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Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940-2007) is widely acknowledged in his native France and in the English-speaking world as one of the most important philosophers of his generation and an exceptionally rigorous reader of Heidegger, Hölderlin, Benjamin, Blanchot, and Celan. An astute thinker of the political and a far-reaching and decisive analyst of the place of theater and music in Western metaphysics, Lacoue-Labarthe also had another, clandestine passion for something called poetry or literature, though he would remain deeply suspicious of these words. Phrase is his most original work, a sequence of texts both autobiographical and philosophical, written in lucid prose and in free verse over a period of more than twenty-five years.
Published here in its entirety for the first time in English, Phrase is a profoundly moving meditation on the relationship between love and mortality, language and embodiment, writing and inspiration, memory and hope, loss and recompense, and music and silence. At its heart is a probing awareness of the mysterious gift of language itself, and of the perpetually elusive yet obsessive phrase that informs all human existence and provides the book with its lapidary title and distinctive signature. This translation also includes a postface by Jean-Christophe Bailly, one of Lacoue-Labarthe's most long-standing friends and interlocutors, and incorporates a number of translator's notes that will facilitate access to Lacoue-Labarthe's sometimes allusive writing. There is no better introduction to Lacoue-Labarthe's thought than Phrase, and no more compelling proof of the enduring significance of his thinking than this uniquely powerful text.
Published here in its entirety for the first time in English, Phrase is a profoundly moving meditation on the relationship between love and mortality, language and embodiment, writing and inspiration, memory and hope, loss and recompense, and music and silence. At its heart is a probing awareness of the mysterious gift of language itself, and of the perpetually elusive yet obsessive phrase that informs all human existence and provides the book with its lapidary title and distinctive signature. This translation also includes a postface by Jean-Christophe Bailly, one of Lacoue-Labarthe's most long-standing friends and interlocutors, and incorporates a number of translator's notes that will facilitate access to Lacoue-Labarthe's sometimes allusive writing. There is no better introduction to Lacoue-Labarthe's thought than Phrase, and no more compelling proof of the enduring significance of his thinking than this uniquely powerful text.
124 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
33 people want to read
About the author
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
60 books23 followersPhilippe Lacoue-Labarthe—philosopher, literary critic, and translator—is one of the leading intellectuals in France. He teaches philosophy and aesthetics at the University of Strasbourg. Among his works translated into English is Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Stanford paperback edition, 1998).
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February 9, 2022
What's in a phrase? What is a phrase? Phrase, the French for 'sentence' - but what is the sentence that is borne, phrased, herein?
The phrase is not a grammatical sentence here, in the work of Lacoue-Labarthe - but it does declare a sentence, bearing a demand, which is marked behind all language, all of its sentences and phrases. But silently - a saying which says nothing (qua any language, at least), which says in silence - the phrase inscribes the very opening or possibility of language, of saying, but only in withdrawing itself from that saying, remaining the possibility of language never actualized in any saying; a pure possibility, which is as much as to say the impossible, the unsayable saying.
How to phrase such an impossibility, which strikes to the heart of we mortals, we beings so integrally entwined with language? Lacoue-Labarthe bore this paradox, this agony of thought and language, more than nearly any other. It was, at once, his joy and his torment - his duty and his ultimate, necessary failure. The sentence, the exigency, of the phrase gives language in order that we might respond to it, to say it, despite its ineluctable retreat from every word enunciated. To say the phrase is like attempting to write the present - not to write in the present tense, but, in dissolving the tension which writing bears with the present, to write a present which is only ever absent, absented in the inscriptive mark of writing. To say the unsayable which ever echoes in the silence of all saying, in the excess of all that is said, which could be said - this is the impossible exigency of the phrase, perhaps.
The sentence of the phrase, in its demand of the impossible (in both genitives), thus marks an arrêt de mort - that is a death sentence, but also the arrest of death. This sentence, and its arrest, is also the sentence of a birth, to what Lacoue-Labarthe has elsewhere referred to as "the injustice of being born." For in being born, given life, we are not given life as such, a life which would be fulfilled or accomplishable. As Lacoue-Labarthe posits in a number of places in this work and elsewhere, there is death before life - not in the trivial sense in which prior to birth it is as much as death for one, but rather that the radical absence, the unspeakable, marks the absence of time before the birth unto the day. The death of the infans, the one without language, marks this coming into the day, but, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, this birth is stained by the fact that we, as singular, absolute individuum, are already dead, absent, no more of being. But can one already dead die - that is, die again? Can we even die a single time? Is this life, post-mortem, mort-né, not already marked under the sign of a suspension, a caesura, the other side of which remains in silence, beyond our possibility? Death suspended, rendering life an interminable dying, refused the terminus of death, and the term by which to speak it, to grasp it, to render it present and proper to ourselves? Language and life are thus both given to us, but refused to us as properly our own - they sentence us to a life as though neutralized, in the agony of a dying without end.
