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The Mediation of Touch
A conversation between Emma Jones and Luce Irigaray.
Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray is a retired director of research in philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris. She has doctorates in philosophy (1974), in linguistics (1968) and in philosophy and literature (1955). She is trained in psychoanalysis and in yoga. She has written more than thirty books, translated into many languages, the last of them being The Mediation of Touch (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2024).
Emma Jones
Emma Jones, PhD, is a psychotherapist in private practice in California. She is the author of Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray (Palgrave, 2023) as well as six articles and book chapters that engage with Irigaray’s work.
Emma Jones: I am intrigued by the role of desire in this text, which you invoke in a variety of ways. What is the role of desire here in allowing us to evolve and become our unique selves as living beings?
Luce Irigaray: Desire is a human way of passing from a physical attraction to a psychic and even a spiritual feeling. Being rooted in nature, desire can transform a merely natural belonging into a psychic or spiritual belonging which can remain sensitive [capable of feeling], thus peculiar to each. Desire builds bridges between our body and our psyche and our mind, but also between us as living beings, in particular between us as naturally, thus sexually, different. As longing for the naturally different other, desire aspires after transcendence, a transcendence which can remain sensitive, and not be abstractly universal. Unlike needs, desire as such cannot be satisfied by consumption, thus it compels us to evolve and to maintain transcendence, notably the one resulting from difference, as a horizon never completely overcome.
As the overarching theme of the book is touch, how does desire animate touch?
Desire motivates touch. It provides touch with dynamism, finality, warmth and other qualities. Desire resorts to touch as a telling before any articulated language, a telling which can speak to the whole being and be heard by it. Desire makes touch an original language which has to do with our natural forms to express itself and its search for reciprocity. Thereby, desire uses touch as a language which speaks to the body and allows bodies to talk to one another, even if they are different and live in different worlds.
In the English-speaking world, ‘desire’ is often taken to mean only sexual desire. Can you speak about the broader concept of desire in your work with examples from beyond the sexual sphere?
Obviously, desire does not confine itself to sexual desire. In my work, desire often concerns a ‘sexuate’ desire and not sexuality strictly speaking. It is then a matter of a desire between identities or subjectivities differently sexuate which, according to my numerous analyses of the sexuation of language, can enter into the constitution of a cultural, political or religious desire. Contrary to what is generally imagined, desire is not in the neuter even when sexuality as such is not at stake. Desiring often amounts to the taking over of a physical attraction to a psychic and even a spiritual level. Differently from needs, desire longs for transcendence and not for being merely satisfied. This is why it is concerned with difference, including sexuate difference, as with what cannot be appropriated. In our tradition, desire often aspires after supra sensitive values – supra sensitive ideals or supra sensitive deities – but this means longing for overcoming our natural physical belonging. In my work, I promote the existence of a longing for a sensitive transcendence, which corresponds to our whole being and our relationships with other living beings and not only with objects. So longing for a sexually different other is longing for a sensitive transcendence, and this transforms our physical belonging without nullifying it nor our sensitivity. In fact, desiring means transcending oneself and if our logic is a subject-object logic, transcendence is put in/on an object, but it is situated in/on another subject if we have to do with a subject-subject logic. If the transcendence is put in/on a supra sensitive object, our living becoming is paralyzed by this object whereas when a sensitive transcendence concerns the way of relating to a different subject it contributes to our own development.
In your book, you identify what you call the ‘mediation of touch’. According to you, touch preserves a relationship to difference that sight does not. Could you explain this difference?
Touch is a particular language, a sort of original talk between bodies which can happen independently of their difference(s). It even has a better impact and meaning between two different bodies and their corresponding psyches and subjectivities because difference creates a space and a milieu thanks to which touch can be inscribed and passed on. This does not exist between the same ones, who must resort to a third to communicate, be it even their bodies transformed into sorts of objects or, more usually, language or ideas. But these are dictated by sameness and cannot really help two beings towards reaching an immediate telling through touch. Another property of touch is its ability to hand down an immediate saying to one another thanks to the permeability of bodily tissues. Indeed, the limits of living shapes – for example, those of the lips or of the palms of the hands – are not opaque, but they let communication or communion cross them. Sight acts almost conversely. Indeed, it isolates by stressing the contours of existing forms or by creating additional forms. Sight does not perceive the relation between beings; it individualizes by dividing differently from touch. Unfortunately, our tradition has favoured sight to the detriment of touch and its relational potential.
