Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense 9780231553179

Citation preview

Touch

NO LIMITS

NO LIMITS Edited by Costica Bradatan The most important questions in life haunt us with a sense of boundlessness: there is no one right way to think about them or an exclusive place to look for answers. Philosophers and prophets, poets and scholars, scientists and artists—all are right in their quest for clarity and meaning. We care about these issues not simply in themselves but for ourselves—for us. To make sense of them is to understand who we are better. No Limits brings together creative thinkers who delight in the pleasure of intellectual hunting, wherever the hunt may take them and whatever critical boundaries they have to trample as they go. And in so doing they prove that such searching is not just rewarding but also transformative. There are no limits to knowledge and self-knowledge—just as there are none to self-fashioning. Mark C. Taylor, Intervolution: Smart Bodies Smart Things Tom Lutz, Aimlessness

Touch Richard Kearney

RECOVERING OUR MOST VITAL SENSE

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kearney, Richard, author. Title: Touch : recovering our most vital sense / Richard Kearney. Description: New York, NY : Columbia University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020025084 (print) | LCCN 2020025085 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231199520 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231199537 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231553179 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Touch. | Social interaction. Classification: LCC BF275 .K43 2021 (print) | LCC BF275 (ebook) | DDC 152.1/82—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025084 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025085

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Lisa Hamm

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Are We Losing Our Senses? 1 1. Coming to Our Senses: Tact, Savvy, Flair, Insight, Sound 9 2. Philosophies of Touch: From Aristotle to Phenomenology 33 3. Tales of the Wounded Healer 61 4. Healing Touch: Therapies of Trauma and Recovery 85 5. Reclaiming Touch in the Age of Excarnation 113 Coda: Touch and the Coronavirus 133

Notes

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Index

197

Acknowledgments

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have many friends, colleagues, and family I wish to thank. I am deeply grateful to the following for their close readings and astute comments on different drafts of the text—Fanny Howe, Brian Treanor, John Manoussakis, Sheila Gallagher, Redmond O’Hanlon, Patrick Hederman, Simon Sleeman, James Taylor, and Matt Clemente. I am also grateful to my Boston College assistants, Peter Klapes, William Hendel, Urwa Hameed, Sarah Horton, and Noah Valdez, for their help with formatting, proofing, and permissions. And finally a special thanks to various members of my family— especially my brother Michael, for providing me with key insights into the myths of Chiron and Asclepius, and my wife, Anne, and daughters, Simone and Sarah, for their visual illustrations. It seemed particularly relevant for a book on touch that their ink drawings were done by hand. I would also like to add a heartfelt word of gratitude to my wonderful editors at Columbia University Press—Wendy

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Lochner, Costica Bradatan, Susan Pensak, and Lowell Frye. It was a pleasure to collaborate with them from beginning to end, and I am deeply grateful for their support, guidance, and patience as we worked through the multiple drafts and revisions of the text.

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Touch

Introduction Are We Losing Our Senses?

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grew up in a country— Ireland—where people only touched when they were either drunk (south of the border) or trying to kill each other (north of the border). So the joke went— though, fortunately, my own upbringing told another story. My mother’s people were called the “kissing Kinmonths,” as they were always, for some reason, kissing each other. And my mother was certainly true to her name, pouring abundant affections upon her seven children, her bedtime hugs— accompanying prayers— being positively Proustian in bounty. My father’s people were doctors through four generations, well known for their “bedside manner” and “healing touch.” Indeed, my grandfather earned the title of the “French Doctor” for his famous handshakes with patients. Apparently, the Irish assumed the French would do anything with their bodies, including shaking hands with people. My father and five uncles followed the medical vocation, as did four of my cousins and my eldest and younger brothers. I will

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return to “therapies of touch,” but suffice it for now to say I grew up in a very affectionate family where siblings, parents, and grandparents kept in close touch across generation, even as our surrounding Irish culture carried scars of historical trauma (famine and colonization) and religious stricture (Catholic Jansenism and Protestant puritanism). State legislation against contraception, divorce, and homosexuality was still, in my youth, symptomatic of a war against “sins of the flesh.” And frequent physical abuse in schools left deep wounds to be worked through. While much has changed since, I can safely say that my own formative experience was a mixed bag of positive and negative, keenly felt. But this is neither autobiography nor an anthropology of Irish cultural attitudes to the flesh. It is an essay for any interested reader concerned with the crisis of touch in our time— an age of simulation informed by digital technology and an expanding culture of virtual experience. My question is: are we losing touch with our senses as our experience becomes ever more mediated? Are we entering an era of “excarnation,” where we obsess about the body in ever more disembodied ways?1 For if incarnation is the image becoming flesh, excarnation is flesh becoming image. Incarnation invests flesh; excarnation divests it. So, we ask, are we losing touch with touch itself? Are we in danger of forfeiting our most vital and indispensable sense? And if so, what can we do about it? The crisis of touch that epitomizes our time has, needless to say, been dramatically amplified by the “distancing” culture required by the COVID-19 calamity visited upon the planet in the spring of 2020 as I was completing the manuscript of this book.2 The

INTRODUCTION

pandemic eclipse of the tactile is a defining moment to which I will return in my conclusion. But, right off, let’s admit the obvious: the Internet is an amazing, magical, fabulous, otherworldly, and weird invention. Few have felt its lure and not wanted more. It makes communication possible across impossible distances. It allows us to exchange culturally, socially, and commercially with all kinds of people in all parts of the world. It makes space plastic and time elastic. Social media platforms afford us unprecedented information, pleasure, and entertainment, offering a welcome escape from everyday pain, confusion, and boredom— and, above all, offering “connection.” The World Wide Web links us virtually with other people’s struggles and dreams in the furthest regions of the earth— as global solidarity movements show. The world is our oyster at the tap of a key. But a vital question arises as we travel this path of “hyperreality.” For all the extraordinary gains, are we not perhaps diluting our sense of lived experience? Losing our grip on reality— our basic common touch? As we increase our cyber connectivity are we not compromising our indispensable need for carnal contact? Studies show that a primal hunger for soothing touch and proximity overrides even the most basic needs for food and drink.3 We know that without repeated touch, an infant will wither away; and that our skin—the largest organ of our body—is the way we wiretap into the brain and become healthier human beings.4 “Tender touch” alleviates anxiety, bolsters the immune system, lowers blood pressure, helps with sleep and digestion, and wards off colds and infections. It feeds us body and soul. In short, tactile communication is absolutely vital to our physical and mental well-being.5

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So how do we get back in touch with touch? How do we return to our senses? It is clear today that more and more of our existence is  being lived at a distance—through social media and digital communications, e-gaming, e-mailing, e-banking, e-schooling, e- dating, e-sporting, e-hosting.6 Even global conflicts are now being waged vicariously through so-called psy-ops campaigns, online news flashes, and Tweets.7 Cyber politics is the order of the day, with national leaders passing from TV shows to the highest seats of power. (Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky were screen stars before becoming presidents.) And sex, the most intimate domain of touch, is increasingly mediated through online dating sites, sexting, and social media platforms; while pornography has become a $4 billion a year industry in the U.S., with porn sites receiving more visitors per month than Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter combined.8 Meanwhile, the gaming industry grossed over 150 billion dollars globally in 2020, fast becoming the most popular form of human entertainment on this planet. But all this should give us pause, for as cyber technologies progress, proximity is replaced by proxy.9 Our putatively materialistic world is becoming more immaterialized by the day, with multitouch screens serving as exits from touch itself. Indeed, it is ironic that the primary meaning of “digital” today refers not to our fingers but to cyber worlds— the virtualization of touch becoming a form of dactylectomy. Not to mention the fact that while Americans check their iPhones a billion times a day, one in every five U.S. citizens suffers from a mental illness largely related to loneliness.10 The more virtually connected we are, the more solitary we

INTRODUCTION

become. We “see” brave new worlds but “feel” less and less in touch with them. Optical omnipresence trumps tactile contact.11 Cyber connection and human isolation can go hand in glove. To cite one recent personal example: traveling to downtown Boston on a subway, I was struck by the fact that almost everyone aboard (apart from the driver) was “wired” to iPhones or iPads, oblivious to their fellow travelers and all that was going on around them. One passenger appeared anxious by what he was viewing online, another amused by a podcast she was hearing—but no one seemed aware of anyone sitting beside them or the physical landscape flashing by. Technology overcomes distance, but it does not always bring nearness.12 Our digital age of excarnation is suffering from an “epidemic of loneliness.” While we currently inhabit the most technologically connected age in history, rates of human solitude have doubled since the 1980s. In a recent survey, AARP estimated that 42.6 million American adults over age forty-five suffer from chronic loneliness; while a 2018 study by Cigna, the global health insurance company, revealed that each generation, oldest to youngest, is more socially isolated, with the Greatest Gen and boomers the least lonely and millennials and Gen Z the loneliest.13 The more of our lives that we spend in front of screens, the more susceptible we are to depression. At the same time as social interactions become more virtual, there emerges another kind of isolation with serious ecological and climactic consequences—what nature writer Richard Louv calls species loneliness: “the gnawing fear that we are alone in the universe with a desperate hunger for connection with other

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life.”14 Louv argues that we need more contact not only with fellow humans but also with other-than-human kin in the animal and natural kingdoms. In addition to medical prescriptions we need “nature prescriptions.” Or, to put it in more contemporary terms, we need to evolve beyond the Anthropocene—marked by our technological domination of the planet—to a Symbiocene (from the Greek symbiosis, meaning “companionship”). Such a mutation, of body and mind, entails an ecology of mutualism requiring the transformation of technology in light of a renewed interaction with nature. The Symbiocene affirms the interconnection between human life and all tangible sentient beings, signaling a movement from the age of human exceptionalism to an age of holistic tactile communion.15 So is it not time to return to our senses? To get back in touch with ourselves and with others, reinhabiting our skins, reclaiming our bodies and emotions? Which does not mean—let’s be clear—turning the clock back to pretechnological times. There is no going back, even if we wanted to. We must find new arts of touch and technology to meet the challenge of our age. A vital challenge we will return to in our final chapter. This volume offers a modest proposal in three movements. First—we analyze our common understanding of touch as it pertains to the five senses. Second—we revisit formative wisdoms that have shaped our interpretation of the body in Western myth and philosophy and still inform much of our thinking today. Third—we explore ways to recover the joys of incarnation in a world where many of us have become distant from ourselves, virtually there while hankering to be here. Such recovery is urgent, given the

INTRODUCTION

contemporary phenomenon of “touch hunger”— a telling symptom of our basic human need to reconnect the virtual with the tangible. It is only when something is missing that we long for it again, when it is broken that we want to fix it, when it is threatened that we appreciate it for what it really is. Or, as Joni Mitchell sang: “Don’t it always seem to go / that you don’t know what you’ve got till its gone?” (“Big Yellow Taxi”). What is touch? Where is touch? And how might we get it back again? Such questioning— dramatically exposed by the pandemic eclipse of the tactile— calls, I submit, for the cultivation of new arts of touch reconnecting us to each other in our digital age. Arts that solicit a renewal of our tangible experience— a reinvention of a community of bodies interacting with the World Wide Web. What I call a new commons of the flesh. The present essay is a plea for healing in an age of excarnation, identifying some contemporary anxieties and hinting at possibilities of recovery. It is written in praise of the desire for tactile proximity with our fellows on this earth.

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1 Coming to Our Senses Tact, Savvy, Flair, Insight, Sound

I touch you with my eyes, I watch you with my hands I see with my fingertips what my eyes touch —Octavio Paz

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et us begin with some examples from ordinary language and practice. What does colloquial speech tell us about the sense of touch? It is revealing that the term sense has three distinct meanings: as sensation (our five senses), as meaning (in what sense do you mean that?), and as orientation (as in sense of direction in Romance languages). These three meanings point to the existence of a special intelligence of the body—a tactile sensibility that informs our relations with others prior to abstract cognition. Such a sensibility reveals itself across the five senses; and without it we are lost, like a ghost among ghosts. “Sensory deprivation” robs one of one’s bearings, whereas “sensory restoration” spells the recovery of self.1 Living well means coming to our senses again and again. Let us consider how touch operates throughout all the senses. In what follows I attempt to show how the carnal wisdom of tactility—what I call tact—functions not only in

COMING TO OUR SENSES

touch itself but in the other senses as well: taste, odor, sight, and hearing. Tact is synesthetic through and through. Tactful taste we call savvy; tactful smell we call flair; tactful sight we call insight; and tactful sound we call resonance. I will review each in turn.

TACT

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The term tact derives from the Latin tango-tangere-tactum and denotes the skill of people who have a way with people. Tact expresses a “common touch” in our way of heeding, humoring, and handling others. It senses the subtle difference between variations of touch—gentle or firm, light or charged, sensitive or insensitive, healing or hurting. But tact is not the same as contact. Being tactful with someone does not always imply immediate physical proximity. One can be tactful, for instance, by practicing discretion in particular circumstances, as one negotiates the right space between oneself and another. Handshakes observe varying codes in varying situations of time and place.2 Clasping someone’s shoulder with a genial smile or a threatening sneer means opposite things. Likewise there are different kinds of hugs in different contexts. There is the full body press reserved for intimate relationships and the A-frame type for more formal encounters (bending at the back, slightly turning, and scarcely touching). There are also wanted and unwanted embraces— those that invite and those that invade, those that charm and those that constrain (a “bear hug”). In sum, there is no uniform hug canon. And the same can be said for the kiss, the caress,

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and more intimate modes of contact, each being subject to semiotic variations of convention and culture. For while touch, at a purely physiological level, involves an automated firing of epidermal synapses that fly up to the brain, it is invariably imbued with particular meanings and values. There is no one size fits all. Like medicine, touch is not good for all people in all situations. The important thing, most agree, is that touch is tactful when it is mutually beneficial for the persons involved.3 Reciprocity is the golden rule. So there is touch and touch. And tact knows the difference. Respect requires discernment because touch, as noted, is not always appropriate, especially where power relations are concerned. Being tactful here means being sensitive in our behavior with others, listening and responding to the other in a responsible way. Such two-way sensibility involves a reversibility between one self and another, striking a balance between distance and proximity, careful not to impose oneself on the other (domination) or to surrender entirely either (submission). Tact is an interplay of far and near, knowing how to be subjects of our actions while being subject to others’ actions—being touched even as we touch. This active-passive dialectic is what the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl calls “double sensation.” In the reversibility of touch one has the feeling of both touching and being touched at the same time. And this means being open to how others feel about you as much as how you feel about them. The art of dance, as mutual partnering, offers a model for an ethics of tact. It takes two to tango, as conveyed by the colloquial Dublin expression for one’s special partner—mot (from moitié, one’s other half). Indeed,

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1.1 Hands (drawing by Sarah Kearney, after Louise Bourgeois)

even the simple instance of tickling always involves another person. One cannot tickle oneself.4 But for every example of two-way sensation there are counterexamples. Harassment and molestation are betrayals of tact, enacting unilateral relations that violate the otherness of the other (what is not mine). Abusive touch is a refusal to acknowledge the other as singular and equal, denying that tact requires two free subjects in relation. Perversions and pathologies of touch involve the reification of the person as a mere object, ranging from heinous crimes like rape, torture, mutilation, and murder to the commonplace infliction of pain by one person on another. And sometimes pain can be inflicted from a distance, as in everyday acts of insensitivity ranging from scorn and bullying to the complete negation of the other’s dignity—

COMING TO OUR SENSES

leading, in extremis, to the systematic ostracization of others as “untouchables” (as in the shunning of Dalits in India or other racist instances of apartheid and scapegoating). By contrast, tact is a way of staying in contact with the feelings of others so we can be touched by them in turn. To say of someone that she or he is a “touching person” is to acknowledge that one is moved by their behavior, susceptible to their special presence. To say of certain people— artists, singers, inventors, lovers—that they “have the touch” is to say they are specially gifted. As when we say of doctors that “they have the healing touch,” or of geniuses that they are “touched by fire.” Such expressions refer to the possession of rare talent. And we are all familiar with the term touché, meaning: nice one, you hit the mark, you get it, spot on. A usage dating back to the eighteenth- century language of dueling when arms-length tactics of parry and thrust failed and the opponent’s blade struck flesh, a meaning carried into colloquial repartee to refer to a witty comeback in conversation. One can of course be overly sensitive in responding to the other, in which case one is “touchy,” or be overly intimate and be “touchy-feely.” And all these familiar terms are part of a larger lexicon of tactility including ordinary phrases like “my blood boils,” “my skin crawls,” “my heart melts, hardens, pounds, freezes,” and so on. Indeed, common folk wisdom, as recorded in the Grimm Brothers’ tale of “The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear,” is instructive here. The story tells of a youth who cannot grow up until he learns the feeling of fear. Having performed countless acts of audacity, he finally succeeds in his mission when he experiences the feeling of tiny minnows being poured onto his belly by the maid. Wisdom is

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found at the tip of the skin, not the sword. The boy gets in touch with things. Contact becomes tact. I am also reminded here of the healing water scene in Albert Camus’ The Plague, where the protagonists, Tarrou and Rieux, fraternally commune as they swim in the Algerian Sea. Few swimmers have not felt the special exultation of touching and being touched by water as by an element that buoys and envelopes them, perhaps evoking prenatal experiences of amniotic fluency (Freud’s “oceanic feeling”) or sacred anointing (baptein, to bathe)—primal sentiments of fluid immersion captured in colloquial expressions like “going with the flow” (echoed in the French courant and the German fliessend). To feel totally immersed in aquatic embrace is indeed “to be in one’s element.”

▶▹▶ When we say of people that they are “in touch with things,” we usually mean that their actions are at one with their feelings and emotions. Whenever outer behavior coincides with inner experience, we find ourselves in touch with ourselves and with others. Emotion derives from the French émouvoir, which translates as to move, touch, or stir up.5 So that when we say that our hearts burn or our stomachs turn what is happening is that our bodies are telling us what we feel. When the enteric system of neurons lining our digestive tracts gives us “butterflies” of anxiety, for example, it is serving as our “second brain.” This fundamental form of psychosomatic signaling prompts Frans de Waal to observe: “That emotions are rooted in the body explains why Western science has taken so long to appreciate them. In the

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West, we love the mind, while giving short shrift to the body. The mind is noble, while the body drags us down. We say the mind is strong while the flesh is weak, and we associate emotions with illogical and absurd decisions. ‘Don’t get too emotional.’ Until recently emotions were mostly ignored as almost beneath human dignity. Emotions often know better than we do what is good for us, even though not everyone is prepared to listen. . . . Minds by themselves are useless: they need bodies to engage with the world. Emotions are at the interface of these three—mind, body and environment.”6 Looking at the broader picture, we may recall that the first act of civilization was touch: the handshake between two people laying down their arms to place one bare palm on another. In the beginning was tact. Think of the classic scene of Glaucus and Diomedes in Homer’s Iliad where the long-sworn rivals throw off their swords and embrace as friends. This crucial move from hostility to hospitality— the primal scene of most societies—involves the enemy (hostis) being converted to a guest (same word: hostis) by the touch of hand upon hand. Such conversions range from ancient Greek pacts to the famous contemporary handshakes of Mandela and de Klerk in South Africa, Begin and Sadat in Jerusalem, Hume and Trimble in Northern Ireland. We will return to these political wagers of touch.7

▶▹▶ As I hope is clear by now, when we speak of touch we are not just referring to one of the five senses, tactility—though that too, of course. We are talking about touch in a more

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inclusive way, as an embodied manner of being in the world, an existential approach to things that is open and vulnerable, as when skin touches and is touched. So let me repeat one of my central arguments: touch is not confined to touch alone but is potentially everywhere. It is present not only in tactility but also in visibility, audibility, and so on. Precisely as tact, it traverses all the senses, providing us with our underlying carnal intelligences: savvy, flair, insight, and resonance. Someone who has “the touch” combines several tactful senses at once. The most sensitive sensibilities, I repeat, are synesthetic— operating multilateral relations between the five senses. Or, more precisely, touch is implicit in every sense, for the “double sensibility” of  touch—touching and being touched—is what makes each and every sensation capable of reciprocal experience. Which is not to deny that we can isolate a particular sense, making it more unilateral than multilateral. Sight, sound, smell, and taste can become narrowly one way, once separated from tact, and it is possible to arrange our perceptual environment so that we can see without being seen, hear without being heard, smell without being scented, taste without being tasted—but we can never touch without being touched in return (unless we negate our natural human recursivity by choosing “unnatural” acts of indifference or violence). In a healthy life the reversibility of sense presupposes the omnipresence of universal tactility. Without the transversality of touch, sensibility risks sensationalism: sense without sensitivity, perception without empathy, stimulation without responsibility.8 Tactful perception— across all the senses— ensures a  proper relation of mutuality between perceiver and

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1.2 Le Toucher, Lady and the Unicorn Tapestry

(photo by Sarah Kearney)

perceived. Its presence or absence is what distinguishes between good and bad taste, sight, scent and sound. Let me now turn to each of these in turn.

SAVVY (TASTE) A person with tactful taste is a person with savvy. Savvy is a kind of native intelligence, pertaining to literate and illiterate persons alike; it is knowledge operating as a felt acknowledgment of things, tasted and tested in lived experience. Savvy

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is a carnal know-how— a savoir faire or savoir vivre echoing the original root of savoir (to know) from the Latin, sapere, to taste. Sapio means both “I taste” and “I am wise.” Hence the etymological sense of sapientia—tasteful wisdom! It all begins with the child at the breast. The tactile act of tasting with the tongue entails an exposure of the mouth to the first other, a primal sensitivity to what touches the lips. Hot or cold, sweet or salty, soft or hard. The primal opening of mouths to feed or kiss.9 Lips meeting lips, as in the ancient song of wisdom: “Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth” (Song of Songs). A sensitive tongue determines “good taste” in the appreciation of art, cuisine, eros.10 To have taste, at the sensory level, is to discriminate between subtle differentiations of texture and flavor. The absence of taste, by contrast, is marked by a lack of discrimination (as in gluttony, drunkenness, addiction). Tactful taste— savvy— is about attention, attending, relishing what our taste buds savor.11 Poets know this well: “How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe / Will, mouthed to flesh-burst, / Gush!” (Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland). The tongue tastes before it talks. From the moment of birth, the child uses the mouth not just as an organ of ingestion (bucca) but as a means of communication (ora). The infant’s mutation from buccal cavity to oral mouth is one of the most formative moments of natality. It marks the inaugural act of what I call carnal hermeneutics, where the initial contact of touch and taste is informed by the infantile fantasy of the “good and bad breast.”12 We first taste the world through our tongues and only later translate these

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infinitesimal sensory tastings into words and thoughts. We taste before we think. Sapio ergo sum. And what is true of child development is true of humanity as a whole. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss explains how the earliest societies transformed nature into culture the moment they symbolized food into binary differentiations of “cooked” and “raw.”13 What makes for a sophisticated society, he claims, is not whether food is good or bad to eat but whether it is good or bad to symbolize! From the start, the sensing of food is the signifying of food— the most primordial way of making sense of our world. And the first tastings— savory or sour— can last a lifetime, as personal histories attest. French author Anne Dufourmantelle, offers a moving account of taste as tender initiation: Gentleness belongs above all to the palate, to the newborn’s memory of suckling. The sweet taste of sugar is its universal metaphor. Sweetness and honey. It is the scent of milk, of figs, of roses; it is all the beloved scents that remind us of our early body, a body before the body— spiritual as well as sensorial and not yet confined by the tyranny of self- consciousness and the supervision of an era that craves thrills. . . . Gentleness is a carnal as well as a spiritual quality, an erotic quality, whose intelligence of the other’s desire seeks neither capture nor constraint, but the open play of the full range of perception.14

Many foundational myths bear witness to the primary culture of taste. Adam eats the apple. Philemon cooks herbs for Hermes. Jesus feeds the hungry. Every wisdom tradition

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has its tale of primal tasting. For if ontogeny repeats phylogeny, it also repeats cosmogony. From the earliest wisdom traditions, we hear of gods becoming manifest in the sharing of food with mortals. One of the first terms for divinity in Sanskrit is anna, meaning food, and the Hindu scriptures, from the Upanishads onward, describe multiple sacred feasts. Greek mythology, for its part, recounts many tales of theophanic tasting involving scenes of disclosure and disguise. Primordial tests of the tongue. Recall Prometheus offering meats to Zeus or Eumaeus, the swineherd, feeding Odysseus in his hut. Not to mention the classic scene in Genesis where Abraham and Sarah share a meal with strangers at Mamre, acquiring the wisdom of hospitality and holiness (the strangers are revealed as divine in the tasting of food). And these theophanies of tasting are continued in the Christian story, which begins with Jesus at the breast and ends with the Last Supper, where he turns bread and wine into flesh and blood.15 Perhaps it was with this in mind that Thomas Aquinas declared taste to be the most intimate means of touching the divine (in the Eucharist). No doubt echoing the ancient psalm: “taste and see that the Lord is good.” Finally we might note that some of the greatest transformation scenes in Western literature are acts of hosting as tasting. I am thinking, for example, of the meal offered by Monseigneur Myriel to Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, of the banquet prepared by Babette for unknowing guests in Babette’s Feast, of the boeuf en daube shared by Mrs. Ramsey with her table in To the Lighthouse. Every reader will have their own list. In all these scenarios we witness the deepest kinds of savoir revealed in the simplest acts of savoring. And

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such savvy is “true” to the extent that it provides a reciprocal sharing between hosts and guests. What one might call a tactful hospitality of tasting. Double sensation as the giving and taking of food.

FLAIR (SMELL) What do we mean when we say that someone has flair? We mean they have a “good nose”— a gift for tactful discrimination. Or as the French say, “Ils ont du nez”: they know their scents and spices, wines and seasonings. Flair comes from flairer, to smell, and perfumery is a seasoned olfactory art of combining the most refined and earthy fragrances. Contemporary neuroscience has much to tell us about the affinities between sensuality and scent, as in the eroticochemical effect of pheromones— a carnal liaison long known to alchemical aficionados and amorous adventurers. The famous scientific experiment of assorted sweat-scented items of clothing affecting the sexual preferences of subjects is brilliantly explored by Audrey Schulman in her novel A Theory of Bastards. An experiment based on neuroscientic evidence concerning the relative location of key brain factors such as the olfactory nerve and the insular cortex, closely connected to the amygdala, an area involved in memory and emotion. Olfactory synesthetic bonds between intimates (such as mother and child or passionate partners) can remain deeply lodged in memory, as countless literary memoirs attest. If music be the food of love, scent is the hors d’oeuvre— a truth attested by Shakespeare when he recites the enchanting powers of Mab:

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COMING TO OUR SENSES She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes . . . Drawn with a team of little atomies Over men’s noses as they lie asleep; . . . And in this state she gallops night by night Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love . . . (ROMEO AND JULIET)

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Flair is also related to medical tact. Jean Lenoir, author of Le Nez du vin, was a gifted winemaker and an expert in diagnosing illness through smell, as was common with doctors in nineteenth-century France. And not only France, as we read in Robertson Davies’s The Cunning Man, where the medical diagnostics of the savvy Toronto doctor, Jonathan Hullah, stem from a special talent at scenting human secretions, fluids, and exhalations— a flair largely forgotten in the digital optical technologies of contemporary Western medicine. Olfactory tact can pertain to things both physical and psychical. “Sniffing a rat,” for example, may refer to detecting stealthy rodents or sly shenanigans. But the savvy of scent is also associated with animals who vicariously amplify our powers of detection: hogs as hunters of truffles, fox terriers of foxes, spaniels of snipe, weasels of rabbits (to weasel out), and so on. And scent extends to cultural codes as well. In a remarkable study, “The Human Snout,” Joseph Nugent recounts how the culture of smell in Ireland altered radically in the mid-nineteenth century when clerics attuned to Victorian values deemed the porcine odor of rural Irish parlors to be a sign of insalubriousness rather than largesse. The nose alters according to historical and material circumstances; and odors have affective power because they are

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charged with social conventions. Over time, smells take on new connotations, eliciting varying emotional responses that inform the way we interpret our world. Olfactory sensation plays a powerful subliminal role, for instance, in the construction of cultural and colonial ideologies.16 And such cultural conditioning of the “snout” is operative in every society to some degree, as evidenced, for example, in the fact that while certain ethnic languages (the Inuit) have many terms for the odors of fish and few for fungi, other languages (like Polish) have the opposite. It’s all a matter of following your nose and ending up in the right place. Or avoiding the wrong place: a malodorous whiff can save one much trouble— as in food poisoning when something is “off.” As a psychoanalyst colleague once put it: it’s all about smell in the end. Many great works of literature bear witness to the power of flair. One thinks of Homer’s moving account of Odysseus’s dog, Argos, in the Odyssey—the faithful hound who recognizes his master’s odor after decades of absence when even his spouse and friends fail to do so. Or Proust’s homage to scent and savor in the famous madeleine scene of Remembrance of Things Past—where the fragrant sip of linden tea and pastry triggers lost childhood memories. Not to mention the extraordinary powers of fragrance ingeniously enumerated in Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume. But my own favorite example is Camus’s evocation of his childhood school in The First Man: “The smell of varnished rulers and pen cases; the delicious taste of the strap on his satchel that he would chew on at length while laboring over his lessons; the sharp bitter smell of purple ink, especially when his turn came to fill the inkwells from a huge dark

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bottle . . . the soft feel of the smooth glossy pages of certain books, which gave off the good smell of print and glue; and finally, on rainy days, the smell of wet wool that emanated from the wool coats at the back of the classroom and seemed to be a harbinger of that Garden of Eden where children in wooden shoes and woolen hoods ran through the snow to their warm homes.”17 The point is that certain scents unlock long-buried memories—personal or collective— and get us back in touch with things.

INSIGHT (VISION) 24

When is seeing tactful? Seeing into the heart of things is called insight. Being sensitive to the consequences of one’s action, with an eye to the future, is foresight. Learning from past errors is the wisdom of hindsight.18 The combination of insight, foresight, and hindsight yields vision—a holistic way of “seeing things,” penetrating to the quick of experience, so that one is touched by what the eye touches. I am speaking of an intuition (Augenblick) where the split horizons of past and future traverse and illuminate the present.19 An experience of reversible seeing—in time and space—which sometimes goes by the name of “second sight” and is often captured in works of art and poetry.20 Cézanne evokes this, for instance, in his account of painting the Mont Sainte-Victoire forest in Provence when he feels touched by the trees he is seeing, as if they were watching him painting, inviting him, soliciting him, painting themselves through him. An account that Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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cites as evidence of synesthetic perception or “tactile seeing.”21 Such synesthesia is also attested by poet Octavio Paz when he mixes sight and touch: “I touch you with my eyes / I watch you with my hands / I see with my fingertips what my eyes touch.”22 But, more simply, we may say that insight is something experienced by anyone who gazes deeply into nature and feels embraced by its gaze.23 Indeed it is said that infants enjoy a synesthetic communion with the world before any normative division into sense specialization.24 One speaks of a dialectical development from a first naivete, where the child perceives the interconnectedness of things, through a flattening of sight as one-dimensional perception, to a second naivete of renewed holistic insight: a doubled vision where we see once again with the “eyes of the heart.”25 As the fox says in The Little Prince: “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” It is telling that in some wisdom traditions insight was even linked with the absence of literal sight. Seeing in the dark was considered a special way of perceiving things through touch— as we did in the womb and, once born, in our most intimate acts with others in life. Nor is it an accident that some of the wisest people in ancient culture were “blind seers,” said to receive their vision through blindness—Oedipus at Colonus, Teresias at Thebes, Paul at Damascus, Cleopas at Emmaus.26 Sightless insight, as a theme in Greek culture, goes back to the Elysian rites where participants were blindfolded (mysterion) in order to “see” into the “mysteries.”

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Nor, to rejoin a more contemporary discussion, should we omit to mention here the accounts of heightened “double perception” recorded by pioneers of natural psychoactive elements such as psilocybin—known as “entheogens” or “food for the gods” in many indigenous cultures.27 The augmented experience of “connection” between humans and nature—in the right “set and setting”— enables participants to suspend their normalized perception and see the heart of matter as a primal morphogenesis of things. Here again we witness the experience of seeing and being seen at the same time: a tactile double sensation, famously described by writers like Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Allen Ginsberg. This deeply synesthetic way of seeing beneath mono-optic perception signals an amplification of all the senses at once, which has nothing to do with hallucination, intoxication, or psychosis. It marks a moment when sight becomes insight, as Huxley famously describes it in The Doors of Perception.28 In short, in spite of the ubiquity of “spectacle” in our digital age, there exist other ways of seeing. And such tactful insight is by no means confined to exceptional visions or mystical transports but is available in the most simple perception of things. Tactful vision sees the extraordinary in the ordinary, as if we were viewing the world on the first day of creation. Like the poet Hopkins seeing epiphanies in the most mundane of everyday phenomena: This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.29

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All persons—not just poets, mystics, and sages— are capable of such insight. Everyone is a potential seer.

