he toucher

Touch/to touch him

With a Kiss on the Eyes

Epigraph
I. 'This heart. .' .
('This is my heart')2
One day, yes, one day, once upon a time—formidable—the question came to
me. No, it did not come to me, it did not pay me a visit, in other words it did
not come to see me; no, it invaded me before I had even seen it coming: it
touched me before letting itself be seen. As soon as I will have named it, this
question, I will perhaps lose the right to write 'one day', since it is a question
about the day, precisely, on the subject of the day. And I will have lost even
the right to say, stricto sensu, that it came to me, as if it thereby came from
me, since it could not have reached me except by being said as well as touched,
by the other or to the other, for the other—come to me from the other. First of
all, it concerns the other [elle regarde I'autre]. Here is the question:
'When our eyes touch, is it day or is it night?'
I tried then to explain to myself, with a patience ready for the infinite, the
time of the experience itself: let's see, first of all, does it ever happen that
eyes can touch each other, press together like lips? To which surface of the
eye can the lips be compared? Can one be sure, in the first place, that they
see each other? For if they see what sees rather than what is visible, a look
rather than eyes, then they see nothing that can be seen; they thus sink far
from any visibility. Is it day, at that instant, or night? And if one answers
'night', would one not say that in the constancy of this relation that holds
them together, they touch each other as would the blind? And the question
objected to me, or I myself objected to myself: unless they begin to hear and
understand each other in this way, but precisely when our eyes meet, I see
both your look and your eyes, love in fascination, and your eyes are not only
seeing but visible. Now, since they are visible (things or objects in the world)
as well as seeing (at the origin of the world), I could touch them, precisely
with my finger, my lips, or even my eyes, lashes, and lids—by coming near
to you. So, I repeat, at the moment of touching your eyes with mine, as with

Paragraph Volume 16: 2

 Le toucher 123
lips, is it day or night? Is there still room, place, space, or interval, chora, for
the phenomenality of the day and for its diaphanous visibility? For everything
can also be reversed—like an image on the pupil: there where day has not

yet dawned, there emerges the origin of its possibility. So long as you will
not have touched me with your eyes, so long as you will not have touched
my eyes, as with lips, you will not be able to say 'one day'. Nor adieu: good
day, see you.
Hardly daring to sign such a question, to say nothing of its gloss (it is a
matter of tact, the caress, and the sublime, when the most discreet verges on,
unless it touches on, the most indecent), I thought at one point about inventing
a story: as improbable as it may seem, I read this anonymous inscription on a
wall in Paris ('When our eyes touch, is it day or is it night?'). It would have
inspired in me the desire to repeat it, purely and simply, as an epigraph to
what I have wanted to write, for a long time now, for Jean-Luc Nancy, the
greatest thinker of touch of all time, or let us say, so as to avoid the appear-
ance of pathos and excess (lack of tact) even if it is true: since Aristotle (Peri
Psyches [II, 11, 422b—424a]) touched in a stroke upon the aporia of touch
(aporia, he says, and aporeseie, etc.), just as he foresaw all the nights of the
tangible (touch is not clear, ouk estin endelon, he says again, and adelon, etc.).
With this history of touch, one is groping, one doesn't know how or what to
advance; most of all, one no longer sees clearly. Thus, an already exhausted
epigraph to what I have given up writing, for reasons that will soon become
apparent. For I will have to be satisfied, an obvious procedure of failure, to
tell—like a story, 'One day, once upon a time .' —while abbreviating, with
. .

omissions, repetitions, and drawn-out passages, and little stories, through suc-
cessive touches and retouchings, tangent after tangent, the story of the text
that, for a long time, I have dreamed of writing peri Peri Psyches (a mud-
died, baroque, and overcharged text which resembles what has always been
my relation to such incredible words as 'soul', 'spirit', and so forth); or else a
text in the margin of On the Soul by Jean-Luc Nancy—and a present for him
who has moreover written a Psyche (it's a proper name, on a single page, first
of all in Premiere Livraison 16, then in Corpus, 93, Le poids d'une pensee, 14,
110, and elsewhere; 'extended', Psyche 'reposes', asleep or dead, before Eros
who 'contemplates' her without touching her). To say of Psyche that she is
'extended', even if Eros has the tact not to touch her, is to recall that she is
tangible and it is to recall what Freud has said of it, in a posthumous note,
precisely, cited in the first line: 'Psyche ist augedehnt, weiss nicht davon\ She
knows nothing about it, at the moment one is speaking of her; she is held in
lecret [au secret], she knows nothing about herself, in particular that she is
extended (thus always in the distance, however near she may be), tangible but
untouchable. At least for Eros when he has some tact.
Now I will have to begin to explain why the Peri Psyches of our time is
today called Corpus.
124 Paragraph
I. 'This heart. . .
'
('This is my heart')2
Went gefiele nicht eine
Philosophie, deren Keim ein
erster Kuss istt [Who would
not like a philosophy whose
kernel is a first kiss?]
—Novalis
What to give him?
I didn't know what to present as an offering to Jean-Luc Nancy in
order to tell him of my gratitude and admiration, whose limits I can't
even measure and which I have felt for him for too long to even attempt
to tell myself their story.
For there is a law of tact. Perhaps the law is always a law of tact. One
cannot imagine what would be a law in general without something like
tact (hasty conclusion: tact, one could say, is the origin of the law). Is
not such a law a fatal machination? Between two given orders, it in
effect installs a relationship that is at the same time conjunctive and
disjunctive. Worse than that, it brings into contact (contamination and
contagion) contact and non-contact. Contamination thus becomes the
interruption of the relation. The law in fact commands to touch with-
out touching it. Not to touch the friend (for example, by abstaining
from giving him a present or from presenting oneself to him, out of
modesty), to not touch him enough is to be lacking in tact; however,
to touch him, and to touch him too much, is also tactless. One would
have to talk about the caress that, although it cannot be reduced to
simple contact, is nonetheless divided by this contradictory injunction,
which is no longer altogether that of tact: to touch without touching,
to press without pressing, always more, always too much, never enough
(Tiensl [but what is one doing when one says 'tiens!' in French, and only
in French, thus in a language, which in principle cannot be touched?
Literally, by saying 'tiens', as I am doing here, one proposes that the other
grasp but also keep what one holds out to him or her, for example a gift,
and thus touch it by taking it on, by taking it in him or herself; one thinks
first of all of hands [mains], of manner, maneuver, or manipulation: tiens
can be violence itself] tiensl, it is precisely on the subject of 'L'offrande
sublime' that Nancy enjoins, lets himself be enjoined to 'change sense',
no less! (How very like him this gesture is: I know Jean-Luc Nancy to be

always ready for everything, resolved to change everything, even sense,

and more than anyone else, he still, always, talks of sense in all the senses
of the word sense, which doesn't prevent his Corpus from remaining
 Le toucher 125
consistent and powerfully faithful to itself.) And he is working on a
book to be titled Le sens du monde [The Sense of the World], no less!
So here he goes and proposes to change sense, no less, and to pass 'from
sight to tact' without one being altogether sure (the difficulties begin)
if by tact he means touch in general or rather that manner of touching
without touching it that characterizes a certain politeness, the discretion
of a certain contact. In truth, he is not content to propose changing sense
and passing from sight to tact. He reminds us that, according to him, it
must be done, it cannot not happen, and that this is the sublime:

the singular mode of the presentation of a limit is that this limit comes to be
touched: one must change sense, pass from sight to tact. That is in fact the
sense of the word sublimitas: that which lies just below the limit, that which
touches it (the limit being thought in terms of height, as absolute height). The
sublime imagination touches the limit, and this touch makes it feel 'its own
powerlessness'.3
If it feels "its own powerlessness" ', then the imagination touches upon
'

