The Difficulty of Experience

Paola Marrati

MLN, Volume 132, Number 5, December 2017 (Comparative Literature Issue),

pp. 1225-1235 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2017.0093

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/686877

Access provided by Binghamton University (18 Jun 2018 22:03 GMT)

 The Difficulty of Experience
❦

Paola Marrati

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s work is entirely animated, one could

perhaps even say haunted, by the necessity of thinking philosophi-
cally about art and politics, about what inescapably connects the one
to the other and both to philosophy. In this sense, he is an untimely
romantic or at least he belongs to a romantic legacy whose exact
contours remain largely to be investigated.
His interest for the early Romantics of the Jena circle is certainly not
incidental to his intellectual life. The Literary Absolute, co-authored with
Jean-Luc Nancy in 1978, is an important selection and translation of
fragments of the Athenaeum and an influential study of the emergence
of the modern concept of literature from the problems opened up in
the aftermath of Kant’s critique. Its publication contributed to renew
the interest in early German Romanticism on the French intellectual
scene, at a time when both philosophy and literary critics had their
eyes set on very different directions, and opened a novel chapter in
debates on the relation between literature and philosophy. But The
Literary Absolute is also something more: it remains, in my view, the
key text to understand Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation of Romanti-
cism as a specific way of defining the task, and hopes, of philosophy,
art, and politics. And, more importantly, it shapes the framework of
Lacoue-Labarthe’s own ideas and intuitions about what is it that in
European history dooms art and politics to raise the same hopes, run
the same dangers, and share the same responsibility. It is in the context
of such preoccupations that his novel and provocative interpretation
of mimesis takes its full significance.
The need to think about what ties together art and politics in the
history of philosophy, which for Lacoue-Labarthe largely overlaps with

MLN 132 (2017): 1225–1235 © 2018 by Johns Hopkins University Press

1226 PAOLA MARRATI

the history of Europe, takes two distinct, although related, aspects in

his work. On the one hand, Lacoue-Labarthe painstakingly attempts to
isolate and analyze the constitutive elements of a dominant conception
of art and politics that accounts for their consistency and dictates their
mutual—and fateful—dependence. His influential and controversial
interpretation of Heidegger’s commitment to and critique of National
Socialism in The Fiction of the Political is exemplary in this regard. On
the other hand, parallel to the critique—that is to say, to the analysis
and denunciation—of a specific and disastrous way of understanding
the task and nature of both art and politics, one can find in Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe’s work the hope to discover and decipher hints of
the possibility of a different idea, and a different practice, of art as
well as of politics. Part of Hölderlin’s works, Celan’s poems, or some
of Schoenberg and Berg’s music are a testimony, in his view, to the
quest of such a different form of art. Lacoue-Labarthe’s study of these
authors and works constitutes his own tentative but constant attempt
to navigate a new intellectual landscape; one, we could or should
hope, more capable of interrupting the configuration of ideas and
forces that lead to Auschwitz.
Lacoue-Labarthe explicitly shares Adorno’s conviction that Aus-
chwitz, or more precisely what the name of Auschwitz has come to
stand for, is no mere accident, no matter how catastrophic, in Euro-
pean history, but is instead an event whose possibility belongs to some
defining aspects of Western metaphysics and history. How exactly we
should understand such a “belonging” is of course no small ques-
tion. To describe the Nazi regime as the outcome of the dialectic of
Enlightenment is a very different project than retracing its origins
in German idealism, or than denouncing the intrinsic violence of
ontology in the manner of Levinas. What such different approaches
have in common though is the acknowledgment that what produced
or made possible the Nazi movement and regime has a long, presti-
gious, and still operative history whose philosophical underpinnings
are neither ornamental nor accidental; and hence that philosophy
has the responsibility to do what it can to come to terms with its com-
promised legacy. As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy write in the closing
lines of “The Nazi Myth:”
We wish only to underline just how much this logic, with its double trait
of the mimetic will-to-identity and the self-fulfillment of form, belongs
profoundly to the mood or character of the West in general, and more
precisely, to the fundamental tendency of the subject, in the metaphysical
sense of the word. Nazism does not sum up the West, nor represent its
 M  L N 1227

finality. But neither is it possible to push it aside as an aberration, still less

as a past aberration. A comfortable security in the certitudes of morality
and of democracy not only guarantees nothing, but exposes one of the
risk of not seeing the arrival, or the return, of that whose possibility is not
due to any simple accident of history. An analysis of Nazism should never
be conceived as a dossier of simple accusation, but rather as one element
in a general deconstruction of the history in which our own provenance
lies. (311)