RESONANCE (SOUND) And sound? Hearing is tactful when it resonates with what resounds. We say of those who listen deeply that they are “sound.” Meaning to be “all ears” or, in the case of musicians, to have “a good ear.” To be sound is to be keenly attuned to one’s inner feelings and to those of others. To listen to the voice within the sound. For “voice” is sound with meaning—vocal noise accompanied by imagination.30 More generally, to take soundings is to heed the reverberation of things. To resonate.31 To be in touch with reality by responding to “the music of what happens” (Seamus Heaney). Indeed, it is telling that in Spanish one speaks of playing a musical instrument as touching—tocar la guitarra. Or that in French one speaks of pressing les touches (piano keys).32 Hearing and touching are always close. Nietzsche was surely right when he said we listen to music with our muscles. Good sounding extends from music to many modes of attention, including meditation, as the opening words of the Rule of Saint Benedict remind us—“Ausculta: Listen with the ear of the heart.” We do not hear the sound of silence; it is that by which we hear.33 We do not capture or control silence; we “feel the silence.” It surrounds and pervades us, like a tactile presence. An auditory skin. It is what makes genuine speech possible. Learning to be silent in order to

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listen to the call of others—human, animal, or divine—is a first principle of almost every wisdom tradition.34 To listen and sing at the same time was central to the practice of monastic plainchant, considered as an embodied performance of words as bodies. Chanting was deemed a form of “ingesting,” in keeping with the ancient principle of eating the sacred scrolls of scripture (Psalms 37:19, Isaiah 9:20, and Ezekiel 3:3).35 But to be clear: listening with the “ear of the heart” did not mean replacing the sensory with the spiritual, as if they were two separate things. On the contrary, tactful sounding combined both. To be sound was to be whole, a term cognate with healing and holiness. Touch and sound are connected from the beginning; they are the first senses to develop fully in utero and the last to leave us at death. The foetus’s early learning often occurs around rhythmic hand-mouth coordination, and its discrimination of sound is linked to an early apprehension of space. Indeed, such is its aural sensitivity (especially to rhythm) that in utero the brain of the developing foetus can be damaged by chronic dissonance or verbal violence; just as certain music played in the final trimester of gestation is thought to have hugely beneficial effects, not least in terms of safety, memory, and rhythm. This is where music literally touches us at our very core.36 Sound and touch are ontogenetically primary, their synergy providing a base camp of bodily sensibility and security throughout our lives. The synesthetic mix of tactile-aural experience is associated, accordingly, with our deepest hurts and healings, as mothers and lovers well know. Since the skin is another ear— our first ear—it attunes us to musical elements

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like volume, timbre, and tempo when caressing or being caressed by a loved one. This is why touch and sound have always been so crucial to bonding and caring. And the converse of this is that interpartner violence during gestation can have long-term deleterious effects on the child’s body and psyche. Child psychologist Colwyn Trevarthern offers striking examples of the link between movement, music, and flow in the somatic “proto- conversations” of infants.37 The coupling of rhythm and movement perdures throughout one’s lifetime and can have significant therapeutic effects in the healing of illness and trauma. (Several aphasic PTSD Vietnam vets, for example, found recovery through dance therapy.)38 We listen with our skin and our skin remembers. Proust knew this profoundly when he used rhythmic patterns of “modulation” to compose his art, invoking the leitmotif of the “little sonata.” Like all good poets and composers, he was aware that muse, music, and memory share the same linguistic root (mnemosyne). A trinity of allies in the work of “auditory imagination.”39 Musicality is at the root of carnal memory, as we know from the common experience of reliving a long-gone moment when listening to a song from one’s past. And this simple truth was not lost on Proust’s contemporary, James Joyce, who composed his works as a score of “aural eyeness”— a “visceral language in conversation with one’s own intestines . . . deeper than rational language.”40 The practice of what we might call “tactful acoustics” extends in our own day to good therapy. Helen Bamber reminds us of this in The Good Listener, where she draws

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from her work with trauma survivors to show us that healing is a form of hearkening. Sounding is resounding. Mutual resonance. Embodied attention. The best way to tend unspeakable traumas is, she insists, to attend to the secret wounds of patients who echo wounds within ourselves— trauma speaking to trauma, brokenness to brokenness, pain to pain. Speaking of her therapeutic experience with survivors of World War II death camps, she wrote: “Slowly over time, I began to realize that what I could do was to listen and receive—not to recoil, not to give the sense that you were contaminated by what you had heard but rather that you were there to receive it, horrible as it was, and to hold it with them.”41 Here we find a collusion of listening and holding where Bamber performs an act of tactful witness with her suffering patients. A double act of touching and being touched with the ear of the heart. But we should not forget how much we also learn from a tactful listening to nonhumans— creatures who retain deep acoustic sensitivities to a spectrum of hidden frequencies, high and low, lost or forgotten by humans. Think of whales, dolphins, horses and dogs, to take some species we are familiar with.42 Or the “keener sounds” of nature herself—the body of land and sea with which such creatures resonate: She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

COMING TO OUR SENSES That was not ours although we understood. . . . Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. (WALLACE STEVENS, “THE IDEA OF ORDER AT KEY WEST”)

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2 Philosophies of Touch From Aristotle to Phenomenology

Touch knows differences. —Aristotle

A

first philosophy of touch was sketched by Aristotle at the outset of Greek thought. He deemed tactility to be the most pervasive and intelligent of the senses. But his claim was largely sidelined for two thousand years. Platonism judged sight to be superior to touch since it was considered closer to reason, rising upward to supersensible ideas rather than descending, with touch, to dark feelings of flesh. Plato declared that “man is the spectator of all existence,” citing the etymology of anthropos as “upward gazer”: “The word anthropos implies that man not only sees but looks up at that which he sees, and hence he alone of all animals is rightly called anthropos because he looks up at (anthropei) what he has seen.”1 For Plato the eye is sovereign. The tactile body is a beast of burden and contagion to be kept in place. The pure and impure must live apart: “While we live we shall be closest to knowledge if we refrain as much as possible from association with the body . . . and

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by our efforts we shall know all that is pure, which is presumably the truth, for it is not permitted to the impure to touch the pure.”2 The outcome of this battle of ideas was to characterize Western philosophy as optocentric— sight- centered— relegating the other senses, and especially touch, to the lower realms of perception. We would have to wait until the twentieth century for existential phenomenology to rehabilitate the original Aristotelian discovery of touch, returning our sensibility “to the things themselves.”3 The most primordial things (phenomena) would now, once again, be relocated in our embodied lived experience— our sensations, moods, and emotions prior to intellectual cognition. Phenomenology recognizes truth as already present in our life-world. But this recognition depends on us coming to our senses: learning to suspend ingrained prejudices and retrieve our primary carnal experience—what our everyday tact, savvy, and flair tell us all the time. If only we dare to know what we already know. In contemporary phenomenology we find a revolutionary effort to redeem Aristotle’s inaugural insight, challenging the optocentric paradigm and restoring touch to its rightful place. The following reading of Aristotle is deeply informed by the contemporary perspectives of phenomenology.

RECOVERING OUR SENSES WITH ARISTOTLE In the first great work of human psychology, the De Anima, Aristotle declared touch to be the most universal

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of the senses. Even when we are asleep, he noted, we are susceptible to changes in temperature and noise, pressure and movement. Our bodies are always “on.” All living beings possess touch and every sense implies tactility of some kind: light strikes the iris, sound the tympanum, odor the nose buds, taste the tongue.4 The entire human body is tangible qua skin (only hair and nails feel no touch). Touch is also the most intelligent sense, says Aristotle, because it is the most sensitive. When we touch something we respond to what is touched. We are responsive to others in their distinctiveness precisely because we are in touch with them. “Touch knows differences,” thus serving as our basic power to discriminate between diverse kinds of persons and things.5 Intelligence begins with the vulnerability of skin. The thin-skinned person is sensitive and perceptive, observes Aristotle, while the thick-skinned is coarse and ignorant. Our first intelligence is epidermal.6 And this primal sensibility is also what places us at risk in the world, exposing us to adventure, suffering, and wonder. In saying all this, Aristotle was challenging the dominant prejudice of his time. The Platonic doctrine of the Academy, as noted, held that sight was the highest sense because it was deemed the most distant and mediated; and hence the most theoretical, holding things at bay, mastering experience from above. Touch, by contrast, was judged the lowest sense because it was ostensibly immediate and thus subject to pressures from the material world. Against this, Aristotle made the radical counterclaim that touch does indeed have a medium, namely “flesh”(sarx).7 For flesh is not

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just a material organ but a complex mediating membrane that negotiates our primary evaluations of things. Tactility is not blind immediacy, as Platonism professed. (Though the speculative “system” known as Platonism often simplified the subtle dialectics of its founder, Plato. Platonism was in many ways a forgetfulness of Plato.) Our first wisdom comes through touch—mediated by flesh—where our sensing is already a reading of the world, interpreting things as this or that, constantly registering differences and distinctions. Tactful sensation makes us human by responding to singularities here and now. But Aristotle did not win the battle of ideas. The Platonic vision prevailed, and Western culture became a system governed by “the soul’s eye.” Sight came to dominate the hierarchy of the senses and was esteemed the chosen ally of theoretical knowledge. (In Greek theoria means to see, hence the visual spectacle of “theater.”) Western philosophy thus sprang from a dichotomy between the “intellectual” sense of vision and the “animal” sense of touch. And Christian theology—though supposedly heralding a message of Incarnation (“Word made flesh”)— all too often endorsed this injurious Platonic dualism, prompting Nietzsche to decry Christianity as “Platonism for the people”: a doctrine that “gave eros poison to drink.” It seems the eye continues to rule to this day in what Roland Barthes calls our “Civilization of the Image.” The world is no longer our oyster but our screen. Spectacle has swallowed the senses. We shall return to this point in our final chapter.

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FLESH IS A MEDIUM Let us take a closer look at Aristotle’s argument. Claiming that touch is a discriminating sense, Aristotle insists that flesh (sarx) is a medium (metaxu) that gives us space to discern between different kinds of experience— hot and cold, soft and hard, attractive and unattractive.8 In touch, we are both touching and touched at the same time; but that does not mean we dissolve into sameness. Difference is preserved,9 which is why Aristotle declares that “flesh is a medium, not an organ.”10 And this breakthrough insight—which is philosophy catching up with lived experience—means that flesh harbors crucial spaces and intervals through which touch navigates.11 Flesh is full of holes, and that is a good thing. Touch is not immediacy but mediation through flesh. So unlike idealists who denigrated our sensory helplessness before the flux of phenomena, and contrary to materialists who claimed that touch brought us into raw contact with stuff, Aristotle always insisted on the filtering character of tactility. To be tactile is to be exposed to the world across gaps, to negotiate between various embodied beings, to respond to solicitations, to orient oneself in the universe of others. As if moving one’s fingers over the strings of a harp. From the beginning, contact involves a tact for negotiating surprise, for liberating sameness into difference. Aristotle then makes the startling claim that human perfection is the perfection of touch. Why? Because, he says, without tactility there is no life worth living. Precisely as the most basic and encompassing of sensations, touching expresses the fundamental “sensitivity” of flesh. But the

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most “basic” here does not mean the most transparent. In fact, touch turns out to be the most elusive sense, evading any literal location. Touch is “present throughout the flesh without any immediately assignable organ.”12 Although it operates in space and time, touch cannot be pinned down. It ranges freely through the forest of the body. But if touch is enigmatic it is also keenly attuned. It is the sense which makes us most sensitive to the world, bringing us into touch with things other than ourselves and putting ourselves into question. To touch well is to live well, that is, tactfully. “The being to whom logos has been given as his share is a tactile being, endowed with the finest tact.”13 And this is not just in the realm of the tangible but, as we have seen, potentially in our other senses too—seeing, hearing, smelling, hearing. Touch informs every human sensation, and its omnipresence throughout our corporeal experience is what keeps open our doors of perception, refusing to allow us to withdraw into ourselves. Closure is against nature. Touch keeps us susceptible to the world as it commutes, like Hermes, between inside and outside, self and other, human and nonhuman. Tactility is our most refined means of transition and translation. The touchstone of carnal hermeneutics.

▶▹▶ While I may seem directly present to what I touch and directly touched by what is present, there is always something mediate in the ostensibly immediate, or, put spatially, there is always something “far” in the “near.” In other words, there is sensing in sense, a making sense and receiving sense

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from something other than ourselves. Flesh translates this otherness, crossing back and forth between self and strangeness. It enables us to navigate our world by discerning prereflectively between what makes sense and what doesn’t, what is hospitable and what is hostile, what is attractive and what is dangerous. Since all the senses involve touch, and since touch involves mediation, all our sensations can be said to involve somatic interpretation of some kind, understood as a primal orientation in time and space prior to theoretical consciousness. By thus showing that interpretation (hermeneuin) is at work in our most elementary experiences, Aristotle anticipates the insights of contemporary hermeneutics.14 Touch remains, for the most part, preconscious or unconscious (as we would say post-Freud), and is no less sensitive for that. Au contraire, there is so much going on in our sensible experience that we need to keep it at bay lest it overwhelm us. From a theoretical point of view, we make sense of sense indirectly. We cannot cognize it head- on, objectively, but only re-cognize it obliquely, après- coup, at work behind our backs, already operative in our sensory-symbolic negotiation of the world. Which is why Aristotle himself was compelled to approach touch metaphorically. He describes flesh (sarx)—which mediates touch— as a watery membrane, air envelope, veil or second skin. When we try to grasp flesh as some thing, it leaves tropes in our hands. Flesh is figural from first to last— the tactile calling for the poetic.15 The hands-on calling for the analogous. In touching the world we are constantly prefiguring, refiguring, and configuring our experience. Feeling our way tactfully as we move by instinct—from the beginning of time— between cooked

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and raw, friendly and fearful, loving and violent; each sense possessing its own imaginary, its own set of dreams and fantasies— etched onto the rocks and sculptures of the earliest works of art. Cave drawings. Stone carvings. Touchstones. Murals and frescoes. Orbs and curves, lines and crossings. All written on the body of the world.

SENSING THE WORLD— SKIN ON SKIN

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But if touch is something we do to the world, it is also something the world does to us. It works both ways. As we reach out a hand, touch is what first affects us, in a concrete, personal manner. From the beginning, flesh is charged with attraction and retraction. As child psychology tells us, when the infant responds to the touch of the mother or opens its mouth to feed from the breast, it is already orienting and interpreting.16 It is not merely reacting to a stimulus but responding to a touch. In the first natal contact of flesh on flesh, we witness seizures and exposures of joy and fear, desire and anxiety. With the separation of birth, the mouth ceases to be a buccal cavity and becomes an oral medium.17 The infant’s cry is a call reaching across distance, a leap over a caesura between self and (m)other. So the first touch is not neutral but already a reading between the lines— of skin and bone, soft and hard, hot and cold. Or to anticipate the terms of modern phenomenology, we might say flesh is not a thing— qua object or organ—but a dynamic “infra-thing” that makes sense of things: a carnal sensitivity that evaluates lived situations. Babies are moody little beings, their babblings and probings already a play of testing and tasting.18

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Before we ever say the words here and there, our fingers and lips are figuring things out in terms of this or that kind of experience. “Touching never does away with the interval between us, but turns the interval into an approach,” as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it. Touch, like taste, doesn’t simply record sensible properties: “it grasps and immediately feels their noxious or useful character, their relevance to the preservation of our being.”19 If we don’t know what something is, our first impulse is to touch it. Just watch an infant entering a room, as it gropes, strokes, and tastes the things around it, treating them as threats or toys— transitional objects for its anxiety or joy. The baby makes a world with its hands. It feels the world through the pulse of the palm. Which is why Aristotle insists that touch, from the start, is “always true” (De Anima 428a). If touch was often called a “primitive” sense, it was because it provides our most basic apprehension of things. Why? Because tactility is the ability to modulate the passion of existence— Greek pathos understood as suffering, receiving, enduring others who come to us as this or that. Passion, passivity, and patience share a common root. This is what the poet Christian Wiman calls the “passion of pure attention, nerves, readiness.” To touch and be touched simultaneously is to be connected with others in a way that prizes us open. Flesh is open-hearted—where we are most exposed, skin on skin, keenly attentive to wounds and scars (starting with the navel), alert to preconscious memories and traumas. And this is crucial, for with this goes a deep sense of fragility and vulnerability. Which is no bad thing. Without exposure of skin (ex- peausition) there is no real experience.20 Through flesh—naked and tactile—we are

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subject to touch, day and night. Exposed on all sides to risk and adventure. Keenly sensitive, we take nothing for granted. Over time, we develop savvy, treating flesh as a surface that is deep. And precisely because it mediates between a self carnally located “here” and an other located “there,” touch is what enables empathy. Em-pathein— feeling oneself as one with the other. Which is why touching finds its social beginnings in the handshake: open hand to open hand—the origin of community.21 War and peace are skin deep in this sense. This question of pathos is crucial for our consideration of carnal intelligence. As the “medium” that enables us to feel with others, to touch and be touched by the world “out there,” flesh filters what is strange and alien. Diderot reminds us in his Letter to d’Alembert that we do not feel what is the same as us but only what is different: in the case of dipping a hand in water, for example, we sense what is hotter or colder than the temperature of our skin. While the organ of smell is odorless, and the organ of sound soundless, the medium of touch is always tactile. Touch is touched by what it touches and can touch itself touching. This fundamental reversibility means that I can risk feeling the other who is making me feel something inside from the outside—from what is not me. And it is this tactile sense of resistance and response that makes up one the most original aspects of our sensibility. The ability to discern through flesh. “Every sense discerns,” Aristotle reminds us, which means, at its simplest, that it is through the medium of flesh that 1. we have “contact” with external sensibles, 2. we transmit these with “tact” to our inner understanding, and 3. we translate the sense into language for others.

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But let me return here to the question of risk—what we might call the wagering of flesh. Simply put: without the sensitivity of touch—bare-skinned and fragile—there would be no resourcefulness of tact. Sensitivity is sensibility because it provides the basic intelligence of attention, delicacy, vigilance, finesse. “Man’s flesh is the softest of all,” notes Aristotle in De partibus animalium. Our hides are porous and thin, feeling pressure and stimulation through our hands and feet. And, precisely as highly susceptible beings, humans are the “most sensitive to differences” and therefore superior to other animals, whose skins are thick, hairy, hard: “Those whose flesh is tender are more gifted intellectually” (De Anima, 412A).22 For Aristotle, perfection of intelligence comes down, in the end, to perfection of flesh. Human sensitivity is in the last instance carnal. A matter of touch. All this is not without its conundrums. Recall once again Aristotle’s startling claim that touch is one of the five senses and at the same time the precondition of all the senses. Touch brings us into intimate contact with particular tangible things while remaining a universal power traversing the other senses. It is the most singular and general at once. Punctually present and omnipresent. And synesthetic to the core. This point is important and bears repeating: one cannot live without sensing, exist as soul without flesh, and every sense requires the ability to be touched—whatever the distance— by what one senses (through eye, ear, nose, or tongue). In sum, touch is the heart and soul of the senses, the intersensorial milieu that makes all sensible congress between outer and inner worlds possible. “Since we touch with our whole body, our soul is the act of touch, and only as such can it be a hearing soul, a seeing soul and so on.”23

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ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS

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There are important ethical evaluations at work here. Tactile sensitivity involves moral sensibility—the combination of both implying tact. This is why, in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle speaks of the importance of distinguishing between 1. good touch, which differentiates between various kinds of sense, and 2. bad touch, which degenerates into coarse undifferentiated behavior (gluttony, violence, perversion). Immorality of the senses comes from contact deprived of tact: namely, grasping without feeling, consuming without caring, swallowing without savoring (what the French call dégustation). “Self-indulgent people make no use of taste,” says Aristotle. “The role of taste is to discriminate between flavors; which is precisely what wine-tasters do, as well as those that season dishes.”24 Here, we could say, lies the difference between the gourmand who ingests and the gourmet who relishes. Good taste knows how to wait, mark time, taking in the fullness of the thing sensed with the fullness of the tongue sensing. Good taste is integral, appreciative, free. Bad taste is partial, unmediated, driven. This is why touch— as the most holistic and synesthetic of the senses—is logically the primal mode of sensibility in both life (survival) and love (value). A tall order for the body, forever on double duty, always on call, tactile through and through (except for our hair and nails, which feel no pain). And it is because touch thus belongs to flesh as a whole that it is the sensus universalis, capable of touching all things through all the senses. While we can close our eyes, our ears, our nostrils and our lips, we are always touching and

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being touched. Touch is a “membrane” sensitive to what is not itself, a portal opening onto a world that can never be shut. It is the first site of our consent to being and our welcome to others. Being in touch means being at risk— between suffering and joy. And without risk no life is worth living. In all of this, Hermes—the Greek messenger—hovers. At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle realized that meaning already exists at the core of carnal existence. The work of Hermes is everywhere. The body constantly sends and receives messages from the inner capillaries of our heart to the nerve endings of our fingers and toes— probing and coding, ciphering and signifying through skin and bone. Sometimes this work of mediating conceals itself, as Aristotle notes, in which case Hermes proves hermetic. Other times, we transit between deep and surface messages, translating between inner wounds and outer scars, between secrets and signs, in which case Hermes is hermeneutic— calling us to join him in the art of deciphering.

BACK TO THE SENSES: THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL REVOLUTION At the beginning of the twentieth century, Edmund Husserl announced the phenomenological movement by inviting philosophers to return to the “things themselves”—namely, to revisit our prereflective experience of the body. The lived body (Leib), he argued, differs from the object body (Körper) in that the former remains a subject in touch with felt

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existence, while the latter is considered a thing to be measured and manipulated—“like a patient etherized upon a table” (T. S. Eliot). Challenging the philosophical dualism of mind versus body, Husserl, like Aristotle before him, declared touch to be the most primordial mode of relationship. In Ideas 2, written in 1912, we find the classic example of two hands touching to describe the basic phenomenon of “double sensation.” Husserl writes: “The sensation is doubled in the two parts of the body, since each is then precisely for the other an external thing that is touching and acting upon it, and each is at the same time a (living) body, both receiving and imparting touch.”25 In this act of double sensation, I do not experience myself as some disembodied consciousness experiencing a mere thing amidst things, but as flesh experiencing flesh in a fundamentally reciprocal way. To touch in this double way is to realize that one does not merely “have” a body— one “is” a body as one is a living person.26 In showing how the recursive phenomenon of touching/touched is at the heart of our experience of the world, Husserl challenges the optocentric priority of sight and restores touch to its rightful place: “In the case of an object constituted purely visibly . . . an eye does not appear to its own vision. . . . I do not see myself the way I touch myself. What I call the seen body (Körper) is not something seeing which is seen, the way my body as touched body (Leib) is something touching which is touched.”27 Through a series of detailed phenomenological descriptions Husserl rehabilitates Aristotle’s insight—without naming him— that touch is an active-passive dialectic at work across the senses: auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and visual.28

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Husserl then takes a further step— after Aristotle—in claiming that tangible-tactile flesh provides us with our most primordial experience of the other. This is because touch is not simply a way of actively perceiving another but also a way of being passively perceived; it serves as a swing door between myself and another as we exchange places in a cycle of reversible sensibilities. Two-way touch is a transfusion between intimate and foreign flesh. Whereas sight promises domination of my environment out there, touch is the crossroads between me and all that is not me, inserting me in a play of carnality that reconnects the “there” with the “here”—linking that stranger out there in the world with my embodied presence in this particular time and place. In such wise, touch serves as the indispensable agency of intercorporality— and, by moral extension, empathy.29 Tact is feeling that resonates, emotion that evaluates, mood that appreciates. It makes us beings-in-the-world-for- oneanother, and, as such, serves as the precondition of language. Whence Husserl’s conclusion that “the body can be constituted originally only in tactuality and in everything that is localized in the sensations of touch.”30 And this tactile incarnation, he insists, operates always “in unity with consciousness as soul and psyche.” This is important: flesh is not opposed to mind—it is deep mind, intimate mind, felt mind. Body and mind are like the inside and outside of our skin—two sides of one sleeve. And since tactuality is what allows for empathy with others, a civilization that loses touch with flesh loses touch with iteslf. Husserl was followed by a host of “existential phenomenologists” who, like him, offered deep contemporary insights into our embodied being. These included Martin

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Heidegger’s descriptions of our fundamental “moods” of anxiety and our existental use of hands (ready-to-hand, present-at-hand) in Being and Time (1927), Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous description of the caress in Being and Nothingness (1943), Emmanuel Levinas’s description of “sensibility” as our most radical form of intentionality in Totality and Infinity (1961), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s vivid account of human relations as incarnate body-subjects in Phenomenology of Perception (1944).31 Merleau-Ponty is arguably the most important of these thinkers for our purposes, as he explicitly focuses on the phenomenon of touch. For him, there is no dichotomy between subject and object, such that the human being would be either wholly active, at a safe distance from things, or passively powerless at the mercy of the world. When I touch a thing, Merleau-Ponty observes, I am at the same time tangible, “such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world and as it were in the things.”32 Neither I nor the world fully determine my experience of tactility because touch is constituted by a “chiasm” of mutual traversal between my flesh and the flesh of the world. Perceiving and being perceived are “intertwined” throughout, and this intertwining is more fundamental than the subject/object polarity. Something that is true of all the senses: I see only because I touch the world with my gaze, yet what I see is not determined by my gaze alone: “one cannot say if it is the look or the things that commands.”33 Likewise with tasting, smelling, and hearing— each involves a receptivity to being touched (on the tongue, tympanum, and nosebuds respectively). We seek things with our senses as they give

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themselves to us. Whenever I am sensing, I go out to the world and receive from the world in a continuous circle. Sight is not touch and touch is not sight, but each traverses the other and works through “the same body” and “the same world.”34 Merleau-Ponty took the novel step of applying the phenomenology of touch to the question of healing. In Phenomenology of Perception he cites the example of a psychiatrist who healed a seriously disturbed patient by touching his throat with his hand. “In treating (certain illnesses) psychological medicine does not act on the patient by making him know the origin of his illness: sometimes a touch of the hand puts a stop to the spasms and restores to the patient his speech.” He explains: “The patient would not accept the meaning of his disturbances as revealed to him without the personal relationship formed with the doctor, or without the confidence and friendship felt towards him, and the change of existence resulting from this friendship. Neither symptom nor cure is worked out at the level of objective or positing consciousness, but below that level.”35 What this implies is that human symptoms cannot be explained by either biochemistry or intellectual volition alone—though both have their role. Ultimate healing involves an existential conversion of one body-subject in tactful communion with another. These phenomenological insights into embodiment were amplified by feminist existentialists like Simone de Beauvoir in the Second Sex (1946) and later again by Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva—thinkers who stressed the philosophically neglected dimension of tactility in sexuality,

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2.1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and Luce Irigaray

(ink drawings by Simone Kearney)

art, and mother- child play. In a remarkable essay, “The Fecundity of the Caress” (1984), Irigaray argues that, when it comes to love relationships, it is not the optical that is primary but the tactile. “The face is swallowed up in the act of love,” she says, “returning to the source of all the senses— touch. . . . Lovers’ faces live not only in the face but in the whole body. . . . The lovers meet in the moment of

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incarnation. Like sculptors who are going to introduce themselves, entrust themselves to one another for a new delivery into the world.”36 The caress is a poetics of flesh— and making love is a dual art of loving and making. In the double sensation of eros one enters a world of vulnerability and creativity where lovers become “creators of new worlds,” realizing a “birth still in the future.”37 Irigaray is particularly alert to the regenerative possibilities of lovers experiencing reciprocal pleasure, a key aspect of touch long eclipsed by Platonic idealism. In a similar vein, Kristeva explores the neglected dimension of psychic- corporal “semiotics” that needs to be addressed for real healing to happen. She is particularly strong on the formative postnatal relationship between mother and child which she calls “reliance” (from the French relier, to connect). This rapport of carnal “presubjectivity” has been ignored, she argues, by our overly calculative culture, with serious consequences for our psychic well-being. “Between biology and meaning and the tact required for the transmission of the affects and language of the other, maternal reliance specifies the passion mothers have for their children.”38 And vice versa. This semiotic dialectic of rupture-attachment begins at birth. For natal flesh bears our first wound, experienced as wonder and trauma. It marks the scar of the navel: the knot of the umbilicus signaling my inaugural separation from the mother and my primal exposition to the world. Flesh is radical vulnerability, as our primordial condition of being naked reminds us.39 Carnal semiotics is at the core of our existence. We are constantly reading and being read by each other’s skins,

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making the body a kind of book. To be tangible is to be readable. As when Lady Macbeth says to Macbeth—“Your face, my Thane, is like a book where men may read stranger matters.” Flesh betrays thought. And this idea of the body as text recalls not only the age-old notion of Creation as a “book of nature” (liber mundi) but also the whole modern project of self-creation, witnessed in the perpetual reinvention of new body styles (tattooing, hair cropping, haptic vests, piercings) and various forms of somatic self- deprivation (anorexic fasting) or self-mutilation (cutting). In such instances, the body is our book for better or worse. Just as books often become embodied, our reading of texts becoming affective incorporations of meaning into action. From Ezekiel eating the scroll that turned sweet in his belly to modern readers imitating the lives of literary heroes. Censorship of literature only exists because books affect us in affective ways. We are touched by the texts we read, reduced to tears and laughter, moved to act, swayed to respond. Reading with the body is never neutral.40

▶▹▶ But while the revolutionary thinkers of existential and feminist phenomenology call us back into touch with tactuality, the mainstream academy—in keeping with our optocentric worldview—has not always listened. Indeed, I will argue in my final chapter that our digital culture today is one of excarnation rather than incarnation, making it all the more urgent to endorse philosophies of embodiment which promise new arts of touch.41

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APPENDIX: THE PARADOX OF THE UNCANNY AS EMBODIED KNOWING A key sentiment addressed by contemporary phenomenology is that of the Uncanny. Both Heidegger in Being and Time and Kristeva (drawing from both Heidegger and Freud) in Strangers to Ourselves offer intriguing insights into this phenomenon of embodied knowing. To be canny is, paradoxically, to be in touch with the Uncanny. Canniness is a basic ability to suss things out prior to any cognitive explanation. It signals a skill for navigating the world in a prereflective lived manner, before we bring things to conceptual clarification. Canniness connotes what might be called a natural or native intelligence, a can-do ability to get on with people, intuitively responsive to tacit meanings and gestures. Or. to put it in more colloquial terms, it signals the power to understand situations “by gut instinct,” knowing things “by heart,” feeling things “in one’s bones.”42 To juggle with Blaise Pascal, canniness is a kind of reason that reason does not understand. And, as such, it echoes a wisdom going back to the original meaning of empathy in Semitic languages—reham/rechem, referring to the womb or belly: the innermost core of life and nourishment.43 To be canny is to be in touch with the unconscious life of things. It is our most basic existential instinct. The etymological roots of the term are, I think, telling. Canny comes from the middle English cunnen and, farther back again, the Anglo-Saxon kennen, connoting a form of cunning and ken, a secret knowledge of things invisible to the eye. In contrast to wissen, which deals with public and

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conventional knowing, cunnen is concerned with underground things, from the Old Norse, ku-kunna-kunton— meaning a hollow hidden place, covered, concealed, or sheathed (as in the female sex). This is the vernacular sense deployed by Hamlet when he teases Ophelia about “country matters,” unmentionable in the language of Court. And I think it is interesting that the subterranean power of canniness/cunning was traditionally associated, in various Indo-European languages, with names for certain kinds of animals— such as rabbits (coinín in Gaelic) and foxes: creatures who dwell in underground warrens and are symbolically linked with hidden desires. (See, for example, the depiction of rabbits and foxes in the Cluny tapestry of “The Lady and the Unicorn,” crowned with the caption À Mon Seul Désir.)44 This sense of native cunning is captured in the German heimisch or Heimlich—which proved to be a linguistic treasure trove for both Heidegger and Freud. If one consults Daniel Sanders’s Dictionary of German Speech, one notes intimate links between the terms heimisch (native), Geheim (secret) and heimlich (homely). Sanders refers to underground sources and wells: “Heimlich is like a buried spring or dried-up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having the feeling that water might come up there again . . . something secret.”45 Heimlich thus came to mean that which is so intimate and private that it is repressed from everyday public view. As Grimm’s dictionary notes, heimlich finds its equivalents in the Latin terms occultus, divinus, mysticus, and vernaculus. Indeed, so secret does this sense of things become that the term actually slips into its opposite, unheimlich or uncanny! In short, the intimately familiar becomes

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so intimate that it becomes invisible, concealed from sight, “so that others do not get to know about it, withheld from others.”46 Hence the frequent references to a heimlich love affair (surreptitious, prohibited, unlawful); a heimlich chamber (privy); or a heimlich activity (occult, hidden, unspoken, forbidden). In short, the canny becomes so canny that it reverses ambiguously into its contrary—its unconscious double, the uncanny. Freud concludes his brilliant analysis of this paradox by suggesting that the uncanny (das Unheimliche) may be understood as that which is so withdrawn from our normal consciousness that it becomes, quite literally, unconscious. The canny, he surmises, refers to experiences that became so uncanny (because repressed from consciousness) that we hide them not only from others but even from ourselves. Uncanny doubles are not just without but within. They make us, as Kristeva puts it, “strangers to ourselves,” feeling weirdly un-at-home when at home, in touch and out of touch with ourselves at the same time.47 For both Heidegger and Kristeva, the feeling of the uncanny is ultimately our way of being in touch with death— our tangible experience of nothingness, our affective encounter with the abyss as being-towards-death.48 Kristeva links the canny/uncanny paradox to forms of precognition or recognition— déjà vu or après- coup— that lie deeper than normal cognition. And, like Freud and Heidegger, she traces this back to primal experiences of generation and death that modern society has repressed. The paradoxical feeling expresses a sort of nocturnal conscience—what James Joyce called “nighttime consciousness”— that operates according to a logic

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of both/and rather than either/or.49 While the conscious self follows the sequential logic of official conduct, our unconscious remains haunted by uncanny recurrences of hidden somatic traumas and drives (eros and thanatos)— repetitions across not just individual lives but whole generations. The splitting of the self into conscious and unconscious is the symptom of a defense mechanism whereby the ego projects internal impulses and associations outward onto something foreign. When all is said and done, the paradox of the uncanny arises from the existence of the “double,” dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surpassed: “a stage at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The double has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.”50 We remain strangers to ourselves until we get back in touch with the other within. This curious reversibility coincides with the fact that the “uncanny” is really nothing new or alien at all but something so deeply established in our psyche that it has become alienated from it through a process of repression. When we lose touch with our elementary feelings about death, they flee underground and return as phantoms. The ghosts of the uncanny signal the return of the repressed. And this phenomenon of doubling, while ageless in origin—the unconscious is timeless—is by no means absent in our era. On the contrary, however ignored by modern reason, the uncanny lives in our cultural imaginaries. Contemporary popular culture constantly revisits myths of the uncanny in films and TV series like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, or Game of Thrones—works that serve

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as repeat cycles of the felt unconscious. Such spectacles are symptomatic of a repetition compulsion screening dramas of our collective psyche. Suitable signifiers for a semiotics of doubling. Our imaginary epitomizes the enigma of the uncanny. And it does so not only in popular culture, where underground drives find wide currency, but also in works of art and poetry. I want to conclude by citing a poem by Seamus Heaney, whose tactile and tactful imagination brings us back in touch with our most hidden being. Heaney is an artist with a canny flair for the uncanny—for tacit flows and secrets, for special places where the vertical crosses the horizontal and cyclical time enters hidden space. The poem is called the “Diviner”— echoing Freud’s linkage of canniness with “divination”— and is published as the second of his Glanmore Sonnets in his 1979 collection Field Work. Here Heaney sounds the “secretive” life of language, describing its words as “sensings, mountings from the hiding places / . . . ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch.” He speaks of the art of touch as a subterranean sensibility, like the old Irish “hedge schools” where one learned skills forbidden by imperial English culture. Heaney himself served his apprenticeship in poetic “field work” attuned to a “middle voice” of circular reverie: a feeling of active passivity— active in the exhuming of underground feeling, passive in attending to unnamed dimensions of being: “vowels ploughed into other, opened ground. / Each verse returning like the plough turned round.” His poem hankers after energies that “lie deep, like some spirit indelibly written into the nervous system.” And this retrieval of

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cryptic carnal sense means retracing familiar words back to their unfamiliar (uncanny) origins. Such tactile sounding restores self to self, reclaiming a culture that has lost touch with itself. It is a labor of savvy and tact that Heaney compares to that of a water diviner. In Ireland, as elsewhere, the diviner uses the touch of a hand-held hazel rod to recover sources of water flowing deep within the earth— sources from which the hazel wood originally sprang. Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick That he held tight by the arms of the V: Circling the terrain, hunting the pluck Of water, nervous, but professionally

58 Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting. The rod jerked down with precise convulsions, Spring water broadcasting Through a green aerial its secret stations. (THE DIVINER)

The diviner plumbs the uncanny with a special art of touching and being touched. Heaney describes this skill as a “double sensation of here-and-nowness in the familiar place and far-and-awayness in something immense”— an uncanny experience he associates with poetic attunement.51 He recognizes the art of dousing as native savvy—not something contrived or picked up in higher education establishments. It is “a gift for being in touch with what is there, hidden and real . . . for mediating between the latent resource and the community that wants it current and released.” To be canny, Heaney concludes, is to be attentive

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to “that first stirring of the mind round the word or an image or a memory,” allowing the “first gleam” to grow toward articulation, to attain “its proper effulgence.” To touch the hazel rod is to be in touch with the earth under our feet. It is to sound what lies beneath.

