The goal of the TACT network (Touch, Arts, Affects) is to interrogate the experience of touch across arts and media. The fourth series of our webinar will address touch in history, disability aesthetics, and literature. 

4th Seminar Series

Convernors

• Caroline Pollentier (Sorbonne Nouvelle IUF)
• Rachel Aumiller (Radboud)

Argument

The goal of the TACT network (Touch, Arts, Affects) is to interrogate the experience of touch across arts and media. With speakers from various disciplines and areas of expertise, we intend to discuss the elusive tactility of the arts in relation to technology, science, ethics, politics, and everyday life. The fourth series of the webinar will more specifically address touch in history, disability aesthetics, and literature. 

Though long considered as a minor sense, touch is now reclaimed as the “first sense” (Fulkerson), which defines intersubjectivity from embryonic formation to social interactions. The main hypothesis of this seminar is that touch constitutes a primordial dimension of aesthetic experience—and cannot, as such, be reduced to the language of affect. When texts, films, dances or performances touch us, how do they mobilise haptics—even when there is apparently no actual contact? Didier Anzieu’s psychoanalytical concept of the skin-ego, theorised after Freud’s early work on “contact barriers,” revalued the epidermis as a founding affective boundary. The recent discovery of C-tactile afferents in neurobiology has subsequently renewed the understanding of “affective touch” (McGlone), now conceived of as a physiological category distinct from discriminative touch. In dialogue, but also in contradistinction with the science of affective touch, this seminar defends the ability of the arts and the humanities to register tactile experiences, to retrace their genealogies, and to imagine haptic futures.

The singularity of the tactile sense lies in its reflexivity—one is touched when one touches (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty). Focusing on the ethics and politics of this chiasm, this seminar foregrounds the ability of haptic aesthetics to disrupt and remodel relationality. From Marinetti’s utopian “Manifesto of Tactilism” to Jan Švankmajer’s tactile collages, from the transgender craft of “the handmade” (Vaccaro) to “touchscreen archaeologies” (Strauven), from the “shared motricity” of contact improvisation (Bigé) to the body-centered medium of performance, touch produces aesthetic dissensus. Tactile experience also materialises acute forms of vulnerability—“hapticality, the touch of the undercommons” (Moten and Harney). Haptics alerts us to shared conditions of exposure and embodied forms of exclusion, even as it opens up concrete modalities of care (Puig de la Bellacasa). In our technological “age of excarnation” (Kearney), what can the arts and the humanities remind us about our own skins?

Program

February 17th 2026

(5.30pm-6.30pm CET) meet.google.com/jgu-qvrx-kqq

• Simeon Koole (University of Bristol)“Immanent History: The Tactile Origins of Tactile Thinking in Modern Britain”

April 14th 2026

(5.30pm-6.30pm CET) meet.google.com/cyr-ynnq-vpt

• Amanda Cachia (Arizona State University) “Touch as Method: Disability, Haptic Knowledge, and Institutional Critique”

November 2026

• Irving Goh (Emory University)“Touch as First Philosophy in Proust's La Recherche”

Bibliography

• ANZIEU, Didier, The Skin-Ego, 1985, trans. Naomi Segal (London: Carnac, 2016).
• BARAD, Karen, “On Touching—the Inhuman That Therefore I Am,” differences 23.3 (2012): 206-33.
• BIGÉ, Emma, “Sentir et se mouvoir ensemble. Micro-politiques du contact improvisation,” Recherches en danse [online] 4, 2015.
• FREUD, Sigmund, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters, Drafts and Notes to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1902, ed. M. Bonaparte et al. (New York: Basic Books, 1954), 347-445.
• FULKERSON, Matthew, The First Sense. A Philosophical Study of Human Touch (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2014).
• HUSSERL, Edmund, Recherches phénoménologiques pour la constitution, Idées directrices 2 (Paris: PUF, 1982).
• KEARNEY, Richard, Touch. Recovering Our Most Vital Sense (New York: Columbia UP, 2021).
• MARINETTI, F. T., “Manifesto of Tactilism” (1924), Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale UP, 2009), 264-69.
• McGLONE, Francis, et al, “Discriminative and affective touch: sensing and feeling,” Neuron 82.4 (2014): 737-55.
• MERLEAU-PONTY, Maurice, Le Visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 172-204.
• MOTEN, Fred, and Stephano HARNEY, The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013).
• PATERSON, Mark, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects, and Technologies (Oxford: Berg, 2007).
• PUIG DE LA BELLACASA, María, “Touching Visions,” Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 2017), 95-122.
• STRAUVEN, Wanda, Touchscreen Archælogies: Tracing Histories of Hands-On Media Practices (Lüneburg: Meson P, 2021).
• ŠVANKMAJER, Jan, Touching and Imagining, An Introduction to Tactile Art (London, I.B. Tauris, 2014).
• VACCARO, Jeanne, “Handmade,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1-2 (2014): 96-97.

Contact: caroline.pollentier@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr

With the support of Institut Universitaire de France.