Figuring art in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Écrits sur l’art

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1940−2007) belongs to the generation of French philosophers that came to the fore in the midst of radical university reforms that heralded a new era of intellectual activism. If Lacoue-Labarthe, a student of Gérard Genette, distinguished himself by the distinct literary sensibility he brought to the philosophical scene, and which is clearly displayed in his late work Phrase (2000), he also led the way in wishing to recast the philosophical foundations of the political. At this time, Sartrian thought was on the wane and attention turned to a more rigorous assessment of the ethical positioning of philosophers, particularly in light of the suspicion surrounding discourses of nationalism and cultural belonging. In the view of his friend Jacques Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe’s ethico-political concerns were never more evident than in the way he unflinchingly pursued the ‘confrontation’ with Heidegger, while contemporaries like Foucault and Deleuze tended to veer away from it or at least remained silent (Derrida, 1987: 613n). It was Lacoue-Labarthe, writes Derrida, who saw the necessity of the Heideggerian question for those engaged in post-structuralism. And it was he who approached it with a ‘probité exemplaire’ (Derrida, 1987: 604) that marked all his work as well as his dealings with his friends and colleagues.

The numerous studies of contemporary artworks brought together in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s posthumous Écrits sur l’art, published in 2009, show the degree to which he valued art and artists, both as a friend of many artists and as a passionate advocate of the arts in a world that now accepts the irreversibility of art’s submission to market principles. This varied collection of short texts written between the mid 1970s and the mid 2000s testifies to the author’s constant concern to determine the position that art occupied at the end of the twentieth century, after a history of mutations that, beginning with Plato, has assumed different degrees of proximity or distance with respect to philosophy. The first pages of Écrits sur l’art ask whether the question of art is still relevant, and which form this question should take given that the questioning power of philosophical discourse has itself been undermined. Avoiding the definitiveness associated with the question ‘What is art?’, and seeking to go beyond Heidegger’s ontologically charged ‘What is a work of art?’, Lacoue-Labarthe’s offers a formulation that he thinks best reflects the predicament art finds itself in the latter half of the twentieth century. His question is: ‘L’art peut-il s’identifier?’ (2009: 31).

The reflexive form of ‘s’identifier’ implies a metaphysical orientation that is no longer based on external legitimising values such as God and Man; at the same time, it acknowledges the ravages associated with the emergence of the question of the subject whose changing contours punctuated debate in philosophy and the human sciences. The form of the question not only positions it historically, but also allows us to anticipate the terms in which the answer will emerge. In this case, the answer is necessarily abyssal. Art, Lacoue-Labarthe declares, ‘ne s’identifie que comme ce qui ne peut s’identifier’ (2009: 32). By this he means that the forms of mediation that have previously informed art’s relation with truth have disappeared. Art cut ties with religion at the end of the eighteenth century and shortly afterwards emancipated itself from speculative philosophy. It no longer serves the ends of God or reason; rather, it occupies a position in which it alone provides a standard for redefining its relation to the truth. It is here that art encounters the abyss: the more it turns towards itself, the more it exposes itself to the impossibility of its position.

For Lacoue-Labarthe, the story began long before this. The unacknowledged origin of Western philosophy, he explains, was Plato’s intemperate gesture in eliminating the unruly arts and the mimetic operation on which they rested. This allowed philosophy to create for itself a sheltered site from which it could contemplate truth as eidos. However, this quietude was never safe from the terror-inspiring arts. Nietzsche saw this, and proclaimed their belated return to a position of power, whereupon they could again overtake philosophy. In his essay ‘Typographie’, first published in 1975, Lacoue-Labarthe describes the return of mimesis in terms of a break-down of philosophical representation:

Ce qui commence à bouger alors, au fond du miroir, derrière sa surface éclatée (derrière les débris de l’idée, de l’immortalité de l’âme, de l’anamnèse, du sujet et du présent vivant, etc.), c’est toute cette instabilité terrorisante que la glace avait été chargée de figer. (1975: 269)

The chaotic forms of representation that Plato excluded from the city in the name of truth, moral elevation and political order return to the fore by way of three distinct epochs: after Plato’s onto-theology (God) and Heidegger’s onto-typo-logy (Man), we have reached, explains Lacoue-Labarthe in the 1970s, the momentous stage he names ‘typographie’.

