The Human

Reviews / Votes

How can it be possible - as we so often see - for human life to be excluded, exploited, oppressed and, ultimately, destroyed in the very name of humanity? This is the crucial question that Lechte tackles in this philosophical tour de force.
The domains of politics, ethics, economics, law and rights are all founded on the idea of the human and are meant to serve this end. Yet, this idea of humanity conceals a distinction, which has been with us since the Greeks, between human life as mere biological necessity, and human life as a 'way of life' - a division that allows certain ways of living to be denigrated. Lechte's bold and penetrating analysis forces us to question this assumption and, in doing so, disrupts the familiar categories of the Western political and philosophical tradition. Taking up from where Agamben left off, Lechte proposes a radical new understanding of the human as transcendent, as that which cannot be reduced to bare life. In doing so, he presents a fundamental challenge to the economic and political rationalities that today aim to objectify and control us. -- Saul Newman, Professor of Political Theory, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK I enthusiastically recommend John Lechte's The Human. Beginning with Hannah Arendt's experience of being a refugee, reduced to bare life and fleeing for her life, Lechte calls into question her claim that only a political life offers a remedy to reducing humans to bare life, and focuses on the transcendence of the human and the ways in which this transcendence is connected to various forms of life, political and otherwise. -- Peg Birmingham, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University, USA A new way of thinking critically about the conception of freedom. * Thesis Eleven *