In other terms, the need to understand the role played by philo-

sophical ideas in the rise of Nazism is as much future as past oriented.
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy feel strongly that this chapter of Euro-
pean history is not closed once and for all with the end of World
War II, but continues to cast its dangerous shadows on the present. The
resurgence of nationalistic movements across Europe and the Balkan
wars of the nineties, where the quest for “national identity” brought
back forms of ethnic cleansings most Europeans believed belonged to
the past, certainly contribute to the urgency expressed in “The Nazi
Myth.” But, more generally, the sense that fascism is still very much
a possibility informs the political thought of many influential French
philosophers of that generation: authors as different as Deleuze,
Balibar, Derrida—to name a few—may not necessarily believe that, to
quote Gérard Granel “les années trente sont devant nous” (“the thirties
are before us”), but they are all convinced that the forces, ideas and
desires that made possible fascism and Nazism have not disappeared
with the historical regimes they are named after, and that to under-
stand the power of those ideas and desires remains crucial to counter
their reappearance in the present. Almost three decades later their
worries, unfortunately, don’t ring any less true.
For Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, this task takes explicitly the form of
uncovering the conditions of possibility of fascism, of what he calls
“archi-fascism” to emphasize the difference between the philosophical
conditions of possibility—in the Kantian sense of the term—of the
fascist phenomenon from its historical instantiations as well as the dif-
ference between philosophical analyses and historical research. Among
these conditions, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s view, the notion of mimesis plays
a decisive role, and he devotes detailed and innovative analyses to the
role that mimesis plays in authors as different as Plato, Diderot, Kant,
Baudelaire and others in order to show how the logic of imitation is
at play well beyond the domain of aesthetics and psychology and over-
laps with being itself. This is to say that mimesis, as Lacoue-Labarthe
conceives it, is nothing short of an ontology. The dominant conception
1228 PAOLA MARRATI

of being, from Plato to Heidegger, would be secretly mimetic and the

task to unveil the logic of mimesis that shapes Western metaphysics,
with its paradoxical nature and far-reaching consequences, amounts
to a critique of ontology as such. In this regard, Lacoue-Labarthe’s
project has the same scope as Levinas’s denunciation of the intrinsic
violence of ontology in Totality and Infinity, although the lines of argu-
ment remain quite different.
Acknowledging that mimesis and ontology overlap in Lacoue-
Labarthe’s view helps to understand why undoing the connection
between art and politics and producing different, non-mimetic forms
of aesthetic and political practices are such daunting tasks and why
the instances of artists who are at least partially successful are so
few—and instances of non-mimetic forms of politics are even more
sparse if not altogether absent. It also helps to clarify why the task
of understanding the logic of mimesis and its effects is more than a
scholarly pursuit, even in the noblest sense of the term, but takes on
the significance of an ethical imperative. Or, more precisely, it defines
the minimal but necessary requirements of any ethics and is in this
sense an “archi-ethics,” the transcendental condition of possibility of
ethics as such, but one that rather than providing a positive foundation
or any explicit normative content is better described by the negative
yet powerful definition given by Lacan in his seminar on the Ethics of
Psychoanalysis that Lacoue-Labarthe is fond of quoting: “une éthique qui
ne connaît pas le bien” (an ethics that does not know the good). (221)
The first analyses of the ontological status of mimesis and the recipro-
cal determination of art and politics that it sustains appear as early as
1975 in “Typography.” “Typography” is in many regards a seminal text
and plays a crucial role for the understanding of Lacoue-Labarthe’s
later work in general and, more particularly, of his increasingly open
and uncompromising critique of Heidegger. The text develops several
lines of inquiry,1 but for my present purpose I would like to focus on
one aspect, namely Lacoue-Labarthe’s singular interpretation of the
role mimesis plays in Heidegger’s thought.
The first claim Lacoue-Labarthe makes is that Heidegger’s contempt
for, or depreciation of, mimesis indicates a convergence between
Heidegger and Plato that is not limited to the problem of mimesis
alone, but is instead an “agreement without limits,” an agreement
on everything that matters, on everything that is essential. Such a
claim is not self-evident, to say the least. It may seem both excessive

