DANGEROUS IDENTIFICATIONS: an exchange between jacques derrida and philippe lacoue-labarthe

Abstract

When friends engage with each other's work, they are exposed to the doubling that has infected philosophical discourse since its beginnings, imbuing it with a chronic instability. Such is Lacoue-Labarthe's vision of philosophy's tendency to madness, epitomised by the way in which the doubling occurring in Nietzsche (Zarathustra) doubles that of Plato (Socrates). By examining the ways in which the problem of doubling, or dangerous identifications, is formulated, avoided or confronted in the mutual readings of Lacoue-Labarthe (“In the Name of”) and Derrida (“Desistance”), it will be possible to shed some light on the anxiety of influence that underlies late twentieth-century philosophy.

Keywords:

• avoidance
• Heidegger
• double
• friendship
• desistance
• deconstruction

Notes

See François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008); Elisabeth Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent Times, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia UP, 2008); Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy, trans. David Macey (London and New York: Verso, 2009); Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, eds. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001).

Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics. See 133. The first chapter, “Typography,” was originally published as “Typographie,” in Mimesis des articulations, ed. Sylvia Agacinski et al. (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1975). Abbreviated henceforth as T.

Abbreviated henceforth as IN. Published originally in French as “À Jacques Derrida: Au nom de,” in L'Imitation des modernes: Typographies II (Paris: Galilée, 1986). Published in English in Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks.

The verb “s'entendre” in the original text could, and in my opinion should, be translated as “be understood.” Thus, a modified translation would read “[…] one must have clarity. Which must not, indeed cannot, be understood simply” (L'Imitation des modernes 230).

Lacoue-Labarthe refers here to those “faithful interpreters” of Heidegger that perpetuate “a manner of slightly outdated and vain aristocratism” (IN 60).

The English translation overturns the meaning of the original when it opts for the wording: “I did not understand that something other than this so very over-determined concept of the nation was possible” (IN 57).

In Derrida's “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” which was originally a paper presented at the conference “The Ends of Man” in 1980, Derrida answers Lacoue-Labarthe's demand for clarity by stating ironically that there are several kinds of clarity, not all of which produce the ends desired by Lacoue-Labarthe. “Clarity is necessary, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe said some time ago. Yes. But there is light, and there are lights, daylight, and also the madness of day” (50; translation modified).

Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?

In Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Derrida, commenting on Walter Benjamin, states that, thanks to translation, “the work does not simply live longer, it lives more and better, beyond its author's means” (203).

For Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger's focus on the un-thought suggests that reading a text amounts to extracting its philosophical message, independently of all contextual or stylistic considerations. But this approach, Lacoue-Labarthe claims, can only lead to an over-determined reading. It proceeds via an “absolute allegorism” (T 61) that saps away the dynamics of an individual text. Derrida, for his part, objects to Heidegger's views in so far as they assume that each text is constructed around a single and unique idea. Against Heidegger, Derrida suggests that every reading that gathers within it the various elements of a philosophical system, in the name of the unicity of thought, also entails a movement of dislocation that affirms its plurality. My point is that Lacoue-Labarthe's and Derrida's critiques of Heidegger's statement regarding the un-thought serve as a conduit for their muted critiques of each other's approach.

Derrida explains that the question of tone deserves to be examined more closely in philosophical discourse, particularly to the extent that it disturbs “the neutrality or at least the imperturbable serenity that should accompany the relation to the true and the universal” (“Of an Apocalyptic Tone” 29).

In a revealing note in “Desistance,” Derrida claims that the disclosed or undisclosed relation to Heidegger constitutes “a kind of film of the French philosophical scene in this quarter-century” (T 17 n. 10). Foucault and Deleuze always avoided proclaiming Heidegger's influence, while he and Lacoue-Labarthe always openly grappled with its “hazardous, indeed ‘necessary’ dimensions.”