The Heritage of Kant’s Work in
Recent French Philosophy
April 4: Lacoue-Labarthe
Introduction
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
• Born 1940
• Friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, both since end sixties lecturers at the University of Strasbourg
• Involved with theater (translation, set up)
• Died 2007
Most important works – original publication in French / English translation
• The Subject of Philosophy (1979/1993)
• Typography. Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (1986/1989)
• Poetry as Experience (1986/1999)
• Heidegger, Art and Politics. The fiction of the political (1988/1990)
• ‘Sublime Truth’, in J.-F. Courtine et al., Of the Sublime. Presence in Question (1988/1993)
• Musica Ficta: Figures of Wagner (1991/1994)
• Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry (2002/2007)
With Jean-Luc Nancy:
• The Literary Absolute. The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (1978/1988)
• ‘The Nazi Myth’ (1991/1990)
• Retreating the Political (1983/1997)
Mimesis
The discussion about mimesis starts with its translation: imitation, (re)presentation, performance, art
1.
Plato: imitation (copy), which necessarily fails – as knowledge
2.
Aristotle, Poetics: performative expression that provides insight, that is more philosophical than
history, because the plot (muthos) reports the general structure of human life
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The plot needs fiction
Aristotle, Physics: ‘hè technè mimeitai tèn phusin’; in a second statement ‘completion’ is added: technè
‘imitates’ phusis and completes what phusis cannot accomplish
 Technè and mimesis coincide, in their relationship with phusis
• If mimesis imitates nature as a productive process, it is productive itself
 Mimesis = poièsis (making, creating)
LL distinguishes:
• Restricted mimesis: imitation, copy, representation
• General mimesis: creation, making, pro-ducing, presentation
Mimetology
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Consequences for relation:
Existing – new: no creation ex nihilo, for phusis is already upcoming itself
Natural – artificial: no naturalism nor constructivism
Original – repeating: original supplementarity: the origin presupposes the supplement of mimesis,
in which it is no longer original => representation impossible
Own/proper/pure – alien/improper/impure: the law of mimesis is impropriété
Identity – difference: the one different in itself (Heraclitus), difference more original
Revealing – hiding: because mimesis gives shape to the revealed object, there is always something
not revealed as well; truth is not transparancy
This is in line with Heidegger
Criticism of metaphysics = onto-typology (analogous to Heidegger’s onto-theology)
Being/alètheia replaced by mimesis
Ontological difference replaced by original supplementarity
No recourse to Eigentlichkeit (authenticity)
Identity
The subject is based on mimesis: identification
• Bildung, Gestalt, façonner, plattein, fingere, prägen, tupein: typography, figural ontology
• No preexisting subject, but an inherent impropriety, not being yourself, insuffisance, orientation on
different ‘role models’
 The subject desists, the Gestalt cannot keep up its standing, unless there is fixation
The problem of the political is identification (on a collective scale)
Germany: die verspätete Nation, the nation coming late
1. Double bind: the only model worth imitating is the old Greece – do not imitate it, for it already
served others as a model (the Romans, France etc.)
 Solution: imitate the ‘other’ Greece: the mystical, archaic, extatic, dionysian Greece (Nietzsche)
• The introduction of a ‘new mythology’ (Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin) – Nietzsche: ‘the myth of the
future’ – Heidegger: mythology more fundamental than historical science
• Wagner: Gesamtkunstwerk as religion (the bond of the community)
2.
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Paradox: imitation of Greece as the work of art made without a model, by genius: Germany
destroyed itself by this impossible tension
Nazism = national-aestheticism: the fixation of the Gestalt; Goebbels: we politicians, giving form to
the people, as artists, create the solid and full image of the people, eliminate what is sick
Sublime Truth 1
LL mentions Lyotard’s ‘formula’ for the sublime: ‘the presentation (of this) that there is the
nonpresentable’
Two quotes from Kant’s 3rd Critique, in both: nothing is more sublime than:
1.
The Biblical passage proclaiming the prohibition of making images (‘Mozes’)
2.
