Figures of Touch - Sense, Technics, Body

As a sense modality, touch has been both over- and undervalued in Western culture. On the one hand, touch has been regarded as the basis of sense certainty and as a rather normative support to the theoretical gaze. On the other hand, it has been considered as vague, vulgar, drive-related or impure. Due to these contradictory and potentially subversive qualities, touch has been invested with various emancipatory expectations. In its ambivalence, the very sense of touch is essentially...