What makes us pensive, feel pleasure and pain at the same time? What are we touched by in (humorous) instances of texts?

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.

Klappentext
Touch has manifold layers of meaning, especially so in the context of the affectivity unleashed by humor, where often touching spaces ensue in deconstructive ways that affect the senses as well as sense-making. Along these lines, Mariam Popal discusses the works of bell hooks, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others. She combines them with close readings of literary texts to open up venues for the performativity of rhetorically and poetologically generated critical, transformative thought that also pays attention to the ethics of dialogism, as well as the relation between philosophy and literature.