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Hardback & eBook • January 2021
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“It is Fain’s achievement in this book to have fully absorbed Laplanche’s rediscovery of a ‘Copernican’ Freud…and to have used it as the basis for an original and highly significant re-reading of modern philosophy [that] concerns the very definition of responsible thinking today." — Luke Thurston, Aberystwyth University
“In Primal Philosophy, Fain shows himself to be a superb reader, writer, and thinker. I now know more about Rousseau, Laplanche, and, most importantly, the question of the origin of philosophy as wonder that addresses, and is addressed by, that ancient contemporaneity of the question of happiness in the face of finitude.” — Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, University of Hong Kong
“Primal Philosophy is an important work and I recommend it to all who have an interest in the future of intellectual history.” — Jeffrey Mehlman, Boston University
Primal Philosophy: Rousseau with Laplanche presents the first comprehensive study of Rousseau’s thought on the possibility of philosophy and the responsibility of the philosopher. Through a close reading of texts from throughout Rousseau’s entire corpus, together with inspiration from Jean Laplanche’s seminal work on the Freudian theory of seduction, this book positions Rousseau within a contemporary debate involving Theodor Adorno and Alain Badiou on the fate of philosophy after Heidegger. In confrontation with the radical subordination of ethics to ontology, which is characteristic of Cartesian thought and its culmination in Heidegger’s philosophical legacy, the reading of Rousseau with Laplanche elaborates the rootedness of philosophy in a process of primal seduction, which opens a way to rethink the meaning of a genuine first philosophy, not as the study of being qua being in the tradition initiated by Aristotle, but as primal philosophy, the study of the genesis of philosophy itself. The rootedness of philosophy in a process of primal seduction then reveals the primal responsibility of the philosopher—a responsibility for human happiness found in the possibility of philosophy itself.