Touching and Not Touching

Abstract

This chapter looks at those dimensions of the human sensorium which lie outside “the five senses,” as they are conventionally understood. It discusses the multiple dimensions of “touch” in the context of contemporary theoretical understandings of the senses as a multiplicity. It opens up the significance of “touch” in psychoanalytic theory, including Didier Anzieu's concept of the “skin-ego,” and explores an understanding of the self as “a complex structure of surfaces.” The chapter examines the ways in which human relations based on touch are played out, or resisted, in works of literature, including writings by Baudelaire, Hugo, and Kafka.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.