its powerlessness. The imagination encounters that which it cannot, the

impossible for it; it encounters, therefore, that which it cannot encoun-
ter, it comes upon that which it cannot touch, and thereby it touches
itself, as we shall see, it feels itself (powerless) there where it touches
(tangentially) what it cannot attain or touch, the point or the line, the
limit at which it can no longer touch; it thus tends toward that which
it can only hold out to itself without giving itself to hold [elle se tend
alors vers ce qu'elle ne peut que se tendre sans se donner a tenir],
and still without touching. It touches itself at the moment it touches
the untouchable. It confines without confining itself to itself. In what
sense and by what right can one then say that it touches itself or that
it 'feels itself touch, touched, touching, that it feels itself by touch or
by touching itself? (Note parenthetically that, concerning what touches
on the French language at least, where the latter touches itself closest to
untranslatability, cela se touche can mean or be understood reflexively
either 'it itself touches itself or 'one touches it, it lets itself be touched
[by something or someone else] without necessarily touching itself.)
And what is the (ontological, rhetorical, logical) status of that which we
cannot without trepidation call the figure of 'touch'? Before quoting the
next several lines, let us already and very quickly point to three essential
indications.
1. In this context, the 'touch' is that of the imagination: sensible
presentation or transcendental schema. The non-delimitable concept of
touch is thus going to take in at once all that these words comprehend (so
126 Paragraph
many figures and things at stake, the importance of which it is impossible
to exaggerate: imagination, presentation, sensibility, passivity/activity,
intuitus derivativus, thus finitude, schematism, transcendentality, and so
forth).
2. To feel itself as touch will be immediately a 'feel itself and thus a
'touch itself. We have not finished exploring the infinite and disturbing
resources of this reflexivity. All the more so because in our grammar,
'se toucher' strangely folds its reflexivity according to the workings
[engagements] of the sentence. Like 's'attendre', 'se toucher' can turn the
subject toward itself (s'attendre soi-meme, to expect or wait for oneself,
se toucher soi-meme, to touch oneself) or toward the other, according to
a reciprocity that is easier to say than to attain (se toucher I'un Vautre, les
uns les autres, to touch each other): 'se toucher to? ['to self-touch you']
he will say in a passage of Corpus of which for the moment I will do no
more than light the fuse.
If I ask you now: 'what does it mean, "se toucher les yeux"T Does it
mean 'to touch one's own eyes with one's own fingers'? That's easy. To
touch (for example) the eyes of the other and reciprocally? That's not
impossible. To touch the eyes of the other with one's own eyes in order
to see while losing one's sight [a perdre la vue], in a sort of reciprocity
that is apparently immediate? That's difficult and rare but not at all
impossible.
3. All of Nancean thinking regarding the syncope, begun more than
fifteen years ago,4 finds itself taken up here again, reread, reinvested,
relaunched. The passage we are reading at the moment concerns the
'syncopated imagination' insofar as it opens the experience of the sub-
lime. The latter is also the experience of the border and of de-bordering
[debordement], the trembling apprehension of that which, touching on
the border, at once de-borders or exceeds it and remains at the bor-
der ('the whole affair of the sublime happens right on [a mime] works
of the 'fine arts', on their borders, their frames, or their contours: at
the border of art, no further than art' (PF, 179). One of our questions
could take shape here: if there is indeed a figure of the limit as bor-
der, does it have an essentially tactile genealogy, tactile by privilege of
birth? Does it figure itself on the basis of the properly or literally tan-
gible? Can one ever speak of the properly tangible? Is not this latter
the very place of the irreducible contamination of the proper, of con-
tamination itself? As you may have guessed, this question does not per-
tain only to itself, which, if it did, it would already be a difficult and
serious question. Rather it doubles and immediately proliferates itself:
Does one have the right, without assuming too many presuppositions,
 Le toucher 127
to wonder if one of the senses (here touch) is, as such and solely, more
originary and more proper, more literally engaged in the constitution of
anything whatsoever, here in that of a figure that would depend on it
in a more necessary fashion? Also opened by Aristotle, when the latter
wondered whether touch (aphe, contact, which also means tact, grasp,
but as well the place of the contact, line of joining, blow or wound) is
one, a 'unique sense' (mia aisthesis) or plural (pleious), this matrix of
questions pertains also to the concept of figure, of course, since inevi-
table figurality has to do perhaps with this internal multiplicity that dis-
perses the so-called literal signification of touch or the property of the
tangible.
But let us leave all that and go on now with the quotation from
'L'offrande sublime':
If presentation is above all what takesplace in the sensible order—to pres-
ent is to make sensible—, the sublime imagination is always of the order of
presentation insofar as it is sensible. But this sensibility is no longer that of
the perception of a figure; it is that of touching the limit, and more exactly
it is found in the feeling the imagination has of itself on touching its limit. It
feels itself pass or pass onto the limit. It feels itself, and it has the feeling of
the sublime in its effort (Bestrebung), which properly makes itself felt at the
moment the limit is touched, in the suspension of the movement, in the broken
tension, in the syncope. (PF, 179)
What is he telling us, exactly? Let's sum up and translate, if that is poss-
ible. He is speaking of an experience, perhaps of experience in general,
which would consist in this: to feel oneself and to feel oneself touch,
thus to feel oneself touched [touche(e)] (I am putting gender in paren-
thesis because it may well be the imagination that is in question [i.e.,
imagination is grammactically feminine in French], but also in order to
respect a possible sexual difference), but to feel oneself touch a limit,
touched by a limit, and one's own limit.What is to touch thus one's
own limit? It is also not to touch, not to touch oneself enough, to touch
oneself too much: impossible sublimity of tact, the diabolical machi-
nation of love when it dictates infinite renunciation. It is to lose the
proper at the moment of touching upon it, and this interruption, which
constitutes the touch of the self-touching, touch as self-touching, that is
what he calls syncope. (When he was writing about the syncope, with-
out speaking very much or even at all, perhaps, about touch, he was
already speaking about it; I am pointing out here a direction for reread-
ing everything consequently.)
If tact and the caress cannot be given their measure or their law in a
128 Paragraph
'more less' of touch, then perhaps they have nothing to do with the
or

experience of touching and all the figures that it has bequeathed to us.
One would have to review everything in this lexicon and this rhetoric,
and take infinite precautions before touching on them. (What is one
saying when one proposes in French to 'toucher un mot' [literally 'to
touch a word', colloquially to have a word with, to mention]—to one's
friend, on the subject of this or that, which might be touch or quite
simply a word, the word 'touch'?)
[...]
At this point, my discourse was shaping up badly, and everything already
had to be started over from the beginning. The necessity of telling a
story and of constantly beginning over again stems no doubt from this
impossible alliance of contact and the syncope. They suspend the pro-
cess in simultaneity but they also interrupt the synchrony promised by
a 'self-touching' that, like the imagination, can only feel itself by feeling
'its own powerlessness''. The power of powerlessness.
So I began again, and I already know that I will proceed here only
according to a series of tangents. A tangent touches a line or a surface
but without crossing it, without a true intersection, thus in a kind of
impertinent pertinence. It touches only one point, but a point is nothing:
no dimension or surface. My impertinence will be my tact. Also my way

ofgoing off on a tangent, as one says, so as to elude while playing a little,

like someone struggling to avoid an impossible task and so as not to
acquit himself of too-heavy a debt. (I would like to think that the story of
the baroque composition, and the flaunted taste for delirious profusion,
even for the video clip, is a—calculated but embarrassed—response to
the aporias of tact.) What precedes already had only a tangential relation
to the work and the corpus of Nancy. Therefore:

Tangent II.
As I had nothing to teach him, of course, and nothing to make known
to him, nothing new that I could suggest to the thinking of someone,
that is, Jean-Luc Nancy, whom I hold to be one of those thinkers in
whose proximity it is always better to hold one's tongue and lend an
ear, I wanted, without telling him anything, at least to touch him. But
not without tact, from a respectful distance. Or, if it was still necessary
to tell him something, that it be a sort of secret which, without teaching
him anything, without bringing anything to his awareness, especially
not the truth, would have had as effect to touch him. But with tact.
 Le toucher 129
In short, to share with him, but to share nothing, a question of tact,
to partake with him, in this taking-part, something that touches him.
Without bothering him, without importuning him with my demonstra-
tions of admiring friendship, almost imperceptibly, intangibly. I sense
but I still do not know what touch/to touch him [le toucher] means. Of
course, I cannot share with him and share this, touch, without touch-
ing upon touch, hence on the question or the demand of touch which
themselves ought to touch pertinently on the theme, that is, on the sense
of touch. How is one to touch upon the sense of touch? Must not the
sense of touch touch us even before we touch it, or perhaps, if it does
not anticipate us in this fashion, then at the very moment at which we
touch it, as if the very idea of simultaneity was born for the first time in
contact with the contact between two points of contact? Tangentially?
f7 faudrait pouvoir le toucher. From now on, we will let this formula
float between its two senses: Once would have to be able to touch him,
and one would have to have the power of touch, to be capable of touch,
to have the potential of this very singular sense that is called touch.
Potential [en puissance] in the double sense of the force of power and
of the indefinitely reserved virtuality, in retreat, of the dynamis. We will
leave this indecision open because what I would like to attain—him, if
you like—is this possibility, touch/to touch him, all the while meditating
with him, simultaneously, on what touch/to touch him 'is' or what it
'does'. Would there be synchrony, and in general some syn-, therefore
even an idea of presence, presentation, and the auto-presentation of
presence, if we could not touch it, if we were not capable of this very
thing, touch/to touch it} He said in the passage just cited: to present is
to make sensible, and sensibility equals 'touching the limit'. What does
this mean?
Pouvoir le toucher. Touch/to touch it(him): to be capable of it, to have
the potential or power. Not simply to touch this or that, for example
him, but to be capable of that very thing, touch, to touch it. To be
capable of touch, thus simultaneously of that contact without which,
hypothetically, the very idea of the simul would never have been born
in us, between us. (I am dreaming of a demonstration which would
translate in this fashion the Berkeleyan logic—oh marvelous Berkeley,
the indisuputable one!—there where it links the privilege of touch, let us
say the privilege of the aptic with regard to the optic, to the grounding
in God, in the language that God speaks to us, of the language among us
and of the institution of signs and knowledge, of everything that resists
doubt and makes of idealism something other than a skepticism. Here
one would have to convoke once again the whole theory of those born
130 Paragraph
blind and operated on in the eighteenth-century, their observers and their
philosophers: Cheselden and Molyneux and Diderot. .) .