Typographie is a function of the dépropriation énonciative (1975: 264) by which the subject asserts itself as loss. The lexical affinity with Derrida’s écriture is worthy of consideration given that both revolve around the position of the subject. For Derrida, writing belongs to the order of the trace as the primary diacritical division that Western philosophy since Plato had constantly sought to mask behind a discourse of appropriation. Against such discourse, writing, as trace, serves the interests of truth by maintaining, keeping alive and afloat, the prior relation of difference. Lacoue-Labarthe refuses to consider the trace in its conquering innocence. Rather, it must assume its position in the aftermath of the collapse of the metaphysical systems of onto-theology and onto-typo-logy. It reminds us that écriture is the result of the death of former legitimising principles, and that this death must be inscribed in the space of writing at the very moment it declares itself as the privileged site of the questioning of truth. For Lacoue-Labarthe, typographie originates in the inescapable fall or slide of the subject, and it is this scenario that is constantly played out in the different arts. Derrida, for his part, does not share Lacoue-Labarthe’s belief in a single, ineluctable, tragically coloured destiny of the subject, but he admits that he is full of admiration for the way his friend relentlessly pursues the trial of the ineluctable: ‘l’œuvre de Lacoue-Labarthe ressemble, pour moi, à l’épreuve même de l’inéluctable: insistante, patiente, pensante, l’expérience d’une pensée très singulière de l’inéluctable’ (1987: 598).

We discover in Lacoue-Labarthe a particular style of thinking that contrasts with much that we have seen in deconstruction. It is as much to acknowledge his uniqueness as a thinker as to outline his radical position on art that the following pages will attempt to elaborate on some of his most telling formulations. For Lacoue-Labarthe, there is an ethical moment in all philosophical questioning that becomes particularly acute when one confronts the event of the disappearance of the subject. When this event is pursued in the region of art, particularly in modern art where the fall of the subject is most resonant, it demands the highest level of commitment and involvement. This is why Lacoue-Labarthe’s encounters with art are presented as intensely personal, as if he felt compelled to subject himself first to the work’s disorienting power as a necessary condition for seeking what is at stake in it philosophically.

The motif of the subject in decline is not unrelated to the particular value Lacoue-Labarthe ascribes to the silence of the ‘silent’ arts of painting, sculpture, photography and mime. These he sets apart from music and literature, to which he had previously devoted several works (Lacoue-Labarthe, 1991, 1986b; Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1978). The ‘silent’ arts are unique in that they pose a significant challenge to the tradition of philosophical discourse that since Socrates favours verbal exchange and open dialogue. Being silent, these arts are not amenable to discursive appropriation. However, they captivate viewers, inviting them to enter into an intimate space. Lacoue-Labarthe notes in his ‘L’épreuve du silence’ (2009: 85−9), in which he discusses the paintings of Jean-Marc Scanreigh, that as spectator he is overcome by the uncomfortable feeling of not being able to speak, as if in sympathy with the silent properties of the works themselves: ‘En détresse: elles ne disent rien, justement, elles ne parlent pas: elles restent muettes, et d’un mutisme irrévocable’ (2009: 85).

Yet the silence proper to these works is not unproblematic. The distress accompanying the silence comes from the fact that it is an impossible silence, impossible because it constantly denies itself as silence. For it attracts all manner of verbal excesses in the form of images, figures, scenes, narratives and allegories. It is an uneasy silence that knows that ‘l’œuvre parle toujours trop’ (2009: 86), often with unwanted eloquence, as occurs, for example, when it draws attention to the association of colours and lines, to the characteristic airiness of the coloured expanses that recall the sea and the sky, or to the inner movement that reminds the viewer of the poetry of Bossuet and the music of Bach. All this amounts to a unceasing chatter that the work attempts in vain to hold in check, with the result that there remains ultimately nothing but a series of stammering phrases and disorganised fragments: ‘Cela balbutie, s’étrangle, et revient au silence, ne cessant pourtant d’indiquer: ici naissait, ou devait naître un discours….; mais voici maintenant qu’il avorte, ou qu’il est ruiné’ (2009: 89).

