Phenomenology-influenced reading of the nature of history, drawing on Edward Said, Nietzsche, and poet Adrienne Rich

History, the Human, and the World Between is a philosophical investigation of the human subject and its simultaneous implication in multiple and often contradictory ways of knowing. The eminent postcolonial theorist R. Radhakrishnan argues that human subjectivity is always constituted “between”: between subjective and objective, temporality and historicity, being and knowing, the ethical and the political, nature and culture, the one and the many, identity and difference, experience and system. In this major study, he suggests that a reconstituted phenomenology has a crucial role to play in mediating between generic modes of knowledge production and an experiential return to life. Keenly appreciative of poststructuralist critiques of phenomenology, Radhakrishnan argues that there is still something profoundly vulnerable at stake in the practice of phenomenology.

Radhakrishnan develops his rationale of the “between” through three linked essays where he locates the terms “world,” “history,” “human,” and “subject” between phenomenology and poststructuralism, and in the process sets forth a nuanced reading of the politics of a gendered postcolonial humanism. Critically juxtaposing the works of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Adrienne Rich, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, David Harvey, and Ranajit Guha, Radhakrishnan examines the relationship between systems of thought and their worldly situations. History, the Human, and the World Between is a powerful argument for a theoretical perspective that combines the existential urgency of phenomenology with the discursive rigor of poststructuralist practices.

"“A compelling interrogation. . . .”" - Modern Fiction Studies

"“A work of noteworthy scholarship. Committed rigorously to the in-between space father than ‘the comfort and security of a monologic home’ (24), History, the Human and the World Between emblemizes intellectual cosmopolitanism with the author's existential respect for the particularity of humanity, poststructuralist critique of totalization, and a fervent pursuit of the dialogical relations between the compulsion to define and a learned conviction about the limitation of defining and definitions.”" - ariel

"“Highly recommended.”" - Choice

"“Radhakrishnan's great contribution in this book [is that] he shows that every proposition offered in the service of understanding the world is also a form of negation, and even the best intentions of theorists and poets may foreclose on the very generative potential of alterity, of the unfinished processes of becoming.”