But how can one still say anything that does not in advance get
surrounded, invested, pre-occupied by all the historical figures of this
rhetorical, logical, hermeneutic circle?
This question—one, singular, acute—nevertheless belongs to a enor-
mous family (resemblances, common traits, genetic variations and
mutations, elementary laws of kinship). Very old, even archaic since
it has given rise over twenty-five centuries to an enormous philosophi-
cal literature that we cannot even skim over here. Aristotle, Suarez,
Berkeley (yes, especially the sublime Berkeley), Kant, Hegel, Comte,
Merleau-Ponty are only its great figures and great names. All the same,
the question of touch still seems to be unheard-of. I have known for a
long time that if there is one work of thinking which responds today
to this single and multiple, traditional and still virgin question, that
responds in act, an act of language and of reflection, it is indeed Nancy's,
even if this work is not burdened with all the references that I have just
evoked.5 I have known this for a long time, although upon searching
through, perhaps too quickly, a number of his first works (roughly
until the middle of the 80s), including, therefore, oddly enough, in
L'experience de la liberte, neither the theme nor the figure of touch lays
siege to, invades, or invests his discourse. One has to specify—and this
is not just any difficulty among others—the theme and the figure. For if
the sense of touch is this theme he speaks of and thematizes (to an even
greater extent, and even at the moment in which I write, which makes
my task difficult), there are also, before or beyond this object of thought
or of discourse, beyond what is called touch, which he does treat, all of
these figural, apparently non-thematic operators through which, thanks
to which, playing constantly with them (as I am doing here), Nancy will
have said touch and touched on touch. Two examples, which I choose
almost at random from my index (at the end of each
volume I prepared an index for myself, under the heading 'touch', for
Nancy's corpus; and an index is a certain order that obeys the finger
and the eye. Why is it that such an index, of which I will be able to
pursue only a very few entries, cannot be exhaustive even when one will
have read from end to end, and several times, as one must do, the whole
collection of works? That is perhaps what these two examples are going
to begin to demonstrate).
1. The first example touches upon a figural manner of making use of
the tactile schema. It is an example of 'touch' in Nancy's language, or
more precisely, an example of the manner in which Nancy touches on or
 Le toucher 131
tampers with language and what touches on language, in language and
for language. The heart is never far away, bis heart, first of all, which I do
not want to avoid mentioning. The heart is one of those interior surfaces
of the body that, in principle, unless one performs open-heart surgery
on oneself, no 'self-touching' can ever reach: absolute intimacy of the
limitless secret, no external border, absolute secret, secret for oneself
of an untouchable self-interiority, secret of that which symbolizes the
origin of life, within the body, by its displacement of it (metabole of the
blood). And yet, nothing appears at least to be more auto-affective than
the heart. Now, so many of Nancy's texts have touched upon the heart in
the last few years (this deserves another study that would intersect with
the present one6). Here then is one of the first examples I noted when I
referred, several years ago, to 'L'insacrifiable' (in Une pensee finie) in a
seminar. Nancy analyzes that very singular denial whereby Western sac-
rifice is constituted, from the Phaedo to Hegel and to Bataille. According
to this analysis, it would be a matter of the spiritualization, which is
also a dialectization, of sacrifice, its sublation in auto-sacrifice or in the
sacrifice of sacrifice. By denying itself, by denying in itself an ancient
sacrifice, it covers over an infinite process of negativity with the
name of sacrifice, which is sacred or sacralizing. In so doing, it installs
in its heart—'at the heart', says Nancy, at the 'heart of this process'—the
sacrificial destruction that it claims to go beyond or abandon. It repeats,
one could say, the 'ancient' sacrifice. The heart is not only the insensitive
figure of the center or of secret interiority; it is the sensible heart, the
rhythm, respiration, and beating of the blood, the bloody heart or the
bleeding heart, an uncircumcised heart (and further on Nancy evokes
the 'circumcision' of the heart7): 'This double operation convokes at
its center, simultaneously, a painful ambiguity, the infinite efficacity of
dialectical negativity, and the bloody heart of the sacrifice'. There then
follows, in the next sentence, two instances of the word 'touch'. They
would deserve an infinite analysis, on the scale of that upon which they
touch, namely, precisely, a process of infinitization:
To touch upon this denial, or to put it succinctly this manipulation, is to touch
upon this simultaneity, and it is to be obliged to wonder if dialectical negativ-
ity effaces the blood or whether the blood, on the contrary, must inevitably
flow into it. {PF, 84)
In this case, one may easily say that it is a question of a manner of speak-
ing, of some kind of trope. Just try to find someone who has ever literally
'touched' upon a denial. Nancy seems to be drawing on the fund of an
old rhetoric that says 'to touch' for 'to concern', 'to aim', 'to think', 'to
132 Paragraph
refer to', 'to speak of, 'to take as its object', 'to thematize' precisely, and
so forth. But because, in the same sentence, one sees first the hands of
'manipulation' (another figure but more strictly determinate), next the
'blood' rise up or take shape, the literality of 'touch' thereby becomes
more sensible, more proximate, less conventional. One begins to ask
oneself: Whence comes and what comes as the authorizing instance of
this figure of 'touch'? Why does one say 'to touch' for 'to speak of, 'to
concern', 'to aim', 'to refer to' in general, and so forth? Is it because
touch, as Aristotle said, is not a 'unique sense'? More and more, Nancy
plays this game—the most serious game there is—which consists in
using, as if there were not the slightest problem, this common and
ancestral figure of tactile language in order to draw our attention to
'touch' itself and to this invasion that, little by little, prevents us from
distinguishing between the thematic meaning and the operative function,
between the proper or literal sense of this sense and all its tropic turns
of phrase. When this non-distinction becomes troubling, one can no
longer avoid eyeing this double writing. Is it touching upon something
or is it touching upon touching itself, there where, having more or less

surreptitiously drawn our attention to the irreducible figure of touching,

this writing makes us put our finger on language, touching itself by
touching us and making us notice what is going on with touching, to
be sure in a manner that is as obscure as it is aporetic, but above all in a
touching manner to the point where all affect, all desire, all fascination,
all experience of the other seems to be involved?
2. I find the second example a little earlier in the same text. One
must recall that pertinence is, literally, etymologically, the quality of that
which touches, of what is important, of what counts (pertinet) because
it touches, concerns, refers to, or stands as it should in relation to that
which is necessary, adjusts itself to the contact, and so forth. It is said,
figuratively, about discourse or thought. Now, here is what one may
read in parentheses, when Nancy seems to be dreaming (he is right to
dream and I want to dream along with him), about a pertinent kiss, about
being pertinent at last as regards the kiss (the stubborn impertinence of
Nancy, the impertinence I like and admire the most, is that, at the heart
of ecstasy, of offering, of ravishment, of the abandon of self to the other,
even of sacrifice, he resolutely recalls—he is a resolute man—that one
must not renounce pertinence, one must not renounce knowing and say-
ing pertinently what is necessary on this subject to 'safeguard reason':
a whole politics of the Enlightenment to come, never renounce either

philosophy, or knowledge, or thought, and take the time to add, even

if in parentheses: '. But I cannot linger on this here'):
. .
 Le toucher 133
(However, here add this remark: no doubt the non-pertinent char-
one must
acter of idea of sacrifice, when confronted with non-Western practices,
our
does not stand out clearly against many other impertinences, indeed against a
general impertinence. Outside the West, we do not know, in a certain manner,
what 'to eat', 'to kiss', or 'to command' mean But I cannot linger on this
....

here.) (PF, 68)

The impertinence, here, would consist in not touching, in not knowing
how to touch, attain, accede (for example) to those experiences of
touching called eating,8 or kissing (and no doubt as well, although
less directly, commanding) outside one's own home, here outside our
West (presuming that one can speak calmly of our West). Here again, the
operative schema crosses the network of thematic figures. This crossing
is troubling, it causes one to think, more precisely to reflect on touch.
And this is confirmed when, along the way, one takes or holds the
mouth,9 eating, and kissing to be privileged places of an auto-affection
for which 'self-touching' seems to deliver up the transcendental model.
This auto-affection (beginning with the suction of the nurseling who
presses its own lips together when the breast is taken away) goes from
the mouth and the tongue to the hearing-oneself-speak of voice in the
sharing of voices.
Here then, first of all, is a deduction of the kiss and of a 'self-touching'
whose grammatical reflexivity we will allow, as, I assume, he does, to
oscillate from one to the other (touching oneself or touching each other?
Is that really something else? How to say it? Is it the object of a possible
knowledge?) The kiss, 'the imperative of kissing', is deduced, if one
...

can believe the author of L'imperatif categorique, from a law of sex or

from 'sex as law' but finally (I tend to think that this is a manner of
...

speaking, pedagogy,
a a rhetoric meant for those who think of nothing
else [ne pensent qu'a qa}; as for me, I would just as well deduce 'sex
as law' from the aporias of the 'self-touching', but this little matters;
besides, he will indeed go on to say that the 'libido' does not suffice to
account for it, nor does some zoo-anthropology):

,.. finally, sex as law, this imperative of touching, kissing, which neither the
drive of the species nor even the 'libido' can account for. For this impera-
tive has no object, neither large nor small, neither self nor child, but only the
pleasure/pain of a 'se//"-touching' [un 'se-toucher'] [Corpus, 36; I provisionally
interrupt the quotation here, at the moment an important parenthesis is going
to be opened—concerning precisely an interruption that is important to me).

,.. / had to start over again when I noticed it: not only had his corpus
134 Paragraph
touched on everything that touches on touch, and continued to do so in
an ever-expanding fashion, he himself, better than anyone else, giving
the reason for this (how so? I am coming to that), but he had been
the first to put his finger on what, in his corpus and in the middle of
his signature, touched itself in the self-touching of touching. Immense
and infinite reflexivity. The generalization and the radicalization that he
engages in may seem to repeat themselves, in the most questioning and
'deepening' sense of the term.
Tangent III.
The law of 'self-touching' therefore: this fatal imperative produces and
interrupts, at the same time, all the syntaxes of narcissism. Let us reread
what could have been the most economic point of departure, namely
a certain page from Une pensee finie that brings together the most

explicit and formalizing of Nancy's remarks—on, let us say, touch.

He elaborates on all the registers (operative and thematic, if, for con-
venience, we are still distinguishing there where the distinction is no
longer strictly pertinent), he touches on all the senses, he integrates the
infinite dimension of the 'self-touching' that touches on everything, on
the tangent, the tangible, and the intangible, he transcendentalizes or
ontologizes everything that amounts to 'touching'. And he even names,
anticipating thereby my dream about eyes, the kiss of the eyes, the scene
of eyes touching themselves/each other. Yes, talking about us in fact, he
names the place 'where vision touches on touch', on 'orbital touch' and
on the 'eye'. Let us scan a page:

To touch on language: to touch on the trace, to touch on its effacement. To

touch on what moves and vibrates in the 'open mouth, the concealed center,
the elliptical return'. To touch on ellipsis itself—and to touch on the ellipsis
inasmuch as it touches, as the orbit touches on the extreme limits of a cosmo-
logical or ocular system. Strange orbital touch: on the eye, language, and the
world. . .Discernment is there where vision touches on touch. It is the limit
.

of vision—and the limit of touch. To discern is to see what differs by touching

itself. To see the center differing/deferring (itself): ellipsis. (PF, 293 ['ellipse',
tiens! elle + lips; elle + ipse])

But after the 'limit of touch', here comes non-limitation itself,

right
the transcendental ontologization of this sense: touch as self-touching.
Touch, as self-touching, is to be sure touch, but also touch plus every
other sense (whence the dizziness of the rhetorical turns of phrase).
Touch, as self-touching, is the being of every sense in general, the
 Le toucher 135
being-sense of essence, the condition of possibility of sensibility in
general, the very form of time and space, and so forth. But, first of
all, the will, the essence of the will, and therefore every metaphysics
of the will (perhaps from Descartes to Kant or even to Nietzsche) will
have been brought back to touch. Perhaps reduced to touch: aptico-
transcendental reduction. A strange tautology that includes touch in the
will, an analytic definition of the will that uncovers in it touch through
simple explicitation. To will is to will touch, to want is to want to touch
(it). To will would be to will touch, thus to fold activity along that fold
in the passive-active auto-affection that is, in any will-to-touch, the let-
oneself-be-touched by that which, the other, one touches at will. And
what here declines or conjugates the passive activity of the will goes
equally no doubt for desire. Like the ontological and the transcendental,
the will affects itself with its other from the first contact, as soon as it
touches or one touches on touch, as soon as one wants touch, wants to
touch it, itself [des qu'on veut le toucher, lui, lui-meme]:
It is the system again, it is the will of the system (but what is will? Who knows,
or believes he knows? Does not the will differ/defer in its essence?) It is the
will to touch: that hands should touch, through the book and by the book.
That its hands touch, attaining nothing but its skin, its parchment. That our
hands touch by means of the skin placed between them, always, but that our
hands touch. To touch the self, to be touched right on the self, outside the self,
without anything appropriating itself. That is writing, and love, and sense.
Sense is touch
. .
(Ibid.)
.

