TOUCH AS SENSE PROVOCATION TO CURRICULUM

Abstract

In this review, I present the book “Politics of touch: sense, movement and sovereignty”, from the Canadian philosopher and artist Erin Mannin, who, by articulating philosophy, art and politics poses touch as a sensorial and affective event that destabilizes traditional ideas of sovereignty, identity, and the body. The author displaces ontological thought about a body that simply “is,” with its own properties and defined boundaries, by pursuing the provocation of what a body “can do”, inscribing it within a relational field that allows us to think of it as something that only comes into being in relation with the other and with the world. By placing movement at the center, Manning invokes unpredictability, improvisation, and invention to rethink relations, politics, and material inscriptions such as gender, race, and sex beyond the normative sovereign fixed definitions of the State. These are stimulating posthumanist provocations that also invite us to think of curriculum as always in movement, not predetermined in advance, and committed to inventing possibilities as alternatives to a neoliberal ethos.