Novotný, K. The genesis of heresy. World, body and history in the thought of Jan Patočka, Paris: Vrin. 2013.

This book is devoted to the thought of Jan Patočka and in its first part focuses  mainly on the elucidation of the donation of the world as such and the way of being from man to the world of life. This striking theme, reveals what profound influence on Patočka had Edmund Husserl and those who, both in France and in Germany, have undertaken a critical reading of Husserl’s work. The second systematic motive of a series of studies in this book is on the Patocka’s conception of the historicity of human existence that is more open to Heideggerian inspiration.
The natural world and history are the two great themes of Patočka's thought, themes which, conjugating and opposing in a complex movement of approximation and distance from the two founders of phenomenology, maintain a tensed relationship that is characteristic of the whole of his work, such as - to use Paul Ricoeur's expression - the two foci of an ellipse. Knowing how to understand and integrate even the most negative experiences of human existence and how to resolve the question of their meaning, Patočka's philosophy also contains a moment of dissent, linked to the central importance of freedom of the human spirit which involves taking radical distance to the given world. The volume closes with the problem of transcendence that is constitutive of philosophical life, which does not lead Patočka to a contemplative position, "outside the world", but can, as a committed thought, directly form practical life.