Chapter 4 focuses on the sensuous quintet integral to Guru Nanak’s metaphysical thought and praxis. Materially made up of transcendent fibers, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and seeing have the cognitive capacity to take audiences off to limitless territories, or inversely, get them tangled up in messy affairs. They belong to everybody irrespective of race, gender, sexuality, class, politics, or religion, and though they are different modalities, they are a part of the same unitary living body and work together intersensorially and synaesthetically. For Guru Nanak there is no stereotypical hierarchy between “lower” and “higher” senses; the five are equally saturated with ontological, ethical, psychological, and soteriological import and flourish in concert. However, in order to understand their critical role and function, the somatic agents are analyzed separately. Hopefully the positive, progressive Nanakian outlook can cure some of the chronic somatophobic abnormalities prevailing across cultures.

The Coda returns to the example with which the book begins: the story about the gentleman caller and the naked lady in the bathroom told by the character Fabienne in Truffaut’s film Stolen Kisses (1968). The aim of the Coda is to revisit key aspects of the theory and history of tact developed in the course of the book, and to draw its findings to a close.

Chapter 1 reconstructs the conceptual history of tact as a social, ethical, and aesthetic category. Starting out with Voltaire’s 1769 definition that marks tact’s fundamental paradigm shift from a sense of feeling to a form of sociability, I reconstruct the word’s ensuing career as a key concept in 19th- and 20th-century pedagogical, philosophical, and literary discourse. I discuss tact’s history within the context of the demise of the ancien régime and the rise of the bourgeois subject, reflecting on a variety of different historical and philosophical explanations (Elias, Adorno, Foucault). I reconstruct how and why, around 1800, tact turns into a key philosophical term, depicting an intuitive form of empirical judgement (Kant). I show how, in the second half of the 19th century, tact, understood as an individual deviation from normative structures, came to occupy a key position in the method dispute between the humanities and the natural sciences (Helmholtz). I conclude by reflecting on how psychological tact went on to become a key category in modern and contemporary hermeneutics, uniting the otherwise antagonistic work of scholars incl. Adorno, Gadamer, Barthes, Felski, and Macé.

Chapter 4 reads Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses (1968) in the light of the historical crisis from which it arose. Mapping the film against selected material from earlier versions of the script, director’s notes, letters, and interviews, I interpret Stolen Kisses against the grain of its conventional reception as a romantic comedy. I show how, while sympathetic to the revolutionary cause, the film occupied a bystander position in relation to the political parties involved in the conflict. Against ideologies of fusional collectivity, Truffaut experiments with new forms of individuality, freedom, and communication. In striking resemblance to Plessner’s theory of tact, he shows how tactful behaviour can facilitate ways to come close to one another without meeting, and drift apart again without damaging one another through indifference. Counter to the widespread expectation that when relations are close, they are warm, and when they are warm, they are beneficial to all individuals involved, intimacies do not necessarily bring us closer together. On the contrary, inasmuch as they may infringe upon the singularity and dignity of the individual, they can have a deeply alienating effect.

This chapter describes positive interpersonal processes: interactions between people that actively enhance their close relationships. It begins by describing the field’s shift toward studying positive processes and highlighting the utility of considering positive phenomena as unique from negative phenomena. Then, it reviews three interpersonal behaviors that have been shown to enhance relationships and describes the evidence supporting their benefits. First, spending time together (particularly spending time on novel and exciting activities) enhances relationships by enabling partners to meet their self-expansion needs in ongoing relationships. A second positive process is co-experiencing positive emotions, such as joy, amusement, and excitement, which augment and sustain positive experiences and facilitate interpersonal synchrony. Finally, this chapter reviews the benefits of communicating affection and the individual differences in how and how often people express affection.

The corporeal dimensions of prayer before icons are often attributed to superstition, antiquated beliefs, or a “graced” function of metaphysical participation. In contrast to this, I develop a phenomenological analysis of corporeal substitution as a real possibility of ordinary experience, for an absent person we love strongly can come to presence in a thing before us and provoke a corporeal response. Guided by the story of the acheiropoieton, the “icon made without hands,” I show how the structure of this ordinary human practice is altered when elevated to prayerful substitution, and through its repetition over time, this allows the icon to serve as a means of communion for the believer across both visual and corporeal dimensions.

