This book opens with a philosophical scene: in the context of a reading of Hölderlin, Heidegger dismisses Rousseau as irrelevant to the true concerns of philosophy, and thus shows his own blindness to Rousseau’s very evident influence. This dismissal is motivated in part by Heidegger’s pro-German posture, but also by a disregard of Rousseau’s thinking, particularly his thinking of mimêsis. In what follows, Lacoue-Labarthe’s task is, first, to show that Rousseau articulates a genuine transcendental thinking of origins, one that will be read and retained by the major philosophers who follow him ... More

This book opens with a philosophical scene: in the context of a reading of Hölderlin, Heidegger dismisses Rousseau as irrelevant to the true concerns of philosophy, and thus shows his own blindness to Rousseau’s very evident influence. This dismissal is motivated in part by Heidegger’s pro-German posture, but also by a disregard of Rousseau’s thinking, particularly his thinking of mimêsis. In what follows, Lacoue-Labarthe’s task is, first, to show that Rousseau articulates a genuine transcendental thinking of origins, one that will be read and retained by the major philosophers who follow him (notably Kant). This demonstration is carried out with reference especially to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, in which, in the wake of readings by Jacques Derrida and Jean Starobinski, Lacoue-Labarthe locates a thinking of technê (as a supplement of nature) that is properly transcendental and originary. Lacoue-Labarthe calls this Rousseau’s “onto-technology,” showing that it is linked with a scene, and therefore with the theater, in a broad sense. The second task, then, is to show that in his discourse on the theater, especially in the Letter to d’Alembert, Rousseau thinks in specifically philosophical terms, and that, despite an apparently conventional reading of Aristotle’s Poetics, he actually articulates a more genuine understanding of mimêsis and katharsis that is more faithful to Aristotle’s text. Katharsis becomes a form of speculative sublation, an Aufhebung, and Rousseau’s apparently reactionary interpretation of theater places him at a crucial initiating point of modern philosophy in the grips of a paradoxical dialectic.