From Mythology to Myth: The Courage of Poetry

Among the themes that preoccupied Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, especially in his later writings, was the relation of mythology to what he sometimes called the mythical, which turned out to be a difficult term to define. Mythology, by contrast, posed no such obstacle given its enthusiastic if short-lived embrace by Martin Heidegger. In the "Prologue" to his collection of lectures Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, Lacoue-Labarthe quotes Heidegger's statement from the 1935 lecture course Introduction to Metaphysics, "Knowing a primal history [Wissen von einer Ur-Geschichte] is not ferreting out the primitive and collecting bones. It is neither half nor whole natural science, but, if it is anything at all, it is mythology [Mythologie]" (3). To know the origin of history or history at its inception requires mythology, since the beginning, as Heidegger repeatedly underscores, is "what is most uncanny and most violent [das Unheimlichste und Gewaltigste]" and hence cannot be subsumed under any concept (Einführung 164). What is inassimilable to understanding, however, is also inexhaustible, and this for Heidegger is where its power resides. The beginning of history is never complete. It has always yet to arrive, and this means it belongs not to the past but to the future as the historical destiny of a people, its mission or vocation, its mythology.

Lacoue-Labarthe was among the first thinkers to expose systematically the political ramifications of these remarks. He pointed out that when in 1935 Heidegger says "we," he means "we Germans," who stand at a juncture where "we" can "place ourselves once again under the power of the beginning of our spiritual-historial Dasein" and derive our calling from it (qtd. in Politics of Poetry 6). Elsewhere he explores the impulse to imitate or mimic—mimetism is the phrase he coins—inherent in any mythology, which did not begin in Germany but took on a particular valence there given its appropriation as a political concept, if not a political ideology. In "The Nazi Myth," a text he co-wrote with Jean-Luc Nancy, the two authors contend that it was the belatedness of Germany as a nation-state that determined its particular form of nationalism:

What Germany lacked, therefore, in practical terms, was its subject (and modern metaphysics, as the metaphysics of the Subject, did not complete itself there by any accident). Consequently, what Germany wanted to create was such a subject, its own subject (299).

The means it used to fashion a collective identity or national subject were decidedly aesthetic in nature, which for Lacoue-Labarthe led to the mutual imbrication of art and politics characteristic of the twentieth century. Germany had to imitate the ancients to forge an identity for itself based on the greatness of its supposed predecessor. At the same time it had to contend with the fact that this return to the ancients had already been accomplished by other nation states in an effort to establish their own political legitimacy. To overcome this dilemma, Germany thus posits a second or, rather, a previously undiscovered Greece, a Greece associated not with order, clarity, and restraint, but instead with excess, darkness, and intoxication. It was this Greece, still largely unknown, to which Germany laid claim through a process of identification that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy call mythology, "the mimetic instrument par excellence" ("Nazi Myth" 298). Politics became the place where this obscure, if not mystical, origin was to come to fruition and what was latent in the past was to see the light of day. The Nazi myth was the mythology that redefined politics as a Gesamtkunstwerk.

In Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry Lacoue-Labarthe continues with this analysis, albeit with a different aim. Here his concern is not with the aesthetic dimensions of National Socialism but with a theory of art, which makes the latter particularly suitable for political projects. It has everything to do with the privilege assigned art in the history of Being. Lacoue-Labarthe explains that for Heidegger art is the event of the disclosure of being, and not simply any art, but poetry in particular which names and says being in...