Global
Cloud
Local
Slought, New York University and Columbia University invite you to join us in honoring the work and person(s) of Philippe Lacque-Labarthe (1940-2007) on March 23rd, 2007 from 7-8:30pm.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe remains a crucial participant in the elaboration of contemporary French philosophy, of which he was a key figure. His path-breaking work has shed light on the metaphysical itineraries and subterranean logic of ethical scarring, historicity, mimetology, tragic articulation, the unicity of the Shoah, the works of Hoelderlin, Kant, and Heidegger and their neighboring texts. A poet, philosopher, theatrical director and jazz expert, Lacoue-Labarthe also gave focus to the repressed urgency of music in the philosophical tradition.
Speakers include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avital Ronell, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Shireen Patell, Mark Nichanian, Claire Nancy, Micaela Kraemer, Dennis Hollier, Eckart Goebel, Paul Fleming, Patricia Dailey, Stanley Corngold, Susan Bernstein, and Emily Apter.
Letters from Phil Lewis and Jean-Luc Nancy and an unpublished piece by Lacoue-Labarthe will also be read. The event will begin and end with original musical composition by Jenny Olivia Johnson in collaboration with Stephen Smith. Selections from the film Proëme de Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (Hors oeil éditions, 2006) will be screened, with additional readings in Babelian tongues by William Rauscher, Christopher van Ginhoven, and Erica Weitzman.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was a contemporary French philosopher, literary critic, and translator. He was a member and president of the International College of Philosophy, and held chairs in philosophy at the University of Strasbourg and the University of California, Berkeley. His many books included The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (1988) and The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan (1992), both with Jean-Luc Nancy, and Poetry As Experience (1999). Lacoue-Labarthe was influenced by and wrote extensively on Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, German Romanticism, Paul Celan, and deconstruction. He was also a French translator of Heidegger, Celan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Walter Benjamin. In 1980 Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy co-organised a Cerisy-la-Salle conference on Derrida, named after Derrida's 1968 paper Les fins de l'homme. They then founded the Centre of Philosophical Research on the Political in November 1980. This Centre would remain active for four years, providing alternative lines of enquiry to the empirical approach of political sciences.
Welcome Remarks by Avital Ronell
Excerpt from Proëme de Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (2006), presented by Aaron Levy
Reading by Claire Nancy
Reflections by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Shireen Patell, Micaela Kramer, Denis Hollier, Paul Fleming, Patricia Dailey, Stanley Corngold, Susan Bernstein, Emily Apter, and Avital Ronell
"Remembrances of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe" by Jean-Luc Nancy
"Andenken an Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe" by Eckart Goebel