The inscription on the temple of Isis: ‘I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and my veil no
mortal has removed (‘Isis’)
In 1 presentation is thought on the basis of figure, form, image, that is, delimitation and unlimitation; in
2 on the basis of unveiling
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LL will elaborate the thesis – and oppose this thesis to Lyotard – that the sublime should be thought
according to 2 (= Heideggerian), for 1 belongs to metaphysics (as understood by Heidegger)
Sublime Truth 2
LL calls genius the sublime artist or the artist of the sublime
• This is in conformity with Longinus
• Lyotard reads Kant as keeping genius (the origin of beautiful art) and the sublime apart
Kant: genius = the faculty for the presentation of aesthetic ideas
• these ideas of (productive) imagination are distinguished from ideas of reason
• productive imagination is very powerful in creating another nature out of the material the real
nature gives it
• for an aesthetic idea no concept or language can be adequate
• it gives a multitude, an immeasurable field of related representations; sensible forms which permit
one to think much more than one can express in a determinate concept
Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929)
Kant: ‘the two stems of human cognition, namely sensibility and understanding’ and their ‘common but
to us unknown root’: (the schematism of) transcendental imagination
Heidegger reads Kant as acknowledging that this ground of metaphysics is an abyss
This could explain why LL focuses on the aesthetic ideas of productive imagination (= on genius) as the
‘basis’ of a philosophy of difference in the 3rd Critique, and as the basis of the sublime
Sublime Truth 3
Heidegger: aesthetics is the metaphysical approach of art, this is especially proven by the application of
the form-matter scheme
• This scheme is delimiting (LL also uses the term closure)
• Heidegger: metaphysics ~ technology
• The first step toward this form-matter scheme is in Plato: the appearance of things is fixed in their
eidos (idea) => aesthetics/metaphysics is ‘eidetic’ = delimiting, closing
• But primary, before eidos, there must be appearing, phainesthai as such
• Heidegger understands beauty (das Schöne) as the appearing (scheinen) of truth
Heidegger about Hegel’s ‘the end of art’ thesis:
• Art indeed no longer great when it is no longer constitutive for the historical existence of a people
• But Hegel’s thesis is determined by his metaphysical (eidetic) aesthetics, therefore the decision
about his thesis depends on the question whether metaphysics can be overcome
• Hegel’s aesthetics: beauty is the adequate proportion of sensible form and spiritual content, the
sublime is the still inadequate version of this proportion: the eidetic form-matter scheme
• A new age, inaugurated by art, is still possible if ‘we’ succeed in overcoming metaphysics – if not,
Hegel’s thesis will appear to be correct
Sublime Truth 4
Heidegger’s ambiguous judgment about Kant:
1.
Kant thinks beauty on the basis of form, the form-matter scheme: the eidetic presentation
=> Kant = aesthetics (metaphysics); Kant will fall under the same fate as Hegel
2.
A. Kant takes beauty to be favor, free satisfaction, for a disinterested person: this is close to the
idea of letting the object appear purely as it is; therefore Heidegger defends Kant against
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who deny the possibility of disinterestedness
=> in Kant there is nearly a non-eidetic conception of beauty, a break with metaphysics
B. Kant connects beauty to the historical destination of humanity (as Schiller has shown more
clearly)
LL: What could be a non-eidetic presentation of being? = What could be at play in presentation that
would not be of the order of the eidos, the aspect or the view?
