Närhetens intima avstånd. Om Känselsinnet som sammanbindande och gränsdragande

Abstract

The sense of touch is often both conceptualized and experienced in terms of closeness in contrast to an objectifying distance traditionally ascribed to the sense of sight. In this article I thematize the closeness of touch and examine the relation between touching and touched through a close reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the lived body and its relation to the world and others. The purpose of such a reading is to throw light on the closeness characterizing the sense of touch as a closeness involving its own distance or gap through which touch and the relation between touching and touched are given birth. Merleau-Ponty offers sophisticated and fruitful tools for approaching established concepts and understandings of sensation and touch, bodily boundaries, and closeness and distance. In a first step, I reflect on the multiple and ambiguous meanings of the words sense (känna) and touch (beröra), emphasizing the impossibility of understanding these words in any simple terms. In a second step, I turn to Merleau- Ponty’s philosophy in order to reach a deeper understanding of the closeness of touch. I discuss his description of the lived body as sensible sentient, that is as both touching and touchable, his understanding of the notion intercorporeity and his description of the relation between touching and touched in terms of an incomplete reversibility that both binds the two terms together while at the same time drawing a boundary between them.