What can we know about ourselves and the world through the sense of touch and what are the epistemic limits of touch? Scepticism claims that there is always something that slips through the epistemologist’s grasp. A Touch of Doubt explores the significance of touch for the history of philosophical scepticism as well as for scepticism as an embodied form of subversive political, religious, and artistic practice.
Drawing on the tradition of scepticism within nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, this volume discusses how the sense of touch uncovers contradictions within our knowledge of ourselves and the world. It questions 1) what we can know through touch, 2) what we can know about touch itself, and 3) how our experience of touching the other and ourselves throws us into a state of doubt.
Table of Contents
Sensation & Hesitation: Haptic Scepticism as an Ethics of Touching / Rachel Aumiller
“Es wird Leib, es empfindet”: Auto-Affection, Doubt, and the Philosopher’s Hands / Jacob Levi
When to Touch and What to Doubt: Zeroing In on the Tactile Surplus / Robert Pfaller
The (Un)Touchable Touch of Pyramus and Thisbe: Doubt and Desire / Bara Kolenc
A Magic Touch: Performative Haptic Acts in Biblical and Medieval Jewish Magic / Bill Rebiger
Noli me tangere: The Profaning Touch That Challenges Authority / Libera Pisano
Touching Doubt: Haptolinguistic Scepticism / Mirt Komel
An Atom of Touch: Scepticism from Hegel to Lacan / Goran Vranešević
The Weak Relations of Touch and Sight through the Passage of Lapsed Time / Adi Louria Hayon
