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"Honoring the Work and Person(s) of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940-2007)"

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avital Ronell, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Shireen Patell, Mark Nichanian, Claire Nancy, Dennis Hollier, Eckart Goebel, Paul Fleming, Patricia Dailey, Stanley Corngold, Susan Bernstein, Emily Apter, et al.

Download Audio (114 min)
Press Kit / Image | PDF Download



Event Date: Friday, March 23, 2007
Location: The Great Room, 19 University Place, NYU
Conversations in Theory Series | Organized by Avital Ronell, Aaron Levy, Patricia Dailey

Philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (Photos by Julian Daniel and Olivier Roller)

New York University, Columbia University, and Slought Foundation invite you to join in honoring the Work and Person(s) of PHILIPPE LACOUE-LABARTHE (1940-2007) on March 23rd, 2007 from 7-8:30pm. Please note that this event will take place in The Great Room, 19 University Place, New York University.

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 Letters from Phil Lewis and Jean-Luc Nancy and an unpublished piece by Lacoue-Labarthe will also be read.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.




Download remembrances of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe by Jean-Luc Nancy (French Language; PDF)
Download "Andenken an Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe" by Eckart Goebel (English Language; PDF)

Please note that an audio recording of the memorial event has been made available from this webpage, and includes the following excerpts:

Welcome 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;
Due to technical difficulties, a textual version of Eckart Goebel's reflections has been made available for download above in liu of a recording.


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.

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To Cite this Page using MLA Style:

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, et al. "Honoring the Work and Person(s) of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940-2007)." Slought Foundation Online Content.
[23 March 2007; Accessed 21 November 2008]. <http://slought.org/content/11356/>.



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This program was made possible in part through the generous sponsorship of the Department of German and Trauma and Violence Transdisciplinary Studies at New York University (NYU)






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