Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, altus

Instead of a complete portrait of philosopher and writer Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Christine Baudillon and François Lagarde have chosen to take us on a journey in his company. It is reminiscent of a pilgrimage in that it passes through ’’stations’’ of the heights of the history of European thought: Sils Maria, Tübingen, Iena, and St Peter’s Island. It is therefore Nietzsche, Rousseau, Hölderlin, Hegel and others that we are visiting: their surroundings, their rooms, mountains and rivers. Thus, adding seeing to speech was the project of these images shot in 2001, to which Lacoue-Labarthe had previously considered adding photographs, music and texts other than those he himself reads on screen. But there’s nothing pious about all this, on the contrary. Although there is a certain amount of contemplation, it never excludes humour, making one think of Moullet, for example, when faced with the slapstick antics of the thinker at the foot of the rock where Nietzsche was struck by the idea of eternal recurrence. There’s no looming pontification, either about the works, or their geography, no edifying purring, quite the opposite: the brutal and simple experience of texts, songs and landscapes which saw them come into being. (Jean-Pierre Rehm, FIDMarseille 2013)