The third chapter turns to the body in erotic poetry. Here the temporal frame widens to embrace the experience of the present within longer human spans, a rhythm over lifetimes garnered through instances of erotic embodiment. Poetry can bind the inexplicable presence of touch to time, and can also summon the past as presence through the reenactment of the poem itself in performance, a dynamic we see at work in Sappho and then again in the modern erotic poetry of Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds – begging the question of why certain poetics recur across time. This is poetry that challenges the ephemerality of embodied experience by showing its power to reenact the force of touch.

This book presents a new understanding of what ‘making’ means and argues for the centrality of crafting as a way of making sense of the world and the place of law, media, and politics within it. When Elaine Scarry recounted the great range of candidates that have been put forward for the category ‘artefacts’, she noted as possibilities that ‘nation states are fictions (in the sense of created things), the law is a created thing, a scientific fact (many argue) is a constructed thing’. Peter Goodrich writes similarly that ‘a significant part of the substantive law is comprised of fabulae, stories, plays, fabrications, images and fictions’. This book takes such possibilities seriously and considers how the notion of manufactured truth can inform our understanding of the tradition of making judgments in law and the trend of making judgments in society at large.

Chapter 8 describes how to build a better connection with children and young people using a range of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies. Different communication tools and strategies are explained in detail.

The rodent somatic sensory system is characterized by a prominent representation of the mystacial vibrissae, which form an orderly array of low-threshold mechanoreceptors. Centrally, the arrangement of the vibrissal pad is maintained in arrays of cellular aggregates referred to as barrelettes (brainstem), barreloids (thalamus), and barrels (primary sensory cortex). Trigeminal brainstem nuclei that receive vibrissal primary afferents give rise to two main streams of information, the lemniscal and paralemniscal pathways. The lemniscal pathway arises from the trigeminal nucleus principalis, transits through the ventral posterior medial nucleus of the thalamus, and projects to the primary somatosensory cortex. The paralemniscal pathway arises from the rostral part of trigeminal spinal nucleus interpolaris, transits through the posterior group of the thalamus, and projects to the somatosensory cortical areas and the vibrissa motor cortex. In this chapter, we review the anatomical organization of these pathways and propose that whereas the lemniscal pathway encodes both touch and whisking kinematics, the paralemniscal pathway signals the valence of orofacial inputs. Lastly, we call attention to the importance of understanding sensory processing in the brainstem trigeminal nuclei to understand their role in regulating behavior. These nuclei are richly interconnected and contain inhibitory circuits that operate both pre- and postsynaptically.

The role of embodiment in social interactions has attracted increasing attention in the last decade, both in the area of conversation analysis and that of cognitive science. Embodiment refers to all aspects of nonverbal, bodily behaviour, such as body posture and orientation, hand movements and gaze. This chapter will explain the concept of embodiment in both cognitive science and conversation-analytically informed research on social interaction, will present a state-of-the art review of research on embodiment in childhood interaction and will make clear the implications of this research for embodied practices in interactions with children, especially for childhood educators.

Chapter 4 considers the significance of embodied encounters between musicians, listeners and musical instruments. It takes as its focus the experience of touch in musical encounters, charting the sensory intensities and eroticism inherent in fin-de-siècle literary depictions of touching musical instruments and scores and in feeling the transmission of the material touch of music in performance. The chapter examines encounters between bodies and musical instruments in Richard Marsh’s ‘The Violin’, Forster’s ‘Dr Woolacott’ and the anonymous pornographic novel Teleny. Tactile proximity between musician and instrument sees the musical instrument transformed in these texts into a technology for the transmission of touch. The experience of piano playing in Forster’s A Room with a View with Woolf’s The Voyage Out similarly suggests that tactile interaction between the body and the musical instrument allows for marginalized subjects to more fully inhabit a sense of their desiring bodies. Finally, in Vernon Lee’s writing about the archival remains of eighteenth-century music, her sensuous affective connection with the historical past is articulated through a wish for restored tactile contact.

Chapter Six, ‘On the Wards’, shifts to hospitals. Hospitals were sites of colonial entanglement in the ‘in-between’ zones bestriding active combat and civilian life. Despite the apparent limitations of the space, where men were rendered immobile by the injury or illness, hospitals facilitated encounters, particularly between patients and nurses. For nurses in these spaces, new responsibilities were expected, as chaperones of racial, national and sexual boundaries. Using not only the men’s letters and diaries but those of the women who nursed them – from Britain and the dominions – the politics of caring for colonial troops, white and of colour, are examined. Complex responses to nursing by both the men and the women surpassed existing maternal motifs of caregiving. The threat of racial mixing placed new limits on ‘care’ but there were complicated individual reactions to the new and intimate contact between white women and men of colour: neglect, anxiety, apathy, curiosity and even desire.