(No doubt one is meant to understand this 'is' in italics as a sort

of transitive whose active, aptic movement, touches: to be means to
touch and to touch touch: sense (is), that is, touches touch, touch is
(touches) touch: thus will or desire (cf. the preceding); touch touches
on everything, it is therefore not a category among others, whence its
transcendental-ontologization, but also that which carries it off beyond
itself, just as writing [I'ecrit] exports itself into the exscripted, that other
conceptual invention of Nancy's.)
Sense is touch. The 'transcendental' (or the 'ontological') of sense is touch:
obscure, impure, untouchable touch (Ibid.)
. . .

If touch is the sense of all the senses, that is, of all sensitive or sensible
presentation, of all that makes sense by presenting itself thus, one only
writes for touch/one only writes to touch on it (in view of it, on it, in its
favor, and so forth) by inscribing that limit on which, as we have just
136 Paragraph
begun to sense, stands the self-touching of any contact. Therefore this
writing is never appropriate or appropriated, no more than it appropri-
ates anything to itself (To touch the self, to be touched right on the self,
outside the self, without anything appropriating itself. That is writing,
and love, and sense'). Nancy calls this the 'exscripted' and one may fol-
low the consistent elaboration of this concept in all his latest work.10
Touching with tact upon the thinking of touch, but also hugging it,
body and soul, in one's arms [a bras le corps], such thinking must at the
same time offer itself and expose itself—to letting itself be touched. For
to touch, so one believes, is, touching what one touches, to let oneself
be touched by the touched, by the touch of the thing, whether objective
or not, or by the flesh that one touches and that then becomes touching
as well as touched. This is not true for all the other senses: one may, to
be sure, let oneself be 'touched' as well by what one hears or sees, but
not necessarily heard or seen by what one hears or sees, whence the
initial privilege of what is called touch.
To touch, so one believes, amounts therefore to letting oneself be
touched by what one touches and is thus to touch, with pertinence,
upon touch, in a manner that is at once touching and touched. Now,
Nancy will have said this better than anyone. He will have said it as
did others before him, to be sure, but here for starters (finally, since I
have the feeling that I cannot get started and that I am doing nothing
other than telling, out of order, the story11 of what I would have liked
to write in order to reach him, precisely [apte]), he will have also said it
otherwise, for example otherwise than did Merleau-Ponty or Maldiney.
Merleau-Ponty: 'To touch is to touch oneself [se toucher]'. Maldiney:
'In touching things we in fact touch ourselves with them, we are at once
touching and touched'. Jean-Louis Chretien cites them in an article I have
just come across12 whose wealth of information is to be faulted on only
one score: it says nothing or knows nothing of Nancy's immense work. I
call this a fault even though it may offer the excuse of sharing this serious
neglect, alas, with too many of our contemporaries. But I wager that this
will not last.
In what way does Nancy also say something other than the tradition
up to Merleau-Ponty and Maldiney? Well, precisely inasmuch as he says
something other. He says, precisely, the other, the other who anticipates
and inter-venes [pre-vient et inter-vient] at the heart of the presence-to-
self of the 'self-touching'. And this other is not enunciated (not written,
not exscripted) by Nancy in the third person of a constative; he addresses
himself to 'you', he apostrophizes the second person at the heart of a
philosophical discourse on the heart. Thus he writes in his Corpus (and
 Le toucher 137
I pick up the preceding quotation where I had interrupted it):
For this imperative has no object, neither large nor small, neither self nor child,
but only the pleasure/pain of a se/^-touching. (Or yet again: of a remaining-self,
or a becoming-self without returning to self. To take pleasure \Jouir] is at the
heart of the dialectic a diastole without systole: this heart is the body.)
To self-touch you (and not 'oneself') [Se toucher toi (et non 'soi')]—or again,
identically, to self-touch skin (and not 'oneself'): such is the thinking that the
body always forces to go further, always too far. In truth, it is thought itself that
forces itself in this way, that dislocates itself: for all the weight, all the gravity of
thought—which is itself a weighing—, in the end goes toward nothing else than
to consenting to the body. (Exasperated consent.) (C, 36)

How is one to gauge the full consequence of this 'toi', of 'toi', yours,
when the 'self-touching' offers its reflexivity to your effraction without
all the same renouncing it, without yielding or ceding in its relation to
self? A certain number of precautions or protocols are necessary.
1. One must first of all speak of reflexivity and not specularity since
the contact (the self-touching and the self-touching-you13 of the two
borders) does not submit to the paradigm of sight or the mirror,
of the speculum. Here, on the contrary, and this is the ontologi-
cal transcendentality of the aptic, sight is a touching. Our question
remains: what happens when our eyes touch? And do they not touch
as soon as our looks cross, hesitating infinitely between the relation to
the visible eye (which it is therefore possible to touch) and the seeing eye
(untouchable)?
2. The self-touching-you is neither one (monadic), a single one, a
unique self-touching-oneself, nor the double, symmetrical, and recipro-
cal relation of a self-touching-one-another whose impersonal law could
be uttered in the third person. The dissymmetry (and the fact that it
is double does not at all make it symmetrical) opens onto the inacces-
sible transcendence of a you, of you, who do(es) not let it(your)self,
is(are) obliged, owe(s) it first of all to desire, not to let itself ever
be reappropriated in the mastering reflexivity of the self, of the rela-
tion to self of whatever touches itself and accedes to self in the
self-touching. This latter 'you' will never let itself be declined in a
first or third person (singular or plural); it must remain the touchable
(that is, untouchable) pole of a vocative or of an apostrophizing address.
This is not said, or not said in this way (in disrespect of grammar out
of respect for the other) in Merleau-Ponty's or Maldiney's utterances.
But the fact that it is not said in this way does not mean that it
remains unthought. It should not prevent us from reading it there
138 Paragraph
while putting something of our own into it.
3. This effraction of the other, of what cannot return to self, is the con-
dition of desire; it is the heart. The thinker of the syncope is also a thinker
of the diastole, of the gap or dilation without return, of this other heart,
at the heart of which the diastolic difference or diastema does not let itself
be gathered up or contracted in the relation to self, in the syn- of any sys-
tole. This thinking of dilation without return to self, without exchange,
of a heart without circulation is the thinking of an absolute generosity,
of a generosity more generous than generosity itself, which, as its name
indicates, would still be genial and too natural. (Ellipsis of a long
discourse on Descartes and Nancy: their respective concepts of the circu-
lation of blood and of generosity; reread from this perspective Ego sum,
a great book; and L'experience de la liberte which gives one to think a

generosity of non-subjective freedom, 'a surprising generosity of being'

[155].) The heart of this other heart cannot be touched, does not touch
itself: it self-touches you. It can only touch itself/be touched by your
eyes. And this other heart, mine, is not an organ that can be cut out of
my body ('this heart is the body', he says). But it is also not something
else; it is not an inherited figure (from the Bible, for example) which
means the center, life, the psyche, pneuma, spirit, inferiority, feeling,
love. It is the body, it is the heart insofar as it is yours belonging to
me [m'appartient a toi], the other heart, the heart of the other, there
where the (inherited) 'spiritual' figure touches on this heart here, my
body, in my body, and can no longer be dissociated from it. In order
for there to be this heart, this good heart, the possibility of the bad heart
must remain forever open. A heart would not be good unless it could
be other, bad, and therefore unless it could be changed. It is necessary
to know how, when the time comes, to change hearts. This is how I
would translate, going very quickly, the analysis in L'experience de la
liberte of malignancy, diabolical wickedness, and radical evil, in short
what Kant calls the 'bad heart' (EL, 161).
4. At stake is the pleasure taken in pleasure \jouir de la jouissance].
What pleases us when our eyes touch? That is what I was finally ask-
ing you. Nancy's response: 'To take pleasure \Jouir] is at the heart of
the dialectic a diastole without systole'. The heart of this other dialectic
(diastole without systole), namely the pleasure of taking pleasure, is the
heart itself, namely this other heart that self-touches you, that belongs
to you, that gives pleasure only there where pleasure is made all the
more intense by not returning to me, by returning to me without return-

ing to me, there where I self-touch you. The ecstatic and aptic without
of the 'without returning to self is what interrupts the circulation in
 Le toucher 139
this heart, this other heart, which is to say also what makes it beat with
a beating that is no longer, has never been the regular alternation of sys-
tole and diastole. What interrupts circulation is what makes the heart
beat and it's you, the you of self-touching-you.
Let us note that 'et toi', 'and you' are the last words of his Corpus.
5. Of course, none of this takes place, and first of all this interruption
(diastole without systole), except by risking death at every moment. This
other heart self-touches you only to be exposed to death. We are here at
the heart of a finite thinking. The heart is always of a finite thinking. It
thinks, for the heart is the place of thinking and not only the place of
feeling, love, desire; in it a finite thinking is thought. You are/is also my
death. You, you keep it for me, you keep me from it always a little,
from death (keep me from it still a little longer, if you please, just a little
longer, keep me from it as much as possible, as well as possible, as long
as possible).
6. One has to understand what is being thought about finitude in
this extraordinary invention of a grammar or a syntactic anomaly ('Se
toucher toi" and not 'se toucher so? or even 'se toucher lui, elle ou
l'autre\ that is, 'to self-touch you' and not 'to touch oneself or even
'to touch him, her, or the other'): it exscripts, it makes writing come
out of itself by marking that you, here, will never be a simple mediation
in a reappropriating movement of self-presence. You, metronome of my
heteronomy, you will always resist that which, in my 'self-touching',
could dream of the reflexive or specular autonomy of self-presence (be
it that of the Dasein) or of self-consciousness, absolute knowledge. The
interruption of the dialectic (which does not exclude the dialectic, no
more than Kierkegaard ever did at the height of his altercation with

