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  • Poetics and Politics (with Lacoue-Labarthe):Introduction
  • Nidesh Lawtoo

What is the relation between poetics and politics? Are these two terms opposed, as their referents initially suggest to modern readers? Or entangled, as the first poetics already implied in classical antiquity? And if the relation between poetics and politics traverses both the Ancients and the Moderns, stretching to in-form (give form to) contemporary fictions that continue to be grouped under the rubric of "politics," what kind of thinker, or character, would be well-positioned to reflect on the fictions of the political that haunted the twentieth century and now cast a shadow on the twenty-first century as well?

As these mirroring interrogations suggest, such a thinker, or character, would have to play a Janus-faced role by stepping back to the ancient origins of Western poetics in order to leap ahead to modern politics. In the process, he or she would have to join the power of affect (pathos) and the rigor of thought (logos) to reflect on the agonistic relation between philosophy and aesthetics, including areas as diverse as music and myth, prose and poetry, theatrical fictions and political theaters, all of which are already at play in two perspectives that might have been opposed in the past, yet need to be thought jointly in the present and future. How? By theorizing and dramatizing the very concept that split poetics and politics in two rivalrous fields of investigation in the first place: namely, mimēsis. I believe this double-faced role is, in very general terms, what the French philosopher-poet Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe never ceased to impersonate in his heterogeneous career, thinking "as a philosopher—against philosophy" ("Philippe" 13), as his lifetime friend and collaborator, Jean-Luc Nancy, once put it. [End Page 1133]

When Paola Marrati and I invited esteemed colleagues from Johns Hopkins University and renowned international speakers to participate in a two-day conference entitled, "Poetics and Politics: With Lacoue-Labarthe," held at the Humanities Center on February 18–19, 2016, our general aim was to "resume" (Nancy's term) a conversation interrupted by Lacoue-Labarthe's passing in January 2007. The tenth anniversary of his death approaching, we both felt the need to commemorate his singular thought, not by giving in to nostalgia or pathos, though, as Alain Badiou casually said to me a few months after the conference, giving voice to a shared feeling: "Il me manque" ("I miss him"). Rather, we wanted to commemorate Lacoue-Labarthe by responding to an address already at play in his work in general by reopening the dossier on "poetics and politics / poétique et politique" in particular, with the type of attention, rigor, and modesty his thought demands.1 We thus opted for a "workshop" devoted to reframing the relation between two concepts that, we were beginning to sense with increasing unease, were already jointly at play in contemporary political practices. And yet, in critical theory, we also felt that the entangled relation between poetics and politics still needed to be rethought in the company of a thinker who posited what he called—in a phrase that gives the title to one of his most important books—"la fiction du politique" (the fiction of the political) at the crossroads of his interdisciplinary meditations. Needless to say, in the months that followed the workshop, the danger of such political fictions and the totalitarian political leaders, types, or figures such fictions generate, became fully manifest on the political scene, redoubling the urgency to rethink the agonistic relation between poetics and politics with Lacoue-Labarthe.

In his protean career, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe persistently returned, with conceptual rigor, genealogical sobriety, and forceful determination to the joint origins of Western poetics and politics in Plato and Aristotle in order carry out an operation—in the manner of what Nietzsche called a "physician of culture"—that was at least double: first, it unmasked the mythic fictions on which modern politics rests; and second, it diagnosed the horrors that ensue when political fictions are put into practice so as to understand and counter the specific logic of fascist pathologies. As Lacoue-Labarthe put it in an interview, speaking of "the pathology...

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