Life: A Critical User's Manual

✍ Scribed by Didier Fassin

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 177
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

How can we think of life in its dual expression, matter and experience, the living and the lived? Philosophers and, more recently, social scientists have offered multiple answers to this question, often privileging one expression or the other - the biological or the biographical. But is it possible to conceive of them together and thus reconcile naturalist and humanist approaches? Using research conducted on three continents and engaging in critical dialogue with Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Foucault, Didier Fassin attempts to do so by developing three concepts: forms of life, ethics of life, and politics of life.

In the conditions of refugees and asylum seekers, in the light of mortality statistics and death benefits, and via a genealogical and ethnographical inquiry, the moral economy of life reveals troubling tensions in the way contemporary societies treat human beings. Once the pieces of this anthropological composition are assembled, like in Georges Perec's jigsaw puzzle, an image appears: that of unequal lives.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on the Illustration of the Cover
Preamble
I: Forms of Life
II: Ethics of Life
III: Politics of Life
Conclusion
Notes
Preamble: Minima Theoria
Chapter I. Forms of Life
Chapter II. Ethics of Life
Chapter III. Politics of Life
Conclusion: Unequal Lives
References
Index
EULA