What is a thoughtful life?

This book offers a space for thoughtful living – for ways of engaging with the ‘nearness’ of the world – with hesitations, doubts, swerves, crafting another manner of grounding. ‘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 truth that reaches out, swerves, calls forth, recalibrates and stills in the vast unthought of a world failing. This takes chops.’—Kathleen Stewart, author of Ordinary AffectsIn this book, we are ‘present’ to thought, ‘together with no one but ourselves’, in Hannah Arendt’s terms – but in this self-presence, conjuring so many friends, teachers, interlocutors, we are also conjuring a world to come. What is a thoughtful life? asks – in this era of crisis – how we might for a moment pause to think; stop to wonder; carve out something of the doubt, uncertainty, awe that have shaped so much of philosophy for centuries and that constituted, for the Greeks at least, a way of shaping everyday living, practising self-reflection as a route to civic life, to political theory. Embroiled in querying the shape of ‘free thinking’, and the circumlocutions that accompany any train of thought as it moves, this book performs an act of recalcitrance relative to the forms that thought takes when it is fit for use.The chapters thus meander, morph – long and short, thick and thin, they act like an imprint of vulnerable and tender reading ensconced in the bodied work of time passing. From Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, Audre Lorde and Werner Hamacher, to Fred Moten, Sara Ahmed and Giorgio Agamben, and from Martin Heidegger’s complex relationship with Arendt to Catherine Malabou’s reflections on the plasticity of narrative prose, this book moves with writers engaged in the radical poetics of ‘passionate thinking’ – attending, in a granular way, to the ‘nearness of life’. Terms such as truth, spectacle, performance, shudder, here: a retort to hypervisibility – a promise for another order of grounding. 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.