MEMENTO MORI
Pierre Hadot
1922 – April 24, 2010
To read a memorial essay on Pierre Hadot written by Horst Hutter, click here.
James Purdy
July 17, 1914 – March 13, 2009
Ingmar Bergman
July 14, 1918 – July 30, 2007
The Seventh Seal, 1957
Michelangelo Antonioni
September 29, 1912 – July 30, 2007
Monica Vitti in L’Avventura, 1960
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
March 6, 1940 – January 27, 2007
When I was first told Jacques Derrida was ill, I thought he could not die soon; after all, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Claude Levi-Strauss, two philosophers a generation senior to him, were still alive, as was Maurice Blanchot, perhaps the most profound wellspring (or absence of such!) of the “literary” side of Derrida. Then Gadamer died, at age 101, having seen, and commented on, the September 11 attacks. Then Blanchot died. But Derrida still lived. By the time Derrida himself died, I was half-expecting it, yet it was still a shock (as were the mean-spirited obituaries that Derrida received—as, much more recently, did Jean Baudrillard—but that is a different story). What fortified my sense of loss is that followers who shared his sense of adventure and critique, such as Sarah Kofman, had also been lost too soon. yet people such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Catherine Malabou, and—I would contend—Jean-Luc Marion were still working—in their own idioms, of course, but in idioms which function as traces and supplements of Derrida.
Now we have lost Lacoue-Labarthe—still in the prime of his career at 66. Some will know him as a critical expositor of Heidegger’s politics who tried to ramify the simplistic slogans hurled around in the wake of Victor Farias’s accusations. Some will know him a political philosopher who seriously thought about what a post-structuralist politics might look like. While sharing the skepticism for totalizing systems evinced by Luc Ferry, Alain Renaut, and, more subtly, Marcel Gauchet, Lacoue-Labarthe still summoned a vision of shared dreams and ideals, even if these can never ‘solidly’ be invoked, constituted, or presumed.
But students of Nietzsche will know Lacoue-Labarthe as someone who attended to what might have seemed, after Derrida, Nietzsche’s greatest vulnerabilities: his tendency (as in The Birth of Tragedy) to formulate binary oppositions, and his evident inheritance from German romanticism, and regard them as Nietzsche’s deepest and most contradictory strengths guaranteeing a deconstructive Nietzsche rather than standing in its way. By extrapolating the undecidability at the heart of the romantic absolute, Lacoue-Labarthe jettisons a univocally hearty reading of Nietzsche’s affirmations, reaching a deeper level where Nietzsche’s seeming vacillations and self-contradictions constitute an ineffable certitude.
Derrida has died, and now we have lost Lacoue-Labarthe, who some have seen as Derrida’s ‘disciple’ but who was so much more. Levi-Strauss still lived, at the age of 98. Lacoue-Labarthe is dead, at 66—a young age as we now regard it, but older than Nietzsche. Yet the demanding reading that Lacoue-Labarthe gave of Nietzsche, the demanding reading that Nietzsche gave of himself and the philosophical tradition, will continue.
—Nicholas Birns, The New School
The untimely passing of Lacoue-Labarthe is not only the loss of an esteemed colleague, critic and thinker, a loss for our discipline, but a conspicuous loss for thinking critically and theoretically, for literature and philosophy, in other words.
From Schlegel and the German Romantics to Hölderlin and Celan, Lacoue-Labarthe’s critical inquiry has engaged not just the literary text but the very foundation of literature, which is the critical act by which it knows itself. Ever since his early work on the German Romantics with Jean-Luc Nancy, his dedication to examining the root causes of our critical thinking on literature and philosophy, their similarities and differences, is apparent. Schlegel and the romantics sketch for Lacoue-Labarthe the ground for criticism, literary criticism, and for literature as well.
The major focus of Lacoue-Labarthe’s critical investigation is to understand this precarious relation between literature and criticism, literature and philosophy, the equivocity, in other words, that occurs when this relation denounces the discrepancy that informs it. The misconceptions that this condition generates, however, are endless and defines what we call literary history. Lacoue-Labarthe’s work can be understood as an attempt to rectify and demystify this history. As he characterized it, the work of the critic is simply a matter of “vigilance”, a constant watching over literature and philosophy, lest the literary be displaced and recycled. This is what we have lost with his passing, his vigilance, and the loss is irreparable.
