Art's passing for Hegel, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy

This article explores the understanding of æsthetics in the work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. It does so in relation to Hegel’s claim about art’s dissolution or passing at the end of the classical, Greek age, as the world entered the modern, Christian age. For the two French thinkers, their relation to Hegel (and to a large extent æsthetics generally) turns on the claim that art was, but is not. The article looks first at Nancy’s discussion of the young girl carrying fruit, a figure used by Hegel to depict this scene in the history of spirit, then moves on to a rarely-read but significant article by Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘The Unpresentable’, before some final thoughts

Universalism and the (un)translatable

A unified set of questions arises in translation theory as it does in philosophy: how can one particularity be related to another? Can any general truth emerge from this relationship? And if so, in what particular language might this general truth be thought about and discussed? This article explores how various French thinkers have addressed these questions, from Alain Badiou’s recent account of philosophical French in terms of universalism, to Antoine Berman’s and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s readings of an alternative approach to universalism provided by German thought. Where a key passage in Badiou’s text suggests that he has Friedrich Hölderlin in mind, this poet-translator provides an explicit model for the other two thinkers