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This is a pioneering attempt to rearticulate the relationship
between music and the problems of mimesis, between presentation and
re-presentaion. Four "scenes" comprise the book, all four of them
responses to Wagner: two by French poets (Baudelaire and Mallarme),
two by German philosophers (Heidegger and Adorno).
It is dificult to realize how profoundly Wagner affected the
cultural and ideological sensibilities of the nineteenth century.
Wagnerism rapidly spread throughout Europe, partly because of
Wagner's propagandizing talent and the zeal of his adherents. But
the main reason for his ascendance was the sudden appearance of
what the century had desperately tried to produce since the
beginnings of Romanticism - a work of art on the scale of great
Greek and Christian art. At last, here it was: the secret of what
Hegel called the "religion of art" rediscovered.
The first two scenes of the book present a historical sequence that
is punctuated by the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, in
which the universal unbridling of nations and classes is
prefigured. The second two register certain effects of Wagnerism
that are not just ideological but make themselves felt in a new
political configuration of the "national" and the "social."
Lacoue-Labarthe's "Poetry as Experience" addresses the question of
a lyric language that would not be the expression of subjectivity.
In his analysis of the historical position of Paul Celan's poetry,
Lacoue-Labarthe defines the subject as the principle that founds,
organizes, and secures both cognition and action--a principle that
turned, most violently during the twentieth century, into a figure
not only of domination but of the extermination of everything other
than itself. This thoroughly universal, abstract, and finally
suicidal subject eradicates all experience, save the singularity of
this experience of voiding. But what is left, as Paul Celan
insisted, is a remainder to the lyric voice alone: "Singbarer
Rest."
Lacoue-Labarthe's detailed analyses of two decisive poems by Celan,
"Tubingen, Janner" and "Todtnauberg"--the one a response to
Holderlin, the other to Heidegger--and his sustained reading of
"The Meridian" present Celan's verse of singularity as the movement
at and beyond the border of generalizable experience, i.e., as an
"experience," a traversing of a dangerous field, in which language
no longer dominates anything, but rather commemorates the voiding
of concepts and the collapse of the constitutive powers of the
subject. For Lacoue-Labarthe, poetry after the Shoah, the poetry of
bared singularity, is no longer a poetry that would correspond to
the "concept" of the subject--or, for that matter, to the concept
of poetry--but is rather the language of the "decept." Only by
being "disappointed" of the heroic language of idealistic poetry,
and of the mytho-ontological tendencies of philosophy, can Celan's
poetry keep open the possibility of another history, another
future.
Philosopher, literary critic, translator (of Nietzsche and
Benjamin), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is one of the leading
intellectual figures in France. This volume of six essays deals
with the relation between philosophy and aesthetics, particularly
the role of mimesis in a metaphysics of representation.
"Comment" 1997]
""Typography" is a book whose importance has not diminished since
its first publication in French in 1979. On the contrary, I would
say, it is only now that one can truly begin to appreciate the
groundbreaking status of these essays. The points it makes, the way
it approaches the questions of mimesis, fictionality, and
figurality, is unique. There are no comparable books, or books that
could supersede it." --Rudolphe Gasche,
State University of New York, Buffalo
"Lacoue-Labarthe's essays still set the standards for thinking
through the problem of subjectivity without simply retreating
behind insights already gained. But this book is much more than a
collection of essays: it constitutes a philosophical project in its
own right. Anybody interested in the problem of mimesis--whether
from a psychoanalytic, platonic, or any other philosophical
angle--cannot avoid an encounter with this book. Lacoue-Labarthe is
a philosopher and a comparatist in the highest sense of the word,
and the breadth of his knowledge and the rigor of his thought are
exemplary." --Eva Geulen,
New York University
"Review"
"In demonstrating how mimesis has determined philosophical thought,
Lacoue-Labarthe provokes us into reconsidering our understanding of
history and politics. . . . Together with the introduction, these
essays are essential reading for anyone interested in Heidegger,
postmodernism, and the history of mimesis in philosophy and
literature." --"The Review of Metaphysics"
This is a pioneering attempt to rearticulate the relationship
between music and the problems of mimesis, between presentation and
re-presentaion. Four "scenes" comprise the book, all four of them
responses to Wagner: two by French poets (Baudelaire and Mallarme),
two by German philosophers (Heidegger and Adorno).
It is dificult to realize how profoundly Wagner affected the
cultural and ideological sensibilities of the nineteenth century.
Wagnerism rapidly spread throughout Europe, partly because of
Wagner's propagandizing talent and the zeal of his adherents. But
the main reason for his ascendance was the sudden appearance of
what the century had desperately tried to produce since the
beginnings of Romanticism - a work of art on the scale of great
Greek and Christian art. At last, here it was: the secret of what
Hegel called the "religion of art" rediscovered.
The first two scenes of the book present a historical sequence that
is punctuated by the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, in
which the universal unbridling of nations and classes is
prefigured. The second two register certain effects of Wagnerism
that are not just ideological but make themselves felt in a new
political configuration of the "national" and the "social."
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, Holderlin,
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.
