Having nearly died in that American hospital, I gave some thought, pacing its corridors, to the “right to life.” In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson’s right to life is followed by a right to liberty and a right to pursue happiness. Liberty is in the middle. Life comes first, which makes sense. We can only be free as a Leib. No Leib, no freedom. There can be a Körper without me, but no Leib without me, as Stein said. Negative freedom makes a Körper of us, one object of many, supposedly free when other objects are not in the way. That will not do. Whatever our freedom is, it
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