This book was written over a very long period of more than ten years. It is the end result of a repeatedly renewed search for an answer to the crisis of the present age that I diagnosed in Social Acceleration, and at the same time is also the result of many intense conversations, discussions, and encounters going back many years. It is ultimately a product of dialogue, of an ongoing debate with my friends, students, colleagues, and many other people who have searched and pondered with me. I cannot possibly acknowledge all of them here. There are many more than I can even name, and so I must ask that all these others accept my apologies!

Resonance emerged in the context of the Center for the Study of “Post-Growth Societies” at the University of Jena, which my colleagues Klaus Dörre, Stephan Lessenich, and I founded together. It is my contribution to our mutual effort to conceive of a world beyond the blind compulsions of growth and acceleration. I owe great thanks to both Klaus and Stephan, to all of the colleagues, fellows, and guests of the Center, and of course to the German Research Foundation (DFG) as our financing institution. The Center also made possible the international workshop on the topic of resonance which I convened in May 2014 and from which I greatly profited. For this, I would like to thank all those who participated, among them Axel Honneth, Rahel Jaeggi, Eva Illouz, Hans Jürgen Scheurle, Dietmar Wetzel, Thomas Fuchs, and Charles Taylor. I consider it my great fortune that, over years of work on this project, Charles became a good friend who always inspired me with his enthusiasm and pushed me forward whenever I was seized with doubt. I also gleaned valuable insights from other colleagues and fellows at the Center, particularly Nancy Fraser, Barbara Muraca, Mathijs Peters, Dimitri Mader, and Johanna Sittel. The same can be said of my colleagues in the Department of Sociology at the University of Jena as well as the associates, fellows, and doctoral students of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. I would like to acknowledge by name my co-director in Erfurt, Jörg Rüpke, together with Jörg Oberthür, Peter Schulz, Anja Gregor, Ulf Bohmann, Sebastian Sevignani, André Stiegler, Diana Lindner, Stefanie Börner, Michael Beetz, and Markus Kleinert, as well as Stephan Langenhan, Michael Karpf, Anne Jasmin Bobka, David Reum, Paul Sörensen, and Katharina Block. I would further like to thank Ilona Bode for our wonderful collaborations at the Max Weber Center, without which I would scarcely have been able to write this book.

I also owe thanks to the philosopher Michael Großheim, who offered me valuable insights on the phenomenology of resonance, and to Lambert Wiesing – our discussions about luxury and resonance yielded not only two books, but also a joint seminar. I was further inspired by my colleagues who helped to launch the interdisciplinary, DFG-supported postgraduate research group on “The Model of Romanticism” in Jena, and I thank them for their important observations about the close connection between Romanticism and resonance. Finally, I would also like to highlight the German National Academic Foundation’s 2013 summer academy in La Colle-sur-Loup, where I taught a course on experiences of resonance in literature together with Daniel Fulda. I learned much from the interpretations and suggestions of the participating students, and especially from my intense conversations with Daniel. The same applies to two block seminars in the Thuringian Forest with students of sociology, philosophy, and education from the University of Jena, at which I immensely profited from my collaborative work with Tilo Wesche and Jens Beljean.

This manuscript was intensively read, commented on, and critiqued by four women without whom this book never would have become what it is. Eva Gilmer from Suhrkamp Verlag took the text apart word by word, inspecting it with exceptional precision and meticulousness and improving it in countless ways. I am extremely grateful for her work, even if it occasionally drove me to great despair! Bettina Hollstein took a similar approach to my work in different respects, clearly and ruthlessly identifying every weakness, defect, and contradiction, and almost always with an appropriate suggestion for how to address any issue. For this, she is also owed great thanks! Elisabeth von Thadden had the greatest influence on this book as it was being written. Ultimately, the text offered here represents an ongoing dialogue with her that commenced at the beginning of my writing process and lasted until the very end (and continues to this day). Her own book resulting from our dialogue – Die berührungslose Gesellschaft (Munich: Beck, 2018) – has in the meantime also been published. I am grateful to her not only for countless individual insights and ideas, but also for much that contributed to the form of my argument as a whole. Lastly, Sigrid Engelhardt took on the most intensive work with this text. It is still a mystery to me how she was always able to take a broad view, editing the text again and again and bringing it into its proper form, such that in the end both author and publisher were satisfied and the book itself met every demand and guideline. I simply do not know what I would have done without her!

In many respects, however, perhaps even in most, the thoughts and ideas that gave rise to my conception of resonance were also the result of private and intimate encounters. I pestered my family, friends, and acquaintances about the opposition between resonance and alienation almost monomaniacally for many years, at every appropriate occasion as well as at many inappropriate ones. They not only forgave me for this, but also helped to provide me with many new and often surprising insights. I can only hope to begin to repay them a little bit for this in the years to come!

Finally, in the two years since its German publication, I have discussed the basic ideas presented in this book with a vast number of students, colleagues, and ordinary people from nearly every segment of society and every corner of the world, from Wuhan and Shanghai to Delhi and Hyderabad, from Recife and São Paulo to Buenos Aires and Mexico City, and from the United Kingdom to the United States. I truly believe that engaging in vibrant conversations and discussions with “real people” across the social spectrum is the most efficient, authentic, and fruitful way of empirically grounding theoretical work. I cannot express enough my gratitude to all of them for helping me to further develop and refine my conception of resonance.

Last but not least, I would also like to thank John Thompson for bringing this book to Polity, Paul Young for managing the entire process of acquisition, translation, and editing with immense patience and competence, and James C. Wagner for his absolutely wonderful, stunning translation.