The Feeling of Thinking

Every true reader knows the feeling: suddenly you are swept away into a new, unknown world. Or a truth slowly dawns on you, the existence of which you never even imagined before, but which touches you at the core of your being. This sensation is triggered by a book, an author, perhaps only a sentence, which puts life in completely new circumstances. Veronika Reichl traces these existential awakenings and turning points in reading theory in her stories distilled from countless interviews and conversations: How does it feel to read Judith Butler or Slavoj Žižek? Do you have to be silent to understand Hegel? How does one get into the Derrida tension? Does Kant help stop the free-flowing phenomena?
Reichl's brilliant narratives of fiction and documentation form an archipelago of knowing and feeling, a universal history of philosophy as much as a reading guide and self-analysis. Humorous and precise, surprising and ingenious, she tells of experiences of thinking, of the pain of reading, of dealing with not understanding, and of how reading touches lives and changes them forever.