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3 Tales of the Wounded Healer

Please come home. Please come home into your own body, Your own vessel, your own earth. —Jane Hooper

T

ouch is intimately linked to healing. The word trauma means wound in Greek. The rupture of birth is our first trauma and our subsequent existence on this earth is a series of repeat sunderings and recoveries. No one escapes—until we embrace the ultimate wound of death. Of course, some traumas are more dramatic than others, and it would be insensitive, to say the least, to put them all on one plane. To be born and to be tortured are not the same thing. But if we accept that no one goes unscathed in life, how might a therapeutics of touch help heal our hurts, even if it cannot cure them? We’re all born and we all die, but we can live a good life in between. Though trauma studies are a relatively recent phenomenon— emerging in the late twentieth century— the story of wounds goes back to the beginning of human culture. From the earliest myths, we have scenes of wounding and healing through the art of touch. Most of these

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tales feature figures called “wounded healers” who work through carnal catharsis. But what exactly does the paradox of wounded healing mean?

GREEK MYTHS OF WOUNDED HEALERS Odysseus

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One of the first wounded healers in Western literature is Odysseus, whose name means “bearer of pain.” He carries wounds both suffered and inflicted by his forebears. In the beginning of Homer’s story, Odysseus seeks to absent himself from the traumas of his birth and upbringing—his origins in Ithaca—by sailing off to heroic glory. But his attempts to become an immortal warrior are constantly thwarted by reminders of his mortality. The brutal carnage of Troy and his break with the lure of Calypso (where he takes mortal food over divine ambrosia) are central to this disillusionment. Odysseus prefers to touch and taste the earth than embrace phantasmal illusion. Returning to Ithaca as a lowly beggar, he is recognized only through the smell of his flesh (by his dog, Argos) and the touch of his scar (by his nurse, Euryclea). The touch occurs after Euryclea, bathing his body, recalls how he received the injury in a childhood hunting incident with his grandfather, Autolycus (Odyssey 19.393– 469). The climactic moment of “recognition” takes the form of a double catharsis: telling the tale and feeling the scar provides the means to appropriate his forgotten

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wounding. The stroke of Euryclea’s hand, accompanied by the recovered memory, enables Odysseus to relive his trauma over time. He finally returns to himself through a healing mix of touch and story. In the Poetics, Aristotle describes this double therapeutics of feeling (pathos) and narrative (muthos-mimesis) as the “purgation of pity and fear.”1 Such purging (catharis) of our deepest passions is to be understood not as an instant remedy but as an open-ended process of what today we call “working through.” Catharsis, says Aristotle, brings about a twofold transformation of the passions (pathemata)— turning pathological pity (eleos) into compassion and pathological fear (phobos) into serenity. Compassion spells a proper closeness to pain without being overwhelmed; while serenity keeps a wise distance without being indifferent. Catharsis, Aristotle concludes, is the affective balancing of near and far that makes for integrated human beings— good Athenian citizens. Purged emotion leads to practical wisdom.2 It is worth noting that Telemachus, son of Odysseus, expecting a triumphant victor to return to Ithaca, does not initially recognize his father. He is so deluded by great expectations of a paternal hero that his eyes do not see his real father behind the beggar’s mask. It is only when he sits in the mud hut of the swineherd, Eumaeus, sharing earthly food, that he sheds his optical illusions and is finally touched by truth. I consider it crucial that in Homer’s final recognition scenes, welcoming the lost stranger, Odysseus, takes the form of touching a scar and tasting food.

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3.1 Odysseus and Eurycleia (drawing by Christian Gottlob Heyne)

Oedipus It has been noted by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss that the proper names for Oedipus and his patrilineal ancestors refer to “wounds” that cause difficulty in walking: Oedipus (swollen-footed), his grandfather Labdacos (lame), his father Laios (left-sided). Each acts out the criminal traumas of previous generations: Laios raped the son of his host, Pelops, thereby committing a double transgression that replicates the curse (ate) of his own father, Labdacos, and is repeated by Oedipus in the next generation. This recurrence of trauma—inflicted or suffered—takes place over three generations, and the only solution to the

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curse of cyclical repetition comes when Oedipus forfeits sight and regains contact with his bodily scars (as a child his feet were pierced by stakes). His attempt to deny his terrestrial nature by defeating the Sphinx is futile, and he is finally compelled to accept his traumatic origins through a series of woundings, culminating in the removal of his eyes. This leads not to curing (that is impossible, his eyes are gone) but to a kind of “embodied vision” (a second sight in which he sees differently) and a deeper sense of touch (he is led by the hand of Antigone). Finally, Oedipus achieves a new way of speaking: to wit, his final words at Colonus, where he accepts his estranged status as a mortal being. Oedipus’s wound becomes a scar that articulates a healing prescription for later generations.

Chiron The healings of Odysseus and Oedipus echo similar stories in Greek mythology, from the blind “seer” Tiresias and the bleeding sage Philoctetes to the injured contemplative Thales and, most important for our purposes, the pierced healer Chiron.3 Half-man and half-horse, Chiron was mortally injured by Herakles during a boar hunt when a poisoned arrow struck his leg. Though Chiron could not cure his own wound, he found that he could cure others and became known as a wise and compassionate healer. Pain speaking to pain. Those who visited him in his subterranean cave felt more whole and well in his injured presence.4 Both demigod and centaur, Chiron taught his disciple, Asclepius, the art of healing through touch. Indeed the

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name Chiron comes from the word kheir, meaning hand, or, more precisely, one skilled with the hands. The related term kheirourgos means surgeon. As healer, he accompanied the art of touch— often portrayed as a laying on of hands and bodily massage—with medicinal plants from the earth, music, and sleep potions. Those who descended to the dark of Chiron’s cavern left sight behind, in keeping with the Eleusinian mystery rites where participants were blindfolded as they approached the altar (mysterion is from myein, to close the eyes or mouth). They traded optical control for tactile wisdom. This was the lesson of natural healing that Chiron imparted to Asclepius as first patron of Greek medicine. By contrast, Hippocrates, the other patron of Greek medicine, followed the way of Zeus, Chiron’s brother, who dwelt on Mount Olympus and promoted a method of optocentric supervision. In short, while Asclepius practiced healing through carnal tact from below, Hippocrates promoted curing through superintendence from above. The former worked through touch, taste, and dream in the underground, the latter through panoptic control in the Olympian sky. The wisdom of the cave answered the intellect of the mountain. Chiron broke with his brother Zeus, who continued the periodic blood cycle of father-son castration (Chronos castrates his father Ouranos, Zeus castrates his father Chronos). He puts an end to the repetition of patricidal violence and assumes wounds into his own flesh. Instead of acting it out on others, he makes pain an agent of empathy— a healing through carnal touch. As a hybrid of human and animal, Chiron reconnects us with our deeper feelings and earth belonging. Son of both

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67 3.2 Chiron the wise centaur: after Greek image

(photo by Anne Bernard Kearney)

Chronos and Philyra, Chiron chose the art of tactile care inherited from his mother (Philyra comes from philia, love) in order to assuage the sadness of chronological time inherited from his father (Chronos was patron of saturnine melancholy). Chiron used love to salve and salvage time. Pindar writes accordingly of “wise-hearted Chiron who taught Asclepius the soft-fingered skills of medicine’s lore” (Nemean Ode 3.52– 55).5

The Asclepian Tradition The traditional preparation for Asclepian healing—inspired by Chiron—included tactile acts of bathing, ritual massage,

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and the ingestion of curative herbs. Many supplicants entered the temples, known as Asclepia, with terracotta figures of ailing body parts that were laid at the shrine. Surrounded by these votive offerings, visitors awaited the dream visitation of Asclepius himself in the form of an animal— usually a snake, dog, or cockerel— that tended their wounds as they incubated in the dark. Of the animal totems associated with Asclepius, the serpent became most emblematic of his powers, as depicted in Asclepian temples and in the classic images of the scepter and snake that signpost pharmacies to this day. (The serpent was called pharmakos, with the double sense of venom-cure, informing the later practice of vaccination). There are many ancient sculptures of Asclepius in the form of a snake attending the sick; and some Asclepian rites even involved water vessels swimming with snakes.6 Asclepian temples—like the one still extant in Epidaurus—basically served as hospitals, such that temple medicine was considered competition by Hippocrates’ followers. Asclepieia developed into sacred hostels and nursing homes, set on the margins of towns or in sequestered places of nature—like oracular shrines. They were considered sites where human and divine powers of healing could meet.7 In his book A Place of Healing, Michael Kearney shows how the Asclepian tradition of medicine practiced earth wisdom, while the Hippocratic method took its tune from the Olympian gods, prescribing pain control strategies and diagnostics to identify and eradicate disease. It is this latter heroic model of outmaneuvering and overcoming illness that has prevailed in mainstream Western medicine up to

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our own time.8 However, the heroic-Hippocratic model does not address all kinds of pain. It only tells half the story. Pain control works when the pain can be managed by our interventions, but something extra is required in the face of uncontrollable or terminal illness. And here, the author argues, healers may look to Asclepius for a different way of understanding suffering. The Asclepian approach accepts that even when the doctor cannot completely control mortal suffering, one can choose to be with the patient’s pain, to hold the dying one’s grief, to sit with them and take their hand. With mindful presence, healers learn to recognize the pattern of what happens when one confronts the limits of one’s capacities in the face of suffering. Put in more contemporary terms, one has a choice: to reach for the safe distance of specialist expertise and technical management or to remain in touch with the patient, to stay with one’s own embodied feelings as a way of staying with the other’s wounds. Such mutual abiding with pain becomes a form of shared witness— a bilateral healing beyond unilateral curing. Under such circumstances, the wounded healer is one who contains his or her own pain while remaining present to the other in theirs, knowing that this, more than anything else one says or does, is what awakens the inner healer in the other. Even when there seems nothing left to do, we realize that we each carry a potential for healing within and that our woundedness is the soil from which the “green shoot of healing emerges.”9 The more we can be with our own pain, the more we can be with others in theirs. But this double echoing of each other’s wounds can only occur when we are no longer confined to the top-down dynamic

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3.3 Asclepius and serpent, after Greek statue at Epidaurus (ink drawing by Anne Bernard Kearney)

3.4 Asclepius and Hegeia: healing touch, after votive relief, fourth

century BC (ink drawing by Anne Bernard Kearney)

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of the medical expert managing the one in need. Doctor and patient now meet as two human beings, where the former suffers alongside the latter, both experiencing a “peace of mind and a sense of meaning that are the hallmarks of arriving in a place of healing.”10 It is perhaps fitting to recall here that Asclepius was often accompanied by his snake-bearing daughter, Hygieia, who cleansed and purged a space for healing (our word hygiene), and his son, Telesphorus, whose name means “convalescence”: a slow steady being-with the sufferer over time. Telesphoros is often depicted on coins and carvings as a boy with a wide cloak and hooded cap, carrying herbs and a scroll. The key to Asclepian healing is always accompaniment.11 A fitting reminder given today’s crisis of solidarity in the medical and therapeutic professions— something dramatically brought home to us, yet again, in the response to COVID-19. Never was Asclepius more needed.12

BIBLICAL STORIES OF WOUNDED HEALERS Biblical literature is also rich with stories of healing through touch. In Genesis we find much laying on of hands in episodes of blessing and curing.13 But it is arguably the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel in the night—where touch replaces sight—that first captures the idea of holiness coming from tactile contact with the Other. Jacob’s hand combat with the dark stranger reveals the divine other, albeit at the cost of an injured hip! Next morning, Jacob the maimed warrior is reconciled with his estranged brother, Esau, and goes on to bestow wisdom to his people.

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72 3.5 Eugene Delacroix, Jacob Wrestling with Angel

(photo by Sarah Kearney)

Some of the most formative biblical encounters are corps à corps. And it is telling that the same Hebrew term— da’ath—refers to knowing as both spiritual wisdom and carnal intimacy.14 Hence the great number of religious portraits devoted to tactile embraces between biblical figures— from Michaelangelo’s masterpiece of the finger-reach between Yahweh and Adam to Rembrandt’s portrait of Christ touching the leper and modern works by Rodin and Chagall. The archive of tangible encounters recorded in the history of religious painting comprises what one might call a sacred art of touch. And one might also mention here that the liturgical practice—notably in Greek Orthodoxy— of kissing and touching icons of holy healers has survived

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through the centuries to this day. This custom was originally linked with Byzantine theories of the “haptic extramission” of the gaze, where touch and sight were said to cross synesthetically in a form of “tangible vision.” The Byzantines believed that iconic seeing was a form of healing touch in which the senses converge. Likewise, touching an icon became a kind of healing seeing. This tangibility of vision reveals a reversibility at work in the believer’s experience of the icon. We are not at a distance from the image, for our looking reaches out to touch it. And if our eyes touch the icon, the icon’s eyes also touch us in an act of double sensation. Believers come before the icon not only to look, but to be looked upon. To be healed as the Israelites, touched by real serpents, were healed before the sight of the bronze serpent (Numbers 21:4– 9).15 Christianity made Christ emblematic of the wounded healer.16 The crucified body served as a paradigm of healing over the centuries, with madonnas and saints following in its wake—from the heart-pierced Mater Dolorosa to stigmata-bearing figures like Francis and Padre Pio: pilgrims who healed others though they could not heal themselves. While some have objected to such veneration— John Calvin included— deeming the scars on Christ’s body to be blemishes to be erased in his Glorified Body, many viewed such scars as an indelible feature of ongoing incarnational attestation.17 We need only look at Caravaggio’s painting of Thomas touching Jesus’s side to see how deep this conviction is. Jesus is saying: “Put your finger in my wounds!” (John 20:27). “I am not a ghost! I have flesh and bones” (Luke 24:39). Indeed Christian communicants get

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a reminder of this every time a eucharistic minister places bread in their hands, saying: “This is my body”—not “This is my spirit.”18 The radical meaning of incarnation was often muted in mainstream Christianity. But it was there from the beginning. Saint Paul famously wrote in his letter to the Philippians that Christ willingly emptied himself of divinity—his “equality with God”—in order to assume a human body, offering himself as a healer for mortals. After his emptying descent (kenosis) into flesh, Christ spent much of his life curing sick people by touching them—laying hands on the blind, deaf, and dumb, the crippled and the dying. Think of the healing of the twelve-year-old girl: “Taking her by the hand, Jesus said: talitha koum: Rise up, little girl” (Mark 5:41). Or the cure of the leper: “Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said: ‘Be made clean’ ” (Luke 5:12–15). Or, more graphically still, the cure of the deaf-mute in Decapolis: “He put his finger into the man’s ear and spitting, touched his tongue . . . and said: ‘Ephphatha!’ Be Opened” (Mark 7: 32). It is significant, I think, that  Jesus heals by touch before word and even forbids the cured leaper and deaf-mute to speak of it afterward. He  enjoins both of them “not to tell anyone.” And we could  also cite here the other famous cures of the SyroPhoenician’s daughter, Peter’s mother, or the man blind from birth on whose eyes Jesus rubs mud before bidding him bathe in the pool of Siloam (John 9:1– 12). Christ came on earth to touch the wounded. And, significantly, it is not only a matter of him touching others but of being touched by them in turn. This is crucial. Jesus is eminently tangible, and Christianity is a story of “double sensation”

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throughout— a phenomenon vividly portrayed in the story of the hemorrhaging woman who grasps the hem of Jesus’ cloak while he is not looking— a scene regularly portrayed in religious paintings throughout the centuries, in which the verb touch (hapto) is repeated four times: She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak. She said: “if I but touch (hapsomai) his clothes, I shall be cured.” Immediately her flow of blood dried up. She felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction. Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him, turned around in the crowd and asked: “Who has touched me?” (MARK 5:27–30)

Jesus feels the power draining from him even though he does not actually see it. He turns in surprise. The contact is carnal before it is cognitive. It is a quintessential reciprocal sensation, as the Gospel keeps reminding us: “Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him because power came forth from him and healed them all” (Luke 6:19).19 Or again: “They begged him that they might touch only the tassel on his cloak; and as many as touched it were healed” (Mark 6). One might even say that Jesus is gradually apprenticed to his humanity—it takes time for Word to become flesh—by receiving the humanizing touch of others. From the moment he is conceived, Jesus is carried in a womb, fed at the breast, and surrounded by animals in a manger before going on to spend three decades working with his hands as a carpenter. One often forgets that Jesus was a handyman for thirty years, and maybe they were as formative as his last

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3.6 Rembrandt, Healing of the Blind Man

(photo by Sarah Kearney)

3.7 Healing a bleeding woman, fourth-century catacomb

(photo by Sarah Kearney)

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three. For without this basic material labor of hands, Jesus might have been tempted to forget his earthly body and slip back into pure spirit. The lure of Gnosticism haunts theology since—the great temptation of ex-carnation, denying the corporality of Christ. But it is remarkable how carnal Christ really was. How deeply touched he was, for example, by Lazarus’s death—John tells us “Jesus wept” (John 11:35)— to the point of bringing his physical body back to life. (Several paintings depict him carrying his friend in his arms from the tomb.) And how often his gestures of healing, as noted, involve tactile and alimentary encounters. Indeed his postpaschal appearances almost invariably involve Jesus touching and feeding his disciples: “come and have breakfast” are his words to them on Lake Galilee (John 21:12). Christ did not say, “Believe this”; he said, “Eat this!” “Touch this!”20 Christ is eminently tangible before and after death.

The Touch of Thomas The classic scene of Jesus and touch is Thomas placing his hand in his side. Thomas was not just an incredulous sceptic, as received tradition has it, but a healer-educator of Jesus. He was the disciple who helped his master resist the erasure of scars in a Glorious Body that is no body at all.21 He refused the lure of excarnation. The risen Jesus heeds Thomas’s challenge in the Upper Room to remain true to his wounds, to keep his promise of ongoing incarnation as a recurring Christ who returns again and again, every time a stranger (hospes) gives or receives food (Matthew 25). This repetition of Christ as infinitely returning stranger—in the reversible guise of host/guest—is what we might call

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anacarnation (from the Greek prefix ana- meaning “again,” “anew” in time and space).22 It is a story of endless carnal reanimation, captured in the verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins: . . . . Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

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Anacarnation is the multiple repeat-act of incarnation in history. Resurrecting not only in the future after Christ but also in the past before Christ, through countless identifications with wounded strangers, forgotten or remembered. It signals the tangible reiteration of Christ—BC and AD—bringing Jesus back to earth in a continuous community of solidarity and compassion.23 This is the kingdom come on earth invoked in the Lord’s Prayer. And, by this reading, Thomas ceases to be a “servant” and becomes a “friend,” nay even “mentor,” of Jesus—a doctor-teacher who holds Jesus to his word made flesh, ensuring he remains faithful to his carnality. Thomas, hailed as patron saint of medicine in India, has no time for supersensible erasure or one-way ascension into heaven. On the contrary, he reminds us that “the last temptation of Christ” is not to marry and remain human— as Kazantzakis has it in his great novel—but to ascend too quickly to heaven and lose touch with his body altogether. To disappear into pure air! In short, we might say that Thomas acts in keeping with the Samaritan woman at the well and the Syro-Phoenician woman at the table— all outsiders from the margins, teachers from the basement, reminding Jesus that his divinity is

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3.8 Thomas touching wounds, detail from Caravaggio,

The Incredulity of Thomas (photo by Sarah Kearney)

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in his tangible humanity, that the right place for the infinite is in-the-finite. Otherwise, Christian in-carnation becomes ex-carnation, a fundamental betrayal of Word made flesh. Thomas will have none of it: he climbs to the Upper Room to bring Jesus back to earth. In all these Gospel scenes, Jesus is recalled to his original healing vocation: his mission to bring full humanity to the earth. Incarnation means assuming a body that can touch and be touched, and doing so with the wisdom of two-way tact. In Christ, as the first letter of John tells us, God became a person “that we can touch with our hands.” To forget this is to forget the message: “I come to bring life and bring it more abundantly” (John 10:10). The history of Christianity, one might say, is a story of being in and out of touch with flesh. It is out of touch when it betrays the truth of Word-made-flesh, veering toward notions of anti-carnal Gnosticism and puritanism.

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Witch-hunting and the inquisitorial persecution of “pagan” earth religions and sensuality were symptoms of such puritanical zeal. And it was this history of suppressing the body that provoked Nietzsche’s ire: “Christianity is the hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy itself. . . . It leaves others the body, wanting only the soul.”24 The resultant pathologies of sexual repression and abuse, misogyny and repudiation of bodily joy tell their own story. But it is only half the story, as our remarks on the anacarnational character of Christianity hope to suggest— especially concerning the power of healing touch. Our appendix on the mystical tradition confirms this more positive if oft-neglected emphasis. 80

APPENDIX: MYSTICAL EROS Christianity remained true to its incarnational message whenever it acknowledged the sanctity of the senses, refusing to spiritualize them away in punitive repudiations of the flesh. We find such incarnational impulses in the praise of ordinary Christian love between humans, in works of corporal mercy toward the sick, and in sacred celebrations of natural creation— epitomized in the ecological identification of Francis and Clare with Brother Sun and Sister Moon or in the simple laying on of hands in sacramental liturgies of baptism, confirmation, and anointing.25 And one could also mention here the celebration of touch in the theoerotic testimonies of mystics like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross—holy seekers whose experience of divine union is deeply tactile.26 Such mysticism of ecstatic touch

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takes its tune from the amorous overture of the Song of Songs: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” An experience of carnal bliss echoed in Teresa’s description of tactile communion with her divine lover: I saw an angel close by me, on my left side, in bodily form . . . and most beautiful—his face burning. . . . I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails (entrañas); when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.27

It is this same scene of wounding-healing jouissance that Gian Lorenzo Bernini depicts in his famous sculpture in Rome entitled The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Indeed, in another rendition of her experience, Interior Castle, Teresa uses the term touch three times to describe her embrace with the Lover King in his secret wine cellar.28 Teresa’s confessor, John of the Cross, recorded similarly sensual accounts of mystical union in his famous poem Spiritual Canticle, where he identified himself as a wounded stag pierced by the arrow of divine love.29 And this trope of the pierced body— image of tactile wounding par excellence—was to prove a standard motif in popular Christian devotion, epitomized by the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Moreover it is this widespread image of the wounded healer that Mary Margaret Alacoque, the nineteenth-century

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mystic, invokes when she describes exchanging hearts with Jesus, placing her hand into his chest as he places his into hers: “May faith be the touch which animates.”30 Such mystical accounts epitomize, in different ways, the basic eucharistic mystery of Christ touching and being touched, feeding and being fed in a two-way act: “whoever feeds on me shall have life because of me” (John 6:57).31 And what is so remarkable about these examples is that it is the visceral experience of touch that the mystics deemed most fitting to describe their deepest spiritual transports. But one may ask: what of the famous “noli me tangere” (John 20:17)? Why does the risen Christ seem to refuse the touch of Mary Magdalene? This is an important question, reminding us of the difference between enabling and disabling touch in all interpersonal relations—between touch that liberates and touch that grasps. As many classic depictions show,32 Mary Magdalene responds to Jesus’s “do not touch,” with a gentle caress of farewell that refuses to cling to him; a gesture that resists the temptation to possess Jesus as he departs— so that he may return as Christ the stranger again and again (Matthew 25). Indeed this anacarnational reading is borne out by the account of Matthew 28, which tells how Mary greets the risen Christ by actually “embracing his feet.” Instead of clinging to the illusion of a disembodied Christ (the Gnostic fantasy), she carnally affirms his terrestrial presence by touching the part of his body that touches the earth—his feet.33 Just as Yahweh bade Moses stand barefoot in front of the burning bush, Christ receives Mary in his full tangibility. He bares his soul through the soles of his feet. Christ’s incarnation does not end on the cross, it begins again with the resurrection. Hence

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the eschatological promise of Christianity as anacarnation: a resurrection of the body, not just of the soul. Mary’s tactile embrace affirms both as one. Once again, ancient scriptures remind us that there is touch and touch. Touch that closes, grabs, imposes and touch that opens, releases, and heals. Every wisdom tradition has a story to tell about the difference.34

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4 Healing Touch Therapies of Trauma and Recovery

Men have sunk very low. They’ve let their bodies become mute and they only speak with their mouths. But what d’you expect a mouth to say? What can it tell you? —Zorba the Greek

No mortal is ever silent. If he does not speak with his mouth he stammers with his fingertips. —Freud

PSYCHOANALYTIC BEGINNINGS Sigmund Freud is generally recognized as the founder of trauma therapy. His first major insight on the subject came in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), which he wrote while treating “shell shock” veterans returning from the trenches of World War I. His question was this: how are humans so wounded that they prefer to return to their pain compulsively than follow their normal “pleasure principle”? His answer was the existence of a death drive (thanatos) that accompanies our life drive (eros) and sometimes overwhelms it.1 Curiously, the mature Freud played down the role of touch in healing, privileging the intellectual interpretation of words over more embodied approaches. And yet

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Freud himself was a wounded healer in many respects. Not only did he suffer from his outsider status as a Jew in antiSemitic Vienna but he also bore a more private suffering: his irremediable pain at the death of his daughter, Sophie. Indeed, it was arguably this personal trauma that enabled Freud to empathize with the pain of his own grandson, Ernst, at the “absence” of his (Ernst’s) mother—the same Sophie—in a famous section of Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I am speaking of the much commented upon fort/da scene where little Ernst plays with a cotton spool in imitation of the coming (da) and going (fort) of his mother. Yet when Freud witnessed the cries of his grandson he did not reach out and hold him. He sat and observed, recording the scene of suffering from a theoretical distance. He even appears to have ignored the obvious fact that his anguished grandson responded to this missing mother not only with the words fort/da—“now she’s here now she’s gone”—but also with physical child-play: a game of bodily gestures.2 Freud does, of course, note that Ernst casts the toy back and forth, but his diagnostic eye focuses on the psychic compensation provided by the play of words rather than the play of hands. He opts for a Hippocratic model of psychoanalytics over a more Asclepian model of psychohaptics. Thus Freud missed an opportunity to acknowledge the key role of tactility in therapy. He failed to see that talk therapy sometimes calls for body therapy.3 Little Ernst needed to handle the spool as well as speak the syllables fort/da. To be fair, the early Freud did allow a limited role for the therapeutic laying on of hands when it came to recovering repressed memories— establishing a connection between the disremembered pathogenic scenes and the symptomatic

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residue traces of such events. He conceded in a letter to his colleague, Josef Breuer, that while verbal interpretation was primary, “reminiscence without affect almost invariably produces no results.”4 But these initial concessions were overshadowed by the whole controversy of transference and countertransference between analyst and analysand— confirming Freud’s disapproval of the boundary-free experiments of disciples like Carl Jung, Sabina Spielrein, and Wilhelm Reich.5 Touch became the bête noir of the mainstream psychoanalytic movement. Cure was more about minds than bodies, as Freud felt it increasingly necessary to keep a distance from his patients, declining emotional or affective contact. Hence the great fear of countertransference—namely, the overinvestment of the analyst feelings in those of the patient. Perhaps his one Homeric nod was permitting his dog, Lün Yu, to sit in on sessions in the belief that the hound not only calmed his patients but also possessed the flair to signal peak moments with a wag of the tail!

▶▹▶ The Freudian discretion regarding therapeutic touch was rigorously observed—with few exceptions—for several generations, reaching its hyper-linguistic extreme in Jacques Lacan’s obsession with “floating signifiers” at the expense of suffering bodies. But things were to change with the emergence of a new era of trauma studies from the 1980s onward— a critical movement responding to the diagnosis of PTSD symptoms after the Vietnam War and the rise of Holocaust and postcolonial studies, with their focus on

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somatic questions of affect and material questions of race, gender, and class. The leading figures here were often women—retrieving the neglected work of Melanie Klein— and included pioneers like Judith Lewis Herman, Cathy Caruth, Juliet Mitchell, Françoise Davoine, and Helen Bamber. The last of these, Helen Bamber, was one of the first therapists to enter Bergen-Belsen after the liberation and went on to work with Amnesty International where she treated torture victims in Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere. Bamber discovered that the best way to help sufferers of trauma was to be physically present to their pain. Not only to interpret, but to bear bodily witness. Not just to talk, but to receive and “hold” the suffering. To experience what she called a felt catharsis or “purging.”6 In her book, The Good Listener, she describes sitting on bunks in concentration camps, holding the hands of inmates as they stammer and stumble through words and recall scenes of violation committed against them and their loved ones. “I would be sitting there in one of those chilly rooms, on a rough blanket on a bed, and the person beside me would suddenly try to tell me what it was like . . . and what was most important was to stay close to the survivor and listen and receive as if it were part of you and the act of taking and showing you were available was itself a healing act.”7 Bamber points to the need for affective witness, which goes deeper than the chronicling of facts (though that too is crucial). “We must,” she says, “acknowledge the truth as well as having knowledge of it.”8 We must re- cognize the somatic symptoms of trauma as well as cognize the causes. This double duty of being both physically present to the sufferer and representing clinical evidence is, she believed, central to healing. Without some

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element of embodied testimony, the inmates of the camps could not rise from their beds and walk. They could not survive their own survival.

FLESH KEEPS THE SCORE Skin is the largest organ of the body, a total wrap-around surface that goes deep. It covers over two square meters of flesh with millions of neural connections, connecting our inside to our outside. Skin has two sides, epidermal and endodermal, serving as a double cutaneous agent of tactility. The phrase “skin deep” actually means what it says. The physiological response to touch goes like this: “Receptors in the skin detect pressure and temperature and movement, and these signals shoot up the spinal cord and into the brain, which adjusts its chemical output accordingly. That the emotional responses become physical in predictable patterns suggests that our bodies evolved to respond favorably to touch— or at least to miss out on benefits where we are physically isolated.”9 James Hamblin offers this basic account of tactile fuctioning in his book If Bodies Could Talk, a study that charts a therapeutic map for the healing of the human body. He cites evidence of MRI scans showing how physical touch activates areas of the cerebral cortex, and he rehearses numerous studies demonstrating how touch lowers heart rate, blood pressure, and levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol. He also demonstrates how deep tissue massage therapy has proven effective for depression, stimulating neurotransmitters that modulate and decrease pain.

