The article deals with four forms of power grabs through the conceptual connection between touch and power, focusing on four structural breakthroughs that show the changing process that this relation underwent, from the secularisation of the sacral via profane materialism until contemporary vulgar-materialism: Christian _Noli me tangere; _monarchic _King’s Evil; _materialistic _Warenfetischismus_; and profane _Grab-’em-by-the-pussy. _.

During the pandemic there were many ways of handling the contagious SARS-CoV-2 virus, most of them in haptic terms, or in terms of touch: masks, hand disinfection, social distancing, quarantines, (self)isolations. Touch thus became not only the privileged object of the new bio-politics, striving to preserve life at all costs, but also what was lost during the pandemic. To be sure, a loss of something we never had that even the vaccine, which promised a return to normal, but actually paved (...) the way for a “brave new post-pandemic world,” could not rehabilitate. In short, one of the elements that radically changed with and in the (post-)pandemic world is precisely the elusive object of touch, which we propose to conceptually grasp through the coinage of the concept of its “mateReal hapticity.”. (shrink)

The contribution links three unusually connected suspects in order to tackle the question of human action, which is eminently at stake not only in the realms of politics and in the field of history, but also in philosophy, and, as a peculiar link between the two, theatre, namely: Hannah Arendt, G.W.F. Hegel, and William Shakespeare. And In order to connect all three authors and their respective fields of philosophy, politics, and theatre as regards the particular issue of action, the starting (...) point will be the figure of Achilles as portrayed in Homer’s Iliad. (shrink)