All the more telling for being an arbitrary and often intimate historical record, poetry provides the primary source for this chapter’s account of nineteenth-century medicine. Poems by John Gibson, Thomas Fessenden, George Crabbe, William Wordsworth, and Humphrey Davy disclose that the practice of medicine, whether by quacks or the learned, was so ineffectual at the start of the century as to allow the Romantics to plausibly argue for the curative effects of poetry and the imagination, both of which became integral to a new science of life. The professional medicine that sprang from this science, however, asserted its autonomy from poetry, most effectively by pathologising such poets as John Keats and Oscar Wilde, who in turn offered their own verse ripostes. Its positivism and ‘hands-on’ diagnostics yielded new conceptions of the body and touch that Alfred Tennyson, G. M. Hopkins, and Walt Whitman each reflect upon in their poetry. Finally, the growing acceptance of the germ theory of disease enabled pathologies of art as illness that are variously elaborated upon and joked about by Edward Lear, Henry Savile Clerk, Wilde, and Ronald Ross, who also reaches for poetry to record his sublimely momentous discovery of the malaria pathogen in 1896.

In the Epistula Apostolorum the retelling of the Easter story is closely related to the Johannine version (GJn 20), but with significant modifications. Here all of the disciples are initially disbelieving and require physical proof of the resurrection, not just Thomas; Mary Magdalene is accompanied to Jesus’ tomb by Mary and Martha of Bethany; and, once reunited with his disciples, Jesus is continually present with them in contrast to the episodic nature of canonical appearance stories. As in 1 Cor 15 but in contrast to the canonical gospels, EpAp views Jesus’ resurrection as paradigmatic of the future resurrection of the flesh. A comparison with the Treatise on the Resurrection brings to light unexpected convergences between these texts, in spite of the ‘proto-orthodox’ character of the one text and the alleged ‘gnostic’ tendencies of the other. The substantive difference is that TrRes understands resurrection soteriologically, as a reality that determines both the present and the future of the believer, whereas in EpAp resurrection is subordinated to the overriding emphasis on future judgement according to works.

Our appearance, gestures, body language, and other types of nonverbal communication convey tremendous amounts of information about who we are, our status, attitudes, and even our goals in an interaction. Nonverbal communication is perceived quickly and mostly subconsciously, drawing on culturally patterned expectations. Since there are few commonalities across cultures in nonverbal cues, there are ample opportunities for miscommunication, such as when and how we touch others, how we relate to time, or what clothes we wear. This chapter explores various types of nonverbal communication, such as facial expressions, gaze, gestures and bodily movements, posture, contact, spatial behavior, clothes and appearance, and nonverbal aspects of speech. At the end of the chapter, these concepts are connected to an intercultural communication-oriented pedagogy, with sample language teaching activities.

Close relationships are, at the same time, a source of risk and a resource that can mitigate risk, fear, and insecurity. Specifically, close relationships provide the potential for rejection and hurt, but a) close others can behave in ways that diminish these perceived relational risks to encourage deepening connection, and b) involvement in close relationships can mitigate risks external to relationships (i.e., risks in the physical and social environment) to facilitate personal thriving. This chapter will describe the relational risks individuals face when they form interdependent relationships as well as partner behaviors that demonstrate commitment and promote trust (e.g., sacrifice, affectionate touch) to reduce the perceived cost of interdependence. Although all people are subjected to risks when they form interdependent relationships, individuals differ in the extent to which they perceive risks and in the ways in which their partners might mitigate these risks. People with insecure attachment orientations (i.e., high levels of attachment anxiety and/or attachment avoidance) are especially concerned with relational risks, and they benefit when partners enact behaviors that are sensitive to their specific insecurities. In addition to relational risks, this chapter will also describe how partners regulate external risks that people face when they experience threats (e.g., stressors, health problems) or opportunities (e.g., goals, positive challenges). Research suggests that supportive and affectionate partner behaviors provide a sense of security to mitigate external risks and encourage exploration, which may be especially critical for individuals with insecure attachment orientations. Finally, this chapter will conclude with suggestions for future research.