Böcker av Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

The first authoritative study of the emergence of the modern concept of literature in German romanticism.

Poetics of History places Rousseau at the origin of modern speculative philosophy by showing that his thinking on the theater, despite its dependence on a false and conventional reading of Aristotle, nonetheless articulates a radical thinking of originary mimesis, and, well before Hegel, an understanding of catharsis as Aufhebung.

This is a pioneering attempt to rearticulate the relationship between music and the problem of mimesis, of presentation and re-presentation. Four "scenes" compose this book, all four of them responses to Wagner: two by French poets (Baudelaire and Mallarme), two by German philosophers (Heidegger and Adorno).