A serious and original philosopher tackles the meaning of life and returns with a majestic, liberating new answer
Martin Hagglund is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University, and a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His first book in English, Radical Atheism (2008), was the subject of a conference at Cornell, a colloquium at Oxford, and a 250-page special issue of The New Centennial Review titled Living On: Of Martin Hagglund. His most recent book, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (2012), was hailed by the Los Angeles Review of Books as a 'revolutionary' achievement. In 2018, he received a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in New York City.
Beautifully liberating ... Hägglund's fundamental secular cry seems
right: since time is all we have, we must measure its preciousness
in units of freedom. Nothing else will do. Once this glorious idea
has taken hold, it is very hard to dislodge.
*New Yorker*
Like the existentialist works of the mid-20th century, This Life is
a stirring reminder about philosophy's power to move and disturb as
well as illuminate.
*New Statesman*
Really moving and actually soothing. It gave me some kind of inner
peace to contemplate Martin Hagglund's arguments, partly because
the arguments really are about how beautiful and precious and
singular it is to have this life, to be alive as a human on this
planet.
*Why Is This Happening? podcast*
Lucidly written, and at times beautifully so, it is unmistakably a
work of philosophy... [Hägglund] wants to effect a revolutionary
change in our understanding of value, in our economies and in our
lives.
*New Statesman*
A breathtaking reconstruction of Marx as a thinker of freedom... An
intervention in intellectual history of the first order.
*Radical Philosophy*
A splendid primer in the importance of authentic freedom.
*Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek minister of finance and author of
Adults in the Room*
Martin Hägglund shows with real originality why the moral concern
that underlies religious faith has always been a hope for the
perpetuation of life on earth. Stringent, lucid, and urgent in its
appeal for a politics equal to the prospect of climate disaster,
This Life is both an argument and a summons.
*David Bromwich, Sterling Professor at Yale University and author
of Moral Imagination*
This is a rare piece of work, the product of great intellectual
strength and moral fortitude. The writing shows extraordinary range
and possesses an honesty and fervor which is entirely without
cynicism... Hägglund is a genuine moralist for our times, possessed
of an undaunted resoluteness and a fierce commitment to
intellectual probity. Maybe he's the philosophical analogue to Karl
Ove Knausgaard.
*Simon Critchley, curator for The New York Times‘ The Stone and
author of Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us*
A bold contemporary take on existentialism... Earnest and
precise... huge intellectual range... beautifully clear. This Life
requires no philosophical training or lexicon to follow it, only an
interest in the meaning of this life...I found Hägglund's
cherishing of mortal life a cheering corrective to the sometimes
joyless scientificity of the new atheism....Hägglund is surely
right that it is our mortality, our miraculous existence as
carbon-based matter turned all too briefly into conscious beings
who can love and be loved, that makes us priceless to ourselves and
to each other.
*Times Higher Education*
Hägglund's This Life is a highly readable, accessible - yet
profound - examination of what kind of society might enable life at
its most fulfilling. Whilst realising our interdependence, we have
to be responsible for our own fragile lives. The theses may be
heavy, but the discussions and analyses, however complex, are
written with a light touch and beguiling clarity which is both
wholly absorbing and deeply relevant. The reader is complicit, a
partner. It is a book to read slowly, and this reviewer is about to
start reading it all over again.
*The Arts Desk*
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