There’s a Tear in the World: Touch After Finitude Curated by Rizvana Bradley A body touched, touching, fragile, vulnerable, always changing, fleeing, ungraspable, evanescent under a caress or a blow, a body without a husk, a poor skin stretched over the cave where our shadow floats … (Jean-Luc Nancy)
This conference day will focus on the haptic through the resonance of touch. Extending our critical sense of the haptic through attendant, experimental grammars of touch, we confront a set of sometimes unruly and even wild philosophical and artistic imperatives. For the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, touch marks the limits of how we come to know ourselves both in and beyond our finitude. Touch has enabled us to enrich our techniques of knowing, making possible a rediscovery of the modalities of movement, matter, and sense that comprise our subject and object worlds. Thematically, touch will recur in our discussions of artworks, and in our explorations of the irreducibly textured expressions of performance and social practice. Weaving between image, sound, and the poetic line, the conversations in this conference day will navigate the overlaps and cuts between them. The included readings, performances, and talks will explore diasporic forms of world-making, dynamic philosophies of movement, the violence of cartographic and architectural imaginaries, the material trace of touch in economies of performance, and the haptic violence manifested in history’s archival inscriptions.