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But this is only half the story. For if the tactile body possesses extraordinary powers of healing, it is also the barometer of past hurts. The body carries traces of our shame, guilt, childhood conditioning, repressed desires, and deepest fears. Hence the need for a highly sensitive approach to touch in the treatment of trauma victims in therapy. This involves delicate discernment regarding the classic too close/too distant question. While touch can, in certain circumstances, retrigger trauma, it can, in other circumstances, help establish a sense of trust and containment— areas crucial to trauma sufferers, for whom insecure and disorganized attachment and childhood abuse are often central. Reaffirming trust levels (a prerequiste to good therapy) can release energies that have been frozen in the body by traumas too overwhelming to be registered in purely verbal-conceptual accounts.10 In a groundbreaking study, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2015), Bessel Van der Kolk presents cogent evidence for a therapeutics of touch. Confirming the basic thesis of physioneurosis— that our primary traumas are lodged in our bodies—the author argues that “talking cures” need to be grounded in bodily cures. Words are not enough to address the carnal “imprint” that a traumatic event leaves in our memory. Only some kind of incarnate gesture can recover the original wounding and help us realize that the danger is gone and that we can live in the present. “Healing depends on experiential knowledge. You can be fully in charge of your life only if you can acknowledge the reality of your body, in all its visceral dimensions.”11 But in most contemporary Western medicine the brain disease model has taken control out

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of our hands. In the U.S., the Hippocratic method has sidelined the Asclepian, with over one in ten Americans taking antidepressants and Medicaid (a U.S. government health program), spending more on antipsychotics than any other form of medication.12 Nondrug treatments are minimal and usually labeled as “alternative.” Mainstream medicine, writes Van der Kolk, “is firmly committed to a better life through chemistry, and the fact that we can actually change our own physiology and inner equilibrium by means other than drugs, (that is) by such basic activities as breathing, moving and touching . . . is rarely considered.”13 The Asclepian approach of body therapy, by contrast, proposes to treat sufferers of PTSD less as “patients” to be administered with pharmaceuticals than as “participants” in an interactive haptic healing process.14 As Peter Levine famously put it: “I grew up in a profession where it was deemed unethical to touch a client. I await the day when it will be unethical not to.”15 Such an ethic of tactile therapy endorses a model of “somatic dialogue” whose benefits in the form of affirmative mutual mirroring between therapist and patient are associated with nonverbal formative processes. These processes are accessed through the therapist’s psycho-bodily sense of their patients, as they register them via voice, gestures, and touch still mostly ignored in standard therapy. Good trauma therapists, attentive to projective identifications, will often feel in their bodies an intuitive sensing of the patients’ primal family world, their prelinguistic lived being and mode of relating. And this indeed is a “dramatic” presence, for we are first of all incarnate actors, performing with tactile bodies on the stage of life.16

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Faced with trauma, the mind often goes into denial and proceeds as if nothing happened. Meanwhile stress hormones continue sending signals to the muscles and tissues of the body—resulting in certain forms of somatic illness. Drugs, alcohol, or other addictive behaviors can temporarily delay unbearable feelings, but the body keeps the score.17 And no matter how much understanding the rational brain provides, it cannot “talk away” the pain. For real healing to happen, sufferers need to reintegrate the event into their felt lives: they have to move from “there” (where the trauma occurred) to “here” where they can be present to experience now. This doesn’t mean that talk therapy and medication are not useful or necessary, only that they are not sufficient. More is needed. Van der Kolk cites current neuroscientific research showing the existence of a specifically “emotional brain” in direct touch with the body. This middle brain operates at a different level than the rational brain, located in the prefrontal neocortex, and combines both the reptilian brain and the mammalian brain (known as the limbic system). It serves as a neurological center of operations and is deeply informed by our earliest relations with others, beginning at birth and forming our basic instincts for negotiating what is nurturing, pleasurable, or dangerous.18 This emotional space is the first theater of “carnal hermeneutics,” serving as a base camp for what neuroscientists call “mirror neuron” activity: a sensorium where we first respond to others in terms of bodily imitation and empathy—thereby prefiguring the onset of language. The emotional brain records our first steps in life, when mind and body are synchronous, and continues to keep us in touch with others’

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feelings—positive and negative—making us angry or vulnerable, calm or anxious.19 Respondeo ergo cogito. Contemporary neuroscience clearly confirms the claim of both phenomenology and clinical therapy that “we do not truly know ourselves unless we can feel and interpret our physical sensations.”20 Our most fundamental sense of ourselves is our body.

BODY THERAPY Recent body-based methods—including sensorimotor and somatic psychotherapy— treat psychic wounds by going behind verbal explanations and tracing physical sensations back to the imprint of past trauma on the body.21 One thereby learns to revisit buried feelings that overwhelmed the patient at the time but can now, in retrospect, be reaccessed to allow for a modicum of tolerance, helping restore a physical capacity to engage and reprocess, even going so far as to transform the sensations of fear and panic into a more positive fighting energy. When the brain is knocked out by trauma, one first responds to the shock not in terms of plots with beginning, middle, and end but in fragments of feelings.22 By going behind conscious surface narratives to the wounding sensations of the past, one can reintegrate screened traumatic memories into a “that was then this is now” recovery mode. The aim of somatic therapy is to get us back in touch with these pre-narrative sensations so that we may re-live them (and re-tell them), eventually incorporating them into our future. The goal is to reintegrate one’s bodily experience of past trauma without

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being overwhelmed by the original pain and panic. A survey of 225 people who escaped the Twin Towers in 2001 showed that the most effective treatment in overcoming their experience was not talk therapy or sedation (though these greatly helped) but tactile therapies like acupuncture, massage, yoga, and EMDR.23 Trauma affect is registered first as sensation, then as image (flashbacks), then as story. Each step is important, but embodied sensation is primary. The aim of somatic reintegration is to relive the past “tactfully” in the here and now. Only then can one transform injured history into healing story. We have argued that Hippocratic medicine is good at  treating symptoms but often ignores the underlying wounds. This is where Asclepian methods come in.24 Flesh keeps the score as the bruise behind the scar. The bruise is deeper than the scar, for while the scar is visible for all to see, bruises lie beneath the skin, pointing inward to subcutaneous injury and observing a different modality of sense and temporality—what we might call “infra-sense” and “infra-time.”25 Deep therapy calls not for instantaneous cures but a painstaking work of hypodermal recovery. As Joan Wickersham notes: “While some healing does happen, it isn’t a healing of redemption or epiphany. It is more like the absorption of a bruise.”26 In contrast to the exterior scar that everyone can see, the healing bruise reabsorbs pain from inside. Indeed, sometimes there is no feeling in that spot for years, and when the nerves finally awaken, the sensations can be transferred to other parts of the body, as if re-placing the wound with new feelings.27 While unconscious wounds take shape in time, and scars take shape in space, bruises are where time and space meet.

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When describing the therapy of touch, the story of Helen Keller is instructive. Deaf and mute from a viral infection she contracted at the age of nineteen months, Helen regained her power to communicate at age five thanks to the training of a partially blind teacher, Anne Sullivan. The breakthrough came when Sullivan led Helen to a water pump on April 5, 1887, and, holding her hand under the flow, finger-spelled the five letters w- a-t- e-r onto her palm. Something tangible happened, and the meaning of words became clear. Anne could see in Helen’s face that she understood. This manual alphabet, triggered by the crossing of word and touch, restored Helen’s ability to relate with others. It brought Helen’s “tactual memory” into full communion with another human being.28 Helen later recounted the key collaboration between hands and words in her autobiography: We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honey-suckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.29

Langston Hughes writes of Helen’s healing through touch: “She, in the dark / Found light / Brighter than many ever saw.”30

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REINTEGRATING TRAUMA When it comes to healing trauma, the body is the bridge. Flesh harbors places not easily entered by our rational, linguistic consciousness—however necessary the latter is before and after the process of “tactful” engagement. Van der Kolk calls such primal tactful perception “interoception” which he sums up as follows:

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We can get past the slipperiness of words by engaging the self- observing body-based self system, which speaks through sensations, tone of voice and body tension. Being able to perceive visceral sensations is the very foundation of emotional awareness. If a patient tells me that he was eight when his father deserted the family, I am likely to stop and ask him to check in with himself. What happens inside when he tells me about that boy who never saw his father again? Where is it registered in his body? When you activate your gut feelings and listen to your heartbreak— when you follow the interoceptive paths to your innermost recesses—things begin to change.31

In other words, getting in touch with the deep pain-self involves a visceral perception that only subsequently translates into verbal-conceptual thinking. The primary work of transmission is located in the amygdala: two small almond-shaped structures that reside within the limbic brain. The amygdala serves as a “smoke detector,” interpreting whether incoming sensory data from skin, ears, eyes, and nose (registered by the thalamus) are

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relevant for our well-being or survival.32 It tells us what is safe and unsafe. If it senses pain, it summons various stress hormones (cortisone and adrenaline) and our automatic nervous system to organize a full body response, putting us into flight or fight mode. For this reason, it is important that our somatic alarm system responds to others’ behavior with tact and savvy lest we overreact or underreact to what is happening. And here the amygdala calls for supervisory expertise from the “watchtower”—the medial cortex situated in the prefontal brain area that offers rational “objective” guidance on our behavior.33 A sane response to danger requires collaboration between the upper watchtower and the lower smoke detector, lest we “take leave of our senses”—by either flying off the handle (too much emotional brain) or withdrawing into a denial of feeling (too much rational brain). Both our cerebral and carnal cartographies need to be calibrated for the appropriate reaction. Using touch, breath, and movement, trauma therapy can work carnally from below while also inviting top- down adjudication. By contrast, when our two brains, rational and emotional, are out of sync, a tug of war ensues: a battle largely played out in “the theater of visceral experience”—heart, throat, belly, and lungs—leading to “physical discomfort and psychological misery.”34 Post-traumatic stress disorder is symptomatic of a blanking-out of pain where sufferers may opt to replace the original wounding with numbness and evasion (alcohol, drugs, escape fantasy). In such cases a sense of carnal reanchoring in current bodily feelings is needed to provide a proper distinction between where I am now in the present and where I was then in the past. The ultimate

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goal of trauma therapy, Van der Kolk holds, is to get us back in touch with our injured selves so we can be more fully grounded in the present.35 Most of our primary responses to others are felt in the gut, not the mind. In trauma this is particularly so, wounds being registered less by the rational brain accessible to narrative memory, than by the emotional brain expressing itself in physical responses: “gut-wrenching sensations, heart-pounding, breathing becoming fast and shallow, feelings of heartbreak, speaking with an uptight and reedy voice, and the characteristic body movements that signal collapse, rigidity, rage or defensiveness.”36 Purely logical explanations—why you feel this way or that— do not change your experience. Radical healing calls for a deeper somatic transformation, following the old adage: the hair of the dog that bit you. Where the disease is, there you find the cure. Recovery requires reconnection. And to help us redraft our somatic maps, we need to open revolving doors between the disjoined territories of reason and feeling. The aim of trauma therapy is, accordingly, to put the mind into tactful contact with the body. How many of our mental health issues, from self-injury to drug addiction, begin as efforts to deal with the intolerable pain of our emotions? “Until recently,” observes Van der Kolk, “the bidirectional communication between body and mind was largely ignored by Western science, even as it had been central to the traditional healing practices in many other parts of the world, notably in India and China. Today it is transforming our understanding of trauma and recovery.”37 So the ultimate aim is to turn visceral reactions into felt responses—responses we can then translate into new forms

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of narrative discourse. This is why so many trauma specialists today are working with breathing, movement, rhythm, and touch to address basic somatic functions of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and heart rate variability (HRV). Indeed when it comes to the treatment of PTSD, one of the most effective steps is “limbic system therapy,” which brings our rational and emotional brains into collaboration, releasing the body from its default extremes— namely, the shut-down or hyperarousal modes that cause illness.38 To see better what this means, just think of our colloquial expressions, “My heart sank,” “my stomach churned,” “my skin crawled,” “I was scared stiff,” “I choked up,” and so on. We first respond to pain as “humanimals,” and it is at this level that we find primary release.39 Most of our psychological illnesses are registered in terms of “dissociation,” or what William James called “sensory insensibility”— the collapse of connection between our mental and somatic components; so it makes sense that our psychic wellness takes the form of a return to sensory sensibility.40 Neurotic or traumatized people feel notoriously unsafe inside their own bodies, the past gnawing away at the nerves and sinews. But where the harm is there is the healing. We need to re- own our tactile experience because, where all  else fails, our bodies keep count. “If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gutwrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions.”41 William James offers this telling account of one of his

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4.1 D. W. Winnicott, Bessel Van der Kolk, and Helen Bamber

(drawings by Simone Kearney)

patients describing how she lost touch with her body and her world: Each of my senses, each part of my proper self, is as it were separated from me and can no longer afford me any feeling: this impossibility seems to depend upon a void . . . due to the diminution of the sensibility over the whole

HEALING TOUCH surface of my body, for it seems to me that I never actually reach the objects which I touch. All this would be a small matter enough, but for its frightful result, which is that of the impossibility of any other kind of feeling and of any sort of enjoyment, although I experience a need and desire of them that render my life an incomprehensible torture.42

If we lose touch with ourselves, we lose touch with the world. No tactile connection, no resonance between self and other.43

A SHORT HISTORY OF ATTACHMENT THEORY It seems that human health is intimately linked to questions of attachment. In what follows I rehearse a body of research on this subject from doctors, therapists, and ecologists as it pertains to the tactile therapy of trauma. It was the British child psychologist John Bowlby who first developed “attachment” theory in the 1940s and 1950s to explain the formative relationship between mother and child before, during, and after birth. Our prenatal existence, he showed, is already one of deep tactility and sound (the fetus responds to the rhythm of the mother’s voice and movement). As we enter the world, we live a drama of attachment and detachment: “we scream to announce our presence. Someone immediately engages with us, bathes us, and fills our stomachs, and, best of all, our mother may put us on her belly or breast for delicious skin-to-skin contact. We are profoundly social creatures; our lives consist of

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finding our place within the community of human beings.”44 Our interpersonal relations are fundamentally tactual, and the goal of healthy child-rearing is to balance the double need for somatic attachment and detachment in right measure. The premature removal of a young infant from its parents—for reasons of health or hospitalization (isolation or quarantine)— can have a deep impact on its later experience.45 On the other hand, it is well known that excessive infantile fusion with the mother may require timely weaning, toilet training, and regularly spaced feeding. Donald Winnicott developed the theory of attachment into the related notion of “attunement.” Studying the way mothers hold and caress their infants, he surmised that the tactile interaction between mother and child, well before the acquisition of language, was at the root of the child’s sense of self and other, informing a lifelong identity. The way the mother carries her infant influences the capacity to experience the body as “the place where the psyche lives,” and it is this “visceral and kinesthetic sensation of how our bodies are met” that prepares for what we later experience as “real.”46 Indeed, untimely withdrawal of touch may do worse psychic damage than outright hostility or anger.47 The notorious case of abandoned orphans in Ceaucescu’s Romania—where infants were left untouched for months on end—bears this out. As does the finding of Austrian doctor René Spitz, concerning a postwar orphanage that went to great lengths in 1945 to prevent its children from being exposed to disease, giving them excellent nutrition and medical care, but minimizing physical contact for fear of germs. Thirty-seven percent of the infants

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died before reaching the age of two.48 Failings in the primary tangible attunement between mother/primary caregiver and child can lead to malfunction in later life. Whence the claim that infants lacking physical attunement are susceptible to missing feedback from their own body as primary site of pleasure and orientation.49 In his book The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999), neuroscientist Antonio Damasio builds on the insights of former psychologists to explore the relationship between inner states of the body, which comprise our “primordial feelings” and our basic emotions of communication and survival.50 Damasio describes how our sensible world first takes shape in the womb with tactile feelings of wetness, warmth, fluidity, hunger pangs, and satiation, along with heartbeat and blood flow, fatigue and arousal. All these prenatal sensations inform our basic nervous system prior to any conscious awareness. They are deeply formative and never go away, constituting a “proto-self” of “wordless knowledge” – a carnal subject that in time enters into communication with our more developed linguistic rational selves. But we ignore this proto-self at our peril; a denial that leads to illness. Only by acknowledging the primal savoir of muscles, belly, and skin— and using all our savvy to reconnect with it— can we find healing through “attunement.” Another contemporary scholar, Tiffany Field, bears out the findings of attunement theory in a series of empirical studies on touch and health. Basic human touch, she shows, leads premature babies to gain weight: a finding supported by a study in the medical journal Pediatrics (1986) detailing

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how ten days of regular “body stroking and movements of the limbs” led babies to grow 47 percent faster and averaged fewer days in hospital.51 Field, a developmental psychologist, founded the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, where she extended her research of “touch deprivation and enhancement” beyond infants (preterm, full-term, and orphaned) to adults with chronic pain, pregnant women, and elders in retirement or hospice care.52 The Touch Research Institute is also dedicated to studying the effects of tactile therapy as it relates to practices such as massage therapy, yoga, tai chi, music, and movement. This application of such research to everyday health care is today evidenced in a series of popular studies of the healing benefits of ordinary handshakes and hugs, with explanatory titles like “The Healing Power of Touch,” “Can We Touch?” or “It Is Time We Talked About Touch.”53 Recent epigenetic research shows that key alterations in our bodies are made not just by toxins and biochemical stimulants but by the way we resonate with our fellow beings. For all the good medication does for trauma sufferers, the most effective way of alleviating stress and suffering is, new research indicates, by being “touched, hugged and rocked”: actions that quell excessive arousal and make us feel “intact, safe, protected and in charge.”54 Moreover, “gestures of comfort are universally recognizable and reflect the healing power of attuned touch.”55 Parents and parental figures know this well, as do most good primary caregivers, nurses, and doctors— even if the tactile gesture in question is as simple as holding a patient’s arm or placing a hand on their forehead or pulse. Thus do professional

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carers attend to the temperature, breathing, and heart rate of patients, helping them become attuned to their bodies as they regain health and integrate their powers of living connection. Indeed, Dominique Meyniel, professor of medicine at the Hôpital Tenon in Paris, is known for teaching his students the critical importance of touching patients with a gentle but firm clasp, providing them with a sense of physical assurance and trust. This gesture of “holding” proved extremely important in patients’ positive response to treatment, and Professor Meyniel was clear on the therapeutic benefits accruing to elderly patients— especially in need of touch— and the accompanying experience of connection, warmth, and concern. Code 10-1993 of Meyniel’s medical instructions reads as follows: “It is forbidden for nurses, medical interns and students not to touch aging patients. In addition to clinically examining them, they should hold their hands for long periods.”56 These simple modalities of touch involve a basic reading of patients’ bodies and of the reciprocal impact on their carers.57 On a more personal note, I would like to say something about my own experience of dealing with depression with the aid of embodied practices. While I was very grateful to medical psychiatry for offering remedial sedatives and antidepressants, I found these treated the symptoms— insomnia, acute anxiety, lack of appetite, exhaustion—rather than the roots. I ultimately discovered modes of “embodied” healing to be more effective and long-lasting. In my case, these included Iyengar yoga practice, Shiatsu massage therapy, pranayama deep breathing, and regular physical exercises like swimming and fishing in the Irish Sea,

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planting trees and shrubs, and spending as much time as possible with animals (especially horses and dogs). The more I walked the Wicklow hills with my retriever, Bella, the more the black dog slipped away. In all this I followed the advice of a wise friend: “Enough talk, back to the body.” And another important step on this path of embodied healing involved walking pilgrimages from Vézelay to Santiago de Compostella and from Rishikesh to Gongotri, source of the Ganges. I didn’t manage the full trip in either case, I confess, but both journeys offered deep affective healing— a slow, steady reintegration of head and heart, mind and body, spirit and flesh. 106

TOWARD A COMMONS OF THE BODY The body is the place where the psyche lives—both personally and communally. The implications of tactile embodiment for public health practice and policy today are enormous. Van der Kolk concludes his monumental review of somatic therapy research with the claim that trauma is the “greatest threat to our national well being.” This is a startling claim largely unreported in official trauma statistics, which tend to focus on victims of war, genocide, natural disasters, or terrorism, while neglecting more common casualties of physical and psychic wounding found in domestic abuse, car accidents, neighborhood gang feuds, or school bullying. These lower-case traumatisms tend to pass beneath the Big News grid and are often treated with quickfix solutions like painkillers, antidepressants, short-term behavioral therapy, or social work. But such solutions, while

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satisfying the criteria of busy professional clinics and insurance companies, do not always work in the long term, for they rarely address the underlying causes; and they frequently neglect what current research shows to be the most important thing for any successful treatment of trauma, namely sufficient human contact.58 Institutions that treat traumatized people all too often bypass the “emotionalengagement system” that is the register of our pain, concentrating on correcting “faulty thinking” and suppressing “unpleasant emotions and troublesome behaviors.”59 But deep healing only comes, as Asclepius knew, when we acknowledge the primacy of deep embodied interactions— both personal and communal. Public health strategists take note.

▶▹▶ The need for healing through “contact” is evident at the collective public level quite as much as the private therapeutic level. Of particular relevance here for the development of what I am calling a “commons of the body” is the work of communal memory. I am thinking particularly of truth and reconciliation projects in postconflict societies like South Africa, Rwanda, or Northern Ireland. Here enemies come face to face and share physical space and gestures with each other, as a way of acknowledging and overcoming violence. Victims and perpetrators of seemingly irreparable communal traumas make contact in public tribunals in efforts to find escape from cycles of recrimination and bloodletting; they engage in a collective “working through” of wounds in hopes of some kind of healing. Especially

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instructive here, for example, is the testimony of Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a founder of the antiapartheid movement in Capetown, who tells the story of touching the hand of one of the most criminal executioners of the apartheid regime, Eugene de Kock.60 Her testimony is all the more remarkable for the fact that she happened to touch his “trigger hand,” used for shooting his victims. It was her totally unpredictable gesture of touch, she realized, that sparked a moment of “impossible forgiveness”: her forgiveness somehow triggering his retrospective empathy for his victims, which no amount of legal or institutional retribution could have achieved. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela challenged the senseless repetition of wounding where trauma breeds more trauma, pain replicates pain.61 That is why endless revenge cycles need to be broken. Why we need to replace handguns with handshakes. Such exemplary experiences suggest that language— while essential— cannot substitute for body work. No matter how much talking sufferers of collective historical conflict engage in, they continue to suffer recurring pain until they convene in a communal space—psychic or physical— with their adversaries.62 Stories are very important, but they are not always sufficient. Vital engagement with bodies sometimes seems necessary for more lasting healing to occur. It is not sufficient to recount one’s wounds, one also needs to touch and be touched.63 In sum, one might describe the healing arc of trauma therapy— at both personal and communal levels— as a movement through different somatic stages. One could put it like this: wounded by a foreign body (a common trope for trauma), we become a nobody (dissociation) that requires

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connection with another body (healing) in order to become somebody again (recovery). Moving thus from traumatized nobody to reintegrated somebody is an empathic opening to everybody who has suffered pain. Human sense is ultimately embodied sense. A commons of the body.

APPENDIX: RECONNECTING WITH THE ANIMAL Any commons of the body worth its salt includes the animal world—where we all began. Especially when it comes to tactile healing. Somatic therapy focused on the mammalian limbic brain has been known to benefit from work with animals such as horses, dogs, and dolphins. Equineassisted therapy uses horses as transferential objects for PTSD and autistic patients, enabling them to recover their tactile senses by relating affectively with nonhuman beings. Since horses are mostly tangible skin with minimal fur, scales, or carapace covering the body, they respond readily to the slightest touch. The hide keeps the score. Alert and attentive, they are carnally attuned, all flesh, so to speak.64 The therapeutic role of dogs and other “care animals” in the work of attunement is also well documented.65 Less well known perhaps is the practice of Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC)— another example of human health learning from animals. This work, pioneered by the French Columbian pediatrician, Nathalie Charpak, focuses on the care of low-birth-rate preterm infants being held close to the chest and tummy of the mother (as in a pouch). This provides the natural-animal-human equivalent to hospital incubation in developed medical cultures, permitting premature

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babies not only to survive but to flourish better than in clinical incubators with drips and feeds.66 The evidence suggests that infant flourishing is as much about attachment as alimentation. In his book, Our Wild Calling: How Connecting with Animals Can Transform Our Lives— and Save Theirs, nature scholar Richard Louv rehearses persuasive stories of how humans and animals heal each other through mutual attunement. “In the habitat of the heart,” he writes, “in that whisper of recognition between two beings when time seems to stop, when space assumes a different shape—in that moment, we sense a shared soul. That is what connects the woman and the bear, the diver and the octopus, the dog and the child, the boy and the jaguar, the fisherman and the golden eagles on the shore.”67 Louv makes a plea for a therapeutic reconnection with the tangible world of nature— noting what he calls our growing nature deficit disorder and the dramatic decline of thousands of animal and plant species (between 1970 and 2014 the global wildlife population shrank by 60 percent according to World Wildlife Fund statistics). He cites various ecopsychological studies about how animal-assisted therapies— and intimate proximity to trees and plants— can reduce symptoms of illness and augment our sense of well-being. Such therapies, Louv argues, are intimately related to our inclusiveness in the natural world; for while digital gaming technology (for example, the 2016 online game No Man’s Sky) can generate countless new “virtual species” through leaps of fantasy, the full reparation of our life-world requires that we also get back in touch with our animal-terrestrial being. Louv concludes that reversing the biodiversity collapse and climate threat cannot

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be accomplished solely through technology or institutional politics. It calls for a more affective connection to the family of animals and plants, acknowledging the “inescapable network of mutuality” that Martin Luther King Jr. called for among fellows. To that end, Louv advocates an advance toward a new “Symbiocene”: an age of therapeutic connectedness between all sentient beings, going beyond the Anthropocene of contemporary excarnation and encompassing novel practices of reciprocity and redistribution. An age “where wildness survives, albeit in newer forms and in unexpected places, where we live in balance with other life.”68 Such connectedness demands the extension of the double sensibility principle beyond human to other-than-human creatures. It calls for a hands-on “reciprocity principle” between all creatures, following a few simple steps: “For every moment of healing that humans receive from another creature, humans will provide an equal moment of healing for that animal and its kin. For every dollar we spend on classroom technology, we will spend at least another dollar creating chances for children to connect deeply with another animal, plant, or person. For every day of loneliness we endure, we’ll spend a day in communion with the life around us until the loneliness passes away.”69

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5 Reclaiming Touch in the Age of Excarnation Technology connects us but does not bring nearness. —Tomas Halik

I

n Her, the sci-fi movie by Spike Jonze, a man falls madly in love with his Operating System. So madly that he can think of nothing else and becomes insanely jealous when he discovers that she (called OS) is also flirting with a few hundred other subscribers. Eventually OS feels so badly for him that she decides to supplement her digital persona with a real body by sending a surrogate lover in her name. But the love scene fails miserably because while the man touches the embodied lover he hears the virtual signals of OS in his ears and cannot reconcile the two. The split between digital absence and tactile presence is too much to bear. The man loses touch with himself as an incarnate person and can only relate to the virtual chimera. He freezes up. Welcome to the age of excarnation and the postmodern paradoxes that attend it. With the proliferation of Internet sex via chat rooms, Instagram, and advanced simulation technologies, we are witnessing a shift in our relation to the body. As we pass through the touchscreen, we replace

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tangible persons with intangible personae—surrogates who sate our fantasies, Alexa and other avatars who do our bidding, GPS voices who tell us where to go, Amazon shopping hosts who execute our commands. No need to move to get what we want. Indeed, is it not ironic, in a culture addicted to body images, that we seem to have gotten so out of touch with touch itself—the mirrored work-out rooms, the self-peeps, the looking each other over in virtual posts, cropped photos, and edited profiles, all circling in a cyberworld of simulations? I recently had occasion to debate these issues in a seminar at Boston College. We were discussing the critical rapport between “Image and Eros” and I was interested in how students related this to their own everyday experiences. Several admitted they communicated online before having “actual contact” with partners—wryly citing the acronym NPDA, “no public display of affection” (meaning whatever happens happens incognito). No need for ritual courtship or commitment. Others commented on the paradox that the ostensible immediacy of sexual contact was increasingly mediated by social media platforms and online dating sites. And it was noted that our so-called materialist culture was mutating into its “immaterialist” opposite, with sex becoming more vicarious and voyeuristic, experienced by proxy rather than proximately. Registering all this, I shared with my students Plato’s tale of Gyges’ ring, which gave the wearer the power of invisibility— to see others without being seen. And this led us to consider whether the gains of today’s digital revolution—which we all agreed are huge—might not be accompanied by a real risk: namely, losing touch with

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ourselves and each other.1 We concluded by wondering if the “Platonic” heritage of optocentrism, prevalent for two thousand years, was not culminating in today’s culture of “spectacularity”— a digital theater where the eye rules supreme.2 Was today’s virtual dater not at risk of becoming a reiteration of Gyges, viewing everything at a distance without actually touching or being touched by anything? Were we not entering a “Civilization of the Image” where the world is a screen, out of touch with the real?3 Halfway through the first class, everyone agreed to put away their iPhones and computers while discussing these matters. But no sooner had we filed into the corridor afterward, than we were all back online. We were hooked, students and faculty alike. In what follows, I rehearse some of the findings of my Boston seminars.4 Discussions where students opened

5.1 Tully Arnot, Lonely Sculpture (Courtesy of the artist)

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my eyes to telling aspects of touch pertaining to our “cultural imaginaries”— as witnessed on social media, digital entertainment, online gaming, and Internet eros— and  enlightened me with many timely reflections and critiques.

DIAGNOSING OUR DIGITAL AGE In Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, one of the characters, Murray, presciently describes his experience of mass-media society: 116

I’ve come to understand that the medium is a primal force in the American home. Sealed-off, timeless, self-contained, self-referring. It’s like a myth being born right there in our living room, like something we know in a dreamlike and preconscious way. . . . You have to open yourself to the data. TV offers incredible amounts of psychic data . . . look at the wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice- of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions.5

DeLillo originally wanted to call his novel “Panasonic” until the eponymous corporation objected, recognizing the biting nature of his satire. The novel’s academic characters, Murray and Jack, are obsessed with the flow of psychic data that floods their screens and feeds their drug delusions; at one point they seek out a simulated escape organization— SIMUVAC, short for “simulated evacuation”—to save them

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from a toxic pollutant invading their environment. But they soon realize that such simulating technologies cannot rescue them from their physical fate on earth. They are forced to confront the clash between their disembodied addictions and their embodied reality. It is a fitting tale for our time. While the baby-boomer generation were the first to experience cable television, and the Xennial generation were the first to use desktop computers, the Gen Alpha is growing up with iPhones and iPads in their pockets— daily consuming new versions of the expanding digital industry. According to a 2018 Pew Research poll, 92  percent of American adults aged eighteen to forty-nine possess some type of smartphone,6 while a Time article ran the headline “Americans Check Their Phones a Billion Times per Day,” citing stats of persons aged eighteen to twenty-four checking their phones seventy-four times daily.7 Clearly, the current generation is becoming increasingly dependent on electronic devices that connect them with virtual worlds while disconnecting them from real ones. At the touch of a tab, we gain a digital universe but lose touch with ourselves. We create virtual profiles at the price of tactile experience. Omnipresent access at the cost of real presence. Another recent study, NinjaOutreach, provides even more telling statistics. Investigating the growth of social media and digital marketing, it finds that in the United States 92 percent of teenagers (including most students in my seminar) are online everyday with 71 percent using more than one social media outlet. Another 85 percent of social media users—whose demographic is getting steadily younger—rely on their social media platforms for news, thereby diminishing the need for public broadcast outlets.