—Massimo Verdicchio, University of Alberta
Robert C. Solomon
September 14, 1942 – January 2, 2007
On January 2, 2007, Robert C. (Bob) Solomon and his wife, Kathleen M. Higgins, were changing planes in Zurich on the way to Rome, when Bob grew short of breath and collapsed. He died soon after of pulmonary hypertension. Bob was born with a hole in his heart. Doctors did not expect him to live to adulthood. Perhaps as a result of this, he packed as much work, travel, friendship, and enjoyment as he could into every day. Death in an airport seemed fitting for a man who would go anywhere to give a talk—a man who had so much to say and little time.
Bob Solomon was born on in Detroit, Michigan. In 1963, he received his B.A. in microbiology from the University of Pennsylvania. When Bob graduated, he initially pursued a medical degree at the University of Michigan before moving to the philosophy department to do graduate work in philosophy and psychology. He wrote his dissertation on unconscious motivation. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1967, Bob taught philosophy in a number of schools such as Princeton, the University of Pittsburgh, Queens College, and the University of Auckland, where he periodically visited for thirty-eight years. He settled down in the philosophy department at the University of Texas, Austin, in 1973, where he was named Quincy Lee Centennial Professor and Distinguished Teaching Professor. At Texas, Bob met and married fellow philosopher Kathleen Higgins, who frequently collaborated with him on books and papers.
Anyone who knew Bob stood in awe of his brilliance and productivity as a scholar. He published his first book, From Rationalism to Existentialism, in 1972 and then went on to produce over 160 articles, 28 original books, 13 edited books, and 11 textbooks, which were published in numerous editions and translated into seventeen languages. His interests were wide-ranging but his second book, The Passions (1977), sets out themes about the emotions and morality that Bob would revisit and refine throughout his career. Psychologists who studied emotions also had great respect for Bob’s work. He served as president of the International Society for Research on the Emotions from 2000-2004. Some of Bob’s biggest fans were in business ethics. He was this year’s incoming president of the Society for Business Ethics.
Among philosophers he was best known for his work in continental philosophy. Bob wrote with a clarity, eloquence, and wit that came from a personal understanding of his subjects. In one of his last articles in Chronicle of Higher Education (January 26, 2007), he refers to Heidegger and Sartre as “the grand old Mr. Cranky and Mr. Grumpy of German and French existentialism.” Bob treated Nietzsche like an old friend. His Nietzsche is a sane social critic, a moralist, and a wise guy who made Bob chuckle. Kathleen Higgins told me that the most distinctive thing about Bob’s work on Nietzsche is that he “emphasized Nietzsche’s relevance for people’s everyday lives. Bob argued that Nietzsche, although opposed to any kind of standardized morality, was a kind of virtue ethicist along the lines of Aristotle though with a much more person-specific notion of virtue in mind. Bob also defended Nietzsche’s use of ad hominem arguments as something more than a rhetorical ploy. He saw it as a strategy consistent with Nietzsche’s insistence that philosophical motivations were ultimately deeply personal passions.”
Bob may have felt a certain kinship to Nietzsche. Both of them suffered from chronic physical problems yet both of them used exuberant words like “joy” and “passion” when they talked about philosophy. Sometimes when Bob wrote about Nietzsche he seemed to be writing about himself. For example, Bob writes: “Philosophy requires Apollonian clarity, to be sure, but it also demands Dionysian gaiety and intoxication. One never misses this when reading Nietzsche: he is in love with what he is doing, in love with the words, in love with the ideas, in love with the way that sentences and segments go together, in love—as he once said of Spinoza—with his own wisdom (What Nietzsche Really Said, p. 206).”
While Bob never had children, he had an extended family of friends and scores of students. He enjoyed teaching and his undergraduate classes were always packed. Bob taught his students how to love (or at least appreciate) philosophy and apply it to their lives. He modeled the virtues he taught. A humble man with an enormous work ethic, Bob showed his graduate students that being a world-class philosopher did not entitle you to be pompous, inconsiderate of students and colleagues, dogmatic, or too important to teach the introduction to philosophy course.
Bob and I were friends for about 30 years. We were both interested in philosophic questions that were not considered “serious” if you were “trained” in an analytic philosophy department in the 1960s and 1970s. A few years ago, we decided to write a business ethics textbook together. I fondly remember Bob, sitting at our kitchen table, merrily banging away on his computer with two fingers. For Bob, the life of the mind was one grand adventure. He brought joy to his work and his enthusiasm was infectious. While those of us who knew Bob miss him, the work that he left behind offers some consolation. Bob wrote just like he talked so when you read him, you can still almost hear his voice.
—Joanne B. Ciulla, University of Richmond