““Perhaps Christ’s injunction noli me tangere is an indication of the secret but essential importance of touch. Pablo Maurette’s superb exploration of this forgotten sense ranges from the early Greeks to our time, reminding us how we kiss, feel and read the world through our skin. In these days of embraceless confinement, this marvellous book is a consolation and a joy.””

“[El sentido olvidado] is an erudite and exquisitely written text, in the wake of the courtly Argentinian tradition of articulating literature and thought, from Martínez Estrada to Ricardo Piglia. In its erudition and great spirit, the book breathes its author’s passion for writing.”

“The Forgotten Sense is one of the most intelligent, well crafted, and original collection of literary essays that I have had the pleasure to read. Maurette meditates on the many facets of the sense of touch, reflecting on some of its properties, such as pain, pleasure, pressure, temperature, speed, and balance. He then explores how touch has been represented throughout time in portraiture and sculpture, philosophy, and literature, and how it has frequently turned these forms of art into a sensorial feast.”

“A charming addition to any contemporary aesthetics collection. . . . Highly recommended.”

“More than an academic work. . . . Unsurprisingly, this book is enjoyable both as an intellectual journey through the text of various works, and as a tactile account of the experience and close relation to the text of a practitioner of literature. The pleasure is enhanced by Maurette’s impeccable style and his capacity to tell stories, of books, works of art, or words.”

“Immensely learned, open to a great variety of traditions and disciplines, The Forgotten Sense belongs to a new crop of readable, friendly books, reminiscent of open conversations among cultivated people. Energetic, diverse, the book agreeably jumps from one period to the next and from one issue to another, in the end succeeding to make a strong point about an invisible, yet deeply ‘touching’ aspect of art and literature.”

“To insist on the existential urgency of staying in touch, quite literally, with the material world that we are inhabiting, has become one of the philosophical priorities of our present. Pablo Maurette, however, has opened a new dimension for this discussion by developing concrete answers to the question how the media of aesthetic experience, how texts, films, and artworks can become instrumental in initiating such closeness to the material world to which, ontologically, they do not belong. His readings, from this perspective, of Western classics like Chrétien de Troyes and Diderot, Kafka and von Hofmannsthal, inscribe themselves in an emerging new style of critical analysis.”

“This beautiful book discovers the haptic sense, pressing close and taking the shape of its object, woven into Western literature from its earliest days. Maurette deftly unfolds and refolds history so that his thrilling discoveries—from Epicurean atomism to a sixteenth century dialogue on kissing to Marinetti’s ill-fated tactile manifesto—arrive to us as though nestled side by side.”

“...an exquisite text about touch, a sense that, throughout many historical periods, was considered irrelevant, rudimentary, and even immoral.”