue-Labarthe, Hölderlin, Benjamin / Takács Ádám, Szabó Zsigmond, Moldvay Tamás etc. Deleuze-fordításaival, Tandori Dezső és Marno János versciklusaival, Tandori Hölderlin-fordításaival, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Walter Benjamin esszéjével, Marno János és Tandori Dezső József Attila-elemzéseivel - R. I. P. TD 2019. 02. 13. / / /

„Empedoklész-számunkra válaszul egy kéziratot kaptunk Labarthe-tól, a cezúra-témát folytatja, a tőle megszokott éles, és itt különösen Heideggerrel szemben kritikus hangnemben. Érdekes módon a Benjamin-tanulmány is, jóllehet egészen más szemszögből vizsgálja Hölderlint, de egy olyan határfogalom megalkotásával bíbelődik, mely természete szerint hasonlít Deleuze „egy élet” fogalmára. Máig vitatkoznak rajta, Hölderlin megőrült-e, vagy határátlépése józan döntés következménye volt. Amiképpen József Attila diagnózisában – borderline-szindróma – ott fut, vízjelként a határ szó: a mai kosztolányizós időkben talán nem árt a „túlnyűgös proli” vagy a „keményszárnyú” oldalt is szemügyre venni.” (a szerk. előszavából)

Presented at the Participants Conference of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum, Città di Castello, Italy, July 12, 2015

I examine the role of mousikê as a performative and sounding activity in the discussion of technē and mimesis in the education of the guardians in Plato’s Republic. I outline two types of mimesis, an affective mimesis modeled after the paradigm of mousikê in book 3, and a visual mimesis modeled after the paradigm of sculpture and painting in book 10. In book 3, Socrates affirms that imitations “become established as habits and nature, in body and sounds and in thought” (395d). In fact, “Isn’t this why the rearing in music is most sovereign? Because rhythm and harmony most of all insinuate themselves into the inmost part of the soul and most vigorously lay hold of it in bringing grace with them” (401d). Mimesis is defined here as a contagious performance, an affective communication that shapes the listener’s soul and body according to what is imitated. This affective definition of mimesis is used to purge the city of improper models and to define what types of poetry, harmonies, and rhythms are to be allowed, so that the guardians attain a noble and good disposition, thus defining the ethical and political effects of mousikê.

The visual paradigm is introduced in book 10, when discussing what mimesis is “in general” (595c), according to the ontological hierarchy of idea, copy of the idea, and the copy of that copy as phenomenon. What is at stake is the lack of true knowledge in poets and the impossibility for phenomena of giving a true manifestation of the being of the idea. This ontological argument leads to the expulsion of the poets from the city, however, without reevaluating the affective aspects of mimesis in relation to the ontological account, so that the former’s status is left undecided.
The question about the discontinuity of books 3 and 10 has been approached from different perspectives, yet most ignore the importance of mousikê in book 3, focusing on poetry. Historicizing the question, Havelock (1963) and Vernant (1975) argue that book 10 attempts to replace the earlier educational use of poetry in book 3 with a new philosophical approach which relies on the introduction of writing (Havelock), and the elevation of vision as a paradigm for thought (Vernant).

Yet, as presented by Havelock, writing is itself mimetic, the debased copy of speech, and is introduced as a mediation and pharmakon to control affective mimesis. In this way, Havelock’s account shows the way mimesis (logocentric writing as mediation) is involved in the production of its own history and of the two types of mimesis I discuss.

Finally, drawing from Derrida’s and Lacoue-Labarthe’s accounts of general mimesis, I argue that the introduction of writing in the history of mimesis makes the distinction between these types undecidable. Affective mimesis operates through several forms of inscription that are denied with the elevation of logocentric writing, while the visual paradigm preserves the affective and educational powers of affective mimesis as it tries to introduce a pharmakon (writing) for the soul of the listeners.

Part of the Homo Mimeticus Seminar at KU Leuven (https://hiw.kuleuven.be/hua/events/hom-seminar), this workshop with Jean-Luc Nancy revisits an essay titled "Le mythe nazi" (1981; with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe) in light of the recent return of neo-fascist movements on the political scene.
Registration: https://hiw.kuleuven.be/hua/events/agenda/homworkshop-nancy

Nidesh Lawtoo’s Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory is an important contribution to Conrad studies. It reads a range of the author’s work from Almayer’s Folly to The Shadow Line alongside a history of the anthropocene, of immanence in the place of transcendence, of the singular-plural instead of the one. The study’s originality lies not only in its choice of theoretical and critical paradigms but also in its method of presentation. It is playful and performative; it stages dialogical encounters and imaginative reenactments. It takes us on a journey through Conrad’s narratives that is entirely contemporary.