By articulating the conflictual relation between the silent arts and discourse, Lacoue-Labarthe sets the scene for the emergence of a key concept that, as we shall see, informs all his work: art, he posits, is by virtue of its paradoxical nature essentially the site of a retreat. Nowhere is this motif more evident than in the first piece, ‘Portrait de l’artiste en général’ (2009: 29−72), which discusses a series of nine full-face self-portraits by Swiss photographer Urs Lüthi. The title of Lüthi’s work ‘Just another story about leaving’ invites us to make sense of the increasing number of visible signs of aging such as wrinkles and greying hair in terms of an attempt to regain what is lost in the aging process. Photography enables us to preserve what is lost in a form that is infinitely reproducible, for, as the title suggests, it is story that is destined to begin again (‘Just another story …’). Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussion touches on the themes of male/female identification, photography in its relation to painting and the ritual dimension of self-portrait, but the point to which he constantly returns is the idea that the subject of the work is a subject in dereliction because it takes its leave at the same time that the work progresses towards its completion. Indeed, he suggests that photographic self-portraiture is a quintessential genre for the way it delivers the identity of the artist ‘in general’ in the wake of the crumbling of the artist ‘in particular’. Thus it poses the question of identity in terms of a lost identity, as a self-showing that proceeds each time via a step back into obscurity: ‘“Lüthi” à l’autre bout de cette histoire, à sa dernière extrémité peut-être, récite encore cette origine – comme une fin’ (2009: 72).

One recognises here the Heideggerian motif of a self-showing that proceeds paradoxically through a movement of retreat. When art grants access, through the particular arrangement of patterns, colours and textures, to the subject that orders it, it does so only because there is an opposite movement of disappearance from view. Art, in other words, construes its universe of meaning by concealing the physical impenetrability of the paint, the fabric and the frame. This is the common experience of ‘seeing’ a beautiful figure only because one ceases to see the wood in which it is sculptured. For Lacoue-Labarthe, the identity of the work and the subject that ordains it is totally constituted in the way it inscribes itself typographically within this double movement.

In his piece ‘Sur Malgorzata Paszko’ (2009: 167−8), Lacoue-Labarthe describes Paszko’s painting ‘Sans titre’ as an oracular presence: ‘Quelque chose d’ancien remonte lentement du fond’ (2009: 107). The painted objects, he remarks, are so lightly traced on the canvas that they seem to arise from their own effacement. It is as if there suddenly appeared on the canvas, through the effects of humidity, parts of an ancient fresco painted on the wall concealed behind it, such that this exterior reality, by coming into view, caused the painting proper to recede into invisibility. Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that Paszko’s paintings have no subject other than this oscillation between the visible and the invisible, and that by showing art in its essential movement, they succeed in probing a more fundamental question, that of the conditions of existence of all things insofar as they participate in the dynamic of Being. What art shows when it elicits its essential movement between unveiling and veiling, is fundamentally the un-representability of time as the fundamental support of existence. The argument is typically Heideggerian. Art is not just an oscillation between seeing and not seeing: it looks beyond to the essential retreat by which the concealment of the ordinarily visible results in the disclosing of the truth of its temporal foundations. The de-familiarising effects of art are part and parcel of art’s power of disclosure, particularly when it connects us, as it does here, to our fundamental relation to being.

It is when art brings to the fore the double movement of appearing and disappearing, such that this movement becomes itself the subject of the work, that it asserts its modernity. It is here that we see how art ultimately identifies itself.

It remains for us to consider how and why this retreat of the subject is unavoidable. It is not merely a question of hesitating between visibility and invisibility, between representation and the un-representable. Lacoue-Labarthe is not content to invoke the structure of the double bind by which one commonly expresses the principle of undecidability. He declares rather that the rule of ambivalence that imprisons the subject between competing forces produces an accelerated oscillation between contradictory positions, such that the subject becomes maniacal, loses its way, dis-identifies itself. Such is the schema that Lacoue-Labarthe, in his ‘Hölderlin et les Grecs’ and ‘Diderot: paradox and mimesis’ (1986a) terms the hyperbological. Diderot in particular observed, Lacoue-Labarthe explains, that the actor uses his craft to make us believe that he could be anyone, yet he never is anyone in particular. He is no one. At the same time, the self-multiplication means that he is everyone, at least in possibility: ‘plus l’artiste (le comédien) est rien, plus il peut être tout’ (1986a: 29). On the basis of this argument, the hyperbological can be understood as the confrontation of opposing notions, which far from producing an uneasy status quo tends to gather in intensity and produce more instability. Syntactically, this process can be rendered by the phrase ‘the more … the more …’ Thus one can understand, hyperbologically, the retreat of art in its relation to religion and philosophy: the more art imposes itself as an autonomous activity that obeys only its own laws, as it occurs in modern art, the more it displays its lost unity with regard to external forms of legitimisation.

