1001Philosophers

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe Quotes

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was a French philosopher, literary theorist, and translator, a long-time colleague of Jean-Luc Nancy at the University of Strasbourg, and a major interpreter of Heidegger, Holderlin, and German Romanticism. His Typography and The Subject of Philosophy explored the rhetorical and theatrical dimension of philosophy through a sustained reading of mimesis from Plato to Heidegger. The quotes below are attributed to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, organized by topic.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on God

  • Attributed to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe:

    “To read Holderlin is to read the experience of the loss of the gods.”

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on Mind

  • Attributed to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe:

    “Every philosophy is haunted by a theatre that it tries in vain to silence.”

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on Politics

  • Attributed to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe:

    “National aestheticism is the matrix in which the Nazi catastrophe became thinkable.”

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on Truth

  • Attributed to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe:

    “Philosophy has always presented itself in the costume of a tragedy.”

  • Attributed to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe:

    “Mimesis is not a representation added to being; it is the very mode in which beings become themselves.”