The new essay book by SAVVAS MICHAEL has been released. The author is one of the most significant pioneering thinkers and essayists in the country, utilizing Marxism, psychoanalysis, the Jewish cabalistic tradition, philosophy, poetry, prose, and the arts as his tools.

HOMO LIBER – The Free Man. Baruch Spinoza defined his life stance with crystal clarity: “The free man thinks about death the least of all, and his wisdom is not the study of death but the contemplation of life” (Ethics). His contemplation of life does not occur in a vacuum, absent of place and time. It develops in a defined place but with the horizon of a specific Utopia (Ernst Bloch), which has yet to find its place. It unfolds in the present time but with consciousness of the present as History. Homo Liber always remains faithful to his “homeland” “within time,” as Leon Trotsky referred to the historical Era.

Contemplation of life is, above all, the reflection on the Era itself. We live in a transitional Era, in days of fear and terror, but also in the time of Hope, the present time, where all questions and all possibilities are open to the winds that change everything! “Justice, seek justice so that you may live...” (Deuteronomy). And justice is inseparable from freedom, the liberation from all the bonds that make life not life but a nightmare for survival. The surrealists were right: we must transform this world, in the way of Marx, we must change life into true Life, in the way of Rimbaud.

The poets of speech and action accompany the essays in the book, alongside the oppressed, in the streets of Life, in the streets of Freedom. The Tiger of William Blake accompanies the protesters in Syntagma Square, along with the bewildered heroines of Rea Galanaki's Extreme Humiliation. Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Alain Badiou stroll through Gezi Park during the hours of uprising. William Shakespeare and Jean Genet, Leo Tolstoy and Andreas Empirikos meet the Peruvian revolutionary José Carlos Mariátegui, Deleuze, Guattari, the fighters of May '68 in the streets of globality. Amid the darkness, they do not cease to see the horizon: in it was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS

Savvas Michael (Sabbetai Ben. Matzas) was born in Athens in 1947. He studied Medicine in Athens and Paris. His wife is Katerina Matsa. He has been active in the field of the Marxist left since the days of the junta. In addition to his articles in newspapers and magazines in Greece and internationally, his books have been published: Perestroika and Economy (Change, 1st edition 1987, 2nd edition 1988), Revolution and Counter-Revolution in China (Pelikanos, 1989), Solomos and Hegel (Leon, 1991), Restoration or Revolution? (Leon, 1992), Sailing and docking of the "Great Eastern" (Agra, 1996), Forms of the Messianic (Agra, 1999), Trotsky as a philosopher (Leon, 2001), Forms of Wandering (Agra, 2004), Homo Po ë ticus (Agra, 2006), Golem On Subjectivity and Other Phantoms (Agra, 2010), The Horror of a Parody – Three Lectures on the “Golden Dawn” (Agra, 2013), Musica ex Nihilo – Essays on poetry, life, death, and justice (Agra, 2013), The Diary as Exile (foreword to The Diary of Exile – 1935 by L. D. Trotsky, Agra, 2015).

He has translated works for Agra Publications by Tariq Ali, Edward Said, Alain Badiou, Marx-Engels, Noam Chomsky.

COVER IMAGE: ELLSWORTH KELLY, La Combe I, 1950