Hyperbology is used deconstructively by Lacoue-Labarthe in order to locate the blind spots that philosophical systems were designed to avoid, but to which they unavoidably return. For Plato, this blind spot was the heterogeneous reign of mimesis. Plato’s rejection of mimesis in the name of the preservation of order exposed him, paradoxically and hyperbologically, to a mimetic contagion that he could neither perceive nor control. ‘Platon condamne la mimesis, y compris bien entendu la mimesis comme reproduction, imitation, etc. Il se retrouve avec une ontologie mimétique … et un texte mimétique, et un porte-parole exemplaire [Socrate]’ (1986a: 281). The creation of a double in Socrates is one of many facets of the mimetic contagion that unleashes itself upon Plato’s rational model. It is, as it were, Plato’s blind spot, where his thought loses itself in its image and slides dangerously close to the abyss.

The foregoing pages have demonstrated how, in Lacoue-Labarthe, the notion of art as the site of a retreat is a function of the hyperbological character of art. If art is destined to be the privileged place of the fall of the subject, and if the retreat that is constitutive of typography is most spectacularly at work in modern art, it is because mimesis has gradually intensified the process by which it has worn down the resistance of rational discourse. In fact, it has never stopped reverberating, quietly contaminating Western metaphysics, by orchestrating for example the philosophical doubling that famously occurs in Plato’s Socrates and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Mimesis shows us, when it shows itself, the peculiar madness that afflicts philosophy. It shows us what occurs ‘quand un philosophe s’y laisse prendre, succomber, tomber – y sombre’ (1975: 170).

Lacoue-Labarthe’s historico-metaphysical account of the return of mimesis impinges upon his intimate experience of art, notably his feeling of being overcome by a strange emotion as he stands before a painting, sculpture or installation. Not only is this emotion a function of the destabilising power of mimesis, but it is also symptomatic of the return of the deinon, a term that Heidegger associated with the fundamental state of un-canniness, of ‘de-familiarisation’ (2000 [1935]: 161). This is because the silence that is the hallmark of the visual arts hollows out the discourses of appropriation from within, causing them to collapse along with the subject that emerges henceforth in its essential groundlessness.

This said, it remains for us to consider two other key notions that inform the varied studies of artworks in Écrits sur l’art: first, the ‘disaster’ of the subject as the necessary condition of the birth of modern art; and, second, the ‘figure’ (otherwise known as the Gestalt) by which the silent arts harness their power of de-familiarisation. We shall focus here on the two chapters in Écrits sur l’art in which Lacoue-Labarthe elaborates more lengthily on these two notions.

The chapter ‘Le Désastre du sujet’ (2009: 177−84) looks at the period between Hegel’s pronouncement of the death of art and the rise of photography as an art form. The disaster in question is the fact that art, as defined by these two crises, finds itself in the haze of an aftershock in which it must exist only in the mode of survival. Having undergone a ‘fall’ by way of its dislocation from external forms of legitimisation (religion, politics, philosophy), it reconstitutes itself in its resistance to discourse, in the silent disquiet to which Lacoue-Labarthe is particularly sensitive. This does not place art in a zone of indecision in which it merely oscillates between competing demands, but posits rather an inescapable downward spiral that reproduces the loss infinitely. Art identifies itself, then, as retreat, disappearance and now disaster.

