{"id":351,"date":"2007-01-29T04:32:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-29T12:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=351"},"modified":"2007-01-29T04:32:00","modified_gmt":"2007-01-29T12:32:00","slug":"philippe-lacoue-labarthe-1940-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/philippe-lacoue-labarthe-1940-2007\/","title":{"rendered":"Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940-2007)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The sad news of the death of French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe<\/span> just in, via Mark Thwaite\u2019s blog<\/a>, where Mark posted the following announcement:<\/div>\n

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Chers coll\u00e8gues, chers amis,<\/p>\n

Je viens d\u2019apprendre avec une grande \u00e9motion le d\u00e9c\u00e8s de Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Nous sommes tout unis dans la douleur du deuil.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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So far I have been unable to find any details; the event is too recent it would seem to have gotten into the French media this morning. The wikipedia<\/a> entry confirms that he passed away on Saturday. Here is a part of that entry for details of P L-B\u2019s career:<\/div>\n

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Influences and associations<\/span><\/h3>\n
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Lacoue-Labarthe was influenced by and has written extensively on Martin Heidegger<\/a>, Jacques Derrida<\/a>, Jacques Lacan<\/a>, German Romanticism<\/a>, Paul Celan<\/a>, and deconstruction<\/a>. He was also a French translator<\/a> of Heidegger, Celan, Friedrich Nietzsche<\/a>, Friedrich H\u00f6lderlin<\/a>, and Walter Benjamin<\/a>. In 1980 Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy<\/a> co-organised a Cerisy-la-Salle conference on Derrida, named after Derrida\u2019s 1968 paper Les fins de l\u2019homme<\/i>. Following on from discussion at this conference and at Derrida\u2019s request, they then founded the Centre of Philosophical Research on the Political<\/a> in November 1980. This Centre would remain active for four years, providing alternative lines of enquiry to the empirical approach of political sciences. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy were colleagues at the Universit\u00e9 Marc Bloch in Strasbourg<\/a>, France. Lacoue-Labarthe was also member and president of the International College of Philosophy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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[edit<\/a>]<\/span> Professional milestones<\/span><\/h3>\n
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Lacoue-Labarthe received his doctorat d\u2019\u00e9tat<\/i> in 1987 with a jury led by G\u00e9rard Granel<\/a> and including Derrida, George Steiner<\/a> and Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard<\/a>. The monograph submitted for that degree was La fiction du politique<\/i> (English translation, Heidegger, Art, Politics<\/i>), a study of Heidegger\u2019s long-abiding allegiances to his vision of National Socialism<\/a>. It followed shortly after a book on Celan and Heidegger, Poetry as Experience<\/i>. Both of these works immediately predate the explosion of interest in the political dimensions of Heidegger\u2019s thought and his personal responsibility as Rector of the University of Freiburg under the Nazi regime, an interest generated by Victor Far\u00edas<\/a>\u2018s book that appeared in 1987. Scholars such as Derrida (in \u201cDeconciliation,\u201d Shibboleth,<\/i> and Of Spirit<\/i>) , Lyotard (in Heidegger and \u201cthe Jews\u201d<\/i>), and Pierre Joris<\/a> (see [1]<\/a>) have strongly commended these works as authoritative.<\/p>\n

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[edit<\/a>]<\/span> On Heidegger and Celan<\/span><\/h3>\n
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In his Poetry as Experience,<\/i> Lacoue-Labarthe advanced the argument that, although Celan\u2019s poetry was deeply informed by Heidegger\u2019s philosophy, Celan was long aware of Heidegger\u2019s association with the Nazi party and therefore fundamentally circumspect toward the man and transformative in his reception of his work. Celan was nonetheless willing to meet Heidegger (although he may not have been willing to be photographed with him or to contribute to Festschriften<\/a><\/i> honoring Heidegger\u2019s work). Heidegger was a professed admirer of Celan\u2019s writing, although he did not attend to it as to H\u00f6lderlin<\/a> or Trakl<\/a> (neither did he attend to Celan as a Jewish poet working within that German tradition). \u201cTodtnauberg\u201d, however, seems to hold out the unrealized possibility of a profound rapprochement between their work, albeit on the condition that Heidegger break a silence that virtually blanketed his work to the end (Lacoue-Labarthe has commented on the insufficiency of Heidegger\u2019s one known remark about the gas chambers, made in 1949). In this respect Heidegger\u2019s work was perhaps redeemable for Celan, even if that redemption or what need was had for it was never transacted between the two men. Lest one implicitly take this as Celan simply dema
\nnding an apology of Heidegger (such a scenario seems simplistic, the more so given that neither was given to simplism), there are reasonable grounds to argue that it was (and still is) at least as important to specify how the Nazi period is das Unheil<\/i> (disaster, calamity) (which is to say: specificity as to a great deal more than counting the dead). What compelled Heidegger to write about poetry, technology, and truth ought to have compelled him to write about the German disaster, all the more so because, on the basis of his thought, Heidegger attributed an \u201cinner greatness\u201d to the movement that brought about that disaster.<\/p>\n

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Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques Derrida<\/a> have both commented extensively on Heidegger\u2019s corpus, and both have identified an idiosyncratically Heideggerian National Socialism that persisted until the end. It is perhaps of greater importance that Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida, following Celan to a degree, also believed Heidegger capable of a profound criticism of Nazism and the horrors it brought forth. They consider Heidegger\u2019s greatest failure not to be his involvement in the National Socialist movement but his \u201csilence on the extermination\u201d (Lacoue-Labarthe) and his refusal to engage in a thorough deconstruction of Nazism beyond laying out certain of his considerable objections to party orthodoxies and (particularly in the case of Lacoue-Labarthe) their passage through Nietzsche<\/a>, H\u00f6lderlin<\/a>, and Richard Wagner<\/a>, all taken to be susceptible to Nazi appropriation. It would be reasonable to say that both Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida regarded Heidegger as capable of confronting Nazism in this more radical fashion and have themselves undertaken such work on the basis of this. (One ought to note in due course the questions Derrida raised in \u201cDesistance,\u201d calling attention to Lacoue-Labarthe\u2019s parenthetical comment: \u201c(in any case, Heidegger never avoids anything)\u201d).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The sad news of the death of French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe just in, via Mark Thwaite\u2019s blog, where Mark posted the following announcement: Chers coll\u00e8gues, chers amis, Je viens d\u2019apprendre avec une grande \u00e9motion...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}