A Touch of Writing, The Writerly Touch: On Touch in Sara Ahmed’s Work

In this paper, I argue that Sara Ahmed presents us with a practice of writing that can keep us in touch with touch in a moment when screen culture is out of touch. In particular, I will focus on the chiasmic structure of her sentences. For Merleau-Ponty, touch is characterized by reversibility. When we touch, we are also being touched. This means that subject and object, self and other, activity and passivity cross and trade spaces. In Ahmed’s phenomenology of institutional life, she embodies this chiasmic structure in the form of her sentences. For instance, in the book titled Complaint! Ahemd uses the following formulation “collective complaints can create complaint collectives.” Here she inverts the terms, and this inversion generates a new set of possibilities. Such sentences enact the reversibility of touch, demonstrating the generativity of the chiasmic structure of touch. In this sense, Ahmed reminds us of the importance of touch and offers a unique, writerly response to the absence of touch in our current lives. We can touch an idea through chiasmic writing, returning writing to its origins in embodied practices.