The Difficulty of Experience

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's work is entirely animated, one could perhaps even say haunted, by the necessity of thinking philosophically about art and politics, about what inescapably connects the one to the other and both to philosophy. In this sense, he is an untimely romantic or at least he belongs to a romantic legacy whose exact contours remain largely to be investigated.

His interest for the early Romantics of the Jena circle is certainly not incidental to his intellectual life. The Literary Absolute, co-authored with Jean-Luc Nancy in 1978, is an important selection and translation of fragments of the Athenaeum and an influential study of the emergence of the modern concept of literature from the problems opened up in the aftermath of Kant's critique. Its publication contributed to renew the interest in early German Romanticism on the French intellectual scene, at a time when both philosophy and literary critics had their eyes set on very different directions, and opened a novel chapter in debates on the relation between literature and philosophy. But The Literary Absolute is also something more: it remains, in my view, the key text to understand Lacoue-Labarthe's interpretation of Romanticism as a specific way of defining the task, and hopes, of philosophy, art, and politics. And, more importantly, it shapes the framework of Lacoue-Labarthe's own ideas and intuitions about what is it that in European history dooms art and politics to raise the same hopes, run the same dangers, and share the same responsibility. It is in the context of such preoccupations that his novel and provocative interpretation of mimesis takes its full significance.

The need to think about what ties together art and politics in the history of philosophy, which for Lacoue-Labarthe largely overlaps with the history of Europe, takes two distinct, although related, aspects in his work. On the one hand, Lacoue-Labarthe painstakingly attempts to isolate and analyze the constitutive elements of a dominant conception of art and politics that accounts for their consistency and dictates their mutual—and fateful—dependence. His influential and controversial interpretation of Heidegger's commitment to and critique of National Socialism in The Fiction of the Political is exemplary in this regard. On the other hand, parallel to the critique—that is to say, to the analysis and denunciation—of a specific and disastrous way of understanding the task and nature of both art and politics, one can find in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's work the hope to discover and decipher hints of the possibility of a different idea, and a different practice, of art as well as of politics. Part of Hölderlin's works, Celan's poems, or some of Schoenberg and Berg's music are a testimony, in his view, to the quest of such a different form of art. Lacoue-Labarthe's study of these authors and works constitutes his own tentative but constant attempt to navigate a new intellectual landscape; one, we could or should hope, more capable of interrupting the configuration of ideas and forces that lead to Auschwitz.

Lacoue-Labarthe explicitly shares Adorno's conviction that Auschwitz, or more precisely what the name of Auschwitz has come to stand for, is no mere accident, no matter how catastrophic, in European history, but is instead an event whose possibility belongs to some defining aspects of Western metaphysics and history. How exactly we should understand such a "belonging" is of course no small question. To describe the Nazi regime as the outcome of the dialectic of Enlightenment is a very different project than retracing its origins in German idealism, or than denouncing the intrinsic violence of ontology in the manner of Levinas. What such different approaches have in common though is the acknowledgment that what produced or made possible the Nazi movement and regime has a long, prestigious, and still operative history whose philosophical underpinnings are neither ornamental nor accidental; and hence that philosophy has the responsibility to do what it can to come to terms with its compromised legacy. As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy write in the closing lines of "The Nazi Myth:"

We wish only...