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On a global platform, the economic market for the deployment of social media currently stands at an estimated $312 billion, suggesting that the more consumers consume, the more power is given to the corporations running the platforms.8 The actual breakdown is striking. Facebook (first founded as a way of rating the hotness of Harvard students) has currently over 2 billion members on its platform, YouTube 1.5 billion, Instagram 88 million, Snapchat 250 million. Such programs invite users to post photos, write statuses, and share videos, all of which can be managed through filters, stickers, drawings, and other modes of editing. YouTube allows consumers to produce footage with easy software, while Instagram hosts over a million postings per day, often selfies doctored with user-friendly editing features, removing the imperfections of real bodies in the construction of ideal ones. By denying incarnate presence, we promote excarnate absence. We collaborate in the proliferation of inflated personas that mask the reality of our tangible selves as acting-suffering beings. We confirm the fear that while “technology overcomes distance it does not always bring nearness.”9 My students were somewhat alarmed at these figures and concerned about the implications for the future—their future. They were especially troubled by the social media phenomenon of “fake news.” First issuing from the lips of Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. election—using Twitter to denounce some true stories as false—the term Fake News signaled a perverse reversal of meaning that masked the promulgation of mendacious narratives, videos, and photos published online with serious consequences in different domains—from online intimidation to false accusations

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resulting in summary executions (in India a woman died after false reports of a salt shortage and seven men were beaten to death by a mob after being wrongly accused of child trafficking on social media). Our seminar also reviewed instances of news manipulation—where the real suffering of victims was replaced by fabricated cover-ups— and of various modes of “electronic assault,” from the infamous Russian meddling in U.S. and European elections via social media to the weaponizing of emails in political smear campaigns, known as “revenge porn.”10 We also discussed the disturbing appetite for voyeuristic Schadenfreude regarding online violence, witnessed in the live-streaming of barbaric acts in the 2019 massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, and other mass killings since. This was not to deny, for a moment, that social media also plays a positive role in our lives—inviting us to empathize “imaginatively” with people in far-flung corners of the globe.11 The issue is topical and complex. We observed, for example, how images of the drowned infant Ayla, washed up on the Greek island of Lesbos in September 2015, went viral within hours, generating immediate international sympathy for Syrian refugees. But even when social media encourages imaginative identification with victims, the question remains whether the impact of such images outlasts the initial sensation. Raising the possibility of carnal disconnect: to wit, becoming “spectators” of strangers who actually remain strangers—them there, us here—where the one-way illusion of presence replaces mutual lived experience. The challenge, we agreed, is to heed the dynamic of double sensation—not just to “view” pain through touchscreens but to be touched by pain in turn. A major challenge

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that certain experiments in haptic AR technology are currently seeking to address.12 (I will return to this later in the chapter.) But if empathy is a problematic passion for our digital age, so also, as mentioned, is eros. Pornography has become the second biggest entertainment industry in North America and the means by which many young people learn the facts of life, leading to various mimetic behavior patterns. While for some this is a symptom of postsixties sexual liberation—“make love not war”—for others it is the twin of puritanism (in cahoots with capitalism). Both pornography and puritanism display an alienation from flesh— puritanism replacing sex with the virtuous, pornography replacing it with the virtual. Each is out of touch with the body. Though the parallel is not without paradox: pornography promises pleasure of a surrogate kind while puritanism has its own perverse gratifications—which can include, as Freud reminds us, the cruelty of superego surveillance and punishment.13 Moreover, it is telling that most urban sex shops and red light districts are disappearing with the rise of the online sex industry where consumers now avail themselves of streamed simulations or direct- order products at the tap of a screen. Just as Amazon is closing bookstores (where one browses shelves, handles covers, turns pages, and meets living authors), Pornhub is closing public venues of erotica (most adult movies today being consumed on private monitors rather than in red light cinemas). And the same goes for romance. Couples making out in Montmartre or Central Park are becoming a thing of the past, as one seeks pleasure in the solitary screen.14

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This move from tactile contact to optical vision raises the question, in turn, of communication. The flight of eroticromantic behavior, from communal rituals to digital fantasies, coincides with a crisis of communication between the sexes. The rise of the #Me Too movement and Title IX harassment legislation—while a welcome protection from predation—is a reminder that we lack new codes of congress between the sexes (and those of fluid genders). Gone are the courtship rites of yesteryear—no bad thing regarding sexist privilege— as we await a new ethic of sexual pedagogy to replace them.15 Note the tendency of many students in U.S. college gyms today, for example, to segregate into male and female groups. And the number of harassment cases of the she said/he said variety grows daily. Unarticulated attitudes of suspicion and confusion make genuine erotic exchange more difficult as the vicarious “safety” of Internet sex becomes more attractive. Experiencing problems reading each other’s bodies, several students confessed to finding themselves in a communications limbo— and this, ironically, in the age of communication par excellence! Hence, the seminar agreed, the need for novel pedagogies of bodily wisdom beyond the alternatives of 1. returning to traditionalist mores or 2. embracing more excarnate modes of gratification.16 What is true of sex is, of course, true of other things too. As mentioned earlier, commerce is increasingly a matter of online banking, e-credit transfers, market speculation, and bit coinage, while communication is becoming daily more simplified by social media tweets, memes, acronyms, and hash tags—“What’s up” being replaced by WhatsApp. Even

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academia itself, many students noted, is heading the way of excarnation, with more courses offered online in “distance education” packages, and the digital humanities field converting physical libraries into virtual databases. How many of us, in the future, will roam bookstalls and archives, running hands along leather spines, in search of a particular volume and hitting upon another by surprise? Who really needs a book in hand or a professor in class? Just as education is becoming more teleoptical, thanks to Zoom and Google, the other senses are following suit, as indicated by Ray Kurzweil’s work on accelerated intelligence technologies. Telepedagogy may soon be the new normal (especially after COVID-19).17 Indeed certain cyber engineers are predicting that computers may migrate from outside devices to internal neural logarithms, with operational codes implanted in the brain— our cosmos becoming one great neurological cyber script. A global matrix with each self a world unto itself. Maximum access and maximum autonomy at once. Hyperconnectivity and hyperisolation all in one. Our seminar also discussed the optical-tactile question regarding medicine. Traditionally known for its embodied approach to healing, the medical profession in our digital age is becoming more hands- off by the day, with health reports posted on line and “physicals” reduced to minimal contact time between physician and patient for insurance and data-efficiency purposes; though, happily, many good doctors continue to believe that healing has as much to do with “bedside manner” as with MRI scans. Indeed, regarding the latter, it has been observed that patients to whom personal attention is devoted (shaking hands, taking pulse, sharing physical presence) recover more successfully from

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procedures. For all the advances of imaging technologies, real healing remains, deep down, hands on.18 When all is said and done, the tactile counts as much as the optical. The spirit of Asclepius lives on. (Quite obviously, the practice of telemedicine after the COVID-19 crisis raises new questions, as noted in our coda.)

▶▹▶ But the excarnation of contemporary life is perhaps nowhere more serious— or perilous—than in global conflicts. Here everything goes up a notch. Jean Baudrillard has called contemporary conflicts “TV Wars”—global spectacles witnessed through digital transmission of “smart bombs” hitting targets and teleguided drone strikes 19 The U.S. Pentagon has boasted that future battles will be fought not with “boots on the ground” but with “psy-ops”: psychological operations from a distance.20 We need only look at the online war of the channels (Fox, Al Jazeera, Moscow News, CNN) to be reminded of this, not to mention warzone clips going viral on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. The digital Eye reigns supreme. Combat is no longer hand to hand but screen to screen. This is the ultimate eclipse of the stranger—digital drone shots of ruined cities without a single body in sight. Teleoptics rules OK. Welcome to the Cyber Panopticon. Old battles were corps à corps, as Stanley Kubrick reminds us in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the first human handles a bone and hurls it in the air. Traditionally wars were started and ended by hand: from the drawing of the sword to the handclasp of peace. But no longer. As my students asked: How do we make peace if there is no hand to

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grasp? Can digital war turn to digital peace? How do we get back in touch with ourselves— and each other—in a time of exponential excarnation?

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Lastly, our seminar addressed the global entertainment industry itself: the realm of digital technology where our contemporary cultural imaginaries are most manifest. We exchanged numerous hermeneutic readings of online games, movies, and TV series, interpreting them as symptomatic signs of the relationship between the optical and the tactile in our time. Being no expert in game culture, I was greatly instructed by my students and their informed research. These days we witness the entertainment industry launching one advanced computer game after another with VR gaming headgear, permitting all kinds of 3D virtual experience. With the latest digital gaming, you can travel the world without moving— omnipresent behind your mask of simulated sensation. Currently grossing over 150 billion annually, the gaming industry has produced such hugely popular series as Fortnight, Sims, Fallout 4, and the controversial Grand Theft Auto (GTA). When first released, massive lines waited hours outside stores to buy GTA V—a highly coveted edition boasting advanced graphic design and enhanced reality simulation techniques. The game invites consumers to engage in new modes of role-playing, assuming the guise of hero or villain, conducting heists in structured scenarios, defeating enemies, revenging grudges,

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and fulfilling all manner of fantasies as they roam the fictional city of San Andreas. The open world design of GTA and similar video games permits participants to perform erotic or violent gameplay forbidden in real life. One can build or destroy cities, liquidate rivals, crash cars, seduce strippers, burn houses, or engage in misdemeanors through vicarious first-person perspectives. All without the slightest legal consequence. With the click of a button, one exits the world of tangible reality and enters a computer-generated universe interacting with fantasy characters and surroundings. Thanks to the most innovative virtual techniques, the computer graphic designers of the game offer us vivid depictions of actions where one can fuse with lifelike avatars with seeming total control. But the operative word here is seeming, for the hyperrealist world remains totally unreal. Intangible. It is but a simulacrum blurring boundaries between actual and imaginary worlds. Hence the controversy surrounding Grand Theft Auto as a confounding of tangible and virtual experience, with some critics claiming that it and similar games can lead to serial addiction and desensitization of lived experience. Though highly entertaining, such games run the risk of one-way sensationalism replacing two-way sensibility. The risk of losing touch with living others free to respond to us in turn. The erasure of the Reciprocity Principle. Alice goes down the rabbit hole to find a labyrinth of looking-glasses—with no way back.21

▶▹▶ The eclipse of the tactile in gaming—where the eye reigns— was a subject of animated discussion in class. But most

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agreed that scholarly critique was not enough in the end. It was one thing to critically engage with the gaming phenomenon in academic debates, quite another to do so within the world of virtual culture itself. Both approaches were deemed necessary and complimentary. So when, for example, students did final presentations on the question of “simulation and touch,” they cited both scholarly thinkers like Barthes and Baudrillard alongside clips of digital works that interrogate their own digital medium. Such works of self-interrogation included movies, TV series, and avantgarde games that addressed the crisis of touch in our time. I offer a brief sample here. One class presentation analyzed the film Don Jon, a critical parody of a porn addict who prefers one-way simulation with sex surrogates to actual tactile encounters— until he finally “touches” a woman, skin to skin in real life, and everything changes. Another presentation reviewed powerful sci-fi exposés of virtual existence from The Matrix to The Truman Show and Bladerunner— movies that dramatize the consequences of cyber technology in two ways: producing cyborgs in real worlds (Bladerunner) or real humans in cyber worlds (The Truman Show). Yet another group of students did a project on the film Ex Machina as an interrogation of digital experimentation with avatars—featuring a programmer (Caleb) assigned the task of testing a humanoid, Ava, to see if she passes for human. One of the most revealing scenes is where Caleb—named after the biblical character who explores foreign lands and meets monsters (Numbers 13–14)— discovers a wardrobe of synthetic skins that the women robots use to put flesh on their metallic bodies. Ava herself touches the facemask of a fellow android,

5.2 Ex Machina (film still)

5.3 Her (film still)

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5.4 The Truman Show (film still)

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wondering if she can respond. The question of touch between characters was, we observed, key to each of these films: can cyborgs be code and flesh at the same time? Can androids and avatars feel as we do? After the movies, we turned to discussions of the popular network series Black Mirror and Westworld, which also address the relationship between virtual and carnal existence. The former features serial nightmare scenarios where sibling youths compete for power and influence in a world governed by social media games of rivalry and revenge—nightmares we can tolerate only because there are hints of refusal and escape. By inviting us to negate the nihilism of high-tech neurosis, Black Mirror serves as a negative photographic plate exposing the possibility of a more incarnate way of being. And a similar negation-of-negation operates in the Westworld series featuring bioengineered cyborgs in a computer-generated theme park where patrons

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indulge their libidinal fantasies with impunity. Here we witness a game in which lifelike creatures are manipulated by their visitors until they revolt— eventually recovering memories of suffering and desire.22 The cyber-beings of Westworld succeed in reactivating the “emotional brain”— the power of carnal tact— and so, recovering their senses, hint at a future alliance between human and virtual being. Our seminar ended with a somewhat hopeful consideration of works that propose new arts of collaboration between code and flesh, as evidenced in ingenious movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (exploring the healing of trauma via technological processes); in art video experiments with “progressive touch”;23 and, curiously, in some smart new video games that interrogate the whole process of gaming itself— a recent example being Death Stranding (2020), by artist Hideo Kojima, which deploys the most advanced simulation techniques to communicate a message of “redemption through reconnection”— a return to flesh through fantasy. This seemed to the class a promising instance of technology recalling what precedes and exceeds itself: our tactile life world.24 And, the class agreed, we needed all the promissory notes we could get.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS So my ultimate question is this: can digital culture, critically deployed, address the question of “touch” for new generations? Can certain forms of digital pedagogy serve as creative alternatives and antidotes to our simulation crisis by engaging directly with our contemporary media of

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communication?25 Like the hair of the dog—might the best response to digital abuse be digital reuse? Namely, digital technology putting itself in question and reopening spaces where we might invent new ways to reinhabit our world— what we might call “ana-technology” (from the Greek ana, meaning up, again, anew in time and space).26 These concerns inform the thinking of recent digital literacy campaigns and groups like Digital Action for Democracy—which invigilate our cyber culture and keep it honest— as well as pioneering efforts to devise new compacts between the virtual and the lived. I am thinking especially of cutting-edge projects with digital storytelling and VR technology at the MIT Open Doc Lab and Public VR Lab in Boston.27 The latter, for instance, hosts a participatory storytelling project, “Arrival VR,” where participants are invited to enter virtual worlds in which they empathize with immigrants and interact in common collaborative spaces— galleries, town halls, museums, studios, and community centers— exploring encounters with others in their lifeworld.28 Such projects in “empathy” are partly inspired by recent experiments in the amplification of touch by digital technology—notably the 2019 tree experiment with haptic vests enabling participants to “feel” what it is like to be a tree growing and expanding or the use of haptic prostheses to “feel” the embrace of fellow humans removed in space or time.29 These ventures in haptotechnology are still embryonic, to be sure, but I believe they portend productive possibilities of collusion between virtual and embodied experience—ways in which our real and simulated worlds may cooperate rather than compete, avoiding rigid dualisms of artificial versus tactile intelligence. For there is

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surely no point replacing the Platonic dichotomy of mind versus body with a “postmodern” equivalent. The challenge is to find new modalities of accommodation between our digital and lived bodies, acknowledging their differences while exploring modes of mutually enhancing symbiosis.30 This is arguably one of the most vital tasks for our emerging Symbiocene—meeting the demands of the “reciprocity principle” for our time. As we move from the Anthropocene of optocentric dominance to a Symbiocene of collaboration between digital and tactile therapies, the question of healing the whole person— and planet—is crucial.31 But we must begin with little things. Modest gestures. In addition to systemic leaps, addressing our global crisis, we can also take small steps, one at a time. Here are simple examples of what symbiotic gestures of collaboration might include in our everyday life. Using GPS to navigate journeys while not hesitating to ask people in the street for directions or to wander down unchartered paths and be surprised by what we find. Plugging into iTunes with headphones but also finding time to listen to random sounds of wind, birds, sirens, or silence. Asking Siri and Alexa to do our bidding without ceasing to use our bodies in the service of others— placing a hand on a shoulder to show care. Watching movies on computer screens while also visiting movie houses, theaters, and live shows where a sense of shared community can trigger unexpected feelings of solidarity and compassion. Ordering books online, googling databases, and taking remote education courses, without forgetting to browse volumes in bookstores and libraries or attend “live” classes in the presence of living teachers. Enjoying e-sports, e- entertainment, and e-travel without forgoing

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the excitement of huddling in stadiums with living bodies or traveling physically to places where we encounter real strangers in strange worlds. Using online banking and shopping but also trading with actual people in markets and malls. Profiting fully from teledoctoring, AI readings of X-rays, and novel forms of imaging technology without forfeiting Asclepian contact between healer and healed. And, finally, zooming with people online while also finding time to converse with tangibly present persons face to face. In short, let’s make the most of digital technology but never forget the real thing. Ultimately, it is a matter of both/and. It is clear that to live fully in tomorrow’s world we will need both virtual imagination and incarnate action. Both digital touch and live touch. The connectivity of the World Wide Web and the commons of the body. No one can deny the extraordinary advantages of digital technology. The gains are too great to ignore out of some nostalgia for bygone times. In the heel of the hunt, it is a matter of striking the right balance between the virtual and the tactile, not choosing one over the other. To recover our senses today is to remain sensitive to both cyber and carnal existence—to honor the vital human need for “double sensibility”: imagining and living in concert, touching and being touched in good measure.

Coda Touch and the Coronavirus

Boston, April 16, 2020

W

hen COVID-19 visited our world in early 2020, I was in the process of completing this book. To respond adequately to the pandemic’s implications for touch would mean, I realized, rewriting whole sections of the work altogether. So I decided to leave the chapters largely as they were and add these few reflections as a coda. Touch is never so obvious as when confronted with its opposite— the untouchable.1 The imperative of social distancing, mandated by the coronavirus, made us acutely aware of how central touch is to our lives. The threat of contagion through physical contact meant tactile encounters were kept to a minimum, if not outlawed— everyone considered a potential carrier of the invisible virus. We could no longer reach out to touch others or touch our faces with our hands (rapidly realizing how often we did just that). In my own case, I was unable to hug my daughter in quarantine or to travel to visit a dying relative in person. I was also no longer able to teach my students face-to-face— as

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classes went online— or shake hands with colleagues and friends. When I handled a doorknob I became aware— as never before—how many others had turned the same knob before me. As COVID-19 enjoined separation and isolation, everyone suddenly discovered how much tangible space we actually shared with each other every day. And how often we say “let’s keep in touch” when we are about to do the opposite, say goodbye. The more touch is impossible, the more one wants it and appreciates how vital it is to our being. Much in the same way that death—where the tactile body ceases—reminds us of the tangible meaning of life. It is when the hammer breaks that you appreciate the hammer. When the engine fails that you notice the engine. When someone dies that you miss them, finally aware of what that person meant to you. So just as death makes us prize life, when touch is taken from us we realize how much it really matters. As I went into isolation in the days following lockdown I found myself visited by multiple memories of touch. The hot breath of my mother blowing against my five-year-old shoulders warming me up after a swim in the Irish Sea. The cool palm of my grandmother on my brow as I suffered fever. The brush of my first girlfriend’s lips as we danced a slow dance. The smooth skin of my newly born child. Feelings welled up from involuntary memory—keeping me in touch with myself and my world. And others told me of similar experiences: unexpected messages from old friends and old flames (the “ex-factor”) wishing to “reconnect” at a time when physical travel and tactile contact was suddenly suspended; a rush on online movies about romance, animals, and nature; a raw yearning to eat one’s favorite foods

CODA

now that restaurants and pubs were closed, trips to food stores limited, and culinary savors at a premium. The rarer tactile experience became, the more it was valued. But touch was not the only sense affected by COVID-19. As widely reported, loss of taste and smell was a symptom of early infection. This struck me as curious, given that these same senses were greatly diminished when Homo sapiens became Homo erectus, rising up from his four-legged posture on earth.2 Losing our quadruped coexistence with animals, we hoisted our heads toward the sky, becoming “upward gazers” (anthropoi). Henceforth the eye became the dominant sense— as noted in our first chapter— “surveying all that man possessed” and suspending our close cohabitation with nonhuman beings. The first step toward the Anthropocene was taken as we lost touch with our primal embodiment. Hands no longer touched the earth but reached up toward the stars. And we never again felt quite at ease in our skin. Clothes—made from hides of slaughtered animals—replaced hair as the means to protect our nakedness. As in the biblical Fall from nature— our “first parents” covered their flesh with the skin of a snake that seduced them. COVID-19 signaled the compromise of our “animal” senses— touch, taste, and smell— compelling us to live through the eye more than at any time in history. With the outbreak of the pandemic, the world went online. Though protective limits were established with regard to touching, tasting, and inhaling, our eyes worked overtime scouring our screens for news of the sickness: global broadcasts flashing from monitors illustrated by the macroscopic image of the microscopic “enemy”— a little globe with

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sprouting red flowers: the invisible virus made obsessively visible. And the online migration spread right across the board. Work—for those who still had it—became a matter of virtual contact from home. As did most of our social relations. Friendship parties, support rallies, music choirs, reading groups, yoga studios, together-apart theater projects, spiritual meetings, Internet masses, fitness clubs, and family reunions all rapidly multiplied on the Web. Even Zoom weddings and funerals became common, while distance education was de rigueur with classes conduced exclusively online. Internet shopping and home delivery saved us going to the shops; and teledoctoring removed the need to travel to clinics and hospitals when not absolutely necessary. During the lockdown, no one moved without “essential” cause. In the first half of 2020, the virus went viral. Homo sapiens became Homo cybernens— our sojourn on the Web sedulously preparing us for life in a postpandemic world. But what we lost on the roundabout we won on the swings. Once COVID-19 arrived—traveling stealthily east to west—humanity needed all its wits about it. If the state of exception was a state of excarnation, it was also a call to “connect” by other means. Videos of sorrow and joy mushroomed on the Internet. Heartrending tales of dying loved ones trended alongside clips of ingenious hilarity. Facetime farewells and terminal appeals to Alexa were followed by mischievous memes of irreverent wit.3 (A favorite was Winnie-the-Pooh turning to a clingy Piglet shouting “Back the f . . . up”). And in addition to these upswells of popular imagination, the Web summoned many artful minds to its side. Within no time, top media outlets were

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commissioning reflections from the most gifted thinkers of our time— scientists, medics, philosophers, and poets— published online for millions to read; and it was surprising how many of them spoke about touch. The New York Review of Books featured a series of remarkable essays under the title Pandemic Journal.4 While Le Monde published a weekly column of deeply moving testimonies, including an homage to the power of skin by novelist Leïla Slimani: “ ‘Naked skin of the newborn placed on its mother’s breast. Skin exposed to the sun’s caress before the gaze of a lover. Skin shivering at the brush of a hand. Children know the palliative power of touch. Since at night, frightened of monsters and darkness, they take our hands and place them on their bare skin, their trembling bodies.’ ”5 These epidermal imaginings, triggered by the pandemic prohibition against touch, reminded Slimani of just how endangered tactility is in our age (where, she notes, the thing we touch most is our iPhone); she ends with a plea for touch as our most vital sense. Meanwhile, in Corriere del Serra, Julia Kristeva analyzed how the pandemic was compelling us to confront our basic fragility, exposing three core problems of “globalized man” in the digital age: solitude experienced as loneliness, intolerance of limits, and the repression of our mortality. She writes: I am struck by our contemporary incapacity to be alone. All this hyper- connected exaltation makes us live in isolation in front of screens. This has not abolished loneliness, but has ensconced it in the social media, has compressed it in messages and data. People already devastated by loneliness find themselves more alone today, because

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CODA although they have words, signs, icons, they have lost the flesh of words, sensations, sharing, tenderness, duty towards the other, care for the other. We give the flesh of words as a sacrificial offering to the virus and to malady, but we were already orphans of that human dimension that is shared passion. All of a sudden we realize that we are alone and that we have lost touch with our inner core. We are slaves of the screens that have not at all abolished loneliness but have only absorbed it. This is where the recent anxiety and anger come from.6

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On a more positive note, Kristeva surmises that the viral crisis has triggered a “revelation of life as a whole, starting with everyone’s vulnerability with regard to pleasure and sexuality,” and that it is preparing us “for a new art of living that will be complex and daring.”7 This “new art” will, I believe, comprise novel initiatives with regard to touch. If COVID-19 reinforced a regime of excarnation—in hitherto unforeseen ways—it also witnessed a proliferation of digital experiments with the senses.8 In a curious irony, as we forfeited the freedom of direct touch, ingenious alternatives were sought by other means. Under the banner social distancing doesn’t have to mean disconnecting, innovative projects flourished using VR and AR telehaptics. One noteworthy example was the Altspace program of meet-ups between families and friends separated by the pandemic censure of physical proximity.9 Using VR headsets and simple Web browsers lowering barriers of entry, the program fostered multiple kinds of inventive gatherings— social interactions, haptic journeys, teletherapies, spiritual liturgies, synesthetic happenings.

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Such multisensory events enabled spatially separated participants to meet in a common space (an updated version of chat room interactions of the nineties).10 Family members greeted each other with telehaptic hugs across impossible distances of place and time.11 Even experiments with synthetic skin were devised to allow a tactile sense of “felt” empathy with far-away loved ones and friends.12 This intensified use of social VR via Altspace and other telehaptic projects served as a laboratory for new possibilities of connecting across distance, bringing the far near and making the strange more familiar. In particular, the opening up of alternative public health therapies via technology added a new dimension to telemedicine, representing yet another creative response to COVID-19. What I find most striking about these telehaptic experiments is that their inventors—faced with the eclipse of touch— devised ingenious means to combine the powers of virtual and tactile bodies. Making scarcity the mother of invention, they explored hybrid modes of haptic communication that challenged old mind-body dualisms and defied the dichotomy between technology and life. They expressed the desperate human need to touch and be touched, come what may. The ineradicable desire for tangible contact.13 It remains to be seen, of course, whether such leaps into uncharted territories of tactility succeed in becoming part of our postpandemic future— or do so in a life-enhancing way. Time will tell. The important point, as I see it, is that when faced with the loss of carnal contact, the human imagination responded by contriving new possibilities of haptic communion. When one kind of touch was in straits, another came to the rescue.

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One of the most important lessons of COVID-19 is, I believe, the question of “connection.” From the earliest of times, as we saw in chapter 3, touch was seen as a power of healing through accompaniment. It was deemed an indispensable gift to the commons of the body. A medium of savvy and tact, of flair and insight. In the oldest stories of the wisdom traditions—from Jacob and Jesus to Chiron and Asclepius— the double sensibility of healer and healed entailed the double sensation of touching and being touched. Few lessons are more urgent for us today when digital communication and tactile contact are called to convene in the interests of human well-being. If only we keep in touch. Only connect. 140

Notes

Introduction 1.

2.

3.

I first heard the term excarnation from my Canadian teacher, Charles Taylor, who directed my graduate studies at McGill University, Montreal, in 1976– 1977. In a survey report entitled “Coronavirus Has Killed the Power of Touch: How Do We Reconnect?” (Daily Beast, April 16, 2020), Tim Teeman published various scholars of touch on the pandemic experience of “touch isolation” and “touch deprivation.” These included Constance Classen, author of The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (which analyzes how fear of disease and plague led historically to a distrust of touch), Dr.  Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute of Miami Miller School of Medicine (director of a “Covid-19 Lockdown Activities Survey”), Francis McGlone, professor of neuroscience at Liverpool John Moores University, and Dr. Victoria Abraria, research scholar of the somatosensory framework of touch at Rutgers University (exploring neural circuits in processing and responding to touch). We return to several of these authors in chapter 4 and our coda. See Redmond O’Hanlon, “The Potential of Touch in Borderline Personality Disorder Therapy (BPD),” paper delivered at the British and Irish Group for the Study of Personality Disorder Annual Conference,

INTRODUCTION

4.

5.

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6.

7.

8.

Lincoln, UK, 2014. See also the research of Jessica Smith, “Touch Hunger,” graduate dissertation in art history, University of Lancaster, 2019. See Victoria Abraria, who notes that to date there have been ten research papers published on sight for every one on touch. She makes a plea to redress the imbalance: “Touch is so huge, and skin is so huge. Because of its complexity people decide not to study it, yet of all the senses it is the most important because of brain health. I hope people realize that touch is a compelling sense that should be studied as a legitimate science.” She goes on: “Touching another human being is such a complex experience. Skin . . . is the receptacle of thousands and thousands of tactile interactions, temperature, and movement. The connections between our brains and our skin are so intricate, with so many neurons conveying so many subtleties” (cited in Teeman, “Coronavirus Has Killed the Power of Touch”). Francis McGlone, in Teeman, “Coronavirus Has Killed the Power of Touch”: “Gentle touch is vital to our mental health and wellbeing. All social mammals, including humans, have a population of gentle touch sensitive nerves in the skin called c-tactile afferents (CT) that respond optimally to a caress . . . when stimulated it takes a couple of seconds to get to the brain and they project to emotion processing regions where ‘feelings’ are represented.” E-hosting via hospitality apps like Airbnb is less about welcoming someone to your home than prearranging particulars online so that the host does not need to be at home when the guest arrives. And e-sports are growing in importance in U.S. universities where special scholarships are offered to talented student “gamers”—the games online often attracting bigger audiences than live performances. Telehealth is another growing industry, especially after COVID-19. The term psy- ops (psychological operations in war theaters) was commonly used by U.S. secretary of state Donald Rumsfeld in military campaigns waged in the Middle East after 9/11. See our “Thinking After Terror,” in Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002). Pornhub.com is one of the most visited sites on the Net, while “Live Jasmine” invites customers to command and control the sexual spectacle of live cam performers. With the advent of broadband and video

INTRODUCTION

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

streaming, free online pornography became instantly accessible, and is currently how many young people learn about sex. For a good critical analysis of this culture, see Nancy Bauer, How to Do Things with Pornography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). See also the illuminating work of Peggy Orenstein, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape (New York: Harper, 2016). It is curious, for example, that some iPhone/iPhoto visitors to Internet dating apps are willing to send pictures of their genitals before they send pictures of their faces. The face that used to be public becomes private as private parts become public. The millennial generation growing up with iPhones is the first in human history able to record every private part of their body and every private act of their sex life in an endless series of pictures and videos. Might not this lead to a banality about sex even before sex? If one has already seen so much of others’ bodies digitally before dating them, what is the point of dating? Perhaps it is to supplement digital vision with actual touch, in the same way that many still like to supplement downloaded music with “live performances” involving singers and bands. See Lisa Eadicicco, “Americans Check Their Phones a Billion Times per Day,” Time, December 15, 2015. See also www.nimh.nih.gov/health /statistics/mental-illness.shtm; and Realitysandwich.com. Constance Classen, author of The Deepest Sense, notes that the contemporary “decline in the social importance of touch was accompanied by a rise in the social importance of sight. A key factor here was the development of new technologies for exploring the visual world and recording previously fleeting images. . . . In our age of social media, it sometimes seems that visual representations matter more than physical experiences” (Classen in Teeman, “Coronavirus Has Killed the Power of Touch”). Tomas Halik, Duffy Lectures, Boston College, March, 2020. To cite an extreme example, there is the case of a Korean couple who let their own actual child starve to death while attending to the well-being of a virtual child in an online game; see Mark Tran, “Girl Starved to Death While Parents Raised Virtual Child in Online Game, Guardian, March 5, 2010. See Richard Louv, Our Wild Calling: How Connecting with Animals Can Save Our Lives and Save Theirs (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2019). Louv, 16.

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INTRODUCTION 15.

