Customer Reviews

Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness

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Another great zone publication. Everyone's on-board on this one. Bruce Mau design, Arthur Goldhammer translation. Francois Jullien? where did i get the idea that he was one of Henry Corbin's students? Anyway, this book is outstanding and entirely necessary. As the title implies this book is "vital nourishment" and i attest to its restorative and life-affirming properties. I mean Who doesn't love a book with the subtitle "Departing from happiness?" I mean that really says it all. With everyone else commanding you to enjoy yourself all the time the book is a glorious reminder of the banality of pleasure and its ready alliance with death through the repetition compulsion. Much like Badiou, Jullien endorses a Platonic return to process and form over Aristotelian ends and goal. Jullien correctly diagnoses the commodification of our very lives in this view of life as finished-product. take away the expropriated product(i.e. a life lived towards a goal) and there is no longer alienated labor (Sartre, Luckacs); furthermore, if there is no longer any subject, but only process, then the task of philosophy is to articulate a proper response to this question of what is to be done? with a formula for action that voids any notion of a transcendent overcoming of this bifurcation via a hopeful hereafter. immanently affirming the present, Jullien's daring book provides a template for the overman's new life; a life, moreover, that is much more active and vital than the one s/he left behind. Surely a manifesto for the new philosophy, and especially in its brevity, a must-read.