• What is a thoughtful life?
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What is a thoughtful life?

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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.
  • 16 June 2026
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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.
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Price: $140.00
Pages: 336
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Publication Date: 16 June 2026
ISBN: 9781526187567
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Politics, Literary theory, PHILOSOPHY / Political, ART / Performance, PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / General, Performance art, Autobiography: philosophy and social sciences, Popular philosophy: Meaning of life / finding sense in life, Social and political philosophy, Biography, Literature and Literary studies
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‘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

Kélina Gotman is Professor of Performance and the Humanities at King’s College London

00 Preface (before): incline
0 Entering (at the outset): horologium, horae

I. Passion
1 Theatre and truth (on passionate thought)
2 The recalcitrant spectator: On theatre and truth (on the now)
3 Passionate repair: Of occlusion, and (dis)appearance
4 Breath
5 Sweating
6 Grounding
7 Splaying: Intimate forms (of the ‘book’)
8 Afterbreath

II. Fragments
9 ataraxia (rest) (also, of love as at the edges of the Black Forest)
10 Of ‘Writing, Life’
11 The ‘moving metabolic ground’
12 On truth ‘value’ (of Heraclitus)
13 Theatre / unveiling / enframing [acts of philology]
14 Ergon / energeia: of work (of use)
15 Marking (on notes)
16 Preface (after): on disclosure
Post/face

III.
95 Theses on the relationship between power and knowledge: with a prolegomenon

Acknowledgements (of vibrant affiliations)
Works cited