Phrase by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (review)

The first of this text’s twenty-one ‘Phrases’ (fragments running from one to several pages, many of them written in free verse) speaks of literature as an impossible event: ‘that which won’t come and can’t reach where it’s going’ (p. 5). Given Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s extensive engagement with Heidegger, this recalls the latter’s thinking of Being and its general apartness, before it is determined in one particular way or another. Transposed into a literary key, Heidegger’s questioning asks: when can we speak of literature? Only once the process of critical reading has run its course, or already in the moment of its first appearance before us? The structure of Lacoue-Labarthe’s Phrase suggests a preference for the second option: ‘Phrase i’ is constructed around the initial newness of the literary event, as something that does not need to exist, does not respond to any economic demand, does not express any identity. If the subsequent ‘Phrase ii’ and the final ‘Phrase xxi’ are both designated as ‘clarifications’, and provide definitions of writing, such an event is presumably what they clarify. That would mean that the interplay between these ‘Phrases’ emphasizes the shock of the new, its freedom from determination and belonging. Indeed, in the later clarificatory ‘Phrases’, Lacoue-Labarthe attempts to formulate this unassimilable newness more fully: ‘Whenever I set about writing [.. .] I listen and can hear it, barely audible, not knowing where it comes from, from no voice distinctly articulated, this unknown tongue, no word of which, nor any structure, nor any sound, is identifiable as such’ (p. 89). But while this might appear a prime example of Romantic inspiration, things alter when we recall the other writings that Lacoue-Labarthe published over the twenty-five years spanned by Phrase. This is particularly the case with his work on German Romanticism, which he saw as a refoundation of myth, gathering into itself the myths of world culture from sources ranging from the Vedas to Greek tragedy to Norse mythology. The question is whether, in being gathered in this way, such myths — and the dangerous allure of myth — are heightened or deconstructed, made more powerful by the retelling or emptied out by the comparative framework. In any case, it is a reminder that for Lacoue-Labarthe to write is to rewrite, to take others’ words as one’s own. That much is shown by the ample practice of quotation in Phrase, and which comes newly to light thanks to the diligent notes in which Leslie Hill traces these often tacit sources (they include: Hölderlin, T. S. Eliot, Racine, Baudelaire, Blanchot, Büchner, Von Armin, Beethoven, Wagner, Debussy, Freud, the Old Testament, Euripides, the ‘Stabat Mater’, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Rimbaud, the Requiem Mass, Homer, Conrad, Rousseau, Mozart, the blues guitarist James Blood Ulmer, Nietzsche, Reik, Lucretius, Lutheran hymns, Apollinaire, Ibsen, Lautréamont, Aristotle). The final impression is that of a striking contrast between these two elements in Lacoue-Labarthe’s thinking, between the uncontainedly new and the citational, with literature, each time afresh, allowing me to hear in my voice the voice of others.