In popular culture and imagination, there is an idea that chromosomes determine or ‘cause’ a culturally stereotypical idea of what ‘men’ and ‘women’ are. How does your discussion in this text about the potentiality of germ cells differ from this idea? [‘germ cells’ here mean gametes or reproducing cells of organisms].
It is funny, but also tragic, to note that the current increasing interest of scientists in our sexuation is accompanied by the refusal of some people to even acknowledge its impact on our existence. Indubitably, sex chromosomes are the cause of this existence and its main basic and universal determination. Sex chromosomes give form(s) to our bodies, which cannot exist without acting on our subjectivity. This gives rise to specific ways of being, behaving and thinking, which ought to result in a culture which takes them into account. And yet this does not really happen, at least in western culture. Furthermore, some people want to remove the few elements which emerge in this culture concerning sexuation – for example, some stereotypes or sexuate grammatical marks – instead of caring about the development of a culture suitable for our sexuate identities and subjectivities. Why? Does that result from the increasing power of a technical culture in the neuter? From the gradual contempt of life and of its cultivation? From a lack of distinction between sexuate identity and subjectivity and sexuality strictly speaking, notably sexual choice, and the persistent difficulty in overtly speaking of sexuality as such? From the radical changes that must be carried out regarding our past culture to reach more justice towards and between the two sexes and the fact that people prefer ignoring them instead of taking charge of them? Or does that amount to the opinion of only few people who have power over the media?
Luce Irigaray by Gail Campbell
Could you explain further the distinction between individualization and individuation that you refer to by reference to the work of Gilbert Simondon? Can we understand the discourse of ‘individualization’ as being like ‘identity’ politics – in which ‘identity’ is understood as a kind of hardened category of existence – versus ‘individuation,’ something which as you say should be key to a democratic culture and a culture of touch?
Individuation concerns the process through which a person unifies the various elements of their becoming in the present and according to the context in which they exist. It has to do with their way of uniting body and mind, sensitivity and thinking, singularity and relationality. Thus, it involves one’s being but also the other(s) and the world. Succeeding in unifying all these dimensions towards a comprehensive and fruitful becoming is a complex undertaking of which few people take charge, letting the outside world determine what they are at a certain time. Their individuation then amounts to a more or less artificial construction on which they can no longer decide.
A few years ago, I discovered how much germ cells matter to us being provided with a living individuation. Indeed, they shape our body, but also our psyche, in a manner which is both individual and relational, present and evolving. Unfortunately, most substitute for the naturally unifying power of the germ cells other aspects of their life such as the place of birth, the original culture, the specific language, etc. Obviously, all these factors take part in our individuation, but they do not have the basically living and universal potential for unifying our being that the germ cells have.
Individualization refers to our collective individuality. Unfortunately, the latter is often shaped independently of our natural belonging, notably of our sexuation, to which even Simondon does not allude in this connection (see L’individuation psychique et collective, 1989). Thereby individualization represents a sort of exile from our true being. It is no longer animated by our natural dynamism but by external factors and information, which little by little transforms our naturally relational world into an artificial and parallel world. This explains many of the problems which arise between citizens, between cultures, and concerning the gradual decline of humanity and the living environment. Returning to an individuation built from our natural being and an individualization respectful of it would be a means of constructing a truly democratic culture, a culture which contributes to the development and blossoming of life and not to its exploitation and destruction.
You have written that modern political discourse repeatedly invokes ‘identity’ yet fails to address the embodied identities of citizens. Do you think this is why they come to feel that political discourse is out of touch?
Yes, I do not understand to what identity the political discourses then refer. Indeed, I not above all the lack of identity of many citizens, their changing their mind from one day to the next and their subjection to the last information they heard. Obviously, this does not favour the existence of a democratic politics, but instead paves the way for a dictatorial power. The shortage of relationships between citizens due to the little consideration for their relational identity also contributes to that. Putting the stress on a politics of money and ownership, including in its leftwing versions, cannot build a real democracy. This contributes neither to the construction of a responsible political identity nor to the cohesion of a society, two things which are determining in the elaboration and the practice of a democratic culture. Besides, the prevalence of sight over touch is also a characteristic of our tradition, which is not favourable to democracy. Touch is necessary for subjectivity to correspond to the physical belonging, thereby for the singularity of each citizen to be preserved, and it is necessary too for citizens to unite with one another. Owning money and goods causes a bad individualism and competition between citizens unlike an individuation respectful of life, including as relation. Of course, touch must adopt modalities which are suitable for a community – for example, common emotions, common projects and commitments which take account of the universal dimension of human life respected in its singularity rather than peculiar having or possessions.
