Published posthumously, Ending and Unending Agony is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's only book entirely devoted to the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003). The place of Blanchot in Lacoue-Labarthe's thought was both discreet and profound, involving difficult, agonizing questions about the status of literature, with vast political and ethical stakes.

Together with Plato, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger, Blanchot represents a decisive crossroads for Lacoue-Labarthe's central concerns. In this book, they converge on the question of literature, and in...

In February 1988, philosophers Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a large audience to discuss the philosophical and political implications of Martin Heidegger's thought. This event took place in the very amphitheater in which, more than fifty years earlier, Heidegger, as rector of the University of Freiburg and a member of the Nazi Party, had given a speech entitled "The University in the New Reich." Heidegger's involvement in Nazism has always been, and will remain, an indelible scandal, but what is its real relation to his...

In February 1988, philosophers Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a large audience to discuss the philosophical and political implications of Martin Heidegger's thought. This event took place in the very amphitheater in which, more than fifty years earlier, Heidegger, as rector of the University of Freiburg and a member of the Nazi Party, had given a speech entitled "The University in the New Reich." Heidegger's involvement in Nazism has always been, and will remain, an indelible scandal, but what is its real relation to his...

Poetics of History places Rousseau at the origin of modern speculative philosophy by showing that his thinking on the theater, despite its dependence on a false and conventional reading of Aristotle, nonetheless articulates a radical thinking of originary mimesis, and, well before Hegel, an understanding of catharsis as Aufhebung.

Poetics of History places Rousseau at the origin of modern speculative philosophy by showing that his thinking on the theater, despite its dependence on a false and conventional reading of Aristotle, nonetheless articulates a radical thinking of originary mimesis, and, well before Hegel, an understanding of catharsis as Aufhebung.