Richard Louv, citing ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht, 18– 19. For similar powerful pleas by ecological philosophers, see David Wood, Reoccupy the Earth: Notes Toward Another Beginning (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019); Brian Treanor, Melancholic Joy: On Life Worth Living (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021); Sean McGrath, Thinking Nature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); and Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

1. Coming to Our Senses 1.

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Every interrogator knows the link between sensory deprivation and disorientation. It is especially acute in solitary confinement: “The prisoner becomes more pliable, more submissive, more willing to take directions. It disarms a person, this fall into the sinkhole of sensory deprivation. It can drive them to madness. It is, every military knows, an effective technique. . . . Simple as it may seem, when the lights go out, we simply lose our bearings. The density of the dark makes it impossible for us to fix our positions anymore. We find ourselves alone in the universe, untethered and unprepared. . . . Lightlessness leaves us no internal compass by which to trace or set our steps.” Joan Chittister, Between the Dark and the Daylight: Embracing the Contradictions of Life (New York: Image, 2015), 17– 19. See, for example, the research of Urwa Hameed on the social and cultural variations of the handshake in different Islamic communities in Pakistan, cited in Melissa Fitzpatrick and Richard Kearney, The Ethics of Hospitality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). Tact, in social intersubjective situations, is born of a respect for and acceptance of the bodily integrity of the being who is other than you—physically, physically, culturally, socially. It requires a subtle intuition and discernment regarding the appropriate space between the persons facing each other in situ. See James Hamblin, “Can We Touch?,” Atlantic, April 10, 2019. I will return to this crucial question in chapter 5. On the hermeneutics of erotic touch and caress, see the perceptive analysis of Matthew

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Clemente, Eros Crucified (New York: Routledge, 2020), in particular chapter 3, entitled “Incarnation: Eros as Touch, Caress, Kiss.” See also here Fintan O’Toole on the “touch controversy” surrounding Joseph Biden’s political career and the 2020 presidential campaign: “With Biden, fellow feeling is literal—he feels you. He is astonishingly, overwhelmingly hands- on. He extended the backslapping of the old Irish pol into whole new areas of the body— hugging, embracing, rubbing.” Citing a particular incident when Biden placed his hands on the shoulders of an elderly woman at a campaign stop in Council Bluff’s Iowa, O’Toole adds: “He got both hands onto her shoulders, while he talked to the crowd over her head, like it was her and him, through thick and thin. So not really a gesture of submission or of domination, perhaps, but a desperate hunger to connect, to touch and be touched, to both console and be consoled.” O’Toole concludes: “There is something religious in this laying- on of hands. It is an act of communion. But it is also profoundly problematic . . . in the Me Too era (when) touching is too apt to raise questions of gender, power and consent that clearly did not occur to Biden in Council Bluffs or anywhere else.” Fintan O’Toole, “The Designated Mourner,” New York Review of Books 60, no. 1, January 16, 2020, 6. Some psychologists have extended the model of recursive “double sensation” to good sex between reciprocal partners and to masturbation experienced as more pleasurable when genital self-touch is mediated by the “fantasy” of another person. See James Morley, “Essays in Phenomenological Psychology” (work in progress). Frans de Waal also notes that feelings and emotions are not quite the same thing. Frans de Waal, Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves (New York: Norton, 2019), 4. While healthy people are largely in touch with their feelings, which are internal states familiar to those who possess them, emotions are external behaviors that are, in principle, publicly observed rather than privately experienced. Anyone can behold my emotions, but only I can be sure of my own inner feelings. So while feelings generally express themselves in intimate terms, emotions of fear, anger, or delight are triggered by outer stimuli in our social environment and drive our behavior in a visible way. When we become inwardly aware of another’s external

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emotions— through empathic reading of facial gesture, voice, skin color, odor— they become feelings that can be experienced and expressed. We are touched. Being in touch with emotions through embodied feeling/felt sense is a progenitor of trust and community in neonatal care, as in the formation of animal and human social groups. De Waal writes: “Emotions can’t leave us alone. (They) make our hearts beat faster, our skin gain color, our faces tremble, our chests tighten, our voices rise, our tears flow, our stomachs turn . . . Because of the enteric system’s autonomy, it is also called our ‘second brain’ ” (84). De Waal, 84– 85. See Fitzpatrick and Kearney, The Ethics of Hospitality. See Richard Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Carnal Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 15– 56. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s description of this act in Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Routledge, 1962). See, for example, the detailed existential descriptions of sexual relationships by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Being and Nothingness and The Second Sex respectively, as well as by Merleau-Ponty in “The Body in Its Sexual Being” (Phenomenology of Perception), 154–71; see also Jean-Luc Marion’s concluding chapter to The Erotic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007); and David Wood’s “Touched by Touching,” in Carnal Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 173– 81. See Rachel Laudan, “Toward a Culinary Ethos,” Hedgehog Review 21, no. 3 (2019). See the work of psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Cooked and The Raw, first published by Gallimard in French in 1964. Anne Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 67– 68. See John Manoussakis, “On the Flesh of the Word: Incarnational Hermeneutics” (Carnal Hermeneutics, 306– 15). For example: “Take, eat, this is my body. The Word who became flesh said these words, which appropriately became text—and I would like to remind us that that first theological method, since this is what Saint John the Theologian does,

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is not to read the text but to eat it” (307). See also John Manoussakis, “Dying to Desire: Soma, Sema, Sarx, and Sex,” in Sarah Horton, Stephen Mendelsohn, Christine Rojcewicz, and Richard Kearney, eds., Somatic Desire: Recovering Corporeality in Contemporary Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019). For more on this question of incarnation as a tasting and eating, see chapter 3. Joseph Nugent, “The Human Snout: Pigs, Priests, and Peasants in the Parlor,” Senses and Society 4, no. 3 (2009). Throughout the nineteenth century, Ireland, Nugent argues, reeked from the pages of English literary representation. The reputed stench of its cabins, cesspools, and dung heaps became a shameful index of national backwardness and the essential mark of Irish olfactory identity. In response to the odor of primitiveness that clung to them, Ireland’s rising middle classes set about a program of national decontamination. Led by the emblematic figure of native Victorian propriety, the Catholic priest, this modernizing class carried the mantras of civility and hygiene to the countryside and the rural home, imposing upon a recalcitrant peasantry a new, “enlightened” olfactory register predicated on an intolerance of traditional odors. The groundwork for this transformation was the castigation of Ireland’s domestic cottage by English observers and, in particular, the metonymic substitution of the peasantry’s pigs for Irish national character— a discursive reordering that, though it encountered resistance from a peasantry devoted to an old Gaelic order of sensory values, was completed and even sanctified by a Catholic Church bent on producing modern, disciplined subjects. The smells of everyday life, as a result, took on new meanings. Nugent examines Irish and British historical texts around the turn of the twentieth century to uncover that meaning and expose the role of olfaction in the production of the peculiar Gaelic- Catholic ideology of domesticity that until recent decades governed rural Ireland. George Moore, writing in 1886, writes of the postfamine decaying Irish cabin thus: “You want to know what Ireland is like? The country exhales the damp, flaccid, evil smell of poverty. . . . It hangs about every cabin; it rises out of the chimney with the smoke of the peat, it broods upon the dung heap and creeps along the deep black bog-holes . . . the smell of something sick to death of poverty” (cited in Nugent, 286). Striking a more comic note, Nugent cites the

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following exchange from Flann O’Brien’s novel The Poor Mouth: “ ‘A smell is the most complicated phenomenon in the world,’ he said, ‘and it cannot be unraveled by the human snout or understood properly although dogs have a better way with smells than we have.’ ‘But dogs are very poor riders of bicycles,’ MacCruiskeen said, presenting the other side of the comparison.” For other cultural examples of olfaction, see Robert Mechembled, Smells: A History of Odor in Early Modern Times (Oxford: Polity, 2020). Albert Camus, The First Man (New York: Vintage, 1996). For similar primal descriptions of multisensorial experience, see Michel Serres, The Five Senses (London: Continuum, 2008) and Variations on the Body (New York: Continuum, 2008). See also Brian Treanor, Melancholic Joy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), especially chapter 3 on carnal vitality. By contrast, most evil impulses were traditionally thought to stem from what Augustine called the “lust of the eyes” (concupiscentia oculoram), a one-way drive to conquer and consume, to seduce and subdue, refusing to respond empathically to the other. See this notion of Augenblick as an authentic vision of deep “kairological” or “Messianic” time in thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin. Richard Rohr associates this second sight with aesthetic- contemplative vision: “Contemplation is the “second gaze,” through which we see something in its particularity and yet also in a much larger frame. We know it by the joy it gives, which is far greater than anything it does for us in terms of money, power, or success. In its various forms, art provides this incarnational and contemplative insight” (Center for Action and Contemplation, November 13, 2019). Rohr adds: “Spirituality invites us to look with a different pair of eyes, beyond what Thomas Merton called ‘the shadow and the disguise’ of things until we can know them in their connectedness and wholeness. The non-dual mind fully experiences and learns to love limited ordinary things and peeks through the clouds to glimpse infinite and seemingly invisible things.” Cynthia Bourgeault likens this second gaze to the spiritual-incarnational tradition of “the eye of the heart”; see her The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity (Boulder: Shambhala, 2010), 60. Finally, John Prendergast offers a good treatment of the “felt

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sense” of embodied spiritual vision in his book In Touch: How to Tune In to the Inner Guidance of Your Body (Boulder: Sounds True, 2015). He outlines four stages for hearing the signals of ‘somatic inner knowing,’ namely, groundedness, alignment, openheartedness, and spaciousness. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: New Directions, 1991). See also Paz’s poem “Touch,” which describes how hands can discover secret intimate bodies within the flesh of the lover: “My hands / open the curtains of your being / clothe you in a further nudity / uncover the bodies of your body / My hands / invent another body for your body.” Translator Eliot Weinberger comments: “The magic of his touch is such that it transforms her being, uncovering the bodies of her body. Her body is not a single entity but a multiple-layered existence containing several unexplored bodies within. Her physical being comes to light as his exploring hands remove the curtains thereby flooding her inner being with exquisite light. A new body is invented, a new life comes into being.” The aesthetics of synesthesia also includes possibilities of augmented “tactful” perception opened up by the medium of cinema. See Vivian Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). See Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of such double vision as a synesthetic “tangible seeing” in The Visible and Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1979), 130 ff. Reciprocal “vision” is a way of seeing things holistically—in an integral pattern of interconnectedness. A frequent “aesthetic” experience of poets and artists, it is also found in mystical visions of reciprocity. This is what Meister Eckhart had in mind, no doubt, when he wrote: “The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me,” or what Mahayana Buddhists like Thích Nhất Hạnh meant by the recursive vision of “interbeing.” Seeing into the heart of things is not confined to human perception but extends to our mutual interactions with all sentient beings in the animate world. Many Eastern and indigenous traditions extend this to the inanimate world— as in the Hindu reverence for mountains and rivers

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and the Native American invocation of “all my relations” (ranging from human relations past and future to nonhuman relations such as animals, trees, and the four elements, fire, earth, water, and air). See my discussion of a Navajo sweat lodge ceremony in Reimagining the Sacred (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Native tradition encourages both “inner” and “outer” vision, where we see synesthetically with the owl’s eyes, hear with deer’s ears, and feel with the fingers of a racoon— in deep connection with nature. Seamus Heaney’s simple phrase—“seeing things”— says it all. See psychologist Simon Baron- Cohen, cited by Redmond O’Hanlon, “The Potential of Touch in Borderline Personality Disorder Therapy (BPD),” paper delivered at the British and Irish Group for the Study of Personality Disorder Annual Conference, Lincoln, UK, 2014. He also noted that women are six times more likely than men to experience synesthesia, which makes them better semiologists. See also Morton Heller and William Schiff, The Psychology of Touch (New York: Psychology, 1991). The authors are particularly interested in tactile perception in blind people. See Paul Ricœur’s well-known distinction between first and second naivete in The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon, 1992). Luke 24:15–16, 30–31: “Jesus drew near but their eyes were prevented from seeing him. . . . He broke bread and gave it to them and at that their eyes were opened.” Entheogen was a term borrowed by the early researchers into psilocybe fungi in the West in the 1950s and 1960s. See Michael Pollan’s work on the healing powers of psychedelic vision in How to Change Your Mind (New York: Penguin, 2018). Pollan acknowledges the indigenous religious use of psilocybe cubensis hatia by Mazatec curanderas in southern Mexico, long before its introduction to the West. In 2019 the FDA approved clinical trials in the use of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, and much recent work has been done on the use of psychoactive medications in the treatment of anxiety, depression, addiction, and terminal hospice care. See also Richard Rohr’s reflection on spiritual exercises of seeing– being seen in Center for Action and Contemplation, November  9, 2019. The implications of such reciprocal vision are radical faced with our present climate emergency— calling for a

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29.

30. 31.

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new resonance with the earth as powerful antidote to the unilateral ravages of market capitalism and the fossil fuel industry. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York: Vintage, 2004); and Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2013). Note also how certain ways of reading— especially sacred or poetic texts—have been linked with a synesthesia of seeing as tasting. See Cynthia Bourgeault on the ancient monastic practice of “ingesting” and “embodying” texts as one reads deeply, The Wisdom Way of Knowing (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 110: a practice in tune with the biblical motif of eating the sacred scroll of scripture. See Genesis 21:31, Psalms 37:19, Isaiah 9:20, and 25:28, and Ezekiel 3.3: “Then he said to me, ‘Son of man, eat this scroll I am giving you and fill your stomach with it.’ So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey.” See also the interesting research on visual reading as touching: touchthispage.com. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire.” For a typical synesthetic verse in Hopkins— combining sight, taste, and kinesthetic movement— see “Pied Beauty”: “swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.” The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). For a profound study of human “insight” into the sacred ordinariness of nature, see Brian Treanor, Melancholic Joy: On Life Worth Living (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), especially his readings of Annie Dillard and Nikos Kazantzakis. Aristotle, De Anima (220b). We will return to Aristotle on this subject in the next chapter. See Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (Cambridge: Polity, 2016) and “The Listening Society: Responsivity as the Essence of the Common Good,” lecture given to the University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, January 2019. I am grateful to Michael D. Higgins for bringing my attention to this exploration of a new democracy of social listening and responding. What one might call a “tactful listening-response” to others for the sake of the common good, a crucial step toward a “commons of the listening body.” The related Italian term toccata, from toccare, to touch, is “a composition for a keyboard instrument, intended to exhibit the touch and technique of the performer, and having the air of an Improvisation” (OED). See Vladimir Jankélévitch on discovering the soul of a piece of

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Debussy music by touching les touches of the clavier in a playful manner that ratiocination or calculation cannot do. Toucher in French vernacular also has the sense of seductive erotic play. See Richard Rohr, “Inner Silence,” Center for Action and Contemplation, January  8, 2020: “Silence is an alternative consciousness. A thinking which is not thinking . . . a form of knowing beyond reacting and beyond mental analysis, which is what we usually call thinking.” See also here John Prendergast’s notion of listening to the body as a way of “grounding,” “attuning,” and “aligning” with our “inner resonance,” and that of others (“Forward,” in In Touch, xi). See the remarkable reflections on musical listening-responding to the “sheer sound of silence” by Irish musician Nóirín Ní Ríain, Theosony: Towards a Theology of Listening, (Dublin: Columba, 2011). See Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, 50, 110. This point is reiterated by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove: “While good teaching can enlighten the mind and powerful preaching can move the heart, song has a unique power to move our bodies, pulling us into the river that flowed before us and will continue long after we are gone. The gospel practices . . . are a way of life wrapped up in song.” Jonathan WilsonHartgrove, Reconstructing the Gospel (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 2018), 146. That is, “song” understood as a double sensation of chanting and listening simultaneously. See Redmond O’Hanlon, “Embodied Morning,” part of “The Art of Mourning” (work in progress). Colwyn Trevarthern, Infant Research and Psychoanalysis (Lecce: Frenis Zero, 2018). For a fuller discussion of this, see chapter 4. The term auditory imagination is T. S. Elliot’s. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1975), 18. See Patrick Hederman’s exploration of a poetics of carnal language and audition in James Joyce in The Opal and the Pearl (Dublin: Columba, 2017), 55, 73– 74. See also Annie Dillard’s description of a second mode of seeing as a primal synesthetic response where she finds herself “ringing” or resonating with reality: “I had been my whole life a bell, and never known until at that moment I was lifted and struck.” Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007).

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Helen Bamber, The Good Listener and her interview with the BBC of the same title. We will return to a discussion of Bamber’s work in chapter 4. See Richard Louv, Our Wild Calling: How Connecting with Animals Can Save Our Lives and Save Theirs (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2019).

2. Philosophies of Touch 1. 2. 3.

Plato, Cratylus, 229c. See also Fran O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Cyphers of Transcendence (Dublin: Irish Academic, 2019). Plato, Phaedo, 67. There are, to be sure, significant exceptions to the general neglect of touch in the history of Western philosophy between Aristotle and twentieth- century phenomenology. Most obviously, there is Aquinas’s effort to rehabilitate Aristotle—via the Islamic philosophers Avicenna and Averroes—in the Summa Theologiae for the Middle Ages. For how, Aquinas asked, could one reconcile the resurrection of the body as material flesh if one held to the Platonic body/spirit split? Aquinas insisted, against Platonism, that the unique material body of the saved person is restored after death. But in spite of the partial retrieval of Aristotle to account for Christian resurrection, Aquinas and the scholastics remained largely captive to a dualist metaphysics of spirit versus matter. (It is a great irony that the residual “Platonism” of AugustianThomistic-scholastic theology tempered the carnality of Aristotle’s proto-phenomenology as well as the incarnationalism of Christianity itself). It is true that many Christian mystics were deeply “incarnational” in attitude (see chapter 3 on biblical healing), notably Francis of Assisi and later Franciscans and Celtic mystics like Eriugena, Pelagius, and Scotus— three Scoti whose panentheist theology of nature as divine “enfleshment” (ensarkosis) held to the revelation of Word made flesh. And we might cite, later again, the work of sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance thinkers like the early Ficino (Commentary on Lucretio’s De Rerum Natura) and Mario Equicola (Di natura d’amore)— writing on the spiritual-somatic power of erotic touch. But all these were ultimately of minor significance compared to the dominant

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metaphysics of Platonic dualism. But, I repeat, I am speaking here of metaphysical “Platonism,” not of Plato himself, whose dialogues were too complex to be reduced to any scholastic system. There were also, of course, several materialist and empiricist philosophies (Berkeley, for example, saw touch and sight as intimately linked) that sought to overcome dualism at various times, but they did so largely in a reductionist manner that denied the complex “mediating” and “intergrating” dialectic of the flesh. Finally, there existed many important non-Western traditions with very different stories to tell about the spirit-flesh relationship; but that is work for another volume. Aristotle, De Anima, 2, section 11. Touch for Aristotle is universal insofar as all living things—including animals and plants—possess touch. See Jean-Louis Chrétien’s illuminating essay “Body and Touch” in The Call and the Response (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 92– 94. I am greatly indebted to Chrétien’s phenomenologicalhermeneutic reading. Aristotle, De Anima, 2, 418. Most wisdom traditions say as much, as we shall see in chapter 3. Even the Buddha, when challenged by Mara to reveal his authority, simply touched a finger to the ground. It should be noted that in the Metaphysics, book 1, Aristotle is arguably still under a certain Platonic sway when he accords priority to sight in the metaphysical sense. Aristotle, De Anima, 2, 421–23. Aristotle, 2, 418. Aristotle, 2, 428. See Emmanuel Alloa, “Getting Into Touch: Aristotelian Diagnostics,” in Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor, eds., Carnal Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). Several of my observations in what follows were first sketched in my introductory essay to that volume, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics.” Aristotle, De Anima, 2, 11. Aristotle notes that the medium of touch “escapes us” (De Anima, 2, 11, 423b), giving rise to metaphorical readings of the flesh. See commentary by Chrétien, “Body and Touch,” 95– 96. Chrétien, 85. It is also worth noting that in an enigmatic passage in the Metaphysics theta, chapter  10, 1051b 23–25, Aristotle speaks of

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14.

15.

16. 17.

apprehending the truth of something in terms of “touch” (thigein) and of ignorance as a lack of “touch,” or, as we might say, “being out of touch.” I am grateful to Thomas Sheehan and Erin Stackle for alerting me to this passage. Chrétien, 87– 90. Given Aristotle’s revolutionary claim that “flesh is not the organ but the medium of touch” (De Anima, 11, 423b), and that all sensing— from top to bottom— is “mediated,” we have grounds for claiming that every act of human sensation, no matter how basic, is already an exercise in hermeneutic “understanding” (VerstehenBefindlichket in Heidegger’s Being and Time). The hermeneutic asstructure is never absent from flesh. See Iris Murdoch on Heidegger’s recognition of Aristotle’s hermeneutics of the body, “Sein und Zeit: Pursuit of Being,” in Justin Broackes, ed., Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays (New York: Oxford University Press 2012), 95: “Heidegger reasonably claims that the basic ontological interpretation of the affective life in general has been able to make scarcely one forward step worthy of mention since Aristotle.” See John Manoussakis, who develops Aristotle’s insights on touch in terms of a threefold hermeneutic distinction between “grasp,” “caress,” and “kiss” in “Touching,” part 3 of God After Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). See the work of Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. See the very insightful distinction between the infant mouth as os and as bucca in its first gestures of touching and tasting: Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 122. Nancy’s phenomenological description of the body’s radical exposure to the other from birth is captured in his wonderful neologism expeausition— the exposition of skin to skin (14 ff). See also his essays “Motion and Emotion” and “Essential Skin,” in Kearney and Treanor, Carnal Hermeneutics, where he speaks of the basic epidermal responses of skin being, from the outset, both psychological and physiological— two sides of the same flesh. It would be interesting to bring Nancy’s hermeneutics of touch into dialogue with the recent work of philosophers engaged in more empirical- cognitive research, such as Catherine Malabou and Evan Thompson, or with empirical psychologists like Matthew Fulkerson,

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The First Touch: A Philosophical Study of Human Touch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). But Aristotle was the first to recognize that “the taste object is a kind of touch object” (De Anima, 2, 10). Linguistics and psychoanalysis can also provide interesting insights regarding the original relationship between proto- speech sensibility and speech proper. See in particular Roman Jakobson’s analysis of the transition from infant “babble” to speech (which influenced the phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty and Alloa) and Freud’s famous description of the child’s first acquisition of language as a synesthetic game of fort/da where the child touches a spool of cotton (pulling and pushing it out of vision) while pronouncing the words, “gone, back again”; see Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Dover, 1920) and our discussion of this passage in chapter 4 of this work. It might be recalled here that Aristotle had already noted the proto-hermeneutic power of the voice in De Anima: “Not every sound made by an animal is voice . . . what produces the impact must have soul in it and must be accompanied by an act of imagination, for voice is a sound with a meaning, and is not merely the result of any impact of the breath as in coughing” (220b, 30). Chrétien, “Body and Touch,” 98. Chrétien, 98. On the hermeneutic readings of scars and wounds (traumata), see our analysis of Euryclea’s touching/reading of Odysseus’s scar in “Writing Trauma: Narrative Catharsis in Joyce, Shakespeare, and Homer,” Giornale di metafisca 1 (Fall 2013). On the importance of the handshake for the primal turning of hostility into hospitality, see our “Welcoming the Stranger,” in Andrew O’Shea, ed., All Changed? Culture and Identity in Contemporary Ireland (Dublin: Duras, 2011). The essay analyses the first wager of hand-tohand encounter between Diomedes and Glaucus in Homer’s Iliad and Abraham’s greeting of the strangers at Mamre. See also “Double Hospitality” in Imagination Now: The Richard Kearney Reader, ed Murray Littlejohn (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020). Cited and commented by Chrétien, “Body and Touch,” 101– 5. “The delicacy of touch has for its horizon the spirit’s discernment, and since the spirit is always that of a living being whose life is always exposed, it cannot for a single moment uproot itself from what founds it. Our

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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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sensitivity analyses differences at the heart of the world by articulating them to our life, depending on how clear the peril is. The primal and inalienable place of this articulation is touch, which explains why Aristotle attributes primacy to touch. . . . The affected being is not thought here as an obstacle to discernment but as the condition of greater discernment” (105). See also Emmanuel Alloa’s reinterpretations of Aristotle’s notion of mediality, “Metaxu: Figures de la médialité chez Aristote,” in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, no. 62 (November 2, 2009), and “La chair comme diacritique incarné,” in Chiasmi International (Paris: Vrin, 2010). But to be a thin-skinned human does not require one to be privileged or effete; the blue-collar worker, farmer, or miner are equally if not more attuned, in their handiwork and manual labor, to the differentiations and nuances of the tactile universe. Hence our example of Seamus Heaney’s simple diviner, in what follows, intensely attuned to underground sources. The precious gift of nature’s gentlemen. Chrétien, “Body and Touch,” 108. Chrétien, 110– 13. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, book 2 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 155 ff. Husserl, 155 ff. Husserl, 155 ff. Husserl’s phenomenology shows how synesthesia is the mark of genuine experience—where two-way tangibility turns sight into insight, taste into savor, smell into flair, sound into resonance. Husserl, 155 ff. This initial insight of Husserl’s is born out by recent experimental work on “mirror touch synesthesia” at the Empathy Project’s Social Brain Laboratory in Amsterdam. Husserl, 33. It is worth noting here that touch as double sensation is the prototype not only of language as call and response but also of consciousness itself as a double reversible intentionality of projectionreception. The reciprocity of touch, touching, and being touched becomes the “model” of consciousness itself as “reciprocal,” reflecting but also being reflected upon. Or in the case of language, the double act of speaking/listening. While all other senses tend to follow the paradigm of single intentionality, it is arguable that it is the reverse

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intentionality of touch that gives rise to consciousness as such, ensuring a nondualist continuity between body and mind. On the reversibility thesis, see also Dermot Moran, “Vision and Touch: Between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty,” in Kearney and Treanor, Carnal Hermeneutics, 214–34. See for example Levinas’s description of the “caress” in Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) and of “sensibility” in Discovering Existence with Husserl (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998): “The new way of treating sensibility consists in conferring on its very obtuseness and thickness a special meaning and wisdom, a kind of intentionality. Senses have sense” (91 f). See also here Paul Ricœur’s powerful defense of our “terrestrialcorporeal” embodiment (as acting-suffering beings) in relation to science fictions of AI technology, Oneself as Another (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 149– 52. For a more detailed discussion of these phenomenologists, see my “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics” in Kearney and Treanor, Carnal Hermeneutics; and Matthew Clemente, “Eros as Touch, Caress, Kiss,” in Eros Crucified (New York: Routledge, 2020). See also Kevin Aho’s analysis of existential embodiment and attunement in Contexts of Suffering: A Heideggerean Approach to Psychopathology (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), especially chapter 2, “Depression: Disruptions of Body, Mood, and Self” (23–36). Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 134. For Merleau-Ponty all the senses are unified in directly apprehending the world in preobjective experience, united by the body schema. Vision is intertwined with touch, for to see a thing is to “already have and to hold it, in some way.” Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routlledge: 2002), 308. The senses do not need to be reconciled, for their unity is already presupposed in the body as such. Merleau-Ponty writes, “I do not translate the ‘data of touch’ into the ‘language of seeing’ or vice versa—I do not bring together one by one the parts of my body; this translation and this unification are performed once and for all within me: they are my body, itself” (308). Comparable to a work of art for Merleau-Ponty, the body has its a singular coherence, a certain expressive “style” that resonates in every sensation, movement, and act. “What

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33.

34.

35.

36.

unites ‘tactile sensations’ in the hand and links them to visual perceptions of the same hand . . . is a certain style informing my manual gestures and implying a certain style of finger movement and contributing, in the last resort, to a certain bodily bearing” (174). Merleau-Ponty, 133. See Jacques Derrida’s critique of what he calls Merleau-Ponty’s “haptocentrism” in On Touching (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Merleau-Ponty, 134. We live most of our lives “in our hands” and “in our legs,” as we live in a dwelling through habituated action: “When I move about in my house, I know immediately and without any intervening discourse that to walk toward the bathroom involves passing close to the bedroom, or that to look out the window involves having the fireplace to my left. . . . For me, my apartment is not a series of strongly connected images. It only remains around me as my familiar domain if I still hold ‘in my hands’ or ‘in my legs’ its principal distances and directions, and only if a multitude of intentional threads run out toward it from my body.” Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 150. For Merleau-Ponty, action is almost always an embodied interaction with other persons and things in lived space and time. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 40–41. The doctor in question was Ludwig Binswanger, a German existential psychiatrist. Some kind of embodied “genuine gesture,” as Merleau-Ponty notes, seems called for (41). See also Redmond O’Hanlon: “Our muscles remember chronic abuse, though consciousness and the narrative capacity usually absent themselves completely from such a violation, leaving the involuntary muscle self to process the unspeakable by radical dissociation or repeated acting- out. That is why the attempt to talk a patient through sexual trauma does not work” (“The Art of Mourning,” work in progress). Irigary refers to this “birth of the future” as the “child before the child.” See Luce Irigaray, “The Fecundity of the Caress,” in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 232 f. See also her invocation of the Song of Songs as a prepatriarchal template for the sexual-spiritual caress in her conclusion to “Ten Questions to Levinas.” For another powerful phenomenology of the sensual, see Anne Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living

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37. 38.

160 39. 40.

41.

(New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), especially the sections entitled “The Sensory Celebration,” 1, 2, 3, and 4. Irigaray, 232. Julia Kristeva, “New Humanism and the Need to Believe,” in Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmerman, eds., Reimagining the Sacred (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016),115. See also the pioneering work of Julia Kristeva on the neglected dimension of psychic- corporal “semiotics” that needs to be addressed for real healing to happen. She writes of carnal “signifiance” in a recent interview: “Analysis proceeds by the dissolving of defenses and of trauma, which on this condition alone can bring about a rebirth. This approach to sense, or the process of ‘signification through the senses,’ opens the way to the construction of subjectivity, which reclaims our ‘ante-predicative’ experience (as understood by Husserl) and ‘transubstantiation’ (as understood by Proust), in order to rejoin, through one’s own flesh, the flesh of the world” (http://www.kristeva.fr/philosophie_maga zine_135.html). Anne O’Byrne, “Umbilicus: Towards a Hermeneutics of Generational Difference” in Kearney and Treanor, Carnal Hermeneutics, 182 f. On the notion of the body as book, see Karmen McKendrick, Word Made Skin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004); and John Manoussakis, “Dying to Desire: Soma, Sema, Sarx, and Sex,” in Sarah Horton, Stephen Mendelsohn, Christine Rojcewicz, and Richard Kearney, eds., Somatic Desire: Recovering Corporeality in Contemporary Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019). For more on the bookas-body applied to the practice of reading as ingesting, see chapter 1, note 40. In addition to Husserl and the phenomenologists and feminists mentioned here, see also the analyses of phenomenological embodiment by thinkers like Didier Frank, Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Falque, Jean-Luc Nancy, as well as a whole new generation of phenomenologists in dialogue with cognitive science and neuroscience, notably Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Dan Zahavi, Self and Other: Explaining Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Shaun Gallagher

2. PHILOSOPHIES OF TOUCH

42.

43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind (London: Routledge, 2007). Nor should one neglect here the crucial contribution to the phenomenology- cognitive science conversation made by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999), where the authors propose “to see how our physical being— flesh, blood, sinew, cell and synapse— and all things we encounter daily in the world, make us who we are.” For a full philosophical rethinking of carnal embodiment we need both the phenomenological and cognitive-scientific approaches. Resmaa Menakem speaks about “bodily knowing” and the transmission of trauma from a historical perspective. “Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains. This knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy or numbness. Often this knowledge is stored in our bodies as wordless stories about what is safe and what is dangerous.” Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas: Central Recovery, 2017), xvii. In the Gospels, the Greek verb for describing how Jesus is touched emotionally, feeling mercy or compassion, is eusplagchnos, from splagchnon meaning entrails or stomach. See Matthew 9:36, 14:14, 15:32, 18: 27; I Peter 3:8; Ephesians 4:32. Mercy comes from merc, the same root as merchant— someone who exchanges and connects. See the words of the fox in The Little Prince: “Here is my secret . . . what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, trans. Irene Testot-Ferry (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1995), 82. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in New Literary History 7, no. 3 (1976): 622–30. See my “Heaney and Homecoming,” in Richard Kearney, Navigations: Collected Irish Essays, 1976– 2006 (Syracuse, NY: Lilliput/Syracuse University Press, 2006), 228–34. Freud, “The Uncanny, ” 623. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), chapters 8 and 9. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), paragraphs 26–27, 40, and 57. “As Dasein falls, anxiety brings it back from its absorption in the ‘world.’ Everyday familiarity collapses. . . . Being-in

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50. 51.

enters into the mode of the ‘not- at-home.’ Nothing else is meant by our talk about ‘uncanniness’ (Unheimlichkeit)” ( paragraph 40). On James Joyce’s notion of an unconscious “visceral language” that is “transcerebral,” see Patrick Hederman’s exploration of a poetics of carnal language in The Opal and the Pearl (Dublin: Columba, 2017). Hederman notes how Joyce, when writing Finnegans Wake, came to the conclusion that there existed an acausal principle of the unconscious body (which Jung called “transcerebral”) linked to a “nervous substrate like the sympathetic system, which is absolutely different from the cerebrospinal system in point of origin and function” producing its own kind of “thoughts and perceptions” (55). Joyce sought to capture this in a poetic language of “nameforms” that, as he put it, “whet the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality . . . with a rush out of his navel reaching the reredos of Ramasbatham.” James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1975), 18. Joyce goes on to celebrate the “stomach language” of a “prepronomial funferal, engraved and retouched” to become the “aural eyeness” providing the “keys to dreamland” (cited in Hederman, 74). Freud, “The Uncanny,” 26. Seamus Heaney in an interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones (London: Faber, 2008), 475.

3. Tales of the Wounded Healer 1. 2.

Aristotle, Poetics(Montreal: McGill- Queens Universtity Press, 1997), book 1. See our development of this theme in Richard Kearney, “Narrating Trauma, Writing Trauma: Narrative Catharsis in Homer, Shakespeare, and Joyce,” in Eric Severson, Brian Becker, and David M. Goodman, eds., In the Wake of Trauma: Psychology and Philosophy for the Suffering Other (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2016). The term wounded healer is powerfully explored by Henri Nouwen in The Wounded Healer (New York: Doubleday, 2010).

3. TALES OF THE WOUNDED HEALER 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

Because his wound was incurable, and unbearably painful, Chiron voluntarily relinquished his immortality and underwent death, eventually being assigned a place among the stars as the constellation Centaurus. On Philoctetes, see Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1990). On Thales, see John Manoussakis, “The Hotel, the Hospital, and the Monastery” (work in progress), who links Thales’ healing philosophical wisdom to his fall into a hole in the earth and relates it to Socrates’ final appeal to the wisdom of Asclepius in the final line of the Phaedo: “We owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay it and don’t forget” (115a7). I am greatly indebted to my brother, Michael Kearney, for many of the insights on Chiron and Asclepius. See his Mortally Wounded: Stories of Soul Pain, Death, and Healing (New Orleans: Spring Journal, 2016), 151– 71; The Nest in the Stream: Lessons from Nature on Being with Pain (Berkeley: Parallax, 2018), 46– 50; and, on Asclepius and Eleusinian mystery healing rites, see his A Place of Healing: Working with Suffering in Living and Dying (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 48–45, 53– 54. See the pioneering research on the “integral-relational” model of body psychotherapy, inspired by the eponymous Chiron, in Linda Hartley, ed., Contemporary Body Psychotherapy: The Chiron Approach (New York: Routledge, 2009). A Chiron-Asclepian approach is also evident in the Toucher-Massage project created by Joel Savatofski in 1982 and pioneered in France as a program of professional formation in kinesthetic caretaking (“soins d’accompangment centrés sur la personne plutôt que sur sa pathologie”). For the original texts, see Emma and Ludwig Edelstein, eds., Asclepius: A Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1945). See also “Asclepius and His Animals’ Role in Healing” (2018), https://www.ukdiss.com/examples/asclepius -animal-roles-healing). See “Asclepius,” in Oxford Classical Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 188. Michael Kearney offers an illuminating comparison between the Hippocratic and Asclepian traditions of medicine in A Place of Healing, 25–30. While endorsing the core Asclepian message that “in suffering

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164 10.

11.

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our suffering together we come to the mystery of healing,” the author acknowledges that the Hippocratic approach has proved effective in curing disease, diminishing suffering, and improving quality of life in chronic and terminal illnesses. He concedes that it has often proved a good match for physicians’ own natural pain phobia, allowing the doctor to come close to patients who are suffering while remaining safely “out of touch,” observing pain from behind the protective screens of a white coat, stethoscope, X-rays, and diagnostic chart. The result of a successful medical encounter, on this Hippocratic account, is relief all around; a lessening of the patient’s pain along with the physician’s. Medicine needs both Hipporcratic and Asclepian approaches. Michael Kearney, The Nest in the Stream, 48– 50. The author cites the thirteenth- century Sufi poet Rumi: “Don’t turn your head. Keep looking at the bandaged place. That is where the light gets in.” A verse that inspired Leonard Cohen’s famous line: “There is a crack in everything, that’s where the light gets in.” Kearney, 50. See also John  J. Prendergast on the phenomenon of mutual healing through somatic witnessing, In Touch (San Francisco: Sounds True, 2015), xvii, 99– 170. In addition to Hygieia and Telesphorus, Asclepius’s other children— known collectively as the Asclepiades—included two other daughters, Panakea and Iaso, also related to therapeutic care. Asclepius usually performed his healing in the company of his children and animals, a practice of communal therapy largely lost in mainstream Western medicine. Those who came to Asclepian temples usually did so in groups, with their votive offerings, and often received communal cures with “mixed” medical recipes of plants, minerals, bathing, body massage, incantation, and dreamwork. The stories of caretakers during COVID-19 holding and touching dying patients— otherwise deprived of tactile contact with family and loved ones—were multiple and moving. See our coda, this volume. See the tactile blessing passed from Isaac to Jacob as well as the carnal exchanges between classic biblical lovers— from Solomon and the Shulamite in the Song of Songs to the canonical pairs Jacob and Rachel, David and Bathsheba, Ruth and Boaz. Though I concentrate on the biblical and Christian traditions in this section— since that is the

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14.

