The Inner Touch

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. -- Brian Dillon, London Review of Books 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 literatures--as 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