Abstract: 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 ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Over the course of nearly thirty years of work in common, between Philippe and I, politics was always present. Our philosophical, literary, and artistic interests were all delineated against the background of a conviction: what matters is transforming the world. Like many in our generation, we shared [partagions] this conviction—let us call it generally and vaguely Marxist—while, at the same time, we were bereft of specific political commitments after the end of the war in Algeria and the ever so complex episode of 1968. In '68, we experienced at once the strongest political intensity and the strongest rejection of all ongoing political practices. There was no longer any party or group that could meet our ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: These words, "No music, not now!" appear in Phrase, Lacoue-Labarthe's book of poems and prose, published in 2000. They come toward the end of "Phrase XVII," which is called "Scène." "Pas de musique!" may well be the words that most attached me to this book when I first read through it; they are the words I've remembered it by ever since. This is probably because when I had the good fortune to know Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, at least a little, I shared an interest in music with him. He knew a great deal of music very well, of course. Once he mentioned to me, in what by some stretch of the imagination one might have taken for a mild, joking boast, that in the past he'd briefly played sax in a jazz band, and that he ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: 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 ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: "Everything changes." What does this truism say' It could mark the fact of human mortality, the "brief candle" of the life of an individual who, says Macbeth, "struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more" (5.5.23, 25–26). It could also attest to a broader, cosmic tendency toward metamorphosis, as when Ovid's Pythagoras exclaims "Nothing endures in this world! The whole of it flows, and all is formed with a changing appearance" (527). Nietzsche will affirm a version of this world of ubiquitous, perpetual change: "Do you know what the world is to me' A monster of energy, without beginning, without end … that does not expend itself but only transforms itself…[A] play of forces and waves of ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Repetition has become the question, what questions us. …are we able to deal with this new urgency of repetition without seeking revenge toward it'Catherine Malabou, "From the Overman to the Posthuman: How Many Ends'"There is a philosophical urgency from which it is now impossible to shy away from: the obligation is on us to think or to rethink mimesis.Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, L'Imitation des modernesWhat is the link between mimesis and plasticity' Is mimesis a plastic concept' Or plasticity a mimetic concept' Or both' Either way, the duplicity of my title mirrors a destabilizing double movement that bears the traces of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's thought, a thought that continues to form, inform, and transform my ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: 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 ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: I take my point of departure from an issue I have raised in a reading of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Phrase that involves what might seem a rather minor difference of interpretation, almost a technical matter.1 I believe, however, that it goes to the heart of Lacoue-Labarthe's concern with the question of literature and might allow an approach to some core dimensions of the practice of writing through which he pursued his literary and critical thought. Once I have developed this issue of a "figural exigency," I will explore what is perhaps a striking instance of its constraint on this text that was so profoundly haunted by the problem of mimesis.So, I begin again with Lacoue-Labarthe's effort to come to grips with ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: March 25, 1984, a quarter century ago. Let us imagine Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on the banks of the Neckar, near the tower. It is here that we can situate Lacoue's French translation of the definition of poetry that Paul Celan proposes in The Meridian. A translation that follows, and at least in certain places opposes, the translations by Blanchot, André du Bouchet, and Jean Launay:Poetry, Ladies and Gentlemen—: that infinite speaking of pure mortality and the in-vain. [La poésie, Mesdames et Messieurs—: ce parler à l'infini de la mortalité pure et de l'en vain.](qtd. in Poetry 105)Poetry is thus: a knotting of speaking, the infinite, and death.April 13, 1984, the same spring, in Barcelona. In a translation ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: If pushed, that is, at those moments of terrifying oblivion when the merest winter light falling on a wall, or grass growing sparsely in a garden, or water flowing in a river, is a pure sign, like a hiatus, that I am going to die, I might say (and this too would speak, in silence, and be captured in the phrase): I will have been a phrase.Or rather: there will have been a phrase, this phrase—which will have haunted me, and never crossed my lips.This abortive utterance, this sense of being haunted, this decidedly I call literature.The story I should like to tell (or recite: perhaps it is, unfortunately, something like a myth) is therefore a story of renunciation.To "renounce" originally meant: to announce or enounce. ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Opitz's poem "An eben jhn / vber seine Abildung eines Frawenzimmers" ("To the Artist: On His Painting of a Lady," ca. 1628) extols a picture by the artist Bartholomäus Strobel. The verses raise a number of questions concerning the relationship between poetic language, pictorial representation, and the lyrical I. Enlisting a topos of the literary tradition of ekphrasis,2 Opitz observes that the image seems to be alive. Although the observer knows he is looking at a painting, the woman strikes him as if she were flesh and blood: "Picture! No picture!" Initially, the poem names two possible creators of the image: Nature—which amounts to denying the artifact—or the artist, who has imitated Nature well enough to fool ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: It has become common among scholars to illustrate the significance of Erich Auerbach's critical project by both situating it within the context of his life and defining it against deconstruction.2 In an early essay, Emily Apter argues that, despite his apparent conservatism, Auerbach's "privileging of exile" (87; he wrote Mimesis as a refugee in Turkey) suggests a parallel with postcolonial theory and might thus offer a corrective to "several generations of Europhilic, deconstructively trained, predominantly white comparative literature critics" (86).3 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht likewise contrasts his own methodological emphasis on Auerbach's biography—a staple of Auerbach criticism whether the focus is (in Gumbrecht's ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: "There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive forever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness—these forces are miracle, mystery and authority": so speaks Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov (320). I would like to show how those three powers, those three forces, can be derived from the Christian theology of omnipotence, and accordingly how this theology forms a place of scission between ethics and the religious. To that end, I shall pick up some of the conclusions from a forthcoming book, Genesis of the Sovereign God (Genèse du Dieu souverain), the second volume of an archaeology of power that I began earlier in God without Power (Dieu sans ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Sharon Cameron's book The Bond of the Furthest Apart takes its title from Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer: "The insensible bond, connecting your furthest apart and most different images, is your vision" (qtd in Cameron 6). What renders the bond "insensible," Cameron argues, is our proclivity to see things in terms of categories, distinctions, and oppositions that keep them apart. Her book, like Bresson's cinematography, loosens conventional boundaries as it works to reveal its own "insensible" connections both thematically and structurally.Structurally, the book thus points to the question of its own inclusivity. The artists at its core, Bresson, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, can be brought together in a ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Jesse Rosenthal's brilliant book works from a disarmingly simple query—what does it mean for a novel to "feel right"'—to unfold an intricate account of how a forgotten branch of Victorian ethical philosophy has tacitly shaped our critical practices and canonical preferences, leaving a "moral stamp" (7) on those experiences of novel reading we might designate "morally neutral" (5). Good Form is not a defense of the ethically improving or sympathetically enhancing qualities of reading, nor an application of recent moral philosophy to Victorian novels. It is a formidably inventive, urbane, and compelling work of scholarship that marshals historical and philosophical insight alongside deft close analysis to reimagine ... Read More Keywords: Arts; Literature; Prose literature; Montaigne, Michel de,; Auerbach, Erich,; God (Christianity); Providence and government of God PubDate: 2018-06-05T00:00:00-05:00
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