Complaint: Grievance Among Friends by Avital Ronell

Author:Avital Ronell [Ronell, Avital]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General, Literary Criticism, Comparative Literature
ISBN: 9780252041570
Google: wE3KswEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2018-04-02T00:46:52.177000+00:00

At the end of Phrase 19 (“PROSE”), Lacoue sends up a flare of return, almost on the order of hope. A diction could come back to us, the last stanza offers, a kind that turns down the decibels of the curse: “nulle raison / d’en désespérer” (no reason / to despair of this return), if I make the effort no longer to rely on the fury of words, and if we are capable of respecting the unpronounceable—“et si nous sommes capables de respecter l’imprononçable.”79 The curse fatally competes with the unpronounceable, with what vibrates with the unsaid.

In “Katharsis et Mathèsis,” Lacoue evokes Bataille, who was profoundly touched, he writes, by “la ‘mère tragédie’” (“mother tragedy,” and behind her, he continues parenthetically, sacrificial experience in general) called “la pratique de la joie devant la mort” (the practice of joy in the face of death).80 Perhaps it is not altogether far-fetched to integrate this tonality into the great plaint of Lacoue-Labarthe, and let it live and resonate together with the Greek experience, to which he devotes multifaceted activities of translation and writing, of ekplèxis: shock, stupor and phobos: fear and terror. It is as if the Greek grasp of the lamentable in life were only now beginning to dawn on us, provoking a plaintive howl through the centuries that bind us. Lacoue’s acute sense of terror, modern yet part of an essential ancient vocabulary, is shared by very few. Part of a recurring rebound from Aristotle’s writings on politics and poetics, this inheritance of terror clutches and visits us all, however.

The extreme experience of “fear and terror,” of “shock and stupor,” the implications of which so many commentators try explicitly to throw or ease down, and still others simply ignore, continues no doubt to practice its covert shakedowns in the worlds we still share and are shattered by.

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