ABSTRACT
The first tangent repopulates the history of touch in philosophical discourse. Ranging from Aristotle’s De Anima to recent treaties of touch in phenomenology, media studies or psychoanalysis, this historical overview follows two main strands: the history of touch as the most fundamental sense organ and touch as a mode of affective experience. The chapter traces the various moments, when these two notions of the haptic and the affective intersect and how they divert again.
