Poetics of History

Now available in Jeff Fort's impeccable translation, The Poetics of History is the culmination of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's lifetime work on the question of mimesis in Rousseau-a question of crucial importance that had never before been posed or answered in this form. Identifying in Rousseau an onto-technology so radical that it challenges his supposed anti-theatricality, The Poetics of History redefines both poetics and history even as it offers a new way of understanding the French reception of Heidegger.-Andrew Parker, Rutgers UniversityRousseau's opposition to the theater is well known: Far from purging the passions, it serves only to exacerbate them, and to render them hypocritical. But is it possible that Rousseau's texts reveal a different conception of theatrical imitation, a more originary form of mimesis? Over and against Heidegger's dismissal of Rousseau in the 1930s, Lacoue-Labarthe asserts the deeply philosophical importance of Rousseau as a thinker who, without formalizing it as such, established a dialectical logic of originary theatricality that would determine the future of philosophy.Beginning with a reading of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Lacoue-Labarthe brings out this dialectic in properly philosophical terms, revealing nothing less than a transcendental thinking of origins. For Rousseau, the origin has the form of a scene-that is, of theater. On this basis, Rousseau's texts on the theater emerge as an incisive interrogation of Aristotle's Poetics, to inaugurate what we could call the philosophical theater of the future.Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was Professor of Philosophy at the Universite Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His many books include Poetry as Experience; Typography; and, with Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute.Jeff Fort is Associate Professor of French at the University of California, Davis, and the translator of more than a dozen books by Jean Genet, Jacques Derrida, and others.