1
See Bennett’s and Lawtoo’s contributions to this special issue (EdN).
 M  L N 1229

and unwarranted. However, it becomes more convincing if one takes

into account Lacoue-Labarthe’s interpretation of what is at stake in
Heidegger’s definition of truth as unveiling: aletheia or Un-verborgenheit.
Already in Being and Time, Heidegger insists that the traditional defi-
nition of truth as correspondence is derivative from, and dependent
upon, a more originary notion of truth understood in the ancient
Greek sense of aletheia as the event of an unveiling, an un-concealing, a
coming into being and into presence that precedes, ontologically and
epistemologically, any possible correspondence between knowledge
and the world. In Lacoue-Labarthe’s view, such an understanding of
aletheia is inseparable from the idea of a transcendental production of
being(s), of a “fictionnement,” a fictioning, a shaping of beings as such
which gives ontological consistency, stability, and identity to everything
that is. As he writes in “Typography”:
aletheia: as unveiling refers to or is inseparable from fictioning, from
transcendental installation, from the production (Herstellung) and erection
(Aufstellung) of the stable (of the Same) […] Fictioning signifies transcen-
dental installation, the production (Herstellung) and creation (Aufstellung)
of the stable (of the Same), without which nothing can be grasped or
thought. (199)

Such notion of aletheia as a transcendental production is precisely what

Lacoue-Labarthe calls “originary mimesis.” The traditional conception
of mimesis as an imitative process that reproduces or re-presents what
already exists is thus predicated upon a more originary dimension
of mimesis as what makes present, what brings into presence, what
brings into being what is not yet. In short, Heidegger’s notion of
the originary sense of truth coincides for Lacoue-Labarthe with the
originary sense of mimesis.
But why? What is at stake in thinking that the event of truth as tran-
scendental production is essentially mimetic? What does the coming
into being that Heidegger describes as aletheia have to do with mime-
sis—originary or otherwise? It all hinges, I believe, on the fact that
such a coming into being, such an un-veiling, is not a generic event
or process, but a very specific and singular one: the transcendental
production of truth is originary mimetic because it is always a “fiction-
ing” (fictionnement), the imposition of form and stability, a process of
active shaping (fictionner) that, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s words, amounts
to nothing less than “a demiurgic act,” the fantasy of an all-powerful
originary mimesis.2
2
It seems to me that these analyses are influenced by the Iena Romantics’ interpreta-
tion of the role of transcendental imagination in Kant; hence the connection between
Lacoue-Labarthe’s work on Romanticism and his conception of mimesis.
1230 PAOLA MARRATI

