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Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (March 6, 1940, Tours – January 27 2007, Paris) was a French philosopher, literary critic, and translator.

Influences and associations

Lacoue-Labarthe was influenced by and wrote extensively on Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, German Romanticism, Paul Celan, and deconstruction. He was also a French translator of Heidegger, Celan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Walter Benjamin. Lacoue-Labarthe wrote several books and articles in collaboration with Jean-Luc Nancy. In 1980 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy organized a conference at Cerisy-la-Salle, centered around Derrida's 1968 paper Les fins de l'homme. Following this conference and at Derrida's request, in November 1980 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy founded the Centre de Recherches Philosophiques sur la Politique (Centre of Philosophical Research on the Political). The Centre operated for four years, pursuing philosophical rather than empirical approaches to political questions. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy were colleagues at the Université Marc Bloch in Strasbourg, and co-authored several books and articles. Lacoue-Labarthe was also a member and president of the Collège international de philosophie.

Professional milestones

Lacoue-Labarthe received his doctorat d'état in 1987 with a jury led by Gérard Granel and including Derrida, George Steiner and Jean-François Lyotard. The monograph submitted for that degree was La fiction du politique (English translation, Heidegger, Art, and Politics), a study of Heidegger's relation to National Socialism. Prior to La fiction du politique Lacoue-Labarthe had already published a book on Celan and Heidegger entitled La poésie comme expérience (Poetry as Experience). Both of these works predate the explosion of interest in the political dimensions of Heidegger's thought which followed the publication of a book by Victor Farías. Scholars such as Derrida (in "Deconciliation," Shibboleth, and Of Spirit), Jean-François Lyotard (in Heidegger and "the jews"), and Pierre Joris (see ) commended these works.

On Heidegger and Celan

In Poetry as Experience Lacoue-Labarthe argued that, even though Celan's poetry was deeply informed by Heidegger's philosophy, Celan was long aware of Heidegger's 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 honoring Heidegger's work). Heidegger was a professed admirer of Celan's writing, although he never gave to Celan's poetry the philosophical attention he devoted to Hölderlin's or Trakl's (nor did he attend to Celan as a Jewish poet working within that German tradition). "Todtnauberg", 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's one known remark about the gas chambers, made in 1949). In this respect Heidegger's work was perhaps redeemable for Celan, even if that redemption was never transacted between the two men. Lest one take this as Celan simply demanding 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 in what way the Nazi period was das Unheil (disaster, calamity). 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 "inner greatness" to the movement that brought about that disaster.

Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida have both commented extensively on Heidegger's 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. Lacoue-Labarthe considered that Heidegger's greatest failure was not his involvement in the National Socialist movement but his "silence on the extermination" and his refusal to engage in a thorough deconstruction of Nazism. Both Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida regarded Heidegger's thought as offering pathways to a philosophical confrontation with Nazism, pathways which Heidegger failed to follow, but which Lacoue-Labarthe did attempt to pursue.

Bibliography

Primary literature

* contents of this book do not correspond exactly to those of the book it otherwise translates

** collects essays from 1979, 1981, and 1983 and others not previously published

Secondary literature

• Jacques Derrida, "Désistance," in Psychè (English translation in Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics).
• Pierre Joris, Heidegger, France, Politics, The University.
• John Martis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: Representation and the Loss of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).
• Avital Ronell, "The Differends of Man," in Finitude's Score.

See also

• list of deconstructionists

External links

• Oedipus as Figure, Radical Philosophy.
• The Ister (2004) is a film based on a 1942 lecture course by Martin Heidegger about Friedrich Hölderlin (Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"). It features extensive interviews with Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. * Official site.
• Brief commemoration by the makers of The Ister.
• Commemoration by Christopher Fynsk (dated January 31, 2007).
• Template:Fr icon Obituary, Libération.
• Template:Fr icon Obituary, by Jean-Luc Nancy, also from Libération.
• Template:Fr icon Obituary, Le Monde, by Jacob Rogozinski.
• Template:Fr icon A 2006 international conference, Deconstructing Mimesis - Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, was held at the Sorbonne in Paris : Overview Complete audio recordings (including Lacoue-Labarthe's and Nancy's lectures).
• Template:Fr icon Monogrammes X (an exchange of letters with Nancy).
• Template:Fr icon De Hölderlin à Marx: mythe, initiation, tragédie, an interview.
• Template:Fr icon Radio France coverage.

• 1940 births
• 2007 deaths
• 20th century philosophers
• Continental philosophers
• Deconstruction
• Fascist/Nazi era scholars and writers
• French philosophers
• Literary critics
• French literary critics