First and foremost a study of mimetic effects, this book cannot be read without a rudimentary understanding of what Lawtoo means, precisely, by mimesis. The book’s introduction helpfully teases out some of the term’s shape-shifting articulations. An alternative to critical analyses anchored in psychoanalytic, postcolonial and cultural models, Lawtoo utilizes the mimetic to launch a perspectival, transdisciplinary and comparative study that borrows from anthropology, metaphysics and psycho-ethics. The critical aim is to utilize these new paradigms as a means to explore the othering of the self. Psychic identifications and unconscious forces that penetrate the ego are grouped under the heading of “mimetic pathos.” Its multiple forms, what Lawtoo dubs “just the major protean manifestations of mimesis” (xviii) include “enthusiastic outbreaks, affective contagion, ritual sacrifices, shared sympathy, communal frenzy, and reciprocal violence, […] panic, possession trance, depersonalization, hypnotic suggestion (or rapport), psychic dissolution (or psychasthenia), mirroring reflexes (or mirror neurons), and brain plasticity (or neuroplasticity). The working premise is that, like pharmakon, the mimetic is both poison and antidote, positive and negative. The phenomena enumerated here consequently fall into one of two sides of an evaluative binary, a duality that is performatively mirrored in the presentation. Much as every mimetic expression finds its antonym, an argument is always followed by a counter-argument...

On sait (mais le sait-on au juste ?) que, sur le tard, Blanchot aimait à citer Luther. Référence peut-être surprenante, qui peut en tout cas au premier abord laisser perplexe, du moins au regard d’une enfance, d’une éducation rigoureusement catholiques. Et d’autant plus surprenante si l’on admet, comme Jean-Luc Nancy, que son catholicisme était “d’âme et de constitution”, que “cela peut se lire dans ses textes d’avant la guerre”, que “cela se discerne encore à travers la suite de l’œuvre”. À moins, à l’instar d’autres Kehren ou Bekehrungen, qu’il n’y ait eu conversion. Mais qu’est-ce qu’une conversion, si l’on accepte d’emblée que l’on ne saurait la limiter, du moins en ce qui nous concerne ici, à sa détermination religieuse ? Question redoutable, à laquelle je n’aurai pas la prétention de répondre mais vers laquelle je tenterai de me diriger aujourd’hui, si tant est que le parcours de Maurice Blanchot se prête à un tel questionnement. “La conversion ne peut jamais être que silencieuse, invisible et parfaitement secrète”, remarque Blanchot à propos de Simone Weil en songeant sans doute à sa propre expérience. Écoutons donc ce silence, en tâchant d’accueillir ce qui échappe au visible sous les espèces du secret.

To venture a commentary on Maurice Blanchot’s “La Littérature et le droit à la mort,” this article takes as its starting point what is perhaps the last of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s powerful intuitions—that Blanchot, as he put it, “constructed […] the modern myth of the writer.” Following this insight, and in order to face—or rather bypass—the difficulty of Blanchot’s notoriously dense essay from La Part du feu, the premise of the present commentary is that what’s at stake in Blanchot’s essay can only be accessed, if it can be accessed at all, by stepping back from its “content” (from what it says) and focusing on its “form” (on how it says what it says). Attention is thus drawn in the first instance to the rhetoric, as the Ancients called it, deployed in the essay—that is to say, its mode(s) of presentation. Analysing the latter, the guiding and seemingly improbable question governing this commentary becomes clear: to what extent does Blanchot’s seminal essay partake of what Lacoue-Labarthe termed “onto-mythology”?

Published posthumously, Ending and Unending Agony is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s only book entirely devoted to the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003). The place of Blanchot in Lacoue-Labarthe’s thought was both discreet and profound, involving difficult, agonizing questions about the status of literature, with vast political and ethical stakes. Together with Plato, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger, Blanchot represents a decisive crossroads for Lacoue-Labarthe’s central concerns. In this book, they converge on the question of literature, and in particular of literature as the question of myth—in this instance, the myth of the writer born of the autobiographical experience of death. However, the issues at stake in this encounter are not merely autobiographical; they entail a relentless struggle with processes of figuration and mythicization inherited from the age-old concept of mimesis that permeates Western literature and culture. As this volume demonstrates, the originality of Blanchot’s thought lies in its problematic but obstinate deconstruction of precisely such processes. In addition to offering unique, challenging readings of Blanchot’s writings, setting them among those of Montaigne, Rousseau, Freud, Winnicott, Artaud, Bataille, Lacan, Malraux, Leclaire, Derrida, and others, this book offers fresh insights into two crucial twentieth-century thinkers and a new perspective on contemporary debates in European thought, criticism, and aesthetics.

Reconnue depuis longtemps de ses proches (Nancy, Derrida, Kofman, Badiou, Bailly, Ronell, parmi tant d’autres), peu connue de la scène philosophique actuelle (heureusement peut-être), inconnue encore à tant d’égards, l’œuvre de Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe est encore loin devant nous. Avenir d’une pensée aux prises avec la question du mythe dans sa modernité même. C’est-à-dire la question, sans cesse renouvelée selon l’injonction d’un ”il faut” tout repenser, de la représentation : du théâtre à la musique, de la mythologie à la philosophie, de la littérature à la psychanalyse, de la politique à l’histoire.