Out of Touch: Finding Our Way with a Praxis of Sensible Attention

Abstract

For those of us living in industrialized countries, our social, political, and existential present can be characterized as being “out of touch.” Our being-out-of-touch can be understood in a double fashion. In one sense, we are more mediated than ever by screens and virtual worlds, and accordingly, we are more disconnected from the earth and its creatures, including fellow persons, and from our multiple senses—particularly touch. The Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated a growing trend towards isolation, privatization, and desensitization in relation to the sensuous world. In another sense, growing numbers of us are out of touch with reality. Delusion is an increasingly significant element in the social-political zeitgeist, shaping policies and election outcomes, and supplanting distraction as the primary mental debility of our time. Two recent books address each of these tendencies: Richard Kearney’s Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense (2021) and Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023). This paper argues that these two phenomena are inherently connected, and it does so by drawing on the rich thought of Simone Weil, whose concepts of the void, the falsifying imagination, necessity, limit, and attention have much to recommend in diagnosing and addressing our current crisis of touch. However, I argue that we must extend Weil’s idea of attention-as-looking to include a more holistic praxis of sensible attentiveness, since the primacy of vision has, for some time, been a major factor in putting us out of touch with the world.

Bio

A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone, Ph.D. is Associate Dean of Curriculum in the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at the University of North Dakota. She earned her B.A. in philosophy at Birmingham-Southern College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Rozelle-Stone served as the President (2014-2016) of the American Weil Society, and she has co-edited The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later, co-authored Simone Weil and Theology, edited Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy, and most recently authored A Very Short Introduction: Simone Weil. Aside from Simone Weil, her research interests include phenomenology, feminism, the ethics of attention, and the growing field of fatigue studies.