On Time, Being, And Hunger Challenging the Traditional Way of Thinking Life [Hardcover]

The traditional way of understanding life, as a self-appropriating and self-organizing process of not ceasing to exist, of taking care of ones own hunger, is challenged by todays unprecedented proliferation of discourses and techniques concerning the living being. This challenge entails questioning the fundamental concepts of metaphysical thinkingnamely, time, finality, and, above all, being. Garrido argues that today we are in a position to repeat Nietzsches assertion that there is no other representation of being than that of
living. But in order to carry out this deconstruction of ontology, we need to find new ways of asking: What is life?

In this study, Garrido establishes the basic elements of the question concerning life through readings of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida; through the discussion of scientific breakthroughs in thermodynamics and evolutionary and developmental biology; and through the reexamination of the notion of hunger in both its metaphysical and its political implications.

Juan Manuel Garrido renews in an impressive way the question concerning life. By the term life we usually mean a sort of immediacy, a self-presence through auto-affection and transmission through self-perpetuation. Garrido, however, opens life  simply, if I may say so  to the infinity of a being-towards and a hunger: this infinity is not the indefinition of a life that simply continues, but the elevation of life  or its hollowing out, which is the same thing  to being-out-of-itself. This is, in one word, a philosophical revolution.

A new and compelling voice in philosophy. Garrido develops a
profoundly interesting and compelling investigation of the senses of
being and temporality. In doing so, he moves beyond philosophies that
emphasize traditional ontology and their correlative concept of time.

Situating itself within the context of current debates in continental philosophy, and through a series of real³›