Hegel’s statement that art is a thing of the past refers to the unrivalled capacity of Greek art to achieve a perfect balance between the material and the spiritual, between the human and the divine (Hegel, 1993: 11−13). This balance, Hegel states, could never again be matched, and certainly not by the Romantics and their insular, self-conscious approach to art. But only a few years before, Schelling celebrated the emancipation of art from religion and philosophy, stating that art from that point on becomes its own end, having refused steadfastly to limit its role to a mere mode of representing the gods or truth. Having separated itself from religion, it posits itself as a new basis for belief while at the same time supplanting philosophy as a means of attaining the Absolute. This extraordinary situation, in which art was proclaimed dead (Hegel) at roughly the moment it reached a state of sovereignty (Schelling) was, as it turned out, a productive one, for history tells us that it provided the impetus for the creation of countless movements and trends in art during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Lacoue-Labarthe’s phrase ‘le désastre du sujet’ refers to the way in which art emerged from this paradox. For his purposes, the term ‘subject’ refers variously to the notions of theme, ordering principle, legitimising authority, and creative origin of art. Taking his cue from Hegel’s pronouncement, Lacoue-Labarthe posits that art, when divested of the gods, no longer knew what to show or represent. Into the void left by the disappearance of the divine the artist immediately stepped, declaring himself the only true source of art. The nineteenth-century depiction of the artist as genius, outcast or dandy is evidence of the self-proclaimed status of the subject as artist. Lacoue-Labarthe regards the elevation of the artist as a product of misdirected energy, of ego-inflation, of the confusion of masks: in short, of a panic (affolement) that caused the subject to become unrecognisable. Ultimately, the artist could not provide the standard that allowed art to identify itself as art, whereupon he consumed himself in his inspired madness. Such is the disaster of the subject, the event that gave birth to art by instituting a paradoxical situation in which the over-inflation of the subject in its creative omnipotence led to its alienation from itself: in other words, a ritual doubling in which the hero could not appear other than by imitating the restless other that resided in him. The story of modern art, in a nutshell, resides in the impasse in which the subject lost itself, an impasse that becomes the place of its survival. The hyperbological character of this state of double belonging ensures that it cannot reach its destiny other than in the mode of a vertiginous collapse.

The two paradoxes mentioned above, namely the death and resurgence of art and the elevation and collapse of the subject, constitute a reiteration of the fundamental ineluctability that presides over both. As is always the case with Lacoue-Labarthe, the doubling that confounds the search for definitive answers is the work of mimesis insofar as it returns here to reclaim the territory that speculative thought had occupied as purveyor of truth. Mimesis enacts this devastation, and elevates it to the status of law. Lacoue-Labarthe writes: ‘Et ce n’est pas un instant l’effet du hasard si la folie, dans l’âge du sujet, la ruine du sujet en tant que celle de l’œuvre même, est l’ultime exemplarité, c’est-à-dire pratiquement sa seule sanction’ (2009: 183).

Lacoue-Labarthe conceives modern art as the story of the disaster of the subject. In doing so, he makes the point that disaster does not mean misfortune, for when broken down as dis-aster, it can be read as a displacement that effects a change of galaxy as it were (dis-placement of the aster-oid). By disaster, then, he means a move that re-acquaints us with the abyss from which Plato had sought to remove himself, and which now re-emerges in the form of the dim light in which mimetic doubling enacts a state of troubled survival.

This account of the emergence of modern art would be insufficient if it did not address the question of art’s characteristic pictorial nature. What is it that one sees, and what kind of seeing does it entail? Here again, Lacoue-Labarthe attacks the site of greatest resistance to discursive logic, where art conspires to catch out, ‘mettre en défaut’, the strategies of theoretical discourse (2009: 170). His starting point is the moment when a painting, through the emotion it elicits, deprives the viewer of the means to express himself verbally. Modesty dictates that one should in this situation take heed of the practical explanations of the artist rather than the polished discourse of professional critics. In his piece ‘Sur Aki Kuroda’ (2009: 169−75), Lacoue-Labarthe attends to the artist’s own description of the moment of creation. Kuroda explains that by fearfully placing himself in the eye of a cyclone, he paradoxically attains the state of grace necessary for the creative act. The work, then, is a space in which tumultuous forces circulate. Faced with the threat of devastation, the artist must accept the challenge to stand firm.