Hegel: and 'taking pleasure' is at the heart of the dialectic, says Nancy)
is you, when I self-touch you. That is why I love you, and sometimes
so painfully, at the heart of pleasure itself. And if I insist here on this
interruption of that reflexivity which is an absolute specularity at the
heart of the 'self-touching', it is because only touch (contact, caress,
kiss) can, as 'self-touching-you', interrupt the mirror reflection in its
visual—ocular or optical—dimension. That is why we began with the
kiss of the eyes: the meeting of looks, eyes that see themselves in the
eyes of the other should be an example of the 'self-touching-you' and
be part of tactile experience; in short, they should involve skin—a caress
or a kiss, eyes kissed by eyes—if desire or love passed through them
(but when we say love, we must never exclude from it, of course, that
modality called hate, jealousy, death dealt to the other, to you, at the
very moment in which I ask 'keep me a little from death'). If one
140 Paragraph
followed through all the consequences of this hyper-transcendental-
ontologization of tact (and I underscore tact, and I say tact rather than
touch), one would have to say of speech in general what has just been said
of sight: only the 'self-touching-you' (and not 'oneself') can interrupt
the reappropriation or the absolute reflection of self-presence (pure life
or pure death: it is always, infinitely, the same thing). When I speak to

you, I touch you, and you touch me when I hear you, from however
distant it comes to me, and even if it is by telephone or by letter. But
of course, in order for me to be touched in this way by you, I have to
be able to touch myself. In the 'self-touching-you', the 'self is as indis-
pensable as you. A being incapable of touching itself could not bend
itself that which absolutely unfolds it, to the totally other who, as
to
totally other/like all others [comme tout autre], inhabits my heart as a
stranger. It is necessary to love oneself/each other [II faut s'aimer], says
every 'I love you', and without this (impossible) auto-affection, with-
out the reflected experience of impossible auto-affection, without the
ordeal of the possibility of this impossibility, there would be no love.14
Whence the all-powerful logic of narcissism: not as experience of the
gaze, but as the painfully ironic discourse of the confession that mimics
the appropriation of the unappropriable, you, my Echo, when you ruse,
as do I, with the divine interdiction, when you deceive it in order to

speak in your own name and to declare untranslatably your love while
pretending to repeat the end of my sentences. As I have done at length
elsewhere, I could invoke here Ovid or Novalis, but I will choose the
latter because my theme is the kiss from you/of you:

One ought never to confess one's love. The secret of this confession is the
vivifying principle of the only true and eternal love. The first kiss in this com-
prehension is the principle of philosophy—the origin of a new world—the
beginning of an absolute era—the act that accomplishes an alliance with self
[Selbstbund] that grows endlessly. Who would not like a philosophy whose
kernel is a first kiss?15

After which, one must hasten to specify:

a. The principle of philosophy is not philosophy. The latter, which
comes after its principle, might therefore consist in no more than a fren-
zied forgetting of the first kiss.
b. This latter, as auto-hetero-affection, inaugurates all experience, in
particular speech and the declaration of love; it does not bring closer
only lips, my two lips to the two lips and to the tongue of the other, but
everything of the body that lets itself be touched in this way by auto-
 Letoucher 141
hetero-affection: for example, our eyes.
c. Novalis says elsewhere: 'The authentic philosophical act [echte

philosophiscke Akt] is suicide [Selbstdtung]; that is the real beginning

of all philosophy, that is what responds to the needs of the philosophical
disciple [des philosophiscben Jiingers], and only this act corresponds to
all the conditions and characteristics of transcendent action [or transcen-
dental: der transcendenten HandlungY.16 What remains to be thought
together is the first kiss and suicide, the principle and the act of authentic
philosophy, their youth and their discipline, the act and the action. The
impossible task of a general aptology.
7. This hyper-transcendental-ontologization of tact (and not of
touch) must remain paradoxical: it exscribes itself instead of inscrib-
ing or writing itself. For that which touches on it or that about which
one speaks in speaking of touch is also the intangible. To touch, in tact,
is to touch without touching that which does not let itself be touched:
to embrace eyes, in a word (or in several words, and the word always
brings to your ear the modest reserve of a kiss on the mouth). To touch
as tact is, thanks to you, because of you, to break with immediacy, with
the immediate given associated with touch and on which all bets are
always placed, as on self-presence, by transcendental idealism (Kantian
or Husserlian intuitionism) or by ontology, the thinking of the presence
of being or of being-there as such in its Being.
8. I have just gone too quickly. In order to demonstrate that the great
thinker of touch is interested, as is finally only right, in nothing but the
intangible—and this is not something else—one would have to weigh
here, to weigh exactly17 what he says about the relation between think-
ing and weighing. One would have to read and meditate here step by
step Le poids d'une pensee and in particular its opening, where Nancy
tells us what to think about the fact that 'Etymology relates pensee to
pesee, thinking to weighing' (PP, 3). Let us first recall that this effect
of etymology cannot be presented, therefore touched, [ne peut . se
. .

toucher], except on the tip of the tongue of certain tongues and risks
becoming unintelligible, in truth intangible in translation. But that is
what is in question here, as we shall see, in other words, the loss of the
idiom and the expropriation of the proper. I propose to define as weight
that which, in touch, is marked as tangible by the opposed resistance (as
the great Berkeley had already seen): the place of alterity or absolute
inappropriability (limit, weight, thus finitude, and so forth). Unable to
follow here this great text step by step and word by word, as one never-
theless should, I will go quickly to the place of confession, that place
of a thinking of touch as thinking of the untouchable or intangible, the
142 Paragraph
very place of what happens, as we were saying at the beginning, when
one touches on, tampers with the limit: there the untouchable becomes
tangible, it presents itself as inaccessible to tact, through tact: inapt to
the aptic. The confession, then, because this contradictory experience
of tact (touch without contact) can only be recognized in the form of a
paradoxical confession. In it, one recognizes that one cannot do or say
or think what one should there where nevertheless, recognizing it, one
transgresses not only the fault but the confession (the confession does
not confess or tell the fault; it says it, it commits it by the fact of saying
it; the confession is the fault, it commits the transgression that does not
take place before it and that it merely feigns to tell in the past):

Let us rather confess what everyone very well knows: thinking can never grasp
weighing; it can propose a measure [does it not then 'grasp' it and thus touch
it, test it? How to measure a weighing otherwise than by weighing, feeling
the weight, thus by letting be weighed? And what difference is there between
weighing and thinking once thought is not limited to subjective representa-
tion (Hegelian argument)?], but it cannot itself test the weight in its hands
[soupeser]. Nor can weighing touch thought; it can indicate a few grams of
muscles and neurons, but it cannot register the infinite leap of which they are
the site. (And what is a leap, if thinking is a leap? What kind of tearing free
from weightiness? What counter-weight?) Against these massive and obvious
facts, the etymologist's desire would be to have us accede, at least by reason
of a trace deposited in language, to a weighty property of thought, one which
would be identical to a thinking property of the weighty thing . .
(PP, 2).
.

Before coming back to the extraordinary density of this paragraph

(but is density of the order of the thinkable or the weighable?), I
will say a word about what I would have liked to do but will not
do: to find the law of the relation between the semantics of Denken-
Danken-Gedachtnis (thinking-thanking-recalling, and so on) and that
of penser-peser-repenser, and so forth. Not as that of a double, hetero-
geneous filiation, with the infinite complications that they would import
into what touches on language and thought, but there where what we
are talking about here involves both semantics at the same time (to

touch, weigh, think, give, thank, memory without memory, gift without
debt, and so forth—but let us leave off here with this immense task,
however necessary it may be). The infinite leap that separates thinking
from weighing, at the very place where they remain inseparable (at least
insofar as thought is not limited to representation nor the body to the
objectivity of neurons), is but the leap, in the very experience of touching,
between the touchable and the touchable, at the limit, therefore, between
 Letoucher 143
the touchable and itself as untouchable limit. It is touching that touches
on the limit, its own limit, that is to say, on the untouchable whose
border it touches. To touch on the limit is not, for contact, just any
experience among others or a particular figure: one never touches except
by touching a limit at the limit. This is a truism that one finds at work
in any profound thinking of the limit (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel) as well as
in locutions of the doxa (such as the one that Nancy cites, for example
on the subject of the lexicon of finitude when it enters 'current usage':

'by that one understands that humanity appears to touch on, to reach
some limits' [PP, 10]. To touch is to touch a border, however deeply one

may penetrate,18 and it is thus to touch by approaching indefinitely the

inaccessible of whatever remains beyond the border, on the other side.
To underscore this impossible but inevitable inclusion of the outside
in the inside, of the untouchable in the touchable, and to recall that a
consistent thinking about touch can only be a thinking of the intangible
(thus of tact), I could find support in what Nancy himself says about
experience and limit on the same page. In the next paragraph, he in fact
writes:
But the experience remains a limit, as does all experience that deserves that
name. It .takes place, but it does not take place as the appropriation of what it

represents: I no more accede to the weight of thought than I do to the thinking

of weight. (PP, 2)

Just as, he said, 'Sense is touch. The "transcendental" (or the "onto-
logical") of sense is touch', so, and for the same reasons, experience
is touch, there where it touches its limits. One could conclude from
this—at the risk of going against the reading that many have done of
Nancy's work, beginning with Nancy himself—that what we have here
is anirreducible thinking of transcendence. When one touches on the
limit of self-touching-you, is there still any reason to decide between
transcendence or immanence? Come now, show some tact. Let's leave
it be.
9. Where it divides and ex-appropriates touch into tact, this
(internal/external) limit inscribes (ex-scribes) therefore the untouchable-
intangible in contact. What one does not touch is that which one touches
and it is part of what is called touch. To touch, to touch him/it, is possible
only by not touching. One thus touches either upon the intangible or the
untouchable, depending on whether one accentuates the cannot-touch
or the must-not-touch. Between the intangible and the untouchable, the
difference of tact. One might also call it modesty or decency [pudeur].
Clever, renouncing without renouncing, it/she [elle, that is, pudeur;
144 Paragraph
grammatically feminine] unfolds its/her veils infinitely, it/she confesses
inan infinite renunciation: from one law to the other (cannot/must not,
must not because it's impossible, must not because it's possible, must not
must not because it is impossible not to have to [impossible to renounce:
what is called the unconscious]). The law marks in this way the without
[sans] in sense or in existence ('insofar as it is the without essence' [PP,
3]) or insofar as it 'is the appropriation of the inappropriable' [PP, 9]). It
thus inscribes the uninscribable in inscription itself, it exscribes. The law
of exscribing, of exscription as 'the last truth of inscription' (PP, 8) finds
here at least one of its essential demonstrations. Nancy has just spoken of
'the most proper sense'. He adds right away the following which touches
on exscribing itself, there where one cannot say 'itself without making
it go out of itself:
the most proper sense, but proper on the condition of remaining inap-

propriable, and of remaining inappropriable in its appropriation. Of producing

an event and a disruption even as it inscribes itself in the register of sense. Of
exscribing this inscription—and that the exscription be inscribed-being, or
rather the true inscribing-being of inscription itself. Of having weight at the
heart of thought and in spite of thought. (PP, 11)

In spite of thought:
thought thinks only in spite of itself, or I would say,
a soncorps defendant [i.e., unwillingly]; it thinks only there where the
counter-weight of the other weighs enough so that it begins to think,
that is, in spite of itself, when it touches or lets itself be touched against
its will. That is why it will never think, it will never have begun to think
by itself. That is what it is necessary to think of thought, to weigh of
weight. What is necessary, in other words, what must pass by the ordeal
of the in spite of, in the inappropriable, thus the untouchable of the
tangible itself. In what we are calling here tact. This is the superlative
exactitude we were speaking of earlier: 'The weight of a thinking is very
exactly the inappropriability of appropriation, or the impropriety of the
proper (proper to the proper itself, absolutely)' (PP, 9).
At the internal/external limit of touch, such an exscription of tact, let
us note in passing, accounts for all the paradoxical chiasms that have
affected the evaluation of touch. In order to explore systematically all
its combinations (which we will not be able to do here), one would have
to integrate, besides this logic of the limit (what lets itself be touched
does so on its border and thus does not let itself be reached or attained
even as it exposes the untouchable itself, the other border of the border,
to touch), the rhetoric (which is more than a rhetoric) that, with each
figure, crosses the limits between the sensible and the intelligible, the
 Le toucher 145
material and the spiritual—the carnal of the 'literal body' finding itself
by definition on both sides of the limit.19

Tangent IV (a supplementary touch or past retouching, long ago left stalled

on my computer, that is, in a place where the relation between thought, weight,
language, and digital touch will have undergone in the last ten years an essen-
tial mutation of ex-scribing. A description would be necessary of the surfaces,
the volumes, and the limits of this new magic writing pad which exscription
touches on in another way, from the keyboard to the memory of a disk said
to be 'hard').