Rousseau's opposition to the theater is well known: Far from
purging the passions, it serves only to exacerbate them, and to
render them hypocritical. But is it possible that Rousseau's texts
reveal a different conception of theatrical imitation, a more
originary form of mimesis? Over and against Heidegger's dismissal
of Rousseau in the 1930s, and in the wake of classic readings by
Jacques Derrida and Jean Starobinski, Lacoue-Labarthe asserts the
deeply philosophical importance of Rousseau as a thinker who,
without formalizing it as such, established a dialectical logic
that would determine the future of philosophy: an originary
theatricality arising from a dialectic between "nature" and its
supplements. Beginning with a reading of Rousseau's Discourse on
Inequality, Lacoue-Labarthe brings out this dialectic in properly
philosophical terms, revealing nothing less than a transcendental
thinking of origins. For Rousseau, the origin has the form of a
"scene"-that is, of theater. On this basis, Rousseau's texts on the
theater, especially the Letter to d'Alembert, emerge as an incisive
interrogation of Aristotle's Poetics. This can be read not in the
false and conventional interpretation of this text that Rousseau
had inherited, but rather in relation to its fundamental concepts,
mimesis and katharsis, and in Rousseau's interpretation of Greek
theater itself. If for Rousseau mimesis is originary, a
transcendental structure, katharsis is in turn the basis of a
dialectical movement, an Aufhebung that will translate the word
itself (for, as Lacoue-Labarthe reminds us, Aufheben translates
katharein). By reversing the facilities of the Platonic critique,
Rousseau inaugurates what we could call the philosophical theater
of the future.
In February 1988, philosophers Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer,
and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a
large audience to discuss the philosophical and political
implications of Martin Heidegger's thought. This event took place
in the very amphitheater in which, more than fifty years earlier,
Heidegger, as rector of the University of Freiburg and a member of
the Nazi Party, had given a speech entitled "The University in the
New Reich." Heidegger's involvement in Nazism has always been, and
will remain, an indelible scandal, but what is its real relation to
his work and thought? And what are the responsibilities of those
who read this work, who analyze and elaborate this thought?
Conversely, what is at stake in the wholesale dismissal of this
important but compromised twentieth-century philosopher? In 1988,
in the wake of the recent publication of Victor Farias's Heidegger
and Nazism, and of the heated debates that ensued, these questions
had become more pressing than ever. The reflections presented by
three of the most prominent of Heidegger's readers, improvised in
French and transcribed here, were an attempt to approach these
questions before a broad public, but with a depth of knowledge and
a complex sense of the questions at issue that have been often
lacking in the press. Ranging over two days and including exchanges
with one another and with the audience, the discussions pursued by
these major thinkers remain highly relevant today, especially
following the publication of Heidegger's already notorious "Black
Notebooks," which have added another chapter to the ongoing debates
over this contested figure. The present volume recalls a highly
charged moment in this history, while also drawing the debate
toward its most essential questions.
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, Holderlin,
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.
Rousseau's opposition to the theater is well known: Far from
purging the passions, it serves only to exacerbate them, and to
render them hypocritical. But is it possible that Rousseau's texts
reveal a different conception of theatrical imitation, a more
originary form of mimesis? Over and against Heidegger's dismissal
of Rousseau in the 1930s, and in the wake of classic readings by
Jacques Derrida and Jean Starobinski, Lacoue-Labarthe asserts the
deeply philosophical importance of Rousseau as a thinker who,
without formalizing it as such, established a dialectical logic
that would determine the future of philosophy: an originary
theatricality arising from a dialectic between "nature" and its
supplements. Beginning with a reading of Rousseau's Discourse on
Inequality, Lacoue-Labarthe brings out this dialectic in properly
philosophical terms, revealing nothing less than a transcendental
thinking of origins. For Rousseau, the origin has the form of a
"scene"-that is, of theater. On this basis, Rousseau's texts on the
theater, especially the Letter to d'Alembert, emerge as an incisive
interrogation of Aristotle's Poetics. This can be read not in the
false and conventional interpretation of this text that Rousseau
had inherited, but rather in relation to its fundamental concepts,
mimesis and katharsis, and in Rousseau's interpretation of Greek
theater itself. If for Rousseau mimesis is originary, a
transcendental structure, katharsis is in turn the basis of a
dialectical movement, an Aufhebung that will translate the word
itself (for, as Lacoue-Labarthe reminds us, Aufheben translates
katharein). By reversing the facilities of the Platonic critique,
Rousseau inaugurates what we could call the philosophical theater
of the future.
In February 1988, philosophers Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer,
and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a
large audience to discuss the philosophical and political
implications of Martin Heidegger's thought. This event took place
in the very amphitheater in which, more than fifty years earlier,
Heidegger, as rector of the University of Freiburg and a member of
the Nazi Party, had given a speech entitled "The University in the
New Reich." Heidegger's involvement in Nazism has always been, and
will remain, an indelible scandal, but what is its real relation to
his work and thought? And what are the responsibilities of those
who read this work, who analyze and elaborate this thought?
Conversely, what is at stake in the wholesale dismissal of this
important but compromised twentieth-century philosopher? In 1988,
in the wake of the recent publication of Victor Farias's Heidegger
and Nazism, and of the heated debates that ensued, these questions
had become more pressing than ever. The reflections presented by
three of the most prominent of Heidegger's readers, improvised in
French and transcribed here, were an attempt to approach these
questions before a broad public, but with a depth of knowledge and
a complex sense of the questions at issue that have been often
lacking in the press. Ranging over two days and including exchanges
with one another and with the audience, the discussions pursued by
these major thinkers remain highly relevant today, especially
following the publication of Heidegger's already notorious "Black
Notebooks," which have added another chapter to the ongoing debates
over this contested figure. The present volume recalls a highly
charged moment in this history, while also drawing the debate
toward its most essential questions.
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