Fragility: To Touch and Be Touched

How the enhancement of aesthetic perception can redeem life’s precarity: a manifesto from the authors of Nearness

In an era of intense competition and individualism, we tend to hide our weak spots. When something comes too close and threatens to touch us, we shield our vulnerability. This means that there is less and less room for real human encounter. The forces of quantification and evaluation push people back further and further into a virtual shell. In this intimate volume, authors Marlies De Munck and Pascal Gielen and artist Lotte Lara Schroeder make a plea for openness and compassion–because all this sheltering keeps us from touching and from being touched. Alongside Schroeder’s drawings, De Munck and Gielen warmly advocate an aesthetic skill: the ability to experience and embrace a ramshackle and fragile reality, and still understand it as a coherent whole. This is the power of culture: to reconcile us with life, even amid its turbulence, incoherence and precarity.