What key capacities must we cultivate in order to become able to dwell within ourselves while remaining open to the other, particularly in the context of cosmopolitanism and globalization? How do we retain the other as a horizon and limit that contextualizes our experience? What is the role of touch in this at a community level?
I think that discovering that our body is our first home can contribute to becoming able to stay in it and wanting to dwell in ourselves. Traditionally, man has searched for dwelling outside of himself without first dwelling in himself. And then he spread indefinitely in search of the most intimate shelter in the most distant. Thereby, rules, norms and laws, which artificially delimit his expansion, have been necessary. And yet human beings have their limits in themselves, and these limits allow them to develop without depriving them of what is their own and that they need to blossom. Self-affection can help human beings to perceive such limits and their positive character. It can reveal to them what it means to inhabit their bodies and how to cultivate that not only in a fleshly but also in a psychic and even a spiritual way. Then they will discover that relating to the other helps in their own development and that the first limit to be respected is their difference from the naturally, especially sexually, different other in order to preserve both their particularity and the fecundity of such a relationship. Experiencing that renders the intervention of the lacanian and traditional patriarchal ‘law of the father’ useless; the latter prevents children from undergoing by themselves a positive condition of their flowering. It also deprives them of feeling how touch must evolve from a little differentiated maternal touch towards a touch which aims to establish a communication, and even to reach a communion, with the sexually different other. The relationship is then also immediately physical and it must resort to more psychical or cultural mediations – like emotions or common aspirations – to make touch suitable at a community level.
What is required for human beings to begin to assume responsibility for our living limits – limits that, unlike that of death, always already imply relation to others? It seems to me we are so often unaware of these limits and that much of our culture contributes to forgetting them. You implied just now that practices of self-affection – one can imagine perhaps meditation, artistic practice, and other forms of dwelling within the self – may be a starting place. Can you say more about the role of these practices, especially artistic creation, in a culture of touch?
Our culture is basically individualistic. It focuses on one subject in a private or a collective situation. The relational aspect of the individual is not much considered either in the family context or in the community. So we find little elaboration of the amorous relations between the spouses, all the more so since sexuation is not acknowledged as the main determining factor in subjective constitution. The relations between man and woman are then assimilated to ties in the family unit and more often than not reduced to parental roles.The subjectivity of the citizens is considered a little more, but above all with the aim of integrating them into a whole through means external to them but not thanks to their own, notably natural, relational aptitudes and wants. The family and the community that human beings form are thus largely to the detriment of their own belonging and its blossoming inside its own limits. How to succeed in developing this belonging in spite of a culture which does not take a great account of it? Of course, it is by favouring relationships respectful of difference(s) and, more generally, by a culture based on difference(s) instead of on sameness. Indeed, such culture functions thanks to consideration for respective limits, living limits as far as living beings are concerned, which are felt by touching. We can also perceive these limits by carrying out works, especially works of art, that is, by trying to gather our sensitive being and put it into a work of our own which acts as an evidence and a memory of it. This can reveal to us something of the nature of our sensitive being and of its limits that we cannot experience otherwise.When I practiced psychoanalysis, I thought that the cure was almost successfully achieved when a patient was able to create a work in which he or she put both their potential and its limits. This provided them with a positive autonomy and responsibility for themselves as living that a mirror image was unable to bring to them.
At the end of the book you write powerfully that “our first touch was of use for entering into a relation with the other and not for appropriating something” and also that “this touch… fits out a space in the common space in which we can shelter” (pp.357-8). This relational space seems so fragile and at risk of disappearing – you speak of it as being hidden or occluded by our philosophical and cultural traditions, but also as something that is occasionally revealed in a glimpse or a wavering between presence and forgetting. How do we glimpse this place through language, and especially through shared language? What are the exemplary moments in which we are inhabiting, and creating, this place, throughout our lives, and that we must turn our attention to and return to in order to ‘irrigate’, as you say, a culture of touch?