What to give him? A kiss? On the eyes? It should remain invisible to any
third party.
A secretoffering, in sum, I promised myself (how can one promise
oneself to give?), one which would touch on the multiple question of
touch in a mode at once necessary and contingent (what is touching?
what does 'touching' mean? is there an essence of touching? is it say able,
intelligible, sensible, tangible, or not? who or what touches what or
whom? how can one remove it from its vast tradition even as the latter
is never forgotten?).
So my offering should touch friend, I said to myself, even as it
my
touched on this thematic, this onto-logic, this rhetoric or poetics of
touch in a manner that would be at once necessary and contingent.
Necessary, that is to say, pertinent, but then pertinence itself, the
pertinere of pertinence is already a figure of the tactile. Is pertinent
(pertinet) whatever attains its object by touching it in a necessary and
appropriate (apte) fashion. A pertinence does not fail to touch or to hit
the object (which is both risky and cocky ['I know what I'm talking
about!'], arrogant impolite, impertinent). Contingent as well because
I, myself, a finite being, would like to touch him, Jean-Luc Nancy,
himself and no other, in his singularity, in the singularity, hie et nunc,
of his body. (I have just remembered, and this still touches me, that
at our first meeting after he had received in himself the living
heart from another, we embraced, spontaneously, in an apparently spon-
taneous double movement, apparently of an instant [why?], which we had
never done before, because of that invincible reserve or modesty

[pudeur] of old friends. My real friends always intimidate me.) But

here once again the figure of contingency (contingere) is also a figure
of contact, of tangence or the tangible. Already one has the impression
that we are always going to be at a loss for a metalanguage with which
146 Paragraph
to say anything whatever about touch, touching, orthe touchable that is.
not in advance accommodated by the skin, exscribed right on the skin.
Without even being watched over or pointed out, each word speaks in
tongues to the skin [touche un mot de la langue a la peau]. As for
this strange couple of the two tactilities, that of appropriate necessity
(pertinent) and of aleatory singularity (contingent), I will mention very
quickly, without being able to explain myself here, that this powerful,
untimely, and still unrecognized book, L'experience de la liberte, helps
us better than any other to think it, there where Nancy draws the entire

consequence from the fact that 'If philosophy has touched the limit of
the ontology of subjectivity, it is because it has been brought to this limit'
(£L,47; emphasis added).20
Therefore: how to touch him in speaking of touch, in a way that is
at once pertinent, but not without tact, and contingent, but not arbi-
trary, and first of all, in the way that he himself does so, namely, in
the way he touches on touch, without all the same imitating him or
following him? Beyond imitation or commentary, beyond simple repeti-
tion, what form of baroque contagion or imperceptible contamination
should I imagine? And how to do it in the correct (apte) fashion, by
touching it without touching it too much, while observing the limits of
decency, of duty, of politeness—of friendship?
Le toucher: I see that I have oriented myself, once again, more or
less blindly, in the direction of the untranslatable of a text that I know
will appear first in English. Like any good blind man, I have oriented
myself by touch. A long time ago, well before the publication of Cor-
pus, I recognized in his work a certain trail that I thought I was the
only, at least perhaps the first, well yes, to identify: it was, let's say, a
certain thematic of touch (oblique, constrained but discrete, insistent
but oddly kept back or kept waiting, suspended). I could specify a few
of these early markers. One of the first concerned precisely the offering
and I wanted to note it before any other because it is an offering that is
in question here. I had been intrigued, upon reading the more than sub-
lime 'Offrande sublime', by the quotation marks within which he took
up the word 'touch', as if he were keen on it, on this word, in a compul-
sive, irresistible fashion, giving in thereby to a barely avowable tempta-
tion, even as he did not touch on it, as if the word were contaminated
in advance, touching it with the quotation marks as if they were twee-
zers, confessing in this way his interest for something which it was too
early to declare, perhaps because the said thing did not answer gener-
ally nor properly (apte) to its common name and because it was neces-
sary to change the whole language, rewrite everything before one could
 Le toucher 147

properly (apte) speak and think of touching it (but note that the proper
is also what escapes from contact, from the contagious, and from con-
tamination). At that point in the text, it was a matter of explaining why,
on the very limit of the sublime, a thinking of the offering defies the
distinction between the esthetic and the ethical. A note at the bottom
of the page, probably added from one edition to the next of the same
essay: 'It defies it because it implies, along with moral determinations
(good/bad), the ethical as presentation of the fact that there is moral
praxis. Freedom gives one to see or to "touch" .' (PF, 187).
. .

To see freedom itself, to let it present itself to sensible sight is already

improbable, and here Kant remains, it seems to me, indisputable. But
to touch freedom! And to want it to present itself in flesh and blood,
is that not to suppress it on the pretext of having its hide? To touch
freedom, is that not to touch on, i.e., tamper with freedom? Is it not to
violate it [y attenter]} What, then, about morality, and politics? For this
double reason, the quotation marks were necessary, yes, or italics. (In
L'experience de la liberte, a book far too complex and novel for me to
even dare to touch on it here, he writes touched in italics: '. . .the dan-
of
ger having surreptitiously "understood" freedom, even before having
touched upon it. .' [EL,65].) And yet.
.

To touch upon 'touch' in quotation marks means perhaps that one

must correct, complete, specify what would have been insufficiently
seen—more precisely, insufficiently thought—about freedom because

only seen. In order to think, to weigh, to put freedom on trial, Nancy

wants to return to this side of sight, to that which of the body proper
exscribes itself in absolute invisibility, namely the heart. He knows that
the heart is the place where, in all senses of the term, one is invisibly
touched by the other, without any possible reappropriation.
But to conclude provisionally this first part of my essay, I would like
to show the movement by which Nancy leads us, and we must let our-
selves be guided by him, beyond or before sight, not in order to lead
us back to touch but in order to delimit the latter, in order to avoid

extending it 'too simple a credit' and to recall us to the intouchable of

touch. I will divide my conclusion in two parts.

(Well, since I formed the project to write on 'touch' according to

Nancy, in order to touch him and touch him there where he has touched
me for such a long time, now he goes and begins to develop, in texts of
his that have appeared more recently, and first of all in Corpus [but also
elsewhere, in an exchange of letters with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe21 or
in still unpublished lectures], an ambitious aptics, a thematics, even a
148 Paragraph
systematics of touch that leaves me onceagain with nothing to say.
All the more so since he has said it very well in advance, and he is
right once again, on the penultimate page of this Corpus where you'll
find everything: 'There is not "the" body; there is not "the" sense of
touch; there is not "the" res extensa. There is that there is .' This is
. .

not getting me very far. What to do? Keep quiet still? I decided I will not
give up. At least I would offer him some proof, in this way, of both my
courage and my humility by trying to touch him/it, touch, to touch him/it
there where, knowing that he is expecting it and that we are already
waiting for ourselves/each other /qu'il s'y attend and que nous nous
attendons deja/ and that he has nothing more to take or to learn from
me, I could still please him by repeating to him, in other words, what he
has already said very well himself: 'Thought self-touches, without being
itself, without returning to itself [C, 102].
One day, and I don't believe I have ever told this to him himself,
but toHelene Nancy over the telephone, I dreamed that I kissed him
on the mouth; it was not long after the transplant of his new heart,
when I had just seen him and did embrace him in fact, on the cheeks,
for the first time. What's the relation? What am I going to do with that?
Draw attention to myself once again, of course, they will say. No, I
want rather to hide something and to make a secret offering to him.
Yes, the truth is I would have liked to be capable of recounting what
was and remains, for my old heart, striking it itself, the ordeal of this
other heart that Jean-Luc Nancy was nevertheless alone in undergoing
at the bottom of his heart, his, the only one, the same.
I will speak to him so as to touch him, about what a 'kiss on the
eyes' might be [freedom given to see or to 'touch', perhaps]. Not a kiss
planted, as one says, by the lips on the eyes of the other [love, death,
benediction]. No, a kiss on the eyes as one says a kiss on the lips, a kiss
of the eyes on the eyes of the other. Is that possible?
With the exception of Novalis, there has rarely been, to my knowl-
edge, an attempt at thinking, what is called thinking, the kiss. It is
already very difficult when a mouth comes in contact with another
mouth and when lips, sometimes tongue and teeth get involved. Not
the kiss on the mouth, but the kiss on the eyes, and without being
satisfied with insipid figures, however interesting or necessary they
may be ['to embrace with one's eyes', 'to devour with one's eyes', and
so forth]? When eyes meet—intensely, infinitely, up to the point of the

abyss—when nothing in the world, not even the light, not even the
third source of a sun, can interpose itself, when I see the beloved
gaze that looks at me beyond all reflexivity, for I love it only inasmuch
 Le toucher 149
as it comes to me from the other,
is it day or is it night? Is there or is
there not contact? Is it a
caress, and can I say so otherwise than
by
means of a figure? If, as I believe and as I declare, to save time [and at
stake is time, just as quickly annulled as objective space in such a kiss],
there is no day or night possible except on the basis of the possibility
of the look and thus of the exchanged look of eyes that meet, as one
says, since one can see nothing in the world [this is the origin and the
possibility of the world which only a world can also give] without the
possibility, at least, of a reflecting surface that makes visible, be it to
Narcissus, other eyes, be it his own; if all that, then in the instant of
this kiss of the eyes, one can ask oneself whether there is already day
or night or only the announcement of their pure and simple possibil-
ity. In the kiss of the eyes, it is not yet day, it is not yet night, but day
and night are promised/promise themselves [se promettent/. I'm going
to give them to you, says one to the other. At the break of day.
I said a moment ago that philosophy had spoken little about the kiss,
and I was going to do just that. But here again, what is left for me?
Corpus does it, as I have just discovered [Nice, the night of 19 August
1992]. I who planned a year ago, well before Corpus, to constitute an
index of the concepts and lexicon of 'touch' in the work of Jean-Luc
Nancy, here I find Corpus will have said it all, anticipating me with-
out warning me. It will have said everything about the kiss [C, 36], the
caress [C, 42], tact and the intact.21)

Provisional conclusion, therefore.

