February 17th 2026 (5.30pm-6.30pm CET)

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

 
What concepts do we use to think about touch? When and how did these concepts originate? This paper sketches a history of common ways of thinking about touch to theorists of modernity in the early twentieth century. It then traces an alternative conceptual history of the body as the maker of the world it perceives. In this model, what one perceives, and consequently how one conceptualises the world, emerges from everyday tactile encounters. Perfected by mid twentieth-century phenomenology, this idea originated in more mundane touches in teashops, tube cars, and university studies in early twentieth-century Britain. This paper therefore proposes a new method of immanent history: a history of our ideas about touch, and ways of theorising it, through that of the everyday touches of our subjects.
 

April 14th 2026 (5.30pm-6.30pm CET)

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

This talk interrogates the museum’s longstanding prohibition against touch and the assumptions about care, preservation, and risk that underpin it. Disability artists have increasingly turned to haptic practices—inviting, requiring, or complicating touch—to unsettle institutional norms that equate access with translation rather than transformation. Through case studies of contemporary disability art practices, the talk explores how touch functions as a politicized encounter that redistributes responsibility between institutions and publics. Rather than positioning touch as a threat to the artwork or an exception granted to disabled visitors, these practices insist on touch as a legitimate mode of engagement that exposes whose bodies are protected, whose are disciplined, and whose are excluded within cultural spaces. The talk concludes by proposing touch as a form of institutional critique that demands new models of care, accountability, and access beyond visual dominance.
 

November 2026, TBA

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

The aim of this talk is to underscore the importance of touch in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, a facet of the novel that has been hardly attended to by both Proust scholarship and philosophies of touch, despite the fact that touch bookends the novel – so prevalent in the first volume Du côté de chez Swann and retuning in full force in the final volume Le temps retrouvé. As will be discussed, in the novel, and not only for the narrator but also for other characters such as Swann, it is through touch that one makes sense of existence, that one learns of limits in existence, and that one might even come to transcend them. In this regard, I argue that touch constitutes the first and last philosophy of Proust’s novel.

TACT (Touch, Arts, Affects)

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?


Works cited

• 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.