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Touching Derrida Touching Nancy: TheMain Traits of Derrida’s Hand
1
 J. Hillis Miller 
Abstract
Derrida has been perennially concerned with hands and touching. Thisinterest finds its most concentrated form in
On Touching—Jean-LucNancy
. This text outlines a number of concerns Derrida has in that bookwhichmightbeextrapolatedasexemplaryofDerrida’sreadingstrategiesin general. It concludes with a consideration of what is revealed aboutthe Derrida-Nancy relationship in this book.
*
ButOforthetouchofavanishedhand,And the sound of a voice that is still.(Tennyson, ‘Break, Break, Break,’ ll. 11–12)
The description of the goals of this issue are ambitious, nothing lessthan ‘the transformation, displacement and mutation of models of assumption and inheritance from the enlightenment and Abrahamictradition regarding touch, haptology, materiality, the phenomenon andthe political.’ Wow! That’s asking a lot, especially the inclusion of the ‘transformation, displacement and mutation of models of...the
 political 
.’ The issue description goes on to orient the contributorstoward the future, not back towards the question of reading eitherDerrida or all those dead white philosophers
he
reads right: ‘As weenter into an epoch of new materialities for which we as yet have notheoretical vocabulary, and which deconstruction must address as itsown future, is it possible to read the matters touched on by Derridaas indicative of a deconstruction-to-come?’ I’m not quite sure what ismeant by ‘new materialities for which we as yet have no theoreticalvocabulary,’ though I could make some guesses, for example, that newtelecommunications devices, new prostheses of the ‘body proper’ are
 
146 J. Hillis Miller
meant, the brain migrating into the machine on the table, the personalcomputer,andfromthattothewholeoftheWorldWideWeb.Itisclear,in any case, that the issue contributors are being asked to extrapolateinto the future, beyond anything Derrida wrote, into ‘a deconstruction-to-come.’I must confess that I have so much difficulty trying to figure out justwhat Derrida is saying in
Le toucher
, word by word, line by line, andpage by page, that I have not had much time yet to think about thefuture as it might be inflected by this book. The ‘political,’ for example,is rarely mentioned in
Le toucher
, just once, if I remember correctly,though political questions of the most immediate and ‘material’ kindare discussed abundantly in other late works by Derrida, for example
Rogues
, or
The Concept of 9/11
, or in the discussion of auto-immunityin ‘Foi et savoir’. No doubt
Le toucher
, nevertheless, has crucial politicalimplications. The one mention of the political in
Le toucher
I havenoted has to do with the political implications of Nancy’s idea of the ego and therefore of decision. Do I suppose that politicians arelikely to read
Le toucher
or even be influenced by it indirectly, sothat what
Le toucher
says or implies would actually be incorporatedin their material decisions, our actions in Iraq, for example, or ourresponse to global warming, or to genocide in Darfur, or to the questionof stem cell research? Or that feminist and general academic doxaabout ‘the body,’ for example the use of the body as a leitmotif ininnumerable conferences is likely to be affected by what
Le toucher
saysabout the body. ‘There is no “the” body,’ says Derrida. Here is oneexample among innumerable examples (I’ve been collecting them), of anunreflective appeal to ‘the body.’ My citation is from the announcementof a conference on ‘Pathologies: Questions of embodiment in literature,arts and sciences,’ held August 20–21, 2007, at the Glamorgan ResearchCentre for Literature, Arts and Science. The goal of this conference,the announcement in part says, is defined as follows: ‘To considerhow the body has been pathologized is to ask questions of what itmeans to be human. As the originating site of humanity the body(extending from the individual to society and nation) is the physical,metaphorical and philosophical place for the
inscription
of selfhood,identity, normality and change. The multiple pathologies of the bodyinvite us to reflect upon bodily conditions and behaviours that markout the boundaries of the individual, the social and the national aswell as their transgressions.’ Everything is potentially put in questionhere except what is meant by ‘the body.’ That is taken for grantedas something we all know. It is the materiality of this body here
 
The Main Traits of Derrida’s Hand 147
(pointing at myself or touching myself or even kicking myself, likeSamuel Johnson kicking the stone to refute Berkeley). The material bodyis basis of the metaphorical and philosophical extensions mentioned.‘What about the materiality of the body,
Judy
?’ Judith Butler reportsher female auditors as reproachfully asking when she gave lectures thatresulted in her ‘seminal’ book,
Bodies That Matter
. If feminists andcultural critics were to read carefully not only
Le Toucher
but alsoNancy’s
Corpus
and the section on ‘hands’ in Nancy’s
Noli Me Tangere
,they might be less highhanded in taking ‘the’ body for granted. AsLiza Doolittle says, it is ‘Not bloody likely!’ that doing this, even if itwere to happen, would have any material effect in the political or evenacademic world. The force of ‘white mythology’ or ‘Western ideology’about touch, the body, the psyche, decision, and so on, are too stronglyin place to be deflected by a book so difficult and so technical, if Imay put it that way, as
Le toucher
. That is just one of Derrida’s mainpoints in
Le toucher
. Can one imagine Georgre W. Bush, or any of hisadvisors, reading
Le toucher
? When President Bush, notoriously, said,‘IamtheDecider,’hedidnot,Isuspect,haveDerrida’stheoryofdecisionin mind. He just meant that he is the imperial sovereign chief executiveand can decide to do anything he likes, such as invade Iraq, or ordera troop surge there, or torture detainees held without charge, withoutneeding to take into account the legislative branch of our government,the laws on the books, or the United States Constitution. The reader of 
Letoucher
,Iconclude,islimitedtoextremelyhypotheticalguessesaboutthe ‘deconstruction-to-come’ and its effect on the ‘new materialities’ ‘forwhich we as yet have no theoretical vocabulary.’ I limit myself to someremarks about
Le toucher
itself.How can I touch Derrida touching Nancy? One little touch, that’s allI want. If Derrida is right, what I want is impossible.Derrida, in
Le Toucher
, is most interested in the hand, as, for somany philosophers, the premier ‘organ’ of touch, and in the assumptionthat the hand as tool, or sign, or means of self-touch is, for so manyphilosophers, the exclusive attribute of ‘man,’ what Derrida calls the‘humanual.’ I shall elsewhere discuss in more detail the role of hands in
Le toucher
.Derrida certainly had an inimitable ‘hand.’ His handwriting was moreor less indecipherable, except by adepts, if then. Paul de Man and I usedto spend a whole lunch hour trying to decipher such and such a letterDerrida had sent me from Paris to New Haven. The most importantparts were the least legible. By a further metonymic extension one mightmean, by Derrida’s ‘hand,’ the distinctive features of his ‘style’ in a given
of 00

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makxmakx

It would be touching if this document could be downloadable.

reply04 / 11 / 2010
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