Institut Ramon LLull

Josep Maria Esquirol is an important figure in contemporary Catalan thought. In his most recent books (slim volumes with wide-reaching influence), he has constructed a way of understanding and being in the world, “the philosophy of proximity,” and he expands on it in this book. With a style similar to the aphorism, Esquirol examines the roots and echoes of language in the company of Husserl, Heidegger, Lévinas, and Patocka (intellectual friendships, he sometimes calls them) and others perhaps not as well known but equally inspirational, such as Saint Francis and Walter Benjamin. With these tools, Human, More Human (a response to Nietzsche) begins in the everyday in order to transcend it (and understand it deeply). Esquirol reveals the four wounds that define us: life, death, alterity, and love… From this certainty, he approaches the post-human theories and, unlike Nietzsche, calls for us to deepen our relationship to what defines us as humans.