Envisioning the Good Life - by Benjamin Noys (Hardcover)

About the Book

A new vision of the good life as collective transformation against the fragmentation of contemporary life.

Book Synopsis

Envisioning the Good Life is a call to re-imagine our lives beyond the limits of recent understandings. While contemporary thinkers of life have promoted a vision of life as excess to escape the crises that beset the present, these vitalist visions leave life detached from reality and fragmented. Contemporary vitalism imagines life as excessive, savage life, as damaged life that flees power, and as redeemed life that forms a new dispersed community. While exploring these visions of life, this book argues for an integrated understanding of the good life. Reading against the limits of the current imaginary, Envisioning the Good Life suggests that our lives are not defined by the limits of illness, death, and finitude. This book urges us to rediscover the vision of the good life in the collective and to grasp our own powers to transform our lives and the world.

Review Quotes

In this book, Benjamin Noys is a kind of philosophical surgeon, dissecting our social needs and desires. We are obsessed with "Life" as a power and source of values, but we do not know concretely how to live. Noys probes this dilemma, and offers us glimpses of a way out.--Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University