Part One: Of mystery and non-belief: one must limit the credit of touch.
One has to admire the strategic assurance of the thinker—his political
sense as well. He mistrusts himself. And precisely (apte) he mistrusts
the perverse effects of the generalized aptic, even of the super-aptic.
He knows that his great transcendental-ontologization of touch can be
(in advance it will have been) reappropriated by all sorts of onto-theo-
ideologies of immediacy—except, except if the movement in 'hyper', if
the leap of an infinite upping-the-ante cuts off contact and amounts to
taking this weapon away from all suspect manipulations; even so one
must read and read carefully Nancy's overcall—and to judge by the
newspapers, the battle has not yet been won. It is not a matter just of
those sons of the earth, the literalist philistines, and thus (the Gospel
truth) sensualist-materialists; it is not a matter just of Thomas, nor even
of those odd Christians who would like to remember that Christ offers
his wounds to the touch; but so many others as well, as you will see. Do
150 Paragraph
not touch, Nancy warns in addressing the onto-theo-ideologues. Don't
touch on, tamper with touch, which moreover cannot be touched, does
not touch itself. One would have to read here the whole chapter titled
'Mystere?', of which here are the first lines:
As wehave already said, the 'touch' of this thinking—this pesenerfs that it
must be or it is nothing—does not belong to an immediacy that is anterior and
exterior to sense. It is, on the contrary, the very limit of sense—and the limit
of sense is to be taken in all senses, each of which breaks into the other . . .

But one must not therefore extend to 'touch' too simple a credit, and, most
important, one must not believe that one could touch the sense of touch, in
so far as it sets a limit on sense(s). This is a rather common tendency of
the most robust ideologies of the 'body', that is, the most crude ones (of
the type 'muscle-bound thinking' or 'sacred-heart thinking', vitalo-spiritualist
fascism—with, no doubt, its real and secret horror of bodies). (C, 40-41; I have
underscored this appeal to non-belief)

The following page, which I will not cite but which I suggest be read
closely in its extreme density, calls for another touch, beyond the
Platonic epopteia, the Vision of the Mysteries, or the consummation
of the Mystery of Sense Certainty ('see here, from out of Cybele's basket,
phalle and cephale, hoc est enim corpus meurrC [41]). To 'the mysteric
epopteia" that 'knows only one face and one vision', Nancy opposes the
concept of areality (elaborated elsewhere):

But areality cannot come out of a basket, be it that of the Mysteries—not

as the expression epopteia would have it. It is in no way to be seen: neither
as extension or pure ex-tensivity of the body, the outside-self which as such
does not make (itself/anything) visible (and which the logic of the Mystery
poses as 'unpresentable' in order to present it to its super-optic), nor insofar
as it is also, and identically, the presentable itself: the determined configura-
tion, the trait of this body here. ... To see a body is not precisely to grasp it
by a vision: sight itself becomes distended there, spaced out. the mysteric
. .

epopteia, on the other hand, knows only one face and one vision ... it is
properly and absolutely vision of death. . Medusa
. . .
(C,
.
42)

Distinguished from this medusizing 'masturbation of the eye', the move-

ment of the caress:

But clefts, holes, zones give nothing to see, reveal nothing: vision does not
penetrate, it slides along the gaps, it follows the edges. It is a touch that does
not absorb, that moves along the traits and retreats which inscribe and exscribe
 Le toucher 151
the body. Mobile, unstable caress, flying in slow motion, speeded up, freeze-
framed, seeing also by touches of the other senses, odors, tastes, tones, and even
with sounds, the senses of words (the 'out' that jouit). (Ibid.)
Part Two: 'The senses do not touch themselves!each other, there is not
"the" 'sense of touch'(C,l 04). But then, what we are talking about?
I have to hurry toward the conclusion. I skip to the end of his Corpus.
It is called, in abyme, 'Corpus'. Here I will withdraw and let you read
this page for yourself, out loud or in a lowered voice; I merely call your
attention to the negative form of a grammar that governs and opens
each of the five paragraphs (miming something like a negative theol-
ogy of touch, in truth of the corpus itself ['There is not "the" body;
there is not "the" sense of touch; there is not "the" res extensa", 'No
place outside-place for sense', 'no place for death', 'nothing, nothing
but...']). Besides these warnings in a negative form, it is the offering,
apparently, of everything and anything, that finally says what there is,
that there is, precisely, and how it is (Tt is the way .'): . .

There is that there is. . It is the way bodies are offered between themselves,
. .

it is the bringing into the world, the putting on the edge, the enhancing of the
limit and of brilliance [I'eclat; also fragment]. A body is an image offered to
other bodies, a whole corpus of images stretched from body to body: col-
ors, local shadows, fragments, areolas, half-moons, fingernails, body hair, ten-
dons, skulls, ribs, pelvises, meatuses, froths, tears, teeth, foams, clefts, blocks,
tongues, sweats, liquids, veins, pains, and joys, and me, and you.

This everything and anything of the offering, of offerings, this world,

these shared worlds, as you have noticed, only feign an empirical accu-
mulation. It is apparently headlong [a corps perdu] contagion, general
contamination.23 But all the rest is exactly calculated. First of all, in
the generous profusion, among all the glorified gifts, there is 'limit' and
'edge' which are not nothing because they make possible any gift what-
soever, if there is any. Next, all the words, which are carefully chosen
and the list of which has to stop somewhere (edge and limit of the et
Cetera), are in the plural. Except me and you, 'and me, and you [toi]'.
Once there is not 'the' (this or that, the body or the sense of touch,
for example) in language or discourse, then one risks no longer know-
ing what one is talking about, that's true, and this risk will never be
excluded. Nothing can insure against that. Perhaps one has to try—this
is the singularity of the singular (which, moreover, is not nor should it
be any more assured)—one has indeed to try to know not what one is
152 Paragraph
talking about but first of all to whom one says 'and you, and me'. Never
put your trust in language to do that, which is why I was dreaming of a
kiss on the eyes: let there be one, if there is any.

JACQUES DERRIDA
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sociales, Paris
Sciences

Translated by PEGGY KAMUF

NOTES
1 Caveat lector: Beginning right away with the title, this translation confesses
its failure. As the author will point out several times in the course of what
follows, 'le toucher' is not simply translatable, hence the doubled title,
to be read throughout. The reader should also be aware, and here and
there reminders will be inserted, that the verb toucher has an idiomatic
extension in French which can only be approximated in another language.
For example, toucher a can mean both to touch on, but also to tamper with,
even to violate (cf. Mallarme's famous exclamation: 'On a touche au vers').
In another syntax, toucher un mot a quelqu'un has the sense of talking
to someone, mentioning, saying a word to. Finally, however, the most
recalcitrant syntactic formation is the pronominal form, se toucher, which
can be either reflexive or reciprocal in the third person or the infinitive, but

may also have the value of a passive voice (cela se touche, i.e., it is touched).
To a very significant degree, the essay may be read as a putting into practice
of these possibilities, while analyzing their implications as they have been
made evident in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. (Tr)
2 For reasons of space and time, I am publishing here only this fragment,
the first part of a work in progress.
3 'L'offrande sublime', in Une pensee finie, 179; hereafter abbreviated PF.
Other works by Nancy will be abbreviated as follows: C [Corpus), EL
(L'Experience de la liberte'), PP (Le poids d'une pensee).
4 In Le discours de la syncope, 1976.
5 In at least one place, to my knowledge, Nancy does mention Aristotle, but
with regard to the senses in general: 'Aristotle, who knows this, says that
each sense feels and feels itself feel, each one by itself, without general
control, each one withdrawn as sight, as hearing, as taste, smell, touch,
each taking pleasure and knowing it finds pleasure in the absolute diver-
gence of its bliss; this engenders the whole theory of the arts' (Corpus,
103).
6 Such a study would not be limited to the essay entitled 'Le coeur des
choses' (PF, 197ff.). But it would begin perhaps with that text, with its
very typical manner of starting out from an idiom, touching thereby the
 Le toucher 153
end of its language, the tip of its tongue (This immobile heart does not
even beat. It is the heart of things. The one that is spoken of whenever one

says "to go to the heart of things" '); from there it goes, in all directions,
to the bottom of things, here to the bottom of the heart, of all hearts. 'Le
coeur des choses' is one of the principal places in which Nancean thought

exposes 'the exscription of sense'.

