Book review: The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China

of political humanity. In everyday life, one might think of the vast number of bodily surveillance technologies that tie the supposed ‘we’ of political subjectivity to the monitoring of ‘bare life’: smart watches with health, efficiency and fitness apps; the commodification of time and life in the labor market; DNA and personality services; ‘life coaching’ to make us more efficient. Lechte’s book is a thoughtful genealogy that allows contemporary readers of Stiegler and Agamben to think about debts to Arendt, Bataille, Heidegger and phenomenology in general. It is also, more importantly, a new way of thinking critically about the conception of freedom that runs from Kant, through Marx and Hegel, to the present: only with the modern positing of mere subsistence can the norm of self-forming humanity be marked off from lives of the stateless, the pre-political and the not-yet human. Finally, by arguing that what is posited as bare life actually harbors the relationality and sense of ways and forms of life, Lechte contributes to future thinking about human life beyond the state form.