What is a thoughtful life?

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

• 00 Preface (before): incline0 Entering (at the outset): horologium, horaeI. Passion1 Theatre and truth (on passionate thought)2 The recalcitrant spectator: On theatre and truth (on the now)3 Passionate repair: Of occlusion, and (dis)appearance4 Breath5 Sweating6 Grounding7 Splaying: Intimate forms (of the ‘book’)8 AfterbreathII. Fragments9 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 disclosurePost/faceIII.95 Theses on the relationship between power and knowledge: with a prolegomenonAcknowledgements (of vibrant affiliations)Works cited

‘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