archive : s0metim3s

Below is a fragment from Lacoue-Labathe’s contribution to a 1980 seminar on Les fins de l’homme, which sought, as he put it, to “question of the links which indisociably unites the political with the philosophical.” The excerpt is from Retreating the Political. It clearly takes place as a response to what, in the 1980s at least, took the form of a dispute between Marxism and deconstruction.

But, since the effort of enshrining these philosophical/political camps is only functional to either/both the academy and sects - which is to say, to a certain priesthood, in both cases - the fragment might otherwise be read as the moment when the intersections (but also tensions) between - as I put it some time back - the philosophers of the désistance and the theoreticians of the refusal were explicitly put. Lacoue-Labarthe:

Lacoue-Labarthe will be missed. “Nous sommes tout unis dans la douleur du deuil.” But how to even begin to speak of loss here - since it was already constitutive, not least of the very sense of Lacoue-Labarthe’s writings on the subject, the author - but also as the loss of what one ‘never had’? Last night I’d planned to extract something of his from Retreating the Political, the discussion of Marxisms, council communism, etc in the ongoing discussion on the political - and will do so soon; but the news from Amie this morning that he had died last night has me detouring into his writings on subjectal loss. Questions which are, obviously, connected. More later. As I become capable of less stuttering perhaps, wanting to say something, but at the same time not wanting to give the sense of loss over to the constraints of language, such as they are - and even less the proprieties, appropriations of mourning. Lacoue-Labarthe will be missed. I never had him.