For Lacoue-Labarthe, Kuroda’s description of the space of the painting as the eye of a cyclone recalls what Heidegger, in ‘Art and space’, describes as an anxiety-filled emptiness. All spaces collapse into one via an expulsive movement that Heidegger calls a ‘clearing away’, in the sense of ‘the release of places toward which the fate of dwelling man turns in the preserve of the home or in the brokenness of homelessness’ (1973: 5). It is within this vertiginous space that the event of painting occurs, as anxiety spills over the canvas and differentiates into the two kinds of stasis: colours and shapes. Colour is an outpouring of the artist’s intimate being, which splashes violently on to the canvas, while the shapes are borders that serve here not to contain or constrain colour, but to attract colour in the same way that the eye of the cyclone attracts the forces of destruction. Colour and shapes are two variations of space: colour is deep and expansive like an ocean, while shapes are trenchant in their movement of limiting and gathering (2009: 174, 175). Their mutual effects create a framework in which the work emerges, not as the interplay between surface effects and subterranean movements, but as two different kinds of depth, the dizzy recesses of colour that Lacoue-Labarthe likens to archaic oriental techniques, and the dark outlines of the shapes that are deep-seated and awe-inspiring in a modern Western sense. When both types of depth are brought together, the vertigo that is the hallmark of the work of art lying in the eye of the cyclone is at its most intense.

The discussion of Kuroda’s work started out by acknowledging the difficulties viewers experience when attempting to account for their reactions to the silent arts. Lacoue-Labarthe argues that these difficulties originate precisely in the figural quality of artworks. The figure is a recurring theme in Lacoue-Labarthe. To do it justice, it will be necessary to examine Lacoue-Labarthe’s treatment of the figure in ‘La Figure (humaine)’ (2009: 189−200) in tandem with a longer discussion devoted to another posthumous text, La Vraie Semblance (2008).

As the title ‘La Figure (humaine)’ suggests, the enigma surrounding art since classical times, more precisely since Greek statuary, lies in the fact that what is figured in art is generally the human form. The fact that the latter is masked, distorted or denied, and the fact that it appears as monstrous or burlesque in the Middle Ages, as half animal and half human in mythical representations, or even, as Hegel remarks, as a simple stick planted in the earth with a vague head placed on top, only confirms the thesis that pictorial art stems from an undeniable preoccupation with the human form.

Lacoue-Labarthe probes further Hegel’s view that the crowning moment of art was Greek statuary. For Hegel, the perfectly proportioned human form in Greek sculpture was the defining characteristic of art as the sensuous manifestation of the Spirit. In sculpture, matter (a stone, a piece of wood or metal) is moulded into a shape that is recognisable as the manifestation of the Spirit. If this form is predominantly human, it is not because of an ingrained narcissism but because, as Lacoue-Labarthe stresses, ‘l’humain est le spirituel parce qu’il est le divin sensible’ (2009: 194). There is, in other words, an element of compulsion in the fact that visual art can do nothing other, essentially, than explore within the contours and the smooth surfaces of the human form the sensuous life of the divine.

The search for ultimate truths falls back into forms that we know: the spiritual collapses into the material human form. Lacoue-Labarthe observes that Hegel’s conception of the figure is rooted in Plato’s distinction between the idea and the eidos, the latter being the external shape or contour that makes a thing intelligible. Without the eidos, the history of Western thought as an epic search for knowledge would not have been possible. Plato’s foregrounding of the mode of appearance as the key to knowledge set in train an intellectual tradition in which the visible shape was named variously ars or figura (Latin), tekhnè or schema (Greek). But the most telling moment was the primacy that Hegel and the Romantic philosophers accorded the Gestalt, understood as the visible form in which truth ‘set up’, ‘erected’, or ‘established’ itself. One can understand, from this viewpoint, why Hegel claimed that statuary, with its upright, monumental bearing, was superior to all the other arts. Or why Heidegger considered the stele as a kind of scaffolding that, in art, holds up the truth. Lacoue-Labarthe deconstructs the architectural function of the figure in Hegel and Heidegger by subjecting it to the destabilising influence of mimesis, whose mirroring frenzy is prone to topple self-standing truth. For Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger’s privileging of Vorstellung over Darstellung (mental construction over self-showing) is a symptom of his inability to ‘see’ the true work of mimesis in the visual arts.

Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussion in ‘La Figure (humaine)’ moves from Plato’s eidos to Hegel’s Gestalt to Heidegger’s Ge-stell in order to show how modern art emerged by way of the collapse of a certain discourse of art that was tied to truth. To understand how this collapse informs our notion of the figure, Lacoue-Labarthe examines Greek sculpture in relation to the counter-example of the religious statues that anthropologists first found in traditional societies. In these statues, the human form is reproduced in a way that emphasises disproportion in the limbs, animality rather than human refinement, and a stature that implies heaviness and clumsiness rather than harmony. In other words, they are diametrically opposed to the features of Greek statuary as Hegel defined it. Yet when introduced into European culture they were considered as art, to the point where modern artists incorporated aspects of their composition into their own works. By comparing Greek statuary with so-called primitive art, Lacoue-Labarthe makes two points about the nature of art. First, as objects of cult, both attain the status of artworks by way of a de-contextualisation that results in the eclipse of their religious significance. The connection with religion remains, however, by way of a hieratic quality that inspires feelings of awe that are now considered part and parcel of a properly aesthetic response. Second, both Greek and ‘exotic’ art possess characteristics that are not wholly divine or wholly human. Considered in terms of imitation, the Greek statues offer an idealised, formal representation, whereas the primitive objects offer a natural, animalistic vision of the human. In both cases, the human is not ‘itself’ but constituted rather by the inhuman. This does not entail a negation of the human nor a transcendence that would absorb it into higher order powers. Rather, ‘l’(in)humain’, as Lacoue-Labarthe writes it (2009: 197), indicates that what is not human is essential to the human in the same way that an invisible source of light is essential to that which becomes visible. The (in)human that bridges the historical divide between classical and modern art is the paradoxical movement in which the religious origin of art, as the invisible origin that shapes and limits art, is both evacuated and retained in the space of the work. It lies there in reserve as it were, in its retreat, from which position it invests the work with its strangeness.

Art figures the (in)human by aligning the visual properties of the work with their invisible origin. It makes no sense here to oppose figurative and non-figurative art because, in the terms of the discussion outlined above, works that do not imitate reality such as abstract art are no less figurative than so-called representative works. In all cases, the play of shapes, colours and textures announces the retreat of its originating moment, whether it be Plato’s eidos, Hegel’s divinity or Heidegger’s truth as a-letheia. Non-representational art confirms rather than diminishes the figural process.

Même la défiguration et le saccage des formes (de Picasso à Bacon, mettons), même le travail sur les ‘matières’, voire sur les débris ou les déchets, toute cette immense entreprise anti-mimétique qui caractérise le moderne … ne se soustrait à l’horizon figural. (2009: 193)

Hegel’s death of art reveals itself as a double-sided prescription that also marks the onset of a different, self-constituting kind of art that feeds upon this death, by creating a space in which this death marks the place of its origin.

We return thus to Lacoue-Labarthe’s argument that art appears by way of a retreat, a loss or a disaster. We have seen that the fall in question defines itself in relation to established forms of authority such as Man (by way of its nineteenth-century avatars) or God (Hegel’s Spirit) or knowledge (Plato’s idea), all of which are inscribed typographically in their disappearance. A further stage is reached when Lacoue-Labarthe confronts Heidegger’s own attempts to construct a theory of art on the basis of a systematic attack on the Gestalt. What can be learned about art when Heidegger attempts to eliminate the figure?

Lacoue-Labarthe’s La Vraie Semblance, a posthumous text published almost concurrently with Écrits sur l’art, undertakes an exemplary deconstructive reading of a short piece written by Heidegger on the Sistine Madonna (1955). It aims to show how Heidegger tries, and ultimately fails, to evince the figure as Gestalt from the domain of art. Heidegger’s rejection of the Gestalt is based on his belief that true artworks do not rely on the production of images. They do not present or show anything because ultimately what is ‘at work’ in art is the process of mapping the space of Being in its separation from all else, as self-showing truth (a-letheia). Now Lacoue-Labarthe shows that Heidegger errs in his premature condemnation of the figure or Gestalt, which he likens to a mere disposable copy of reality. Here is Lacoue-Labarthe’s argument: if Heidegger had regarded the pictorial nature of the work in terms of its relation to the abyss, he would have recognised that what is shown in the work is essential to the showing forth of truth. Considered abyssally, the figure is not a projected image but the place where the image appears, like a window understood as a place where the visible comes to show itself because of what limits it. The figure is the site of the emergence of the image. It is in this sense that the figure is ‘a presentation, a Darstellung [representation], albeit the presentation of something “impossible”’ (2008: 64).