Yet the demand to speak, to speak out in supplication, without any determined word or recipient - our fate is as though marked by this (tragic) fault, in pursuit of the default of the phrase, of death, in the default of "ourselves," appearing only ever as disappearance, in effacement. And yet we speak - is this not what all literature, at its abyssal bottom, attests to? Perhaps. There is something of the greatest weight, which is not to say that it is not also of the greatest levity, at play here in Lacoue-Labarthe's work.
Just what this is, of course, I cannot say. It remains unspeakable. But in reading there might be given, beyond all hope, some glimmer or echo of what no word can bear - this conveyance, this fleeting transport, is perhaps all that was ever desired by this all too mortal desire.
Alas, words fail, as they must. All that is said remains, as the tombstone marking an absence always already fading into oblivion. Yet when all has been said, tout dire, perhaps only then the exigency that remains, the demand of an insistence to say, perhaps this would be the most imperative instance of saying, marked only here, now, by these two words which bear upon so much, and bear so much weight as they remain, suspended, as though above us - il faut...
The phrase is not a grammatical sentence here, in the work of Lacoue-Labarthe - but it does declare a sentence, bearing a demand, which is marked behind all language, all of its sentences and phrases. But silently - a saying which says nothing (qua any language, at least), which says in silence - the phrase inscribes the very opening or possibility of language, of saying, but only in withdrawing itself from that saying, remaining the possibility of language never actualized in any saying; a pure possibility, which is as much as to say the impossible, the unsayable saying.
How to phrase such an impossibility, which strikes to the heart of we mortals, we beings so integrally entwined with language? Lacoue-Labarthe bore this paradox, this agony of thought and language, more than nearly any other. It was, at once, his joy and his torment - his duty and his ultimate, necessary failure. The sentence, the exigency, of the phrase gives language in order that we might respond to it, to say it, despite its ineluctable retreat from every word enunciated. To say the phrase is like attempting to write the present - not to write in the present tense, but, in dissolving the tension which writing bears with the present, to write a present which is only ever absent, absented in the inscriptive mark of writing. To say the unsayable which ever echoes in the silence of all saying, in the excess of all that is said, which could be said - this is the impossible exigency of the phrase, perhaps.
The sentence of the phrase, in its demand of the impossible (in both genitives), thus marks an arrêt de mort - that is a death sentence, but also the arrest of death. This sentence, and its arrest, is also the sentence of a birth, to what Lacoue-Labarthe has elsewhere referred to as "the injustice of being born." For in being born, given life, we are not given life as such, a life which would be fulfilled or accomplishable. As Lacoue-Labarthe posits in a number of places in this work and elsewhere, there is death before life - not in the trivial sense in which prior to birth it is as much as death for one, but rather that the radical absence, the unspeakable, marks the absence of time before the birth unto the day. The death of the infans, the one without language, marks this coming into the day, but, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, this birth is stained by the fact that we, as singular, absolute individuum, are already dead, absent, no more of being. But can one already dead die - that is, die again? Can we even die a single time? Is this life, post-mortem, mort-né, not already marked under the sign of a suspension, a caesura, the other side of which remains in silence, beyond our possibility? Death suspended, rendering life an interminable dying, refused the terminus of death, and the term by which to speak it, to grasp it, to render it present and proper to ourselves? Language and life are thus both given to us, but refused to us as properly our own - they sentence us to a life as though neutralized, in the agony of a dying without end.
Yet the demand to speak, to speak out in supplication, without any determined word or recipient - our fate is as though marked by this (tragic) fault, in pursuit of the default of the phrase, of death, in the default of "ourselves," appearing only ever as disappearance, in effacement. And yet we speak - is this not what all literature, at its abyssal bottom, attests to? Perhaps. There is something of the greatest weight, which is not to say that it is not also of the greatest levity, at play here in Lacoue-Labarthe's work.
Just what this is, of course, I cannot say. It remains unspeakable. But in reading there might be given, beyond all hope, some glimmer or echo of what no word can bear - this conveyance, this fleeting transport, is perhaps all that was ever desired by this all too mortal desire.
Alas, words fail, as they must. All that is said remains, as the tombstone marking an absence always already fading into oblivion. Yet when all has been said, tout dire, perhaps only then the exigency that remains, the demand of an insistence to say, perhaps this would be the most imperative instance of saying, marked only here, now, by these two words which bear upon so much, and bear so much weight as they remain, suspended, as though above us - il faut...
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