Primal Philosophy

After the epoch of the “end of metaphysics” and the attendant disasters of twentieth-century political violence, this book initiates a renewed inquiry into the responsibility of the philosopher and its rootedness in the possibility of philosophy itself.

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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.