Against Heidegger’s claims that art is not to be reduced to its religious content or its visible subject matter, Lacoue-Labarthe tells us that its capacity to represent depends on the disappearance of divinity or of truth, and that it is precisely this disappearing origin that frames the visual experience. The figure appears, says Lacoue-Labarthe, in the mode of a ‘paradoxie aléthique’ (2008: 65), that is, on the condition that the visual configuration is brought forth against an opposite movement of concealment that grounds and frames it: ‘le paraître du paraître dans son retrait même’ (2008: 67). Lacoue-Labarthe’s figure is thus the basis for the fictional fashioning that can be observed in Heidegger’s own description of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. Here, the Virgin carrying baby Jesus holds him towards us, obscuring herself effectively in her gesture of showing; on the other hand, the baby is that by which the Virgin Mary shows herself as carrier, in which case the baby recedes in order to allow the Virgin Mary to bathe herself in the light of Being. By virtue of this double concealment, in which the Madonna and her baby alternate in concealing themselves in order to let the other appear in themselves, the work of art ‘figures’ the truth of Being.

Lacoue-Labarthe’s remarks suggest that the pictorial representation figures both the visible and that which cannot be made visible, which he describes as the place of retreat of the divine. The paradoxical structure that defines the figure as emanating from what conceals itself within its bounded space is hinted at in many modern works that problematise the relationship between the work and external reality, such as self-referential works or works that incorporate peripheral elements such as frames or pedestals. Lacoue-Labarthe’s commitment to art and his metaphysical intuitions do not amount to a simple explanation of modern art as a simple overturning of established categories and ingrained habits of thinking. Rather, he suggests that modern art is more richly understood if we viewed it from the point of view of the hyperbological system according to which the more it distances itself from its illustrious predecessors, the greater the challenge to locate its lost religious and philosophical origins. He does this by treating origins not as causes or genealogical antecedents, but as the place of ‘desistance’, of abandon: that is, as both origin and destiny. Art is thus something

qui fait signe vers la disparition du sacré et, dans ce mouvement même, le retient, non pas comme le sacré lui-même ni le regret du sacré, mais comme ce qui nous requiert et pour ainsi dire nous attend à la place du sacré. (2009: 162)

Of all the writers associated with the post-1968 generation, few have been as generous as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in patiently guiding readers through the philosophical tradition, reacquainting them with the fundamental questions that have haunted it since Plato. He does this, however, without ever losing sight of the difficult position he occupies in a world that has still not come to grips with the crisis that was the modern turn. Hence his distinctive approach, which has been described by Alain Badiou as ‘inconsolable et sûre’ (2008: 144), and by Jacques Derrida as ‘fidèle justement, et justement à l’inéluctable’ (1987: 602). As we saw at the outset, Lacoue-Labarthe proceeds by proposing a formulation of the question of art that reflects this difficult position (L’Art peut-il s’identifier?) and connects it to writing or, as he terms it, ‘typographie’. This makes the questioning of art possible in an epoch when the questioning itself has become barely audible, when society may well be uninterested in fundamental questions, and when art is in danger of becoming irrelevant or at least turned into an industry. This proximity to insignificance, irrelevance or corruption is characteristic of art insofar as, through mimesis, it is open to what is improper or inimical to it. This is why Écrits sur l’art restates the question of art with so much urgency on each occasion that its author comes across an artist, a work of art, an art event, or a philosophical exchange. The fact that the answer is always the same, that it always takes the form anticipated in the question, shows that it always returns to its metaphysical presupposition: in other words, it returns to the trace that repeats the first movement of art as an internal rupture. From here it lays out many different paths, such as the retreat of art, the disaster of the subject and the paradoxical constitution of the figure, but for Lacoue-Labarthe there is only one destiny: the impossible situation in which art can identify itself only as that which cannot identify itself. Like our relation to birth and death, art is essentially an endless challenge to attain the sphere of non-knowledge: ‘nous faisons l’épreuve au fond sans répit de notre non-savoir’ (2009: 33).