7 'After Saint Paul, Augustine, and the whole tradition, Pascal will write:
'Circumcision of the heart, true fasting, true sacrifice, true temple: the
prophets have indicated that all of this must be spiritual. Not the meat
that perishes, but that which does not perish' (PF, 77).
If there is so much at stake between Judaism and Christianity regarding
circumcision (literal or spiritual, of the body or the heart, as figure of
spirituality, of the touchable or untouchable heart), can one say for all
that that what separates Christianity from Judaism, the syncope between
them, there where they cannot touch each other, the Judeo-Christian non-
contact is precisely the relation to touching? Can one say that the Jew
requires (sensible or literal) touching whereas the Christian spiritualizes
it and thus loses it? That would be somewhat simple and, in part, the part
of spirit, already Christian. For Christianity, inversely, is also a religion
of sensibility, even of touching. Hence, it would also accuse the Jews of
giving into the sublime or cold hardness of the insensitive or untouchable,
and so forth. We will have to come back to this—and say more about a
certain hardness.
8 For Aristotle, touch is, among other things, 'the nutritive faculty': 'All
animals have at least one of the senses, touch, and for that which has
sense-perception there is both pleasure and pain and both the pleasant and
the painful; and where there are these, there is also wanting [epithumia]:
for this is a desire for that which is pleasant [hedeos orexis]' (Peri Psyches II,
3,414 B3 ff. [translated by J.L. Ackrill A New Aristotle Reader (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1987)]; quoted by Jean-Louis Chretien in his
L'appel et la reponse [Paris, Minuit, 1992], 117-19).
9 The bucal mouth and not the oral mouth. 'Bucality is more primitive than
orality'. Here I am referring to the very fine pages that conclude Ego
sum. Already Nancy was drawing the consequences, for Descartes as for
Freud, of the fact that 'The psyche is extension, it knows nothing about
it' (Ego sum, 161). 'Os, oris, the mouth of orality is the face itself taken
as metonymy for that which it surrounds. . But bucca is the puffed-out
..

cheeks, the movement, contraction and distension of breathing, eating,

spitting, or speaking.. .. The mouth is the opening of Ego, Ego is the
opening of the mouth. What passes there is that it is spaced out [Ce qui
s'y passe, c'est qu'il s'y espace]' (ibid., 162).
10 Unable to follow here all the developments that speak of the exscripture
of scripture or writing, the trace as effacement of self, I quote only the
lines that are closest to this (hyper-) (transcendental-ontological) analytic
154 Paragraph
of touch: 'As soon as [writing] touches [the body], it loses touch itself.
As soon as it traces body, writing effaces it. But the body is not lost
the
in the simple exteriority of a "physical" or "concrete" presence. On the
contrary, it is lost to all the material or spiritual modes of the full presence
of meaning, of presence full of meaning. And if writing loses it, loses itself
headlong [a corps perdu], it is to the extent to which it inscribes its pres-
ence beyond all the accepted models of presence. To inscribe presence is
neither to (re)present it nor to signify it; it is to let come, come to pass, or
befall that which only presents itself on the limit where inscription itself
withdraws (where it exscripts itself). the experience called "writing" is
. .

this violent exhaustion of discourse where "all sense" is altered, not into
another sense, nor in the other sense, but into this exscripted body' {PF,
294-95; cf. also 18, 29, 55 ff., 143, 207-08, 211, 241, 243-44, 247-49,
254, 258, 263, 267-68, 271 et passim; and PP, 11, 14 et passim).
11 No, not even the story, but the stories, more or less anecdotal, of what
touched me while I was trying to write (to touch/to touch him). Thus,
for example, this story of friendship, of meetings, and contretemps; the
contretemps at the rendez-vous, the missed meeting. I remember our last
meeting, that of a missed rendez-vous one evening at the Strasbourg air-
port, on the eve of one of those innumerable colloquia of geophilosophy
on Europe. Impossible to reach each other [se toucher] on the telephone.
Jean-Luc Nancy comes to join me after having missed me at the airport,
and after I had already gotten to town; he is accompanied by our friend
Jacqueline Risset to whom I had just written to say, rather belatedly,
how much I liked and admired, once again, L'amour de loin [Love from
a Distance]. The title of one poem there was already echoing, without

my realizing it, the title chosen much earlier for the 'text-on-touch-that-I-
dreamed-of-writing-for-Jean-Luc-Nancy .' No punctuation whatsoever
. .

in this poem, no period, not even at the end, except after the question to
'you' ('sinon toi?' [if not you?]). All these modalities in two words: the 'si',
the 'non', the interrogation.
Le Toucher
Tu ne m'as pas touchee encore/l'amour passe par les yeux/et descend
dans le coeur/l'amour de loin nous exerce/et nous perfectionne/mais
qui/pourrait me toucher a present/sinon toi?/je circule dans l'air/dans ce
bois sacre/couloir de givre/dans cette aureole
[You have not touched me yet/love passes by way of the eyes/and descends
into the heart/love from a distance exerts us/and perfects us/but who/could
touch me at present! if not you?11 circulate in the air/in this sacred wood/cor-
ridor of frost/in this halo]

12 'Le corps et le toucher', in L'appel et la reponse. I will attempt to come

back to this text later.
13 See above, note 1, on the difficulties of translation here. These are all the
 Le toucher 155
more evident, and the solutions all the more dissatisfying, when the origi-
nal takes an agrammatical turn, as it does here, that turns the French lan-
guage against itself around the reflexive construction. We have neverthe-
less adopted 'self-touching-you' to translate 'se-toucher-toi' throughout
what follows. (Tr.)
14 On the contact (with self), on self-love, the love of self, and philautia,
cf. PF, 245 ff. The being-touched of the subject in love signifies here its
being opened up, wounded, broken in its integrity, struck as, in a duel,
one may be 'touche': 'Love re-presents I to itself, but broken (and it is
not a representation). It presents this: it, this subject, has been touched,
opened up in its subjectivity, and it is from now, for the period of love,
open to this opening, broken or cracked, however slightly that may be'
(PF, 247).
15 Novalis, Fragments, translated by A. Guerne (Paris, Aubier, 1973), 55; on
the heart, cf. 95.
16 Ibid., 45.
17 Exactly: one cannot overemphasize the concern Nancy, the man and the
thinker, has for exactitude. One has to know him well. Even when he
oversteps the bounds, as he must, and opens himself up to excess, to
exaggeration, ecstasy, exscription, he insists on giving himself over to it not
only with that probity (Redlichkeit) which he has spoken of so precisely (cf.
'Notre probite!' and 'Le kategorein de l'exces' in L'imperatif categorique),
but with a singular exactitude that is not necessarily opposed to rigor,
as others have maintained (Husserl or Heidegger) who limit the exact to
the objective and calculable form of quantitative measure (of a 'what'),
forgetting that exactitude can also be a virtue (the relation of a 'who' to a
'whom'). Nancy says both of them, the exactitude of measure and that of
the person (to Georges: 'you are exact'). Exactitude here describes exactly
(exacte, in a correct manner, apte) an acute, incisive, precise punctuality,
as at the driving penpoint of the drawing (exacta, from exigo, ex-ago: to

push, finish, require [exiger], measure, rule), the faithful punctuality of one
who commits himself to be at the rendez-vous and thus respects, for that
which concerns [regarde] the other when I look at him and he looks at me,
all the determination, limits, contours: the most exigent respect for that
which is in question when it is a question of acting [ce dont il s'agit quand il
s'agit d'agir]. Those who are interested in Nancy's exactitude will find con-
firmation of what I am saying at the exact tip of his pen, exactly acute like
the beam of a scale that is as just as justice, for example in Le poids d'une
pensee (beginning with the end, on the back cover: 'Thought weighs exactly
the weight of sense', a sentence that says exactly its disturbance, between
transitivity and intransitivity: does thought weigh the weight of sense,
having therefore the same weight? Or does it weigh the weight of sense,
having therefore not the same weight since it weighs it, that is, evalu-
ates it, measures it? Response: exactly! Within the same book, the photo-
156 Paragraph
graphs of Georges are exactitude itself: it is exactly him and it is the exact
image of exactitude that is the law (The photo was taken just before,
exactly' [115]; 'The photo shows how exact you are. You look exactly
into the lens, you know exactly what it's all about: your image' [116];
'Once again, you look so exactly into the lens that one has the feeling of
being, not looked at, but measured with great precision' [117]; 'You are
one of the most exactly real persons that I have ever known' [120]; 'You
are playing your role exactly, Georges ..' [124]).
.

As for his most extraordinary recourse, that is, very exactly superlative,
exactly exaggerated, to the excess, exactly, that enters into the exigency
of exactitude, here is another example: 'The weight of a thinking is very
exactly the inappropriability of appropriation or the impropriety of the
proper (proper to the proper itself, absolutely)' (9). How can anyone say
that? Well, like him, just as he does [comme lui],
18 On exscription and the impenetrable (that which would set up an obsta-
cle to traversal or perforation), cf. PP, 8; also EL, 134: 'thought touches
the impenetrable resistance of freedom' (that is, also that of 'language',
of the 'singularity of thinkers and thinking', 'of the body that thinks'). I
would have liked to insist on the impenetrable according to Nancy. By
associating this motif with that of his exactitude, I would have shown
that his taste for the impenetrable (of which there are countless signs in
his texts) lets one divine in Jean-Luc Nancy a degree of hardness. His ten-
derness, his generosity, his attentive availability to all others, to all virtual
differences, always ready for anything, are not necessarily contradicted by
a certain hardness, the rigor of the 'no-nonsense guy' (resolution, duty,
courage: to know how [when necessary] to be or to appear insensitive or
untouchable).
19 Jean-Luc Nancy, to whom I have spoken about my long-standing wish to
write on his thinking about touch (and who since then, with a gentle irony,
has gone on putting out ever more tactile antennae of his corpus), wrote to
me last August: '[someone] . . has written to me about Christianity (in
.

relation to certain of my texts—but without establishing any "positive"

relation), and he said in passing, "our faith no longer has any notion about
what the divine touch might be—for Christianity is indeed a religion of
the touch, whatever one might like to do about that (Jesus lets himself
be touched and this is not without meaning)." Well here, dear Jacques,
is something that can revive a certain mischievous remark, which has on
occasion shown up, about my "Christianity" '.
20 On the self-touching of thought as freedom, of a thought that 'touches . . .

in itself on this limit that is freedom itself, cf. as well EL, 82. It is a difficult
thought because this experience would be that of a non-subjective, even
non-conscious, freedom. The self-touching that forms its space or spacing
also exceeds subjectness, the subject/object opposition, responsibility as
egological or subjective, even intentional, consciousness. This has to affect
 Le toucher 157
a whole politics, a whole problematics of the political.
21 'Scene' in Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 46 (Autumn 1992).
22 '. it is not a question of rejoining an "intact" matter: we are not oppos-
. .

ing immanence to transcendence There is no intact matter—if there

. . .

were there would be nothing. On the contrary, there is tact, putting and
un-putting [la pose et la depose], the rhythm of the coming and going of
bodies in the world. Tact unbound, sharing itself out' (C, 102).
23 On the contagious and the contaminating, on the immune system and
immunity suppressants, cf. for example C, 91. The latter is also therefore
a book about organ transplants, AIDS, auto-immunity even, and all that
follows from there. A text like this one (this one, you understand) is
itself exposed in this way and cannot, either with some system, or with
an index or some supposedly exhaustive treatment, protect itself against
the contamination that immediately overruns it. We are touching on the
limit! And we are testing it—or harming it.