Body, Community, Language, World by Jan Patocka, translated by Erazim Kohak, 183 pages
Czech phenomenologist Patocka was banned from teaching for most of his life by the Soviet-backed Communist dictatorship that ruled his native land throughout most of his lifetime. He continued to mentor small groups of students as part of the "Underground University", but during the Prague Spring of 1968 he was fleetingly able to lecture publicly. Body, Community, Language, World is a reconstruction of those lectures based upon notes taken by his students.
Patocka undertakes a phenomenological analysis of corporeity, the embodiedness of the human subject. For Patocka, it is the body which is being-here, establishing the primary orientation of the human person towards action, which is always interaction, involving the world in its assorted potentialities. The lectures unfold as a dialectic between the ideas of Husserl and those of Heidegger, building upon both, and drawing in other thinkers from Aristotle to Bergson in a masterful synthesis.
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