"Daniel Heller-Roazen"s archaeology of sensation casts an utterly new light on a number of essential moments in the history of philosophy and the human sciences. Yet what is most crucial about this extraordinary investigation is that it uncovers a fascinating field of research, which is of the utmost importance for contemporary thinking: that of the sense by which, before, or beyond consciousness, we sense that we exist."Giorgio Agamben , Professor of Philosophy, University of Venice "Famously, Foucault begins Les mots et les choses with an homage to Borges. It"s a striking meeting of the minds -- the archeologist of human sciences and the fabulist of many literaturesas Foucault surely intended it to be. Little did he know that these unlikely voices would be blended brilliantly on every page that Daniel Heller-Roazen writes in The Inner Touch. Like Echolalias, his essay on the forgetting of languages, this meditation on "the common sense" manifests a most uncommon intelligence. Heller-Roazen practices "comparative literature" as the greatest figures in the field have done before him -- with exacting philosophical rigor and immense cultural range. Somewhere Erich Auerbach is smiling."Hal Foster , Townsend Martin '17 Professor of Art and Architecture, Princeton University "With his stunning erudition, fluid style, and unique tact, Daniel Heller-Roazen unearths the "common sense" which may in fact be lost to us but which we are once thought to share with beasts: it is the sense of our own perceptions, the feel of existing, the "inner touch."Ann Smock , Professor of French, University of California, Berkeley
Daniel Heller-Roazen is the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature and the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations, and The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World, all published by Zone Books.
Heller-Roazen's contribution is to remind us of a feeling we always
suspected was in there, but whose name we had forgotten - and to
make us pause, time and again reading The Inner Touch, to try to
feel it again.
*London Review of Books*
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