This space is both fragile and strong, but our past culture, in particular our philosophical culture, did not pay attention to it because it did not much consider our relational being, what is more as sexuate. This fundamental determination of our being was almost ignored. Sexuation had to serve for reproduction, and sexual intercourse had to be in hiding, in the dark of the bedroom of the family house as a thing quite shameful which remained without language and culture. Even Freud approached sexuation through its pathology without developing its positive resources and the manner of making them flower. Did he not affirm that a marriage can be successful only when the wife becomes the mother of her husband? Hence, the place opened by our sexuate relations has not been broached by Freud himself and he did not suggest a path to cultivate it. And yet it is a crucial place in which to take refuge with respect to the work, the multitude, the technical and inanimate world. It is also a place to which we can return to recover and cultivate our natural belonging at a fundamental level.
About the amorous relations between two differently sexuate beings, our culture thus told very little except in art and above all literature, but, still there, mainly as aspiration or unhappiness. This basic aspect of our human relationships is still to be explored and put into practice. How to perceive and to cultivate it, notably regarding the space which is then concerned? First, we must note that the space between two different human beings exists because of their difference, and desire happens in this space. Longing for the other takes place in the space open between two beings, above all when it is a question of a desire between two beings differently sexuate. The problem is how to keep this space open and to inhabit it. Neither our culture as it is nor the family house, as the place devoted to the natural life, can today ensure that. The one traps lovers in artificial differences and the other conceals difference in a familiarity which dulls desire. To elaborate a relational culture is a task of our epoch. It requires us to leave a past culture governed by sameness and enter into a culture respectful of difference(s), beginning with the most original difference, sexuate difference. In every intention, decision, behaviour, we must take account of the fact that those of the other differ from our own and that our desire to unite with one another cannot ignore that on pain of being abolished. Therefore, we must continuously care about how to unite with the other as different while keeping our singularity. To support this permanent attention and concern, I suggest dividing an apartment usually made of a dinner room and a bedroom into two studios that each arranges according to his or her taste, and in which they invite the other when they want, so keeping, revealing and sharing their difference(s). Obviously, this does not exempt them from elaborating internal spaces which can inspire suitable gestures, words, but also silence and in which each can also return to repose and dwell in itself. And, undoubtedly, touch is that which can tell us to one another in the absence of an appropriate other language and beyond, but it must respect difference and occur in the place opened by it to succeed in that. To extend to community and irrigate culture, touch must exceed an immediate bodily touching and be converted into emotions and means of sensitively sharing on a broader scale, keeping care of our physical belonging.
As a psychotherapist for couples (and as a parent) I was quite interested in your discussion of how the development of a transcendence between two members of a couple can be interrupted or halted through parenthood. I take this to mean that each partner risks ceasing to cultivate themself as an autonomous sexuate being, and also in relation to the other, perhaps due to becoming absorbed in a parenting role, or due to social and energy constraints, or other issues. What kinds of interventions do you think are necessary to help prevent this from happening?
It is Hegel who says that children cause the death of parents. And he is generally right, at least if I well understand his words. But I hope that it is not completely unavoidable, and my work endeavours to contribute to that. You allude to some of the possible causes of this fact. However, I think that the main reason that children can suspend the becoming, and even the being, of the parents is something else, something largely due to our past culture. Indeed, what ought to uphold the relational belonging of the spouses is the transcendence of their sexuate difference. Their union is founded on a horizontal transcendental difference that they must preserve when uniting with one another, never filling the space which safeguards their difference and is the place in which their desire can arise and last. But the children will precisely occupy this space with somas begotten by the conjunction of different germ cells of their parents. What had to be kept separate to keep desire alive is united in the somas of the children in which the transcendental longing between the spouses is immobilized in a definitive conjunction. This probably explains why the transcendence of genealogy has supplanted the horizontal transcendence of the amorous longing which had sealed the couple. Obviously, this modifies the nature of transcendence which no longer is what arouses and preserves the commitment of two lovers towards one another as a potential that can never been fulfilled once and for all. And that can also prevent children from becoming aware and taking charge of their future amorous longings.
Glossary of terms used by Luce Irigaray
sexuate: is used, instead of ‘sexual’, when it is a question of sexuation regarding identity, subjectivity or other uses than sexuality strictly speaking
germ cells: reproductive cells of the human body
soma: non-reproductive cells of the human body
self-affection: affection of/for oneself
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