Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Phrase

Infancy, Survival

Christopher Fynsk

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781438463490
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book presents an interpretation of a volume of poetry and theoretical reflections ( Phrase ) by the late Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, who is widely known as one of the major contributors to thinking about the relation between philosophy and literature in the continental tradition. His work has shaped the deconstructive approach to the question of the subject and has opened important paths of research relating to the topic of literary mimesis. Along with Jean-Luc Nancy, he made very important contributions in the areas of romantic literary theory and psychoanalytic theory. Christopher Fynsk's analysis of Phrase focuses principally on two of its key motifs. Fynsk first deals with the theme of infancy and draws forth the deep relation to Blanchot that is revealed in this text. The second motif which organizes the narrative of the autobiographical component of Phrase (which Lacoue-Labarthe entitles "a history of renunciation") names the condition of modern poetic speech. Thus, Fynsk interprets the history of renunciation and elucidates the meaning of what Lacoue-Labarthe terms "literature."

THE LIFE OF A PHRASE

Infancy, Renunciation, Passing

In 1976, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Mathieu Benezet invited Maurice Blanchot to contribute to Première Livraison, at that time a journal with limited circulation. They received, in response, the initial version of the brief narrative that Blanchot would republish a few years thereafter in The Writing of the Disaster.1 The latter publication introduced only a few alterations, but drew the original title into a parenthesis and suspended it with a question mark, leaving the following:

(A primal scene?) You who live later, close to a heart that beats no more, suppose, suppose this: the child—is he seven years old, or eight perhaps?—standing, drawing the curtain and, through the window pane, looking. What he sees: the garden, the wintry trees, the wall of a house: while he sees, no doubt in a child’s way, his play space, he tires and slowly looks up toward the ordinary sky, with its clouds, the grey light, the day pallid and without depth.

What happens then: the sky, the same sky, suddenly open, absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane had broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore been lost in it, to the point that there is affirmed and there dissipates there the vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond. The unexpected in this scene (its interminable feature) is the feeling of happiness that immediately submerges the child, the ravaging joy to which he can bear witness only by tears, an endless streaming of tears. He is thought to suffer a childish distress; attempts are made to console him. He says nothing. He will live henceforth in the secret. He will weep no more.

The appearance of this version roughly halfway through The Writing of the Disaster was prepared by nine pages of theoretical and philosophical reflections that implicitly (though across the borders of an insistently fragmentary exposition) linked Blanchot’s fictional casting of the after-experience of an “immemorial death” to the meditations of D. W. Winnicott and Serge Leclaire on what Blanchot invites us to think as “the death of the infans.” They also addressed a difficulty faced by the (Hegelian) dialectic in seeking to subsume in negation a passing that renders it both possible and impossible: what Blanchot named “the impossible necessary death.”2 This impossibility, he suggested, only reinforced the exigency of a singular figuration that would necessarily insist in psychic life, even in its effacement in the traces of what Blanchot named a writing.

A child already dead dies, of a murderous death; an infant of which we know nothing, even if we qualify him as marvelous, terrifying, tyrannical or indestructible. Except this: that the possibility of speech and life would depend, through death and murder, on the relation of singularity established fictively with a mute past, to the hither side of history, thus outside the past, for which the eternal infans becomes a figure, at the same time as it steals away from it. “A child is being killed.” Let us not be mistaken about this present: it signifies that the operation could never take place once and for all, that it is not accomplished at any privileged moment of time, that it operates inoperably and thus tends to be none but the very time that destroys (effaces) time, an effacement, or a destruction, or a gift that has always already avowed itself in the precession of a Saying outside any said, a word of writing whereby this effacement, far from effacing itself in its turn, is perpetuated without term even in the interruption that constitutes its mark.3

I cite these stunning lines in order to establish the bridge between the reading of Phrase to come and the reflection on infancy that I pursued in Infant Figures. I also want to prepare the reader’s ear for the repeated recourse to the motif of infancy and related themes in Lacoue-Labarthe’s text, beginning with the striking image from which it starts, dated July 1976 (following Lacoue-Labarthe’s usage in this volume, which is to date each part, each “Phrase”):

and because it is manifest that it is, in you, elsewhere,

no place of concern to you, that this streams

or collapses (I don’t know, I think of a visage exhausted, betrayed, covered in tears,

etc.—in fact, of supplication). (P, 9)

Of course, the link to Blanchot does not exhaust what appears in these words. Indeed, they may have been written without immediate reference to Blanchot’s text. But we might well imagine a stronger connection if we pursue the hypothesis that Blanchot’s text somehow released the writing that would become Phrase—in which case, Blanchot’s brief narrative would have been the original scene for Phrase itself, a kind of focal point for a broader textual involvement that was not without an agonistic dimension. Implicit citations of Blanchot abound in Phrase, but one section, describing a scene of intense struggle, is dedicated to Blanchot and quotes insistently from another section of The Writing of the Disaster devoted, in reflective dialogue, to the “primal scene” offered earlier in Blanchot’s volume.4 It is one among several segments that reveal just how deeply Lacoue-Labarthe was engaged with Blanchot’s text (a fact not otherwise strongly visible until the posthumous publication of Agonie terminée, agonie interminable, sur Maurice Blanchot5). We will have to return to the question of the nature of this engagement. For now, let me merely offer a last recollection of the lines from which Lacoue-Labarthe drew for the section of Phrase to which I have just referred, “(L’émoi).” They name, via their evocation of the drying of the “endless flow of tears” that bore witness to the child’s overwhelming joy, the dis-interest Lacoue-Labarthe sought in what he termed “renunciation.” And they name what we may feel to have been at stake for Lacoue-Labarthe in his effort to write this extraordinary book: survival.

