This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free Professor Martin Hägglund, Yale University

Event details

Yarburgh Lectures

This open lecture forms part of Professor Hägglund’s UK tour for his book This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free (Profile Books, August 2019). Hailed as “beautifully liberating” by the New Yorker, as “a new philosophy for our time” by the Boston Globe, and as “a monumental achievement” by Jacobin, Hägglund’s book offers a new secular vision for how we should lead our lives in the 21st century and beyond. Profound, original and accessible, ranging from fundamental existential questions to the most pressing social issues of our time, This Life shows why our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism.

Hägglund will give a short reading from the book, followed by a dialogue with Dr Adam Kelly from York’s Department of English, a Q&A with the audience, and a book signing.

This event follows a lecture Hägglund gave at the York Festival of Ideas in 2014, which saw the European debut of the ideas that would culminate in the publication of This Life.

NB: There will be a drinks reception open to the public along with a book signing following the event.

Martin Hägglund

Martin Hägglund is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of four highly acclaimed books, and his work has been translated into ten languages and has been the subject of conferences at Oxford, Harvard, Yale and Cornell. He was elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2009, awarded the Schük Prize by the Swedish Academy in 2014, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018.

Watch the talk on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urXw0RfBP-o&feature=youtu.be