Hence, it’s not only truth as aletheia, but the ontology that it com-
mands that is essentially and originary mimetic because it conceives
being itself as the imposition of a form, of a type and it is on the
background of such analyses that Lacoue-Labarthe’s claim about
Heidegger’s Platonism acquires its full meaning.3 Heidegger openly
repeats Plato’s condemnation of mimesis in its derivative sense of
imitation of what already is, but remains blind to the complicity
between such a gesture and the determination of truth as originary
mimetic; which is far worse because while Heidegger’s explicit aim
is to distance himself from any and all historical determinations of
mimesis, he ends up by inscribing mimesis into being (Sein) itself, by
granting to originary mimesis a properly ontological dimension. As a
consequence, Heidegger’s very project to deconstruct metaphysics is
compromised by the secret complicity at play between the philosophical
condemnation of the derivative notion of mimesis and the affirmation/
determination of the originary mimetic nature of truth and being as
such. In sum: Heidegger’s rejection of imitation is inseparable from
the determination of being as a demiurgic act of imposing a type, of a
kind of fictioning, which constitutes the originary domain of mimesis
although Heidegger fails to fully grasp this latter aspect.
What Heidegger fails to recognize, more generally, is that the attempt
to distance himself from any ontic or historical determination of meta-
physical concepts in order to reach their originary meaning, rather
than loosening the grip of tradition, leads to the re-inscription of those
very determinations at the ontological level. For Lacoue-Labarthe, this
is neither a paradox nor the accidental result of insufficient analyses,
but instead the necessary outcome of any quest of the “archi-originary”
that is bound to reinforce rather than bracket traditional assumptions.
In the case of the concept of mimesis, the understanding of being
as an originary “demiurgic mimetology” not only saddles Heidegger’s
project of overcoming metaphysics with a Platonic legacy but also, in
Lacoue-Labarthe’s view, seals the fate of his meditation about art and
politics. It is such a fate that Lacoue-Labarthe discusses in the Fiction
of the Political, arguably his most famous book and certainly his most
controversial, as well as in Musica Ficta and in The Politics of the Poem.
In The Fiction of the Political Lacoue-Labarthe directly addresses
the vexed question of what relation, if any, Heidegger’s engagement
with Nazism maintains with his philosophy and strongly advances the
somewhat counterintuitive idea that both Heidegger’s open affiliation

3
Lacoue-Labarthe names such an ontology “onto-typo-logy” to emphasize the promi-
nence of fictioning.
 M  L N 1231

to Nazism and the later withdrawal of his support to “the real Nazi
movement” are rooted in Heidegger’s “archi-mimetological” concep-
tion of aletheia. In Lacoue-Labarthe’s view, at the very moment when
Heidegger distances himself from national-socialism as a concrete,
historical political movement—that is to say, with the ontic determina-
tion of fascism—he re-affirms what is essential to it: namely, the project
of a “national esthetics” whose goal is nothing less than the creation
of the German people, the shaping or fictioning of its identity with
the means that only art can provide.
Heidegger subscribes without reservations to the idea that art decides
the political destiny of a people and hence its destiny tout court for
there could not be such a thing as a non-political people. What he
reproaches to the Nazi movement in its actual historical manifestation
is that it does not understand what art truly is: National-socialism is
mistaken in the fundamental matter of the nature of art itself and
hence cannot fulfill its promise and historical mission. The party
and its ideologues, perhaps too indebted to Wagner, still believe in
esthetics in the traditional sense of the term; they believe in mimesis
as the imitation of a pre-existing model; they do not understand that
the power of art is not to re-present but to present.
Art does not represent anything that already is: its mimetic power
consists rather in the ontological power of presenting what is not
yet, of making present, of bringing into being for the very first time.
Lacoue-Labarthe often reaffirms this fundamental idea in his work,
but perhaps nowhere as clearly and concisely as in Musica Ficta (first
published in 1991) where he writes about Heidegger’s second version
of The Origin of the Work of Art:
La méditation de Heidegger sur l’art s’ouvre et se brise, peut-être,
sur cette déclaration péremptoire : ‘L’oeuvre d’art ne présente jamais
rien (stellt nie etwas dar), et cela pour cette simple raison qu’elle n’a rien à
présenter, étant elle-même ce qui crée tout d’abord ce qui entre pour la
première fois grâce à elle dans l’ouvert.’ (98)

Heidegger’s meditation on art opens and is perhaps broken on this

peremptory declaration: ‘The work of art, however, never represents any-
thing [stellt nie etwas dar]; for the simple reason that it has nothing which
it could represent, because the work creates [schafft] in the first place that
which only through it enters into the open [ins offene tritt].’ (96)