The ever-suspended question: having died of this “ability to die” which gives him joy and devastation, did he survive—or rather, what does to survive mean then, if not to be sustained by an assent to refusal, by the exhaustion of feeling, and to live withdrawn from any interest in oneself, disinterested, thinned out to a state of utter calmness, expecting nothing?—Consequently, waiting and watching, for suddenly wakened and, knowing this full well henceforth, never wakeful enough.6

How, then, shall we approach Lacoue-Labarthe’s testimonial effort in Phrase and what it gives to us of an infancy? The path indicated is that of the story (histoire) of a renunciation (P, 13), offered in the course of the twenty-one sections of this text: a story, or a history—even though the fragmented, varying character of its writing and the extra-temporal character of its events (the times of “birth” and “death” do not conform to chronology) make any reliance upon a narrative order fundamentally problematic. The motif of infancy is powerfully recurrent in Phrase, as I have noted, but what Lacoue-Labarthe evokes with this term cannot be taken simply as some stage or moment within a standard temporal schema or developmental order, however insistently it presents itself as initial in the psychic life presented. Moreover, like “phrase” or “caesura,” “infancy” finally resists discursive hold or theoretical construction. No conceptual definition can quite secure a consistent meaning for these terms which Lacoue-Labarthe sought to apply to a profoundly overwhelming experience. In fact, Lacoue-Labarthe himself did not believe such a meaning could be found, as a significant theoretical statement appended to Phrase II makes quite clear; the question presented by what he names “phrase” cannot ever be properly formulated (P, 20). We are thus left with the task of following the way these motifs are deployed and brought to speech in Phrase, and for a minimum of intelligibility we are pretty much obliged to follow the broken story Lacoue-Labarthe offers, his construction of the exposure he repeatedly suffered in and as what he came to name literature, and his highly reflected account of the way in which a decisive chapter of this literary experience opened and closed in relation with another whose name is given to us as “Claire.” From something more or less than a story, therefore—and for this all the more poignant, all the more painful—I will seek to trace Lacoue-Labarthe’s incipient thought of infancy and what the experience in which it echoed required of him in the manner of what he came to call renunciation. I will thus follow Lacoue-Labarthe’s effort to write the allegory that is Phrase itself.

From the outset, however, we encounter a difficulty that goes to the heart of the “story of renunciation” and is an essential factor in both the undoing it recounts and the “unworking” that afflicts it as a story. It manifests itself narratively, but derives essentially from the import of that latent pre-inscription (“phrase”) that he claims is determining for his existence. Addressing this difficulty, if only through a work of provisional definition and by a rapid sketch of the narrative, seems a prerequisite for achieving coherence and legibility in the necessarily brief (too brief, however long) account to come. The challenges involved here will make this necessary introduction rather dense, but my hope is that this initial step will ease the way for a reading that seeks to follow closely the movement and language of a very beautiful text.

We begin with “phrase,” then, a term whose position as both title and repeated section-heading (each of the twenty-one sections of the volume thus presumably partakes in some manner of what is named with the term—each one phrases in the invention or sounding of the sought phrase) mark it as defining both for the material presented and its mode of presentation. To what does the term refer in this volume—bearing in mind Lacoue-Labarthe’s own admission that its provenance and character ultimately escaped him? Let us describe it, again provisionally and somewhat abstractly (seeking to evoke what so defines—though it is no “thing”—and leaving aside as yet its presentation, the way it comes to be written in the text), as what destines or “sentences” in an individual existence: something less than an articulated saying and present to experience as barely more than a latent, pre-scribing idiograph. But let us also recognize that this already overly formal definition cannot be secured by reference to linguistics, music, philosophy, or psychology (even with a psychoanalytic turn that would open onto the preconscious or the unconscious). The term calls upon us, rather, to draw from all of these fields from the ground of their possible pertinence for the constitution of a subjectivity —this “ground” (or non-ground) requiring for its conception something comparable to what Jacques Derrida entertained and deconstructed in his earlier work under the name of a “grammatology.”7 Lacoue-Labarthe had himself traced this formidable methodological imperative in an essay on Theodor Reik composed very shortly before he undertook the writing that became Phrase, noting very precisely at its opening where the questions undertaken inevitably escaped his theoretical hold.8 Phrase, as I have suggested, will repeat this indication of a limit, implicitly inviting us to carry the questioning further. And we can, perhaps, carry a form of speculation about this “originary” experience a bit further along some of the lines Lacoue-Labarthe has drawn. But Lacoue-Labarthe makes it clear that the limit he reached was ultimately not traversable in theory inasmuch as it was finally defined by nothing other than the finitude of the human Dasein, as Heidegger offered it to thought (refusing it, in the same gesture, to the grasp of any conceptual articulation as he traced the limits of the metaphysics of subjectivity and representation). The term “finitude” doesn’t settle anything, of course, but it will serve to indicate the level at which Lacoue-Labarthe sought to move/to write in this auto-bio-graphical attempt, and it offers perhaps the most fitting rhetorical register for this initial work of definition (all the more so as Lacoue-Labarthe’s primary philosophical reference in the initial period of the composition of this book was in fact Heidegger9). It thus leads me to recast what has been offered thus far with a definition of “phrase” that remains still too philosophical, but is perhaps suggestive of what Lacoue-Labarthe sought to bring to writing, which is nothing other than the experience of his own finitude and what he knew of a fateful destiny.

“Phrase,” as Lacoue-Labarthe sought to present it, then, would name the schematizing element of that liminal exposure in which a subject finds a relati...