Agnes Heller's Existential Ethics and Bare Life

The following paper explicates and critically analyses the existential ethics of the reflective postmodernist phase in the work of Agnes Heller. Beginning with a brief summary of the biographical and theoretical roots of her development, it goes on to analyse the meaning of her key slogan of “turning contingency into destiny.” After elaborating her version of the “existential leap” and her later attempts to refine her position in An Ethics of Personality, the paper will employ some literary lives from W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee to test the general viability of Heller's model.