The power of art is the power of truth as aletheia: art is the fictioning
of being itself. National-socialism as it stands does not understand
the originary mimetic power of art; hence its incapacity to actually
1232 PAOLA MARRATI

create the German people by shaping its identity and Heidegger’s

disappointment with the regime. The reality of Nazism falls short of
what it could and should have been; as well as the German people as
it stands fall short of its identity (Gestalt) and historical destiny. It is for
this reason that Lacoue-Labarthe, somewhat provokingly, claims that
Heidegger’s misgivings toward German Nazism are founded in his very
attempt to uncover the truth of art and politics: the truth of fascism
itself, its philosophical and ontological essence as archi-fascism. To say
it bluntly: it is in the name of the truth of fascism that he renounces a
historical regime that fails to embody such truth. Heidegger’s seminars
on Hölderlin in the mid-thirties, in Lacoue-Labarthe reading’s, rest the
case. Heidegger credits Hölderlin of being the yet unacknowledged
poet of the German people precisely because he understands the
“truth of art” the Nazi party and the German people are as yet deaf
to and unworthy of.4 Whether the German people still have a hope to
claim their poet and their political destiny is unclear; what is by now
clear though is that National Socialism can’t.
What this line of inquiry suggests is that the “truth of truth,” the
essence of truth, reveals itself as ultimately political, too political to
paraphrase Nietzsche. The determination of Being as figure, type,
empreinte is the dream (or the nightmare) of a community that pro-
duces itself, of a people that engenders itself by the mimetic power
of fictioning.
The possibility of art in its originary sense thus overlaps for Hei-
degger with the possibility for the German people to achieve its
historical destiny, to find its identity, its figure (Gestalt). The political
problem of creating the authentic German nation finds its answer in
a conception of art as the production—the coming into being—of
truth that breaks with a limited and derivative notion of mimesis as
imitation of a pre-existing model only to emphasize the ontological
power of originary mimesis: the mimesis that “imitates” what is not
yet, that brings into existence for the very first time.
In this sense, Lacoue-Labarthe argues, Heidegger certainly disavows
the esthetic agenda of national-socialism, based as it is on the concept
of imitation, but he does not renounce what truly matters: the affir-
mation of the deepest of links between art and politics, the idea that
only art can create a people by shaping its identity and, further, that
such creation of a people is the essential task of art. The complicity
between Heidegger’s thought and “national esthetism” is sustained by

4
Nor, perhaps, are they yet worthy for the true philosopher which seems to have
been, for a time at least, Heidegger’s own ambition.
 M  L N 1233

the entanglement of truth, art, and politics, but their coming together
is, tragically, neither novel nor surprising. German Idealism as well as
most of Western philosophy since Plato have already sealed the fate
of art, truth, and politics to one another. If Fascism is not the “destiny
of the West,” neither is it a simple aberration.
How can we disengage ourselves from this catastrophic history—of
philosophy, of Europe, of the West?
And—can we?
We certainly must (“il faut”). But everyone knows no ethical impera-
tive has ever promised, let alone guaranteed, its fulfillment.
Lacoue-Labarthe’s ethics that does not know the good, that responds
to a categorical imperative without maxims guiding our actions, dictates
his search for glimpses of different, non-mimetic forms of art that in
our troubled history may still testify to the possibility of a different
path for thought and politics. Paul Celan is an exemplary name in
such a quest and I would like to conclude with some short remarks
on Lacoue-Labarthe’s Poetry as Experience.
Poetry as Experience, first published in 1986, is perhaps Lacoue-
Labarthe’s most explicit discussion of a poetics that actually succeeds
in suspending figure and fictioning and escapes—although precari-
ously—the lure of demiurgic mimesis. What Celan offers, in such a
reading, is the possibility of a non-mimetic experience. The prominence
of the notion of experience is surprising considering that Lacoue-
Labarthe makes no secret of his lack of sympathy for empiricisms of
any sort and that “experience” isn’t exactly a central topic in Celan
either. What is equally remarkable is how exactly Lacoue-Labarthe
understands the sort of non-mimetic experience he finds in Celan.
Early in the book, he provides a definition of the concept of experi-
ence and a description of what such (non-mimetic) experience is that
deserves to be quoted at length. Definition first:
Ce dont il est la traduction, je propose de l’appeler l’expérience, sous la
condition d’entendre strictement le mot—l’ex-periri latin, la traversée d’un
danger—et de se garder, surtout, de référer la chose à quelque “vécu,” ou
à de l’anecdote. Erfahrung, donc, et non pas Erlebniss. (30)

