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Primal Philosophy

Rousseau with Laplanche
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Ever since Martin Heidegger initiated the destruction of the Western philosophical tradition, we have heard that philosophy has come to an end; that metaphysics has exhausted all of its possibilities; that the history of philosophy terminates in nihilism; that we require "another beginning," a return to the tradition of first philosophy, and a renewal of the question of being. For Heidegger, thinking in a postmetaphysical epoch therefore begins with thinking about being, with the consequence that our views about ethics or politics must first depend upon the meaning of being. Primal Philosophy: Rousseau and the Seduction of Happiness calls all of this into question. This book presents the first account of Rousseau's thought on the rootedness of philosophy in the question of happiness, while it simultaneously positions this account at the forefront of a larger effort to combat the nihilistic consequences of Heidegger's decision to found the future of thinking on a radical return to the question of being.
Lucas Fain is lecturer in philosophy at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Acknowledgments Chapter 1. The Wager of Rousseau Chapter 2. Philosophy in Crisis Chapter 3. Rousseau's Intervention Chapter 4. Primal Philosophy Chapter 5. Philosophy and Responsibility Abbreviations and Works Cited Notes Index
The French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, in retrospect, has emerged as one of the grand masters of the art of reading in the twentieth century, and Lucas Fain, in his gripping work on Rousseau and the Seduction of Happiness, has shown himself to be one of those who have taken the genius of Laplanche most seriously. One can only imagine the riches to be gleaned from a comparative study of Fain on Rousseau and Derrida's practice of "grammatology," a philosophical (or post-philosophical) stance developed in a book principally about Rousseau. Primal Philosophy is an important work and I recommend it to all who have an interest in the future of intellectual history.--Jeffrey Mehlman, professor of french, Boston University
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