ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to measure the importance of the various contemporary collaborations or engagements with 'the timely', to use to Friedrich Nietzsche's term in Lacoue-Labarthe's thinking. It looks at the mode of his relationship with Jean-Luc Nancy and the various forms this dialogue takes, whether explicit or implicit, playful or serious. At stake in the identification with and ultimate rejection of the avant-garde model represented by Jena Romanticism and by Tel Quel is Lacoue-Labarthe's understanding of the modern. The critical anthology L'Absolu litteraire: Theorie de la litterature du romantisme allemand is certainly one of the works, and perhaps the work, for which Lacoue-Labarthe is best-known. The chapter examines Lacoue-Labarthe's displacement of the modern, which forms the impulse behind his rejection of a certain version of Wagnerian opera and of Cahiers Maurice Blanchot's post-romantic fragmentary writing, both of which he sees as too intricated within a modernist aesthetic.
