Enduring Touch

Abstract

Exploring questions of touch after COVID, this essay puts into dialogue Antonin Artaud and Adam Tooze (among others). The dynamics of care and contagion, the tangible and intangible, active and passive–as also reflection on the ‘contactless’ and ‘untact’ economies–are addressed in terms of Artaud’s visionary writings concerning theatre and plague, madness and judgement. Being touched by these writings offers a way to think through the ambiguities of what is enduring in Artaud’s conception of society, not least as the mandated language of ‘social isolation’ itself became viral during the pandemic. How is touch an index for what is infectious in thought? How are technologies of power already operative in the mutable senses of touch?.