What is a thoughtful life?

Name: What is a thoughtful life?
Price: 255.01 AUD
Availability: PreOrder
ISBN: 9781526187567

Kélina Gotman

$318.95 $255.01

Hardback

Forthcoming
Pre-Order now

QTY:

English

Manchester University Press
16 June 2026

Performance art

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.

By: Kélina Gotman
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 138mm, Spine: 19mm
Weight: 534g
ISBN: 9781526187567
ISBN 10: 1526187566
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 16 June 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Kelina Gotman is Professor of Performance and the Humanities at King's College London

Reviews for What is a thoughtful life?

‘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 -- .