Post-Deconstruction and the Rhetorics of Touch

Discourses of touch have become important discursive sites around which questions concerning the body, its materiality, and its place in the sphere of cultural analysis are currently arrayed - the powers of touch that we postulate influence our understanding of the limits and capacities of both our bodies and the technologies through which we extend our bodily touch. What is at stake in the contestation of touch, then, are really questions about communication and community. How does this bodily reorientation in the humanities and in the social sciences affect our understanding of how we communicate, and what we communicate? How does it impact our thinking about our embodied relation to communication technologies? In order to address these questions, we must first consider how (and why) some of these new rhetorics of touch announce themselves as post-deconstructive. That is, we must understand that the relation between these new rhetorics of touch and deconstruction is critical to their constitution. This essay explores three books - Ann Weinstone's Avatar Bodies (2004), Erin Manning's Politics of Touch (2007), and Jean-Luc Nancy's Being Singular Plural (2000) - wherein this relation is negotiated.