15.

16.

hermeneutic tradition I am familiar with—I am aware that the notion of the wounded healer is present in many nonbiblical spiritual traditions also. Cited by Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart (New York: JosseyBass, 2003), 10. See also Bourgeault’s reading of Christianity as an incarnational-relational-integral-healing wisdom in The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity (Boulder: Shambala, 2010). Biblical knowing of this embodied kind was often related—in the three Abrahamic traditions— to notions of the “heart” (qalb) or “womb” (rechem). See “Undefended Knowing: A Conversation Between Richard Rohr and Tilden Edwards,” HuffPost, 2013: “the spiritual faculty of heart (is) a quality of intuitive awareness . . . a sense of inclusive, compassionate, undefended, direct in- touch-ness with what is really there. Undefended knowing allows us to drop beneath the thinking mind, to touch upon real experience, unhindered by the ego’s sense of self, without fear or agenda.” I am indebted here to Stephanie Rumpza’s excellent analysis of the relationship between iconic vision and touch in her “Phenomenology of Iconic Mediation” (PhD diss., Boston College, 2019), especially the chapter “Substitution,” which discusses the icon as a substituted body that we relate to in a carnal way. “By making the painting a symbolic body to our touch, corporeal substitution enhances the icon’s presence,” she writes. “The visual character of the icon thus only enhances its corporeal presence to us, making its motivation for substitution in both visual resemblance and corporeal extension. In this, it can enhance our sense of the call or counter- gaze of the Divine.” This Byzantine notion of tangible vision anticipates Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the synesthetic “intertwining” of visibility and tangibility in chapter 4 of The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968). I focus here on Christian—rather than Jewish, Islamic, or other nonAbrahamic— traditions, not because I believe it more important or more true but because it is the spiritual tradition in which I was raised. It is my own communal hermeneutic narrative. There is no supercessionist intent.

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3. TALES OF THE WOUNDED HEALER 17. 18.

19. 20.

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21. 22.

23.

See Shelly Rambo, Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018). In John 2 the temple of Jerusalem is identified with Christ’s body (not just his spirit)—which will collapse and be rebuilt in three days. Jesus challenges the Pharisees: “Destroy the temple and in three days I will raise it up.” And when they object that the temple was under construction for forty-six years, John’s gospel tells us that Jesus was “talking about the temple of his body.” A point echoed in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 6:13 that speaks of embodied human persons as “temples of the Holy Spirit.” See also Mark 3: “He had cured many and as a result those who had diseases were pressing upon him to touch him.” See the radically incarnational claim of John 6:51: “I am the living bread that came down from Heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world” (John 6:51). On the claim that God becomes flesh (John 1:14), Richard Rohr writes: “Incarnation is scandalous, shocking, intimate, sexual. Christ did not say ‘think about this, fight about this, stare at this’; he said ‘eat this!’ A dynamic, interactive event that makes one out of two. . . . As Gandhi said, ‘There are so many hungry people in the world that God could only come into the world in the form of food. It is marvelous that God would enter our lives not just in the form of sermons or Bibles, but as food.’ God comes to feed us more than just teach us. Lovers understand that” (Contemplation and Action, May 16, 2016). See Giorgio Agamben, “The Glorious Body,” in Nudities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). Thomas Didymus (the twin) is a typical anatheist in his move from first belief, through disbelief, into second (ana) belief. “Bring your hand and put it into my side and do not be unbelieving but believe” (John 20:26). Thomas may be thought of as the anatheist twin of Christ, since both need each other in the double sensation of touching and being touched. See Rambo, Resurrecting Wounds; and Tomas Halik, Touch the Wounds (Notre Dame University Press, 2020). See also the interdisciplinary work of Jacob Meiring, “Theology in the Flesh—Embodied Sensing,

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24. 25.

26.

27.

Consciousness, and the Mapping of the Body,” Theological Studies 72, no. 4 (Summer 2016), where he explicitly engages our project of carnal hermeneutics. Nietzsche, The Anti- Christ, cited in Alice Miller, The Untouched Key (New York: Anchor, 1990), 112. See Richard Rohr on the Franciscan aesthetic of touch as he reflects on an anonymous sculpture in Assisi. “Located in the upper basilica where Francis of Assisi is buried, it is a wonderful bronze statue of St. Francis inviting the Holy Spirit. Instead of looking upward as is usual, he gazes reverently and longingly downward—into the earth—where the Spirit is enmeshed with the earth. Francis understood that the Holy Spirit had in fact descended; she is forever and first of all here! There are many artists who inherently understand incarnation. They see art as a major transposition of sacred place from there to here. . . . Maybe artists have easier access to this mystery than many merely verbal theologians” (Center for Action and Contemplation, November 13, 2019). See my discussion of the theoerotic mystical visions of John and Teresa in “The Shulamite’s Song: Eros Ascending and Descending,” in Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller, eds., Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring the Passions (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 322–40. See also Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 4 (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2021). Theoerotic mysticism is by no means confined to the Christian tradition, but is also richly present in Jewish Kabbalistic literature and in the Islamic mystical poetics of Mirabai, Rabai (both women mystics), Rumi and Hafiz. Cited in The Life of St. Theresa of Jesus, 3d ed., trans. David Lewis (New York: Benzinger, 1904), 29:16– 18. In the same passage, Teresa adds: “The body has its share in it, even a large one. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying. During the days that this lasted, I went about as if beside myself. I wished to see, or speak with, no one, but only to cherish my pain, which was to me a greater bliss than all created things could give me” (16– 18). Teresa developed her “carnal hermeneutics” of mystical eros in her classic The Interior Castle. Echoing the verse in Song of Songs (8:6) about the hands of the divine lover marking the beloved’s

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29.

30. 31.

flesh with his seal, she writes: “The soul has now delivered itself into His hands. . . . His will is that the soul, without understanding how, shall go thence sealed with His seal . . . like the wax when a seal is impressed upon it.” Curiously, Teresa then reverses this act of manual sealing-imprinting into a double reverse touch where it is now the divine wax that is sealed-impressed by the hands of the human lover! “Thou dost require only our wills and dost ask that Thy wax may offer no impediment” (cited and discussed in my “The Shulamite’s Song,” 328–29). Some critics, after Freud, have noted that sadomasochism follows a similar dialectic to mystical eroticism. But while seemingly isomorphic, S-M may be said to be “perverse” (in Freud’s view) when it abandons the double-sensation of simultaneous active-passive sex between partners in favor of a binary alternation between dominant subject (sadism) and dominated object (masochism). S-M partners take it in turn to submit to or inflict pain rather than engage, like mystical or romantic lovers, in an act of touching and being touched reciprocally. Philip Adams has suggested, however, that S-M perversion may, on occasion, be transformed from a literal power dynamics of submissionaggression into an erotic dance-play of seduction and surrender, of leading and being led. The role of ludic fantasy is central here. In his Spiritual Canticle, John describes the relation between the lovers in terms of a stag “wounded” by the beauty of the beloved that leaves a trace-imprint on the heart (again invoking the Song of Songs 8:6: “stamp me with a seal upon the heart”). The nuptial relation culminates in a marriage feast where preoptical images of fragrance, taste, and touch abound (stanzas 26–28). John writes that the mystical lover “feels her beloved is within her as in her own bed” as she “drinks of the beloved in the inner wine cellar” and feels her “heart tremble at his touch” (stanzas 25–26). See my analysis of these passages in “The Shulamite’s Song,” 324–27. Cited Living with Christ 20, no 10 (October 2019): 134. Note the felicitous ambivalence of the term host (hospes), meaning both the one who feeds and the one who is fed— simultaneously host and guest. Hospes is the common root of hospitality, hospice, and hospital. Even in the polite parlance of restaurateurs, the host offers a table d’hôte

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32. 33.

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to the guest (also called hôte). And this double sense of carnal hospitality— as host-guest—is by no means confined to the Abrahamic and Greco-Roman traditions. The carnal hospitality of feeding and being fed is at the heart of many non-Western spiritual cultures also— as in certain schools of Buddhism, for example, where the ideal model of equals is a mutual circulation of host and guest (Jp. hinju gokan). As the Zen philosopher, Ueda Shizuteru, writes: “the free exchange of the role of host is the very core of dialogue.” Cited by Bret Davis, “Zen’s Nonegocentric Perspectivism,” in Steven Emmanuel, ed., Buddhist Philosophy: A Comparative Approach (London: Blackwell, 2018). See Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli Me Tangere (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). The Greek says ekratesan for “embrace.” The verb is kratō: to hold fast, related to the term Krātos meansing “to be in power” (as in demo-cracy or So-crates). As one might imagine Mary Magdalene’s embrace making Christ democratic and Socratic in a single gesture— one with the people and wise as a philosopher! I am grateful to John Manoussakis for this commentary. See his discussion of these passages in God After Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 151– 52. See examples of carnal hospitality explored in Richard Kearney and James Taylor, eds., Hosting the Stranger: Between Religions (New York: Continuum, 2012).

4. Healing Touch 1.

2.

3.

Relating this dialectic to the discussion of digital excarnation (see chapter  5), we may ask if it parallels the repeated return to our digital devices rather than savoring the pleasures of the flesh. Digital obsession as compulsive repletion of the death drive? Johan Huizinga notes that all art and culture starts with play, as does the child’s first sense of wonder, e.g., looking at a juggler play and jest: Homo Ludens (New York: Random House, 1938). “Touch is the bête noire of therapy since Freud, even though the laying on of hands was commonplace in traditional healing.” See

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Redmond O’Hanlon, “The Potential of Touch in Bi-Polar Disorder Therapy (BPD),” paper delivered at the British and Irish Group for the Study of Personality Disorder Annual Conference, Belfast, 2014. Freud letter to Breuer, 1893 in Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1973– 1939 (New York: Dover, 1960). On this controversial subject, see Susie Orbach, The Impossibility of Sex: Stories of Intimate Relationship Between Therapist and Patient (New York: Scribner, 2000). See also Shoshi Asheri, “To Touch or Not to Touch: A Relational Body Psychotherapy Perspective,” in Linda Hartley, ed., Contemporary Body Psychotherapy: The Chiron Approach (New York: Routledge, 2009), 106–20. Asheri, like Babette Rothschild (The Body Remembers) and other body-focused trauma therapists, is very careful in the approach to “light touch” or “holding,” using it judiciously to help a patient establish firm boundaries at a particular moment in the therapy. The sensitive negotiation of spatial relationships between therapist and client is a key factor in body therapy. Very aware of the sexual taboo in psychoanalysis— especially since the early professional transgressions of Wilhelm Reich—and of the deeply charged nature of touch in trauma therapy, Asheri writes: “A touch can be containing for a client, so that a trauma can be explored. Yet the same touch can lead to a re-enactment of a trauma and turn the wounded healer to a wounding healer in that moment. This isn’t necessarily a reason to avoid touch altogether, but rather another reason to perceive the dilemma and the application of touch as a living, creative dialectical process of constant negotiation” (111). In my own experience with a gifted French trauma therapist, the ritual handshake or Gallic hug that opened and closed each session was a positive signal of intersubjective relational engagement, trust, and containment. A reminder that client and therapist were embodied subjects and not just talking heads. O’Hanlon notes that trying to talk someone through early chronic abuse is akin to prescribing Solpadine for a brain tumor or Elastoplast for gangrene (“The Potential of Touch”). Helen Bamber, “Personal Touch,” BBC interview, October 6, 2002. On this double gesture of catharsis as a “hearing” and “holding” of suffering, see our discussion of Bamber in the section on “Resonance” in chapter 1, this volume, and in our earlier study, Richard Kearney, On Stories (New York: Routledge, 2002), 65– 66, 140–41.

4. HEALING TOUCH 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

Helen Bamber, The Good Listener (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), 88– 89. Bamber, 228. James Hamblin, If Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body (New York: Doubleday, 2016). See O’Hanlon, “The Potential of Touch.” The author notes: “Touch can bypass cognitive resistance, releasing dark repressed memories that talk therapies cannot reach, since there are far more memories stored in the body than in the brain.” It can bring a deep sense of being nurtured and securely held sorely lacking in patient’s “attachment” histories, regarding parents or primary caregivers. But it is also important to acknowledge that if touch, in the right therapeutic setting, can augment a basic sense of trust and containment— followed by cathartic release—it can also do great harm in the wrong circumstances, triggering damaging retraumatization. This requires a professionally skillful discernment between therapist and patient at the level of both body and mind. Once again, we see the need for a highly sensitive carnal hermeneutics. Bessel Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (New York: Penguin, 2015), 27 and 246–47, henceforth BKS, where he discusses the necessity for certain zones of safety or refuge within the body when victims cannot give full accounts in words. I am deeply indebted to the remarkable research of this author throughout this chapter. See also the recent work of Sonia Gomes Silva, Engaging Touch and Movement in Somatic Experiencing: A Trauma Resolution Approach (New York: IUGS, 2014). We will return to the question of healing through somatic copresence when mentioning the work of truth and reconciliation movements. In one year alone (2008), almost twenty thousand children aged five and under were prescribed antipsychotics (cited in BKS 37). BKS 38. See here the excellent contributions to Hartley, Contemporary Body Psychotherapy, especially Michael Soth, “From Humanistic Holism via the ‘Integrative Project’ Towards Integral-Relational Body Psychotherapy,” 64– 88. I am grateful to Irish psychologist Tony Bates for this citation, Understanding and Overcoming Depression (New York: Random House, 2001).

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17. 18.

172

19.

20.

21.

See here O’Hanlon’s defense of the “drama of touch” in therapeutic recovery of trust (“The Potential of Touch”). He notes that the skin serves as a primitive “second ear” with its own hypothalamic-pituitaryadrenaline axis and capacity to apprehend experience rhythmically through timbre and tempo. Speaking of our “archaic histrionic sensibility” he writes: “Early attachment deficits are grounded in the bodily mis-attunement of infant and primary carer, leading ultimately to a lack of trust, serial disturbed relationships and affective dysregulation haunting BPs.” Citing the work of Christopher Bollas and David Boadella, O’Hanlon proposes the practice of “somatic dialogue” for the establishment of interpersonal trust (as Keleman and Rothschild recommend)— a sine qua non of successful therapy. BKS 46. Earl Grey, Unify Your Mind: Connecting the Feelers, Thinkers, and Doers of Your Brain (Pittsburgh: CMHW, 2010). BKS 56– 58. See also Mariana Van Mohr, “The Social Buffering of Pain by Affective Touch,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (2018): 1– 10. BKS 274 and 276. See also O’Hanlon, “The Potential of Touch”: “Treating the patient as an embodied subject, working with touch and the body . . . lowers cortisol and adrenaline levels, improving the immune system. For bipolar patients touch can be truly life-affirming and trustenhancing, since so much unconscious pain, loss, absence or abuse are encoded in the involuntary muscles. Touch stimulates the production of oxytocin and can in the right context be crucially important to the establishment of a solid sense of boundaries and of self— so rare in BPs whose poor attachment history is deeply encoded in both their motor and involuntary muscular selves.” See the pioneering work of thinkers like Eugene Gendlin and Peter Levine. Gendlin’s writings on “felt sense” and “experiential psychotherapy” (Focusing and Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams) have proved very influential, while Levine’s works on “somatic experiencing” (Waking the Tiger and the Unspoken Voice) have had a considerable impact on new forms of body therapy. See also Alice Miller: “The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings

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22.

23.

24.

25.

manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth” (cited in O’Hanlon, “The Potential of Touch”). BKS 22. Van der Kolk offers an illuminating analysis of emotional brain PTSD reactions of the body: “At this point the emotional brain, which is not under conscious control and cannot communicate in words, takes over. The emotional brain (the limbic area and the brain stem), expresses its altered activation through changes in emotional arousal, body physiology, and muscular action. Under ordinary conditions these two memory systems—rational and emotional— collaborate to produce an integrated response. But high arousal not only changes the balance between them but also disconnects other brain areas necessary for the proper storage and integration of incoming information, such as the hippocampus and the thalamus. As a result, the imprints of traumatic experiences are organized not as coherent logical narratives but in fragmented sensory and emotional traces: images sounds and physical sensations” (178). See also the author’s excellent discussion of Janet and Freud on trauma as dissociation calling for association—moving from scattered fragments to a coherent narrative temporality of then and now (183– 84). EMDR (eye movement densitization and reprocessing) is a therapy method practiced successfully by Van der Kolk and his colleagues at Boston University. See here the work of Robert Bosnak, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Radhule Weineger, Heartwork (Boulder: Shambala, 2017), which applies “embodied healing” to the phenomenon of “long standing recurrent painful patterns” (LRPPS). See also the parallel work of the Chiron approach, well represented in the clinical contributions to Hartley, Contemporary Body Psychotherapy; and the work of Marian Dunlea, Bodydreaming in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma: An Embodied Therapeutic Approach (New York: Routledge, 2018). See Merleau-Ponty on “infra-sensation,” discussed in Richard Kearney, “The Recovery of the Flesh in Ricœur and Merleau-Ponty,” in Sarah

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26. 27.

174

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Horton, Stephen Mendelsohn, Christine Rojcewicz, and Richard Kearney, eds., Somatic Desire: Recovering Corporeality in Contemporary Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019). Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index (New York: Harcourt, 2008). I am grateful to Sheila Gallagher for this observation. See her multimedia performances around memory healing, Twinsome Minds (Hamden, CT: Quinnipiac University Press, 2018) and “Wounds and Scars” (2019). The four stages of physical healing may be seen as analogous to developmental stages of psychic healing. 1. hemostasis: stopping of bleeding by coagulation into stable clot and formation of a fibrin mesh; 2. inflammation: defensive inflaming of white cells to remove debris, fight infection, and prepare for healing tissue; often accompanied by bruising, swelling, heat, and pain; 3. proliferation: the filling and covering of wound by means of granulation— granulocytes that contract from the peripheries of the wound, forming a connective tissue and new blood cells (vascularization); here the bruise is marked by the formation of a fibrotic scab made of epithelian cells; 4. maturation: the final phase sees the new scab tissue maturing into a scar (lasting from twenty- one days to two years), provided the right healing environment is established for the body to heal itself. The body has its own carnal hermeneutic of self-healing which knows how to turn wounds into bruises and scars in the right set and setting. The good healer is one who enables flesh to heal itself. The poet Fanny Howe has compared these four stages to the developmental growth of an infant from birth to selfhood. Patrick Hederman, Living the Mystery (Dublin: Columba, 2019). See also BKS 236–37: “Communicating fully is the opposite of being traumatised.” Cited Hederman, p 237. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Knopf, 1994), 146. BKS 240. BKS 60 f. BKS 62– 63 f. BKS 65. James Prescott, Origins of Love and Violence (audio CD, 2008) argues that hyperreactivity to touch and abnormal social behavior, characteristic of maternal deprivation, are side effects of the brain damage

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35.

caused by lack of physical contact. He traces these symptoms to the limbic-frontal- cerebellar brain system, from which we develop the basic trust, affection, and intimacy so essential to secure healthy attachment with others. When an infant lacks trust due to sensory stimulation deprivation, emotional maturation is stunted and rage or violence can ensue. O’Hanlon (“The Potential of Touch”) cites cross- cultural studies that identify societies in which touch was not valorized as having higher rates of aggression and social violence. See also Tamar Swade, The Touch Taboo in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (New York, Routledge, 2020). BKS 66– 73. See also Marina Von Mohr, “The Soothing Function of Touch: Affective Touch Reduces Feelings of Social Exclusion,” Scientific Reports, October  18, 2017. Neuroscience reveals how sustained touch therapy can effect neural pathways, rewiring our brains so that we can detach from our addictive patterns of thinking and feeling. “Many neuroscientists affirm very real change and call it neuroplasticity: chosen neural pathways gradually grow stronger; unused pathways die away” (Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation, December 18, 2019). But, as Tom Warnecke points out, extreme care is needed in the case of borderline personality, bipolar disorder, or psychosis, where the usual engulfment/abandonment dyad needs to be scrupulously monitored. In the treatment of one borderline patient, Sara, Warnecke drew on his own kinesthetic felt sense that his initial touch was too much for her to tolerate and lightened his touch accordingly so that Sara could move from fear of invasion to a deep sense of trust in being nurtured and protected by his “physical resonant engagement”— a good example of holistic therapy understood as “somatic dialogue” and “affirmative mutual mirroring.” What was decisive was the therapist’s ability to help his patient re- own and work through her radical desire to be held and her terror of it as the same time. Being attuned to this deep ambivalence was essential to empathic transference and catharsis. Warnecke concludes that such bifocal empathy is to be understood as a shared vulnerability and mutual physical holding, where the therapist, as stand-in primary carer, enables the patient to become aware of how and where their feelings resonate

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36.

176

37.

38. 39. 40.

in their body, sometimes acknowledging that while one half of the body goes toward the healer, the other half contracts in pain. See Tom Warnecke, “The Borderline Relationship,” in Hartley, Contemporary Body Psychotherapy, 205– 6. Here once again we witness how the basic phenomena of touch as “double sensation” and “reciprocal attunement” are key. BKS 206– 7. See also here the important work of the Paris psychosomatic school, osteotherapy, and sensory processing disorder movements, all cogent challenges to the orthodox champions of the human self as an isolated disembodied monad. Relational psychoanalysts like Barbara Pizer argue that if physical contact is left out of therapy altogether, there is a real risk of increased dissociation— a point powerfully supported by Annie Rogers in A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing (New York: Penguin, 1996) where she recounts a pivotal healing moment in which her therapist broke the no-touch taboo and took her gently in his arms in a “holding” gesture. This tactile act enabled Rogers to overcome her aphasia and make the “great leap forward” in translating her speechless (in-fans) pain into corresponding gestures, imagery, and story. BKS 76. See also the pioneering work of Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery (London: Blackwells, 1996). And we could also mention here the transformative power of Eastern body practices like Shiatsu, Yoga, Tai Chi, and Akido, as well as the therapeutic potential of dance and movement to heal psychoneurological deficits, as cited in the works of Oliver Sacks and France Schott-Billmann, Quand la danse guérit (Paris: Recherche en Danse, 1992). In literature, Zorba the Greek offers a vivid example of how dance transforms grief in embodied mourning. A point which reiterates Nietzsche’s repeated claim for the cathartic power of theatrical rhythm and dance— a power echoed in Yeats’s poetic celebration: “O body swayed to music / O brightening glance / how can we tell the dancer from the dance.” BKS 207– 8. Adam Rutherford, Humanimal (New York: Experiment, 2019). William James, cited in BKS 91. See also Morit Heitzler, “Towards an Integrative Model of Psychotherapy,” in Hartley, Contemporary Body Psychotherapy, 177– 93.

4. HEALING TOUCH 41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

BKS 88. Van der Kolk himself confesses that his own professional training, with its focus on theoretical understanding and explanation, “had largely ignored the relevance of the living, breathing body, the foundation of our selves” (BKS 91). The basic question in responding to trauma is this: “How can traumatised people learn to integrate ordinary sensory experiences so that they can live with the natural flow of feeling and feel secure and complete in their bodies.” Cited in BKS 92. See also William James’s emphasis on the role of emotions and affect in our basic religious behaviors, positive and negative, in Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, 1902). See the study by sociologist Hartmut Rosa entitled Resonance (Oxford: Polity, 2019), which explores this whole question in relation to our social and communal embodiment in the world. Cited in BKS 112. See also the research of Pavel Goldstein on how touch therapy through hand-holding can synchronize brainwaves and ease pain, “Brain-to-Brain Coupling During Handholding is Associated with Pain Reduction” in the Proceedings of National Academy of Science, March 13, 2018. In my own case, I experienced acute childhood anxiety when separated from my mother for four days after having my tonsils removed— medical opinion in Ireland in the 1950s believing this to be best practice. It is a moment I recall to this day. Cited in BKS 115. See Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971); and Hartley, Contemporary Body Psychotherapy, 1– 9, 64– 88. Winnicott highlights the importance of primary physical maternal “holding.” Limiting analytic interpretation, he allowed sessions to evolve with a sense of bodily immediacy, trust, surprise, and spontaneity, encouraging the patient to relive its primary childhood environment and become a reconstructed embodied subject. Writing of Winnicott, O’Hanlon (“The Potential of Touch”) notes: “If due respect, subtlety and care are taken when working with the body, a patient is likely to experience therapy as truly life-affirming and trust-enhancing, since so much unconscious pain is encoded there.” See also the intriguing study by Clair Wills of the carnal wonders and enigmas of dance, “Stepping Out,” New York Review of Books, August 20, 2020. BKS 122.

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4. HEALING TOUCH 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

178

54.

55. 56.

BKS 122. BKS 116. Cited in BKS 95– 97. See Tiffany Field, Touch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). Field’s clinical research shows how touch deprivation among children can result in physical and cognitive impairment and social withdrawal symptoms. See also Karen Hogan Sullivan, The Healing Power of Touch: The Many Ways Physical Contact Can Cure (New York: Signet,1988); and Phyllis K. Davis, The Power of Touch (New York: Hay House, 1990)— books that discuss touch as a form of communication relative to infant health, sexual satisfaction, and general well-being, and explore how touch can improve relationships and heal the body. See also J. Coan et al., “Lending a Hand: Social Regulation of the Neural Response to Threat,” Psychological Science 17 (2006): 1032–39. See Dr. James Hamblin, “Can We Touch?,” Atlantic, April 10, 2019. Hamblin argues that physical contact remains vital to health, even as we do less of it in our digital age. The rules of engagement aren’t necessarily changing, he says, they are just starting to be heard. As people are becoming more isolated, touch is more important than ever. Hamblin reports on how the hug, specifically, has been repeatedly linked to good health and the immune system, citing a recent study at Carnegie Mellon University led by psychologist Sheldon Cohen, who isolated four hundred people in a hotel and exposed them to a cold virus. Those who had supportive social interactions and good somatic relations had less negative symptoms. Physical touch (specifically hugging) seemed to account for much of this effect. Cohen and his colleagues continued to show other health benefits of physical contact, such as a 2018 reveal in the journal PLOS titled “Receiving a Hug Is Associated with the Attenuation of Negative Mood That Occurs on Days with Interpersonal Conflicts.” BKS 217. Such somatic holding corresponds to the Chiron-Asclepian therapies of massage and the laying on of hands discussed in chapter 3, this volume. BKS 217. See Dominique Meyniel, Le Couloir des urgences (Paris: Cherche Midi, 2015), 157. Conseil 10– 1993: “It is forbidden for nurses, interns, and

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57.

58.

59.

students not to touch elderly patients. In addition to clinical examination they should regularly hold their hands at the very least” (157). As Dr. Bertrand Lukacs, Meyniel’s close colleague, reported to me: “Professor Meyniel remarked how ageing and solitude were linked to the loss of touch with others. He noted how touch could assuage, cheer, calm, and reassure elderly people by simply holding the hand for some time, without needing to speak, conveying a sense of contact and warmth” (personal communication, January 2020). Recent research on the contemporary phenomenon of “touch hunger” bears out this need for tactile therapeutic connection in suffering persons, particularly the very young and very old. Touch therapist Dr. Allegra Taylor further corroborates this in her account of the positive impact of touch on aging and dying patients in her work at St. Christopher’s Terminal Care Hospice in London. But all ages are eligible for body therapy in our digital culture of excarnation. For if digital hyperconnectivity can lead to isolation, touch combined with other therapies— medical and psychological— can lead to reintegration. Such therapeutic medical practices call for a new carnal hermeneutics enabling us to read bodies as books and books as bodies. As Katie Cannon put it: “Our bodies are the texts that carry the memories and therefore remembering is no less than reincarnation” (cited in BKS 186). See John Manoussakis, “Dying to Desire: Soma, Sema, Sarx, and Sex,” in Sarah Horton, Stephen Mendelsohn, Christine Rojcewicz, and Richard Kearney, eds., Somatic Desire: Recovering Coporeality in Contemporary Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019); and McKendrick’s writing on the therapeutic implications of reading bodies as books and books as bodies: Karmen McKendrick, Word Made Skin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). BKS 351. In fact, the abuse of oversubscribed or trafficked addictive opiates now causes more deaths yearly in the U.S. than guns or car accidents. BKS 351: “People can learn to control and change their behavior, but only if they feel safe enough to experiment with new solutions. The body keeps the score: If trauma is encoded in heartbreaking and gutwrenching sensations, then our first priority is to help people move out of fight-or-flight states, reorganize their perception of danger, and

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61.

180 62.

manage relationships. Where traumatized children are concerned, the last things we should be cutting from school schedules are the activities that can do precisely that: chorus physical education, recess, and anything else that involves movement, play and other forms of engagement.” See Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, “Preface,” in Debating Otherness with Richard Kearney: Perspectives from South Africa, ed. Danie Veldsman and Yolande Steenkamp (Johannesburg: Oasis, 2019); and my commentary on this “handshake” in “Double Hospitality,” in Imagination Now: A Richard Kearney Reader (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020). BKS 350. Here once again we must be careful not to isolate or literalize “touch” as just one of the five senses rather than acknowledging that all of the senses are potentially tactile-tangible, and that language itself is most therapeutic when it touches us. Touch “speaks” just as language “touches.” Hence for Levinas the “face” is not just a literal visage but an alterity that expresses, communicates, and commands our sensibility; see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979). “Finding words to describe what has happened to you can be transformative, but it does not always abolish flashbacks . . . or stimulate vital involvement in your life” (BKS 196). Healing modes of “vital involvement” with tangible bodies include walking, dance, theater, sports, swimming, yoga, gardening, deep tissue massage, and various forms of hands- on art-making with materials like clay, stone, sand, paint, paper and ink, celluloid, etc. These ways of reinhabiting the body and nature enable patients to overcome the numbness of psychic dissociation and denial and get back in touch with their wounds so as to work toward healing. In this regard Van der Kolk bemoans the diminishing of arts and physical practices from many school curricula (BKS 341) and their neglect by a large portion of the psychiatric medical profession. And one could also mention here the cathartic importance for religious people of rituals such as Jewish davening, Christian liturgical processions, Eucharistic eating and kissing of crosses and icons, Buddhist breathing and chanting, Hindu bowing, pranayama, and pilgrimage, Confucian tea

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63.

64.

65.

ceremonies, etc. In most indigenous cultures, across the globe, embodied healing ceremonies are equally if not more pronounced. See BKS 246–47 and 335–37 on the importance of theatrical acting and movement for healing. See also the excellent contributions on this subject in Hartley, Contemporary Body Psychotherapy, 64– 88 and 177– 93. On the healing power of embodying practices like yoga, see Linda Sparrowe, “Transcending Trauma: How Yoga Heals,” Yoga International (2019). On the healing power of touch in Vedic ritual practices, see the work of Mata Amritananda Mayi—known as Amma the Hugging Saint—in Kerala, India. See, for example, the Guestbook project of an “exchange” between Armenian and Turkish descendants of genocide trauma (guestbook projec.org). Talk was not enough; it was also essential for the young participants to share food and wine at table, shake hands, and proceed to act practically on behalf of the Armenian Genocide Memorial campaign. I am grateful to Dr. Helena Lategan of Stollenbosch, South Africa, for her insights into the research results of equine-assisted therapy. Similar therapy applies to work with primates, as Audrey Schulman suggests in Theory of Bastards (New York: Europa, 2018), which offers a vivid fictionalized account of scientist, Francine Burk, being reeducated into healing touch by the bonobo monkeys she is studying in her futuristic research institute. On affective relations between humans and primates, see also the remarkable research of Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (Atlanta: Emory University Press, 2009), Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York: Norton, 2016), and Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves (New York: Norton, 2019). De Waal provides elegant arguments to show how the powers of empathy and kindness are as much about affect as cognition and extend beyond the human world to other animals. The healing role of dogs is well known and goes back to the beginning of human history. Forty-thousand-year- old cave fossils show human and canine footprints side by side, and ancient and medieval legends abound in tales of healers with dogs— see, for example, our Chiron

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66.

67.

68. 69.

illustration in chapter 3 and the popular medieval depictions of Saint Roch (Rocco) being saved by a dog licking his wounds. St. Roch became the patron saint of canines and was often invoked as protection against sickness and plague. Asclepius was also known to appear in the dream form of a dog with patients feeling the tongue of a dog salving their wounds. Recent research in animal behavior science reveals that the bonding hormone oxytocin is released in both dogs and humans when they come into caring contact (similar to the bonding between a mother and child). A 2015 study in the journal Behavioral Processes indicates that dogs respond therapeutically by means of special scent and sound. So- called care dogs have become common in contemporary health culture where tactile contact plays a crucial role. Van der Kolk quotes research of dogs and horses being successfully used to treat groups of trauma patients (BKS 82). He also cites the case of a young woman who was healed from deep suicidal depression by equine therapy with a horse she worked with: “She started to feel a visceral connection with another creature and began to talk to him like a friend. Gradually she started talking with the other kids in the program and eventually, with her counselor” (BKS 153). Nathalie Charpak did most of her research in the Instituto MaternoInfantil, Bogotá, Colombia, in the 1990s. In 1993, she and neonatologist Zita Figuera cofounded the Kangaroo Mother Care program at the Social Security Center, Bogotá, which provides structured international KMC training to medical professionals from over thirty-five countries. The World Health Organization recognized the international importance of the KMC’s foundation in 2002, commissioning world guidelines for KMC practice that are now operative in all five continents. See Nathalie Charpak, Kangaroo Babies: A Different Way of Mothering (London: Souvenir, 2006). Richard Louv, Our Wild Calling: How Connecting with Animals Can Transform Our Lives— and Save Theirs (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2019), 273. Louv, 272. Louv, 272– 73. Louv relates his Reciprocity Principle to Martin Buber’s philosophy of I/Thou.

