What is a thoughtful life?

By: Kelina Gotman

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Hardcover | 16 June 2026

At a Glance

Hardcover
334 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.6 x 13.8 x 1.91

Hardcover

$227.69

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In fresh readings of Theodor W. Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Barbara Cassin, Michel Foucault, Werner Hamacher, Martin Heidegger, and many more, Gotman rearticulates the foundations of broadly western philosophical thinking to carve out a shadowy space of recalcitrant thought 'in dark times'. At once indebted to the legacy of critique and enmeshed in affective and performative approaches to language, anti-theatricality, critical race theory and gender studies, she weaves a poetic mesh of intimate fragments, reflections on what it means to think and to write, as she puts it, after spectacle. Almost but not quite a straight work of philosophy, distinctly literary and performative in its anti-genre, this book twists and turns, swerves and cuts, to show the work of thinking as an intimate act a theatre of angles and openings, adjacencies and reverberations.

Industry Reviews

'This is a wholly original work of writing theory as a restless form of life built like a muscle in the granular friction between word and world. A free-thinking choreography of a theatre of truth that reaches out, swerves, calls forth, recalibrates, doubles down, and stills in the modularity of pulses, beats, edge sensations and the vast unthought of a world failing. Here, thought is improvisatory and performative - a riffing on the potentia of worldings as they unfold. This takes chops.'
-Kathleen Stewart, author of Ordinary Affects

'What is a thoughtful Life? moves between page and stage, approaching truth as a form of work sustained through thinking. The book traces a dramaturgical unfolding marked by exposure and restraint, in which truth appears not as assertion but as attentive work carried out over time. Its open and processual mode of writing treats thinking itself as a site of effort and endurance, articulating writing and theatre as embodied practices through which truth is produced, tested, and sustained under contemporary conditions.'
-Bojana Kunst, Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, JLU Giessen

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