Sublime Truth 5
The two quotes about the sublime: ‘Mozes’ is a prescriptive utterance, ‘Isis’ is a constative utterance
 ‘Isis’: the truth of phusis is not presentable; ~ Heraclitus: phusis likes to hide itself
• This statement presents that there is the nonpresentable (~ Lyotard on the sublime)
• Tells the truth about truth as the play of revealing and hiding: ‘I reveal the truth = that truth cannot
be revealed’; the paradox
 The truth is sublime
This is in conformity with Heidegger (‘The Origin of the Work of Art’): ‘truth is in its essence un-truth’,
for Lichtung (clearing) is Verbergung (concealment)
Two ways of concealment:
1. Verstellen (deplacement): the one being slides in front of the other being => it gives itself different
from what it is: concealment of what it is (of the quidditas of being)
2. Versagen (refusal): being gives itself no further than the minimal beginning of the clearing:
concealment of that it is (of the quodditas of being)
• ‘Isis’ corresponds with 2: here the finitude, which is at the same time the condition of possibility of
appearing as such
Sublime Truth 6
Heidegger calls ‘that something appears’ / ‘that something is’ the Ereignis (event)
This event, the event of truth, is ungeheuer (uncanny) (also: the Ungeheure), it ‘shocks’ (Stoss) us out of
the common, out of the familiar, it is an estrangement, derangement (Verrückung)
 LL: this is the lexicon of the sublime (even if Heidegger does not use the word ‘sublime’)
The what of the appearance, the eidos (the eidetic) of being, always becomes a figure (in Heidegger:
Gestalt)
But the work of art is also a that: the opening of the fact that there is being, the presenting, Scheinen,
phainesthai as such, in relation to which the figure is secondary
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In the aesthetical tradition the sublime was often qualified negatively: not-yet-beauty, failing form,
etc.
• The un- of ungeheuer (the uncommon) does not mean that there is a negative presentation
• The concealment or retreat which is part – or even condition of possibility – of this appearing is not
something negative
 The sublime is not the presentation of the fact that there is the nonpresentable, but of the fact that
there is presentation, that there is something (and not nothing): an affirmative conception of the
sublime
Sublime Truth 7
Heidegger registers the event of appearing under beauty, he never mentions the sublime
Why Heidegger remained silent on the sublime – LL assumes the following reasons:
• The concept only arose in later Greek culture (with Latin, jewish, and christian influences): the era
of metaphysics had already started
• It did not arise in philosophy, but in rhetoric
• It is thought on the basis of beauty => conceptually the sublime does not offer something different
• (Like beauty) it is thought on the basis of the metaphysical opposition: sensible  suprasensible
LL: Heideggers nonmetaphysical thinking of beauty corresponds with what generally was intended with
the concept of the sublime
In the history of philosophy a concept of beauty more original than Plato’s interpretation of beauty on
the basis of eidos has been preserved better in the concept of the sublime
• For instance Longinus mentions 5 sources of the sublime, showing a tension between technè,
methodos on the one hand and natural talent, phusis on the other hand
• Longinus actually acknowledges the original supplementarity in the relation between technè and
phusis (the relation of mimesis): the gift of nature is nothing if one does not take the right
‘decision’, only technè can reveal phusis
 Mimesis is the condition of possibility of knowing that there is being (and not nothing)
 The truth of great art: it presents, retreating from presentation, that there is being, that something
is present
Hölderlin
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Heidegger: ‘In Hölderlin’s poetry, the domain of art and beauty, and all metaphysics in which both
can only have their place, is transgressed for the first time’ (GA 52, 63)
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In his many works on Hölderlin LL focuses not so much on Hölderlin’s poems, as Heidegger did, but
on Hölderlin’s comments on tragedy
Hölderlin’s definition of tragedy: ‘the boundless union’ of god and man ‘purifies itself through
boundless separation’
This separation between the divine and the human: the ‘categorical reversal’; presented in the play by
the ‘caesura’: the ‘counter-rythmic interruption’
This reversal forces human beings ‘more decidedly down to earth’, leaves us only ‘the conditions of
space and time’, the law of finitude
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The lesson of tragedy is Kantian – Hölderlin: ‘Kant is the Mozes of our nation’
Earthly finitude ~ Hölderlin’s principle of sobriety: his more literal/sober/prosaic language in his
later work, ‘calling a cat a cat’
Heidegger misses this: his ‘remythologization’ of Hölderlin’s poetry, ‘a revolting mythicaltheological confiscation’, holding on to a connection between the gods and the community, even if
this is in the modality of ‘waiting for the gods’
Hölderlin was a republican, knew that a national appropriation or identification is impossible, said
goodbye to the stereotypes of sacralization, to the cult of heroes