Why is it important to consider the human today? Exploring this
question John Lechte takes inspiration from the interplay of two of
Giorgio Agamben's concepts: 'ways of life' and 'bare life'.
Stateless people, those who do not have a political community, such
as asylum seekers and refugees, are no less human. However the
European tradition, represented most clearly in Hannah Arendt's
thinking of the opposition between the oikos, as the satisfaction
of basic needs, and the polis, as the realm of freedom and glory,
proposes the opposite of this. Arendt's famous phrase, 'the right
to have rights', means that freedom and full human potential can
only be realised in the context of civil society; in short, that
only citizens can be fully human. Because Arendt's view is so
influential, yet often not acknowledged, it is necessary to
undertake a full investigation of the nature and meaning of the
human to establish that it is not reducible to the citizen, but is
always characterised by a 'way of life' - life mediated by
language. The human is never reducible to 'bare life' - a life with
no other significance than physical survival. The implications of
'bare life' are investigated through important themes in relation
to the human, such as: freedom and necessity, the animal, animality
as nature, inclusion and exclusion in politics, the sacred, death
and dying, technics and nature, the Same and the Other, the
everyday as extraordinary. Journeying through Agamben, Arendt,
Bataille, Derrida, Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas, Schelling,
Simondon, and Stiegler, this is a profound search to reveal the
truly human.
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