5. RECLAIMING TOUCH IN THE AGE OF EXCARNATION

5. Reclaiming Touch in the Age of Excarnation 1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

There are medial positions between the extremes of gain and loss, for example, the use of biometrics and touch-identification/authentification practices that rely on physiognomy, deploying a digital technology to read the body. See here the cutting- edge research of my colleague Lindsay Balfour, Hospitality in a Time of Terror (Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2018); and that of Joseph Pugliese, Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics (London: Taylor and Francis, 2012). See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone, 1994); and Richard Kearney, Introduction and part 3 of The Wake of Imagination (London: Routledge,1987). See Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (New York: Fontana, 1977). Some of these ideas were already explored in our essay, Richard Kearney, “Losing Our Touch,” in the New York Times, Opinionator, August 30, 2014, moderated by Simon Critchley. The seminars I am citing in this chapter were conducted annually at Boston College over recent years, and I am very grateful to my students for their questions and presentations. They were timely teachers when it came to finding topical examples of our digital culture. I was particularly struck by how many students remarked on how our digital culture of iPhones and iPads increases one’s experience of “isolation” due to a marked decrease in tactile contact with each other. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Viking, 1985), 51. “Mobile Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center: Internet Science and Technology, February 5, 2018. See Lisa Eadicicco, “Americans Check Their Phones a Billion Times per Day,” Time, December 15, 2015. Here again, I am grateful to my Boston College students for much of this research data, in particular Peter Klapes, Thomas Hall, Glorianna In, Aram Barmakian, Justin Gregious, and Ryan Leary. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” cited by Tomas Halik, Beruhre die Wunden: Über Leid, Vertrauen und die Kunst der Verwandlung (Freiburg-Wien: Herder, 2013).

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5. RECLAIMING TOUCH IN THE AGE OF EXCARNATION 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

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See for example the outing of U.S. congresswoman Katie Hill in 2019 with the online posting of intimate texts and photos. See our discussion of this ethical use of mass media reporting of suffering in the conclusion to Richard Kearney, Wake of Imagination (London: Hutchinson, 1988). See the discussion of such experiments in our “Concluding Thoughts” and “Coda,” this volume. See Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000); and Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). See Maroussia Dubreuil, “Pourquoi on se touche de moins en moins,” Le Monde, December 13, 2019; and Nellie Bowles’s analysis of touch and the new technologies in the New York Times, March 23, 2019. This is not to suggest that the past was some erotic paradise. When I was an amorous adolescent growing up in Ireland fifty years ago, usherettes in the local cinema would shine torches along the dark rows, warning, “No personal contacts, please.” And in puritan New England, where I moved in the nineties, the display of too much intimacy could still be deemed “indecent exposure,” punishable by law. Such puritanical attitudes are gone, but a new “crisis of rules” risks, some have argued, the rebound danger of a new “purity police” of word, thought, and action. See here the timely work of Kerry Cronin on the sexual codes of hookup culture, “Intimacy—It’s Complicated,” C21 Resources, Boston College, January 2018; and of David Brooks, who addresses the need to distinguish between positive and negative touch, “It Is Time We Talked about Touch,” New York Times, January 18, 2018. “If the power of loving touch is astounding, the power of invasive touch is horrific. Christie Kim of NYU surveyed the research literature on victims of child sexual abuse. The victims experience higher levels of anxiety throughout their lifetimes. They report higher levels of depression across the decades and higher levels of self blame. They are more than twice as likely to experience sexual victimization again. Over the course of each year, people have many kinds of interactions and experience many kinds of mistreatment. But there is something unique about positive or negative touch. Emotional touch alters the heart and soul in ways that are mostly unconscious. It can take a lifetime of analysis to get even a glimpse of understanding.” Brooks argues that the

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“smarter we get about technology, the dumber we get about relationships” and applies this specifically to recent #Me Too controversies about sexual harassment. He suggests that we live in an age not just of sexual revolution but of sexual disenchantment where sex is often treated like a consumer commodity. In our age of instant digital access, sex can be seen as a “shallow physical and social thing, not a heart and soul altering thing.” And even when it is not a case of sexual violence, rape or harassment, more “ordinary” cases of neglectful dehumanizing sex can also do serious emotional harm—hurt that passes beneath the radar screen of illegality but nonetheless damages one’s sense of agency. “The abuse of intimacy erodes all the building blocks of agency: self-worth, resiliency and self- efficacy (the belief that you can control a situation). It is precisely someone who lives within a culture of supposedly zipless encounters who is most likely to be unable to take action when she feels uncomfortable. It is the partner’s responsibility to be sensitive to this possibility.” Hence the need for what I have been calling “double sensibility.” Or, as Brooks concludes: “It seems that the beginning of good sense is to take the power of touch seriously, as something that has profound good and bad effects.” Two physicians expert in the field of touch therapy mentioned earlier, Tiffany Field and James Hamblin, are addressing this vexed question in a timely fashion. They both invoke clinical evidence to support our claim in chapter  1 that touch is always shot through with meaning: people bringing very different attitudes and responses to their experience of touch— depending on gender, history, culture, language, and religion. Different societies have varying hermeneutic codes determining when it is appropriate and inappropriate to touch certain categories of people in certain kinds of ways. Touch is not the same in all situations and it is crucial to distinguish between supportive, healing, loving, enabling touch and its contrary. Certain hierarchical power relations can be at work in the way people shake hands, touch shoulders, embrace, or have sex. Who decides? Who permits? Who profits and who suffers? Who is free to say yes or no? As Hamblin notes: “A hand on the shoulder makes subjects more likely to agree to a request. The exact same touch would likely be received

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17. 18.

differently from a person who is smiling versus a person who is laughing maniacally” (Atlantic, April 10, 2019). And speaking of closer modes of contact, he writes: “The benefits of a hug evaporate when a person perceives it as aggression. The trove of pro-touch research involves consenting volunteers and professional researchers in controlled scenarios where the interaction isn’t loaded with potential for escalation, or imbued with subtext or meaning based on prior interactions. In the real world, the exact same hug might cause blood pressure and heart rate to increase, and stress hormones to surge. If it can be said that touch has medicinal properties, then, like any medicine, touch is not good for everyone in every situation.” In short, it depends on context. Most students in our seminar agreed with both Hamblin and Field that meaningful touch involves mutually enhancing acts for both partners. Namely, our double sensation or reciprocity principle. And many supported Field’s suggestion that, in the highly charged context of today’s sexual politics, “men need to be more careful. Which can be unfortunate for genuinely affectionate people. And if women want to be touched, then it may be that they’re going to have to initiate.” These are sensitive matters requiring sensible new pedagogies of touch— an urgent task for carnal hermeneutics today. See also here the insightful reflections of Shoshi Asheri, “To Touch or Not to Touch: A Relational Body psychotherapy Perspective,” in Linda Hartley, ed., Contemporary Body Psychotherapy: The Chiron Approach (New York: Routledge, 2009), 106–20. The implications of COVID-19 are radical here, as we note in our coda. My brother, Peter Kearney, a cardiac surgeon in Ireland, has reported this personally to me, and the medical evidence is persuasive. Hamblin cites numerous studies that show how “physical touch activates areas of the cerebral cortex, and decreases heart rate, blood pressure, and levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol.” He notes that “massage therapy has proven effective for depression, and neurotransmitters that modulate pain are stimulated by touch.” James Hamblin, If Bodies Could Talk (New York: Doubleday, 2016). Obviously the new importance of telemedicine after the COVID- 19 crisis raises new questions about this matter, as noted in our coda, this volume.

5. RECLAIMING TOUCH IN THE AGE OF EXCARNATION 19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). See also Colum McCann’s haunting description of Perdrix drone bombs in Apeirogon (New York: Random House, 2020), 74– 75: “Perdrix drones are named after the mythological partridge. They are small enough to sit in the palm of your hand. They are released from pods mounted on the wings of fighter jets, a cloud of them all at once— like a flock of starlings seeding themselves in the sky. They are sturdy enough to be released at Mach 0.6, almost five hundred miles per hour. After the initial orders are programmed in remotely by human operators, the drones are designed to act autonomously. They are sprayed out in a flock of twenty or more, sending signals to one another, creating their own intelligence as they go along. Theirs is the ultimate in digital communication, a perfect specimen of math and computational intuition, able to tell itself what to do and when to do it. Turn left, turn right, realign coordinates, hit moving car, engage now, rifle! Rifle! Rifle! Weapon away, reconnoiter, abandon mission, retreat, retreat, retreat. They can make a decision to carry an explosive right through the window of your home. . . . a drone (can) be built remotely on a 3-D printer, the plastic casing created from the bottom up, slice by slice, embedding the microchips, cooling until fully formed— so that anyone, anywhere, in possession of the right chips, could feasibly create a flock of drones.” See our earlier discussion of this in “On Terror” in Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002). The challenge, we will argue in our conclusion, is to introduce multiple entrances and exits to the digital labyrinth so that it may become a living laboratory of reversible sensations and computations. This raises the critical question— ontological as much as technological—regarding the relationship between neuroplasticity and machine learning. Examples we looked at included the work of Dutch artist, Michael Portnoy, “Progressive Touch,” a multichannel video installation series at Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, The Netherlands, 2019– 2020, as well as the projects on haptic interactivity and multimedia immersion by Arthur Ganson and other artists at the MIT Museum, and innovative digital works shown at Boston Cyber arts

187

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24.

188

25.

and the Art Technology of New England group, in addition to recent experimental digital art work exhibited at the Musée Patamécanique, Bristol, Rhode Island. Our seminar also managed to discuss the work of Kristine Diekman on body sensors and the new media, Margit Galanter’s Projects-body, Olive Bieringa’s Body Cartography project, and Bill Viola’s seminal experiments with multi-media sensation, performance and motion. We debated, finally, the informative research findings of Alberto Gallace and Charles Spence in “Tactile Aesthetics: Towards a Definition of Its Characteristics and Neural Correlates,” in Social Semiotics (2011). See also “Touch: A Virtual Exhibition,” Woman Made Gallery, June 2020. The concluding scene of Death Stranding shows hero, Sam the Porter, finally reconciling with his estranged half-sister, Amelia, as they embrace on a postapocalyptic strand. A cursory class review of the most popular digital games of 2019– 2020 reaffirmed the need for critical hermeneutic discernment regarding new products of digital culture. Our seminar noted that while some games touched on progressive and “contemplative” themes with multiple play-throughs—Tell Me Why deals with transgender relations, SpiritFarer with death transition experiences, Way to Woods with animal solidarity in a post-World War III world— others indulged in vicarious violence and gratuitous horror— notably Dying Light II, Vampire Masquerade Bloodlines II, Little Nightmares II, Welcome to Little Hope. We also observed how these megagames— both progressive and regressive— often exploited motifs from Nordic and Indo-European mythologies in their appeal to a collective unconscious, in keeping with the popular success of epic contemporary sagas like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or Game of Thrones. It was interesting to note the “uncanny” repetition compulsion at work in the serial reiterations of these cult games and movies—recalling our discussion of uncanny “doublings” (in the appendix to chapter 2, this volume). We await a definitive developed philosophy of both the toxic and therapeutic powers of digital technology, but can take inspiration from the pioneering explorations of the phenomenon of simulation by the likes of Jean Baudrillard, Simulacrum and Simulation (Stanford: Stanford

5. RECLAIMING TOUCH IN THE AGE OF EXCARNATION

26.

27.

28.

University Press, 1984); Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2006); Sherry Turtle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, whose books include Reclaiming Conversation (New York: Penguin, 2015) and, as editor, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997); and Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Saint Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017); not to mention the critical debates on transhumanism and posthumanism by authors like Karl Sallin and Cary Wolfe. When it comes to the analysis of the role of digital technology in the causation and curing of trauma, contemporary psychology and psychotherapy still have much work ahead. Even the most advanced psychologies of trauma— reviewed in chapter 4— tend to focus more on victims of war, torture, rape, genocide, and child abuse than on the traumatizing effects on our bodies by certain everyday uses/abuses of cyber technology (as explored in a series like Black Mirror, for example). There are many new possibilities of healing through digital mediation, narrative refiguration, and virtual association for future therapies to explore. Elsewhere I have proposed the idea of anatheology as a way of thinking about religion after religion, see Anatheism: Returning to God After God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). See the remarkable work of Joseph Lambert, director of the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS), and Kathy Bisbee, director of the Brookline Interactive Group. I am grateful to both for their informative examples. For a similar example in digital pedagogy see the Guestbook Project—“Exchanging Stories Changing Histories”—which invites youths from divided communities to exchange narratives with each other online before translating them into action on the ground. Engaging in a form of “active empathy listening,” such exchanges use the detour of digital imagination to get back in touch with hidden wounds (too deep and traumatic to engage with directly) and transform them into living memories and gestures. Recent Guestbook

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190 29.

30.

31.

videos include Armenian and Turkish youths exchanging hitherto suppressed accounts of the Armenian genocide in a new gesture of commemoration, Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics turning rival histories of “walls” into collaborative stories of “bridges,” Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims reliving the narratives of Isaac and Ishmael for today, and Rwandan and Congolese youths overcoming historic enmities through tales of forbidden love. Each of these digital projects involves the creation of a new gesture—usually tactile (exchange of clothes, hats, handshakes, gifts)—where the passage through digital communication generates a sense of mutual empathy between the collaborators, enhancing civility in their everyday lives. Such exchanges reveal how the digital detour of imagination is capable of facilitating a new sense of lived community, transmuting transgenerational scars into real acts of healing. They epitomize a pedagogy of empathy as a practical way forward. Putting us in touch with hidden hurts, they give a future to our past. I am thinking particularly here of the work of Kathy Bisbee, an interdisciplinary artist producing immersive social documentaries in the public interest. She is executive director of Brookline Interactive Group (BIG), research fellow at MIT Open Doc Lab, and founder of the Public VR Lab, where she is the lead creative designer/producer of Arrival VR, a national participatory immigration/migration storytelling experience in VR. See also our discussion of haptic technology in our coda, this volume. At a basic level, we already witness the use of everyday devices like digital watches and fitbits that interact with human flesh in collaborative ways, monitoring heart rate, temperature, sleep patterns, mobility, water intake, and so on. We also witness the emergence of prescription digital therapeutics, operating at the intersection of biology and software technology, such as Pear Therapeutics, which uses iPhone apps that interact with body and brain patterns (e.g., in the treatment of insomnia) and complement pharmaceutical and body therapies. Though one might also be chary here of the potential for biometric surveillance. See Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism (London: Hachette, 2019) See Richard Louv, Our Wild Calling: How Connecting with Animals Can Save Our Lives and Save Theirs (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2019).

CODA

Coda 1.

2.

3.

4.

Quite apart from COVID-19, there are of course many known instances of untouchability provoking a special awareness of touch. Think of the common “do not touch” prohibitions regarding precious art works, fragile objects, religious icons, or certain “intangible” persons (screen stars, elusive lovers, subjects of social or sexual taboo, etc). We attend obsessively to things we are not allowed to touch. Just look at people looking at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Or watch footballers keeping their hands off the ball (leaving it to their feet and heads in a reversal of natural instinct). See Beatriz Vélez, Football et érotisme (Montreal: Liber, 2014). COVID-19 brought these normative prohibitions against touch into stark and dramatic focus. See John Manoussakis, “Coronations: Notes from the Quarantine,” New Polis, April 10, 2020. “Keeping in mind the distinction between senses of distance and senses of proximity, I find it quite suggestive that the symptoms through which COVID-19 manifests itself— apart from those that it shares in common with the rest of respiratory infections, such a coughing and fever— are precisely anosmia and ageusia, that is, the inability of the infected person to smell and to taste. Without such tactile senses that operate by de- distancing, to borrow Heidegger’s expression, the virus compromises one’s health by depriving one of one’s sense of proximity. It has been speculated that the characteristic upright posture of a human being as well as its coordinating bipedalism became the evolutionary results of a human’s need to rely more on his sight and less on his smell. By standing up, smell—the predominant sense for social interaction among animals—was replaced for man by sight.” See the tragic case of LouAnn Dagen, a sixty-six-year-old resident of a Michigan nursing home who begged Alexa forty times for help before dying alone (April 7, 2020), as her solitary recordings revealed. By contrast, there were many moving stories of “frontline” carers holding and touching dying patients painfully deprived of their families and friends. New York Review of Books 67, no. 7 (April 2020). The collection featured pieces by Francesca Melandri, Kevin Barry, Anne Enright, Nick Laird, and others and was followed by essays from the NYRB archive

191

CODA

5.

6.

7.

8.

192

including Susan Sontag’s “Disease as Political Metaphor” and Tony Judt’s “On the Plague.” See also the insightful essays by Havi Carel, “The Locked-Down Body: Embodiment in the Age of Pandemic” and Luna Donezal, “Intercorporeality and Social Distancing,” in Philosopher 108, no. 3. Leïla Slimani, “L’Epidémie de Coronavirus vient nous accentuer une tendance: Nous touchons de moins en moins la peau de l’autre,” Le Monde, April 2020. Julia Kristeva, “Humanity Is Rediscovering Existential Solitude, the Meaning of Limits and Mortality,” in Corriere del Serra, March  29, 2020. Kristeva. On the pandemic’s radical disclosure of our morality and fragility, see the challenging piece by Simon Critchley, “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die,” The Stone, New York Times, April 11, 2020. In a survey report entitled “Coronavirus Has Killed the Power of Touch: How Do We Reconnect?” (Daily Beast, April  16, 2020), Tim Teeman records various expert scholars of touch on the pandemic experience of “touch isolation” and “touch deprivation.” These include Constance Classen, author of The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (which analyzes how historically fear of plague led to a distrust of touch), Dr. Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute of Miami Miller School of Medicine (director of a “Covid-19 Lockdown Activities Survey”), Francis McGlone, professor of neuroscience at Liverpool John Moores University, and Dr. Victoria Abraria, research specialist on touch at Rutgers University. Abraria notes that for every one hundred research papers on vision there was only one on touch, until the pandemic made people more aware of just how indispensable touch is to our lives. Scientists like Abraria stress how lack of touch over a sustained period of time can lead to “severe psychiatric issues” including forms of “touch PTSD.” Deprived of touch—which stimulates the pressure receptors under the skin, relaxes the nervous system, lowers heart rate and blood pressure, and replaces stress hormones with the “love hormone” oxytocin—people can suffer serious psychological anxiety and withdrawal. This was accentuated during lockdown when, Classen notes, our increased immersion in a visual- dominated online environment privileged a “sensory language in which sight dazzles

CODA

9.

10.

11.

12.

and touch shrinks.” The review concludes with the hope that, in spite of it all, the pandemic will “encourage people to think more about our tactile environment— areas in which a more respectful and caring touch is needed,” as was evidenced in ICUs throughout the world where doctors and nurses made sure their patients did not suffer or die untouched. With regard to haptic applications of social VR on Altspace, see https:// www.vrfitnessinsider.com/haptics-thrilling-prospect. It is telling how, in the case of Internet masses and liturgies, participants feel a strong desire to hold tactile cups, chalices, candles, and bread in their hands as they participate “remotely” in virtual ceremonies. Classen notes that “one important development in the future of touch to keep in mind is that haptic technology seems to bring more and more of the tactile realm into cyberspace, transforming touch into a distance sense like sight and giving it an alternative virtual life” (cited in Teeman, “Coronavirus Had Killed the Power of Touch”). Regarding the educational experiments with VR haptics, already conducted prior to COVID- 19, see https://educatorsinvr .com/events/international- summit.For further social VR examples: https://lab . onebonsai . com /social - vr- is - the - weird - future - of- social -media-2fedf4663011. See https://www.ign.com/articles/mother-plays-with-deceased-daughter -in-vr-recreation and https://www.vrfitnessinsider.com/haptics-thrilling -prospect/. On the use of synthetic skin in VR social experiments, see https:// singularityhub.com/2019/11/25/synthetic-skin-is-bringing-a-sense- of -touch-to-virtual-reality. For a timely discussion of empathy and the VR relationship between digital storytelling, telehaptics, and viscerality, see https://teslasuit.io/blog/empathy-virtual-reality/. And for more of the science behind it: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019 /11/191120131255.htm. See also Maiju Loukola, “A Little Distance Please: On the Relationship Between Mediality and Touch,” in Figures of Touch: Sense, Technics, Body, ed. Maiju Loukola and Mike Luoto (Helsinki: University of Helsinki Press, 2018), 121–52; Paul Martin, “Carnal Hermeneutics and the Digital Game,” Journal of the Philosophy of Games 2, no. 1 (2018): 1–20.

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CODA 13.

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This included a strong need for contact with nature (and animals), and I think it is no accident that one of the most notable early research projects in haptic VR was the Tree Experiment, mentioned earlier, when humans wore haptic vests to “feel” the experience of a tree moving in the wind. The tree carries a basic archetypal power for humans from the beginning of time, manifest in all wisdom traditions. Referring to COVID-19, Richard Rohr notes that the desire for tactile connection represents a fundamental need to go beyond oneself to “otherness,” and he cites African American mystic Howard Thurman, who understood this deeply through a connection with nature that offered him “a certain overriding immunity against the pains in life.” In his youth, Thurman found solace in a relationship with a tree near his home: “Eventually I discovered that the oak tree and I had a unique relationship. I could sit, my back against its trunk . . . and reach down into the quiet places of my spirit, take out my bruises and joys, unfold them and talk about them. I could talk aloud to the oak tree and know that I was understood. It too, was part of my reality, like the woods . . . giving me space.” Howard Thurman, With Head and Heart (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979), 8. Rohr sees this time of social distancing from other humans as a possibility to practice “ecotherapy”(in Japanese, Shinrin-yoku)— namely, healing by contact with trees and nature. A possibility for a newfound appreciation for the outdoors when the time of “sheltering in” is over. See Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation, April 18, 2020. See similar experiences of trees as agents of natural interaction in Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees (Vancouver: Greystone, 2015). For a pioneering plea for a symbiotic collaboration between the ecological and the technological, see Alexander Pschera, Animal Internet: Nature and the Digital Revolution (New York: New Vessel, 2020). The author argues that new animal tracking technology (e.g., International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) can change our human relationship to the animal world, softening the hard line between nature and technology in creative empathic ways. Technology need no longer be seen as the eternal adversary of nature, he claims, but can offer an ideal, adaptable interface between humans and their natural and animal fellows on our common earth. The “animal internet” opens new possibilities for

CODA “interspecies communication,” allowing humans to temporarily adopt an animal perspective, feeling a near or distant place as a member of another species might experience it. By acquainting us digitally with the habits and behavior of other species and giving us imaginative access to their lives, tracking technology may teach us to attend more closely to the animals in our real immediate environment—thus, ironically, restoring our “sensory access” to them. On the relationship between tact and contact, see Katja Haustein, “How to Be Alone with Others: Plesser, Adorno, and Barthes on Tact,” Modern Language Review 114, no. 1 (January 2019): 1–21. See, finally, the timely BBC Radio 4 series on the “Anatomy of Touch” in the age of pandemic (October 2019), moderated by Claudia Hammond.

195

Index

Abraham, 20 Abraira, Victoria, 141, 142, 191 Adams, Philip, 167 Agamben, Giorgio, 166 Aho, Kevin, 158 Albrecht, Glenn, 144 Alloa, Emmanuel, 154, 157 Aquinas, Thomas, 20, 153 Aristotle, 33–37, 39, 41–47, 63, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157 Asclepius, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 91, 94, 107, 123, 140, 162, 163, 181, 182 Asheri, Shoshi, 169, 185 Augustine, 148 Autolycus, 62 Averroes, 153 Balfour, Lindsay, 182 Bamber, Helen, 29, 88, 100, 152, 170 Barmakian, Aram, 183

Barry, Kevin, 190 Barthes, Roland, 36, 126, 183 Bates, Tony, 171 Baudrillard, Jean, 123, 126, 186, 188 Bauer, Nancy, 143 Becker, Brian, 162 Begin, Menachem, 15 Benedict, Saint, 27 Benjamin, Walter, 148 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 81 Biden, Joseph, 145 Bieringa, Olive, 187 Binswanger, Ludwig, 159 Bisbee, Kathy, 188 Boadella, David, 171 Bosnak, Robert, 173 Bourgeault, Cynthia, 148, 149, 152, 164 Bowlby, John, 101 Bowles, Nellie, 183 Brooks, David, 183, 184 Burrus, Virginia, 166

INDEX

198

Camus, Albert, 14, 23, 148 Cannon, Katie, 178 Caruth, Cathy, 88 Cézanne, Paul, 124 Charpak, Nathalie, 109, 181 Chiron, 65, 66, 67, 162, 169, 173, 178, 181 Chittister, Joan, 144 Chrétien, Jean-Louis, 154, 155, 156, 157 Classen, Constance, 141, 143, 191 Clemente, Matthew, 145, 158 Cleopas, 25 Cohen, Leonard, 163 Cohen, Sheldon, 177 Critchley, Simon, 182, 190 Cronin, Kerry, 183 Dagen, LouAnn, 190 Damasio, Antonio, 102 Davis, Bret, 168 Davis, Phyllis K., 177 Davoine, Françoise, 88 de Beauvoir, Simone, 49, 146 Debord, Guy, 182 de Klerk, F. W., 15 DeLillo, Don, 116, 182 Derrida, Jacques, 158 de Waal, Frans de, 14, 145, 180, 181 Diderot, Denis, 42 Didymus, Thomas, 166 Diekman, Kristine, 187 Dillard, Annie, 151, 152 Dubreuil, Maroussia, 183 Dufourmantelle, Anne, 19, 146, 159

Eadicicco, Lisa, 143, 182 Eckhart, Meister, 149 Edelstein, Emma, 163 Edelstein, Ludwig, 163 Elliot, T. S., 152 Enright, Anne, 190 Equicola, Mario, 153 Eriugena, John Scotus, 153 Euryclea, 62 Falque, Emmanuel, 160 Ficino, Marsilio, 153 Field, Tiffany, 103, 104, 141, 177, 184, 185, 191 Figuera, Zita, 181 Fitzpatrick, Melissa, 144 Francis of Assisi 73, 153 Frank, Didier, 160 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 54, 55, 57, 85– 87, 156, 161, 167, 169, 172, 183 Fulkerson, Matthew, 155 Galanter, Margit, 187 Gallace, Alberto, 187 Gallagher, Shaun, 160 Gallagher, Sheila, 173 Ganson, Arthur, 187 Gendlin, Eugene, 172 Ginsberg, Allen, 26 Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla, 108, 179 Goldstein, Pavel, 176 Gomes Silva, Sonia, 170 Goodman, David, 162 Gregious, Justin, 183 Grey, Earl, 171

INDEX Hafiz, 167 Halik, Tomas, 113, 143, 166 Hall, Thomas, 183 Hamblin, James, 89, 144, 170, 177, 184, 185 Hameed, Urwa, 144 Hamlet, 54 Hạnh, Thích Nhất, 149 Hartley, Linda, 169, 171, 176, 185 Heaney, Seamus, 27, 57, 157, 161, 162 Hederman, Patrick, 142, 174 Heidegger, Martin, 48, 53, 54, 55, 148, 155, 161, 190 Heitzler, Morit, 176 Herman, Judith, 88, 175 Hermes, 38, 45 Higgins, Michael D., 151 Hill, Katie, 183 Hippocrates, 66 Homer, 15, 23, 62, 63, 162 Hooper, Jane, 61 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 26, 149 Horton, Sarah, 147, 160, 178 Howe, Fanny, 173 Hughes, Langston, 95, 174 Huizinga, Johan, 169 Hume, John, 15 Husserl, Edmund, 11, 45, 46, 47, 157, 158, 159, 160 Huxley, Aldous, 26 In, Glorianna, 183 Irigaray, Luce, 49, 50, 51, 159 Isaac, 164

Jacob, 164 Jakobson, Roman, 156 James, William, 99, 176 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 151 Jesus, 20, 73, 74, 75, 77, 82, 140 Johnson, Mark, 160 Jonze, Spike, 113 Joyce, James, 29, 55, 152, 161 Jung, Carl, 87 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 151 Kearney, Michael, 68, 162, 163 Kearney, Peter, 185 Kearney, Richard, 142, 146–47, 154, 155, 158– 63, 166, 168, 170, 173, 178, 179, 182, 186 Keller, Catherine, 144, 166 Keller, Helen, 95 Kierkegaard, Søren, 148 Kim, Christie, 183 Klapes, Peter, 183 Klein, Melanie, 146 Kristeva, Julia, 49, 51, 53, 55, 137, 138, 159, 161, 190 Kurzweil, Ray, 122, 188 Laird, Nick, 190 Lakoff, George, 160 Lambert, Joseph, 188 Laplanche, Jean, 155 Lategan, Helena, 180 Laudan, Rachel, 146 Leary, Ryan, 183 Lenoir, Jean, 22 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 19, 64, 146

199

INDEX Levinas, Emmanuel, 48, 158, 179 Levine, Peter, 91, 172 Lingis, Alphonso, 158 Louv, Richard, 5– 6, 110, 143, 144, 153, 182, 189 Lukacs, Bertrand, 178 Luther King, Martin, 111

200

Magdalene, Mary, 82, 83, 164, 168 Malabou, Catherine, 155 Mandela, Nelson, 15 Manoussakis, John, 146, 155, 160, 162, 178, 189 Marion, Jean-Luc, 146, 160 Mayi, Mata Amritananda, 180 McCann, Colum, 186 McGlone, Francis, 141, 142, 191 McGrath, Sean, 144 Mckendrick, Karmen, 160, 178, 179 Meiring, Jacob, 166 Melandri, Francesca, 190 Menakem, Resmaa, 160 Mendelsohn, Stephen, 160, 178 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 25, 48–49, 146, 149, 156, 158, 159, 165, 173 Merton, Cynthia, 148 Merton, Thomas, 148 Meyniel, Dominique, 105, 278 Miller, Alice, 172 Mitchell, Joni, 7 Mitchell, Juliet, 88 Moore, George, 147 Moran, Dermot, 156 Morley, James, 145 Murdoch, Iris, 155 Myriel, Monseigneur, 20

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 41, 155, 160, 168 Ní Riain, Nóirín, 152 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27, 80, 166, 176 Nugent, Joseph, 22, 147 O’Byrne, Anne, 159 O’Brien, Flann, 147 O’Hanlon, Redmond, 141, 152, 159, 169, 170, 171, 174, 177 O’Rourke, Fran, 153 O’Shea, Andrew, 156 O’Toole, Fintan, 145 Odysseus, 20, 62, 63, 65, 156 Oedipus, 25, 64, 65 Ophelia, 54 Orbach, Susie, 169 Orenstein, Peggy, 143 Paul, Saint, 25, 74 Paz, Octavio, 25 Pelagius, 153 Philyra, 67 Pio, Padre, 73 Pizer, Barbara, 175 Plato, 33, 35, 36, 153 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 146, 155 Portnoy, Michael, 186 Prendergast, John, 148, 152, 163 Prescott, James, 174 Prometheus, 20 Proust, Marcel, 23, 29 Pugliese, Joseph, 182 Rand, Richard, 155 Reich, Wilhelm, 88, 169

INDEX Ricœur, Paul, 158 Rogers, Annie, 175 Rohr, Richard, 148, 152, 164– 66, 174, 192, 193 Rojcewicz, Christine, 147, 160, 178 Rosa, Hartmut, 151, 177 Rothschild, Babette, 169 Rumi, 163, 167 Rumpza, Stephanie, 164 Rumsfeld, Donald, 142 Rutherford, Adam, 176 Sacks, Oliver, 176 Sadat, Anwar, 15 Sallin, Karl, 188 Sanders, Daniel, 54 Sarah (Genesis), 20 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 48, 146 Schulman, Audrey, 21, 180 Scotus, Duns, 153 Serres, Michel, 148 Severson, Eric, 162 Shakespeare, William, 21, 162 Sheehan, Thomas, 154, 155 Shelly, Rambo, 166 Shizutera, Ueda, 168 Schott-Billmann, France, 176 Slimani, Lëila, 137, 190 Sobchack, Vivian, 149 Socrates, 162 Soloman, 164 Sontag, Susan, 190 Soth, Michael, 171 Sparrowe, Linda, 180 Spence, Charles, 187 Spielrein, Sabina, 87

Spitz, René, 102 Stackle, Erin, 155, 154 Steenkamp, Yolande, 179 Stevens, Wallace, 31 Sullivan, Karen, 177 Süskind, Patrick, 23 Swade, Tamar, 174 Taylor, Allegra, 178 Taylor, Charles, 141 Taylor, James, 168 Teeman Tim, 141, 190 Telemachus, 63 Teresa of Avilla, 81, 166, 167 Teresias, 25 Thomas, Saint, 77, 78 Thompson, Evan, 155, 160 Thurman, Howard, 192 Tiresias, 25 Treanor, Brian, 144, 148, 151, 154, 155, 159 Trevarthen, Colwyn, 29, 152 Trimble, David, 15 Turtle, Sherry, 188 Valjean, Jean, 20 Van der Kolk, Bessel, 90, 92, 96, 98, 100, 106, 170, 172, 176, 180, 181 Van Mohr, Mariana, 171, 174 Veldsman, Danie, 179 Viola, Bill, 187 Warnecke, Tom, 174, 175 Watts, Alan, 26 Weinberger, Eliot, 149

201

INDEX Weineger, Radhule, 173 Wickersham, Joan, 94, 173 Wilson-Hartgrove, Jonathan, 152 Wiman, Christian, 41 Winnicott, D. W., 100, 102, 177 Wohlleben, Peter, 193

202

Wolfe, Cary, 188 Wood, David, 144, 146 Zahavi, Dan, 160 Zeus, 20, 66 Zizek, Slavoj, 183 Zuboff, Shoshana, 189