I propose to call what it translates “experience,” provided that we both under-

stand the word in its strict sense—the Latin ex-perire, a crossing through
danger—and especially that we avoid associating it with what is “lived,” the
stuff of anecdotes. Erfahrung, then, rather than Erlebniss. (18)
1234 PAOLA MARRATI

And description:
Un vertige peut survenir, il n’advient pas. Ou plutôt, en lui, rien n’advient.
Il est le pur suspens de l’advenir: césure ou syncope. C’est ce que veut dire
“avoir une absence.” Ce qui est suspendu, mis en arrêt, basculant soudain
dans l’étrangeté, est la présence du présent (l’être-présent du présent). Et
ce qui advient alors, sans advenir (car tel est ce qui par définition ne peut
advenir), est—sans être—le néant, le “rien d’étant” (ne-ens). Le vertige est
une expérience du néant: de l’(in)advenir, “en propre” comme dit Heidegger,
du néant. Rien n’y est “vécu,” comme dans toute expérience, parce toute
expérience est expérience du néant. (32)

Dizziness can come upon one; it does not simply occur. Or, rather, in it
nothing occurs. It is the pure suspension of occurrence: a caesura or syn-
cope. This is what “drawing a blank” means. What is suspended, arrested,
tipping suddenly into strangeness, is the presence of the present (the
being-present of the present). And what then occurs without occurring
(for it is by definition what cannot occur) is – nothingness, the “nothing
of being” (ne-ens). Dizziness is an experience of nothingness, of what is, as
Heidegger says, “properly” non-occurrence, nothingness. Nothing in it is
“lived,” as in all experience, because all experience is the experience of
nothingness. (19)5

The vocabulary is clearly and explicitly Heideggerian, no doubt about

it. However, there is something less explicit, but equally important, at
stake in this definition of the condition of possibility of experience as
the experience of nothing (that is), of a caesura, of the suspension
of time itself—or at least of time as present. Namely, the reference to
Kant: Kant, the philosopher of the transcendental conditions of pos-
sibility of experience as well as Kant, the philosopher who condemns
experience to the empirical realm and forever forbids its transgression.
For Lacoue-Labarthe, “experience” is exactly what exceeds the empirical
domain—which includes the psychological and natural subject, the
subject who lives but does not exist—but this transcendent “experience,”
in the sense he gives to the term, is nothing. It is a cut, a caesura, a
radical but transient break with everything that can appear in space
and in time. Lacoue-Labarthe’s understanding of experience—and
hence of the possibility of a non-figurative poetics (and perhaps of a
non-figurative politics)—does not actually transgress the boundaries
assigned by Kant’s critique; it can only suspend them for the briefest
of instants, in an experience of nothing (that is).

5
The literary nature of these lines deserves to be heard in the original French even
if the English translation is quite good.
 M  L N 1235

The hopes briefly held by the Iena circle of overcoming the Kantian
limits of experience are not renewed. But the longing for, and the
mourning of, those impossible hopes haunt all of Lacoue-Labarthe’s
oeuvre.

WORKS CITED

Granel, Gérard. “Les années trente sont devant nous. ” Les Temps Modernes, February 1993.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, edited
by Jacques Alain Miller, translated by Dennis Porter, W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Musica Ficta. Translated by Felicia McCarren, Stanford
UP, 1995.
———. La poésie comme expérience. Christian Bourgois, 1986.
———. Poetry as Experience. Translated by Andrea Tarnowski, Stanford UP, 1999.
———. “Typography.” Typography. Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, edited by Christopher
Fynsk, Stanford UP, 1998, pp. 43–138.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of
Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester.
State U of New York P, 1988.
———. “The Nazi Myth.” Translated by Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry, vol. 16, no. 2,
Winter 1990, pp. 291–312.