On the weekend of the 27th of January, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, one of the foremost figures in continental philosophy, died from respiratory failure at the hospital Saint-Louis in Paris. His work was well-known by those working in the continental tradition in the United States.
Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg at the time of his death, he was the co-author with the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy on a number of important studies, including The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan (1973), The Literary Absolute (1978), on German Romanticism, and Le Myth nazi (1991). But he is distinguished by his own work on Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Celan, producing foundational readings of their individual thought and their relation to one another. The thesis he wrote for his doctoral d’etat, for example, which was translated into English as Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political (1988), was one of the first attempts to respond to the “Heidegger controversy” then emerging in France. His reading is marked, however, by a refusal to either offer an apology for the relation between Heidegger’s thought and his participation in National Socialism or dismiss it outright.
It could be said all of Lacoue-Labarthe’s work engages in some way with the problem of mimēsis, which he linked to the problem not of imitation, as it has been commonly translated in the history of western thought, but “presentation” (Darstellung). His encounter with Heidegger’s text, and the role of what he characterized as the mythic in his thought, led him to formulate the notion of “onto-typology.” Speculative thought, whose origin he traced to the space between German Idealism and German Romanticism, grounds itself, Lacoue argued, in the attempt to capture Being in representation (an act he called “figuration”) and then lose itself in this representation. Speculative thought is what becomes captured, so to speak, in its attempt to capture the event of Being; its speculation involves a fundamental relation to making a spectacle of Being, but especially that aspect of Being that allows no mastery, namely, death.
I never had the opportunity to come to know Lacoue, but his thought has been influential–even formative–for my work in philosophy. My dissertation on Heidegger, Blanchot, and Deleuze was very much framed in large part by his thematization of the figure and the debate he carried on with Nancy on the “necessity of the scene.” I devote an “excursus” to this debate in the text of my dissertation, in fact. It is remarkable, nonetheless, how close one can become to someone through their writing. His death struck me with a profound sadness.
But I felt proximate to his thought in another way, since he was both friend and mentor to my own mentor, Christopher Fynsk, Director of the centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Fynsk offers a moving commemoration to Lacoue on the Centre’s blog, found here.
In addition to obituarties found in Libération and Le Monde, one may find a note Nancy wrote to Lacoue (literally written “a toi”) published in the latter as well. Sadly, there was very little mention of Lacoue’s passing in Germany, and absolutely none, save notices on blogs, in the U.S. –M. Eng
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