Read philosophy. It'll do you good.

A fascinating new book by a philosopher underappreciated in America, Giorgio Agamben:

In the forty-five years since the publication of Agamben’s first book, two things have been utterly uncontroversial: he is an unusually erudite philosopher, and he is an unusually graceful writer, something that translation, of necessity, struggles to reflect. He has a high level of technical competence in a wide range of fields, from classical philology to modern jurisprudence, from ancient Greek to modern German, from theology to art history to poetics and ontology. L’uso dei corpi’s central question is, however, easy to grasp, and requires neither ancient Greek nor modern German to formulate. It is: What is yours, and how do you use it? Your body, for instance, is yours, as is the life you lead with it; but in what way, to what degree, is it subject to what restrictions? And above all how is it conditioned or curtailed by which notions of what life is, what it is for, what obligations it carries, and what tasks it may be assigned? 

The method Agamben employs to ask and answer these questions is one he calls “genealogical,” which is to say historical. It is explicitly borrowed from Foucault, just as Foucault’s use of “genealogy” was explicitly borrowed from Nietzsche. In each case there was, of course, more to the matter than the mere carrying over of a concept. Agamben’s genealogy moves into different, and above all more distant, regions. “Foucault once said something quite beautiful about this,” Agamben has noted. “He said that historical research was like a shadow cast by the present onto the past. For Foucault, this shadow stretched back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For me the shadow is longer.” Much longer, as L’uso dei corpi makes clear. Agamben’s name for the limit—the depth of that deepest past which ontology and theology and philosophy and poetry jointly explore—is “anthropogenesis,” or how we became what we are. It is this which lies at the center of all his disparate writings.