Primal Philosophy: Rousseau with Laplanche by Lucas Fain (review)

In Primal Philosophy: Rousseau with Laplanche, Lucas Fain sets out to explicate the very possibility of philosophy, with its origins in wonder and its end in happiness. He moves toward these goals through a comprehensive reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Socratism” intercalated with Jean Laplanche’s psychoanalytic intervention focused on the universality of untranslatable “enigmatic messages” that shape the (un)conscious of each individual. Through this combination of trajectories, Fain hopes both to deconstruct philosophy’s metaphysical origins along the lines of thinkers from Descartes through Badiou, and also return this fundamental question back to the emergence of the wisdom of eudaimonia, the flourishing of happiness, as a libidinal object.