ABSTRACT
The writers admired by Lacoue-Labarthe are those for whom literature is not a straightforward practice, but a site of ambiguity or question. He corresponded with Maurice Blanchot and with Roger Laporte, as well as often writing on them, as he also did on Paul Celan, Friedrich Holderlin, and others. This chapter first looks at Lacoue-Labarthe's reading of Celan in La Poesie comme experience, which develops the notions of caesura and interruption previously explored in relation to Holderlin. It explores Lacoue-Labarthe's own writing via various aspects of the poetic collection Phrase, notably its dialogue with Blanchot in texts that would only be united posthumously as Agonie terminee, agonie interminable. Lacoue-Labarthe's reaction was therefore one of astonishment as a reader; and together with his reaction to Blanchot's L'Instant de ma mort. In terms of Lacoue-Labarthe's thinking, and particularly his thinking of writing as a separate strand from his main work on philosophy, this scepticism regarding fragmentation is at once important and inhibiting.
