Touching Spaces in Textures (Mariam Popal)

Touch has many layers of meaning, especially so in the affectivity unleashed by humor, where touching spaces often emerge in deconstructive ways that affect the senses, alter sense-making, and generate productive forms of non-knowledge (NichtWissen) and power-lessness (OhnMacht). The study discusses the works of various thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, Helmuth Plessner, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, bell hooks, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Achim Geisenhanslüke. Drawing on such critical theories and poetically generated epistemologies of literary works the study illuminates venues for transformative thought while also paying attention to the ethics of dialogicity and the relation between philosophy and literature.