La Malédiction: The Sentencing of Lacoue-Labarthe

The thought-poem, phrase, wants to end itself, stop its complaint, but risks drowning in affect—it has been enraged and must stop. Organized around a plaintive cry, the text, whose title I would be tempted to translate as “Sentencing,” tries to contain an encroaching sense of rage, uncontrollably on the take. The complaint must not tip over into hate speech, a constant temptation and vanishing point for its signatory. Poetic thinking strives instead to offer protection, securing the terrain from which the Hölderlinian gods, ever dependent on language, have fled. Yet, anger competes with the complaint, threatening to disrupt its course of relative incapacitation, as if two types of impotence were in mortal rivalry. The poetic “I” must cut itself off due to a rising swell of anger, an invasive intonation of revolt, the spectacle of which he/she/ it wants in fact to spare us, or “you:” “je sens monter une colère sans nom, je préférerais vous en épargner le spectacle. Mais je sais bien que la violence est inévitable, il n’y a jamais d’apaisement” (p. 107).¹ Livid, unappeasable, the poetic stance pitches a place in the book of inevitable violence and dissipation. The “inevitable” on which it wagers takes a tumble, however, when it states a turnaround: the only thing left to announce, it contends, concerns whatever advent we await—the advent has already arrived. Lacoue carries this temporal collar to the furthest extreme, to an end already attained. As wounded being, we are already dead: “Nous sommes déjà morts, nous le savons. Même les enfants le savent, et du reste ils en pleurent. Il n’y a là aucun secret” (p. 107).

I do not know what children—whether those of the German Romantics, historical revolution, or of more empirical vintage—do and do not know concerning mortal being, and his remark makes me think that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe ought to know better when it comes to the little ones. Does a child’s lacrimose complaint play to the modernist beat of a mortality timer? He has addressed children before in his work, teaching them philosophy, telling them not to be afraid of “big words.”² These minoritized beings are said to sniff out death. Children, unleashed: They cry about playtime’s last call and squirm at having to go to bed before everyone else, shut out. Maybe such abrupt expulsions, each time an ambush of the mainmise and experience of injustice, draw the child to the horror of extinction, and Lacoue was right all along about the fearful taunt of relentless exposure.³ Not to mention that he was such a child himself, in fateful line with self-surrender and keyed to the powerless acceptance of children.

The child that Lacoue-Labarthe was—the one (or many) carried in the hollowed place of a Self—was felled, in his time, by a mother’s finitizing curse. Intersecting in a dreadful way with German calamity, as its own little homegrown allegory, she went after him as an envoy of historical erasure. For a long while, maybe forever, she continued to burn him up in the living hell that pulsed catastrophe in his life and works—two motifs that cannot stand up to the fatal curse, “life” and “works.” By means of destructive phrasing, she dealt him out. Anger—which, Lacan reminds us, Freud never handled—prowled in the wings, as extended life-span of the curse’s pounce. In fact, the oversized anger “sans nom” issues from a facet of Mother that cuts into history, an modus operandi that psychoanalysts of the archetype call the Death Mother.⁴ Let me back this up.

The revolt of rage settles on having death apportioned to us, and “ces viatiques ridicules” in order only “to make us vaguely forget that we will never know it” (p. 107). The voice, interrupting itself, apologizes, breaking the grip of anger, adding a tinge of irony released to the air of atheisms: “Mais voici que je m’emporte. Excusez-moi, je vous en prie” (p. 107...