“Touching through calligraphy and tattoos: two exercises on human and animal bodies”. Paschalidis, Gregory (ed.): “The Fugue of the Five Senses: Semiotics of the Shifting Sensorium”, Punctum – International Journal of Semiotics 3:1 (2017) 76-93. (original) (raw)
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Stedelijk Studies Journal, 2016
In my article, I will present as a case study the collection exhibition shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in 2016.[1] The starting point for the exhibition was the metaphor of touch. As a concept, touch is ambivalent: it is more intimate than sight, which has been the traditional metaphor for knowledge in Western thinking. Yet touching is also about grasping or understanding, as in it we are taking hold of something. Our curatorial team, Eija Aarnio, Arja Miller, and myself, was interested in touch early on, because with it the distance to the observed is lost: when touching something we, too, are being touched. To be clear, we did not want to create an exhibition where spectators are actually able to touch. Instead, we were looking at the collections of the museum and searching for artworks that would “touch” us—works that were able get under our skin. While forming the conceptual core of the exhibition, our curatorial team recognized a tension in the way in which “tou...
TOUCH (Law and the Senses Series)
TOUCH (Law and the Senses Series), 2020
Described by Aristotle as the most vital of senses, touch contains both the physical and the metaphysical in its ability to express the determination of being. To manifest itself, touch makes a movement outwards, beyond the body, and relies on a specific physical involvement other senses do not require: to touch is already to be active and to activate. This fundamental ontology makes touch the most essential of all senses. This volume of 'Law and the Senses' attempts to illuminate and reconsider the complex and interflowing relations and contradictions between the tactful intrusion of the law and the untactful movement of touch. Compelling contributors from arts, literature and social science disciplines alongside artist presentations explore touch's boundaries and formal and informal 'laws' of the senses. Each contribution unveils a multi-faceted new dimension to the force of touch, its ability to form, deform and reform what it touches. In unique ways, each of the several contributions to this volume recognises the trans-corporeality of touch to traverse the boundaries on the body and entangle other bodies and spaces, thus challenging the very notion of corporeal integrity and human being.
THE CONCEPT AND PHENOMENON OF TOUCH
ung.si
This study analyses the concept and phenomenon of touch. It begins by demonstrating that touch is problematic for a "Science of Touch" and for human beings as well. In this context, the notion of embodiment is re-thought in order to open the discursive space for a study of touch that takes into consideration all the difficulties implied in it. The study identifies in the phenomenon of touch an element that makes the self-identity of a science of touch and of embodiment impossible. This element is the concept of self-difference.
Towards an Understanding of the Paradox of Touch
This essay builds an argument that leads towards an understanding of the paradox of touch. When the immediacy of a tactile sensation and—its logical contrary—the mediated or metaphorical connotations of a ‘touching’ experience, are juxtaposed, we arrive at a paradox, which I expose in relation to the aesthetic encounter. I do this by examining my experiences of the works and process of Cuban performance artist Ana Mendieta, and Ståhl Stenslie’s employment of haptic technologies. Engaging with these very different artists enables me to open a multi-dimensional discussion about touch. To elaborate this discussion, I draw together several key ideas: the haptic sense in the aesthetic experience, haptics, empathy, aura and synaesthesia. Juxtaposing these ideas, and applying them to my chosen artists, demonstrates the value of considering the paradox of touch. It does so because my expansion of this theme reveals how touch signifies our mimetic capacity—as humans—to empathise, to be affected, to react and repeat. A key consequence of the paradox of touch is its facility to redistribute binary logic, whereby two opposing or contradictory notions can be realigned to co-exist and, potentially, cooperate. I argue that this ethical transition evolves from the haptic aesthetic experience. Thus my original intent to juxtapose Mendieta and Stenslie develops into a larger conversation about the role that touch has to play in this aesthetic experience. My application of the paradox of touch then begins to demonstrate how we co-exist in the world, with other people.
Philosophies of Touch: from Aristotle to Phenomenology
Research in Phenomenology, 2021
This essay explores Aristotle's discovery of touch as the most universal and philosophical of the senses. It analyses his central insight in the De Anima that tactile flesh is a "medium not an organ," unpacking both its metaphysical and ethical implications. The essay concludes with a discussion of how contemporary phenomenology-from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray-re-describes Aristotle's seminal intuition regarding the model of "double reversible sensation."
2021
This thesis aims to explore how literal notions of touching as well as being touched figuratively can be put to work through thinking-with-touch in education and midwifery contexts. Specifically, it examines the stains of developmental psychology and Early Childhood (EC) trajectories that haunt such contexts. In order to explore how students’ bodies flow through their studies of early childhood, it also considers how babies and students become-with the HE classroom, baby-room and worldly materiality; the visible and invisible boundaries that maternal deprivation and attachment theories produce; how developmental theories of psychology are anchored in the policies and practices of EC; and how all that is the discursive, affects. This thesis goes on to propose that these explorations have the potential to open bodies towards the precarious landscapes pedagogues navigate with ECS students and the possibility of new ways of being. Traditionally, cartesian abstractions and humanistic fra...
The Phenomenon of Touch: a Trinitarian Reduction
Leib -Leiblichkeit - Embodiment Pädagogische Perspektiven auf eine Phänomenologie des Leibes, 2019
In this chapter, I posit the erotic and the body in close relation to the universality of touch, in an attempt to show their proximity in formative experience. To do this, I work through an essay by Ignacio Martín-Baró called “La Psicología de la Caricia” [the psychology of a caress] (1970). As Martín-Baró compellingly shows, there is a subtle dialectic through which touch and the human being shape each other. In discussing the phenomenality of this dialectic in touch, I draw both from the phenomenological tradition represented in the lineage of Husserl, Heidegger, and Marion, as well as from psychoanalytic theory. Methodologically, the study is organized in three moments of phenomenological reductions, operationalizing a “trinitarian lens” (Rocha 2015). The chapter then offers a discussion on the Freudian perspective on the drives, as lending an understanding of the phenomenality of touch by positing Eros as “the ultimate cause of all activity,” particularly including educational activity.
Touching Matters: Embodiments of Intimacy
Touch is, I propose, a foundational, intercorporeal form of intimacy. Such intercorporeal intimacy precedes developmentally and undergirds permanently the intersubjective intimacy that is possible between adult subjects. For, it is in the affective intimacy of touching and being touched that we first realize (i.e., make real, actualize) both a coexistence or participation with other bodies, and an organization and differentiation of ourselves as embodied beings. Section 1 lays out phenomena of interpersonal (and interanimal) relations that require thinking touch as much more than either the exploration of a physical surface by an embodied subject or a conventional form of communication: I note the powerful existential effects of being or not being touched. In section 2, I recall philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment, focusing on features that provide resources for understanding touch. I argue that touching must be understood as potentially transformative of the toucher, that being touched can equally be transformative, and that touching and being touched are inherently intertwined. This intertwining and transformative power is what makes touch an intercorporeal form of intimacy and accounts for its ability to inaugurate and enliven, at the affective level, our sense of self as differentiated from and in relation to others.
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Mika Elo and Miika Luoto (eds.): Figures of Touch. Sense, Technics, Body, 2018
published in "Oxford Handbook of philosophy of perception, Oxford University Press (Ed.)de Vignemont, F. & Massin, O. (forthcoming). Touch. In M. Matthen (ed), Oxford Handbook of perception, Oxford University Press., 2013