Le Toucher and the Corpus of Tact: Exploring Touch and Technicity with Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy

Donald A. Landes

L'Esprit Crateur, Volume 47, Number 3, Fall 2007 , pp. 80-92 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/esp.2007.0052

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Le Toucher and the Corpus of Tact: Exploring Touch and Technicity with Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy
Donald A. Landes
Moins de vingt ans plus tt, on ne greffait pas, et surtout pas avec recours la ciclosporine, qui protge contre le rejet du greffon. Dans vingt ans, il est certain quil sagira dune autre greffe, avec dautres moyens. On croise une contingence personnelle avec une contingence dans lhistoire des techniques. Plus tt, je serais mort, plus tard, je serais autrement survivant. Mais toujours je se trouve troitement serr dans un crneau de possibilits technique.1

HEN JACQUES DERRIDA offers a reading, we should be reminded of his suspicion of any such endeavor that pretends to regarder le texte sans y toucher, sans mettre la main lobjet, sans se risquer y ajouter, unique chance dentrer dans le jeu en sy prenant les doigts, quelque nouveau fil.2 For in Le ToucherJean-Luc Nancy, Derrida follows and adds threads in and to Nancys corpus, weaving together concepts and themes such as partes extra partes, there is no the X (Nancean deconstruction), and exscription. Derrida risks reading Nancy alongside the tradition of which the latters texts can be nothing other than an interruption, for according to Nancy, even a corpus resists unification and essential taxonomies. Yet despite Derridas discussion of the paradoxical logic of touch as both the foundational and the most aporetic sense, or his exploration of Nancys deconstruction of Christianity and Western haptocentrism, Derrida does not engage with Nancys explicit reflections on touch developed in Pourquoi y a-t-il plusieurs arts, et non pas un seul? in Les Muses.3 Confessing in an extended aside that this collection of Nancys essays on aesthetics revient avec force sur la question du toucher et du primat du toucher, Derrida nonetheless limits his inquiry to only those texts appearing prior to 1993.4 A close reading, however, of Nancys rethinking of touch in the mentioned essay is essential to understand fully the question of technicity and Nancys distance from phenomenology in his rejection of the immediacy of touch. Without the supplement of Nancys aesthetics, it becomes difficult to recognize the significance of Nancys deconstruction of the ars/techne binary and the ethical implications of his subsequent post-deconstructive ectopic ontology of bodies as developed in Corpus.5
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Touching, Technicity, and la force des Muses After surveying traditional philosophical determinations of the plurality of the arts, Nancy brings into question the typical separation of art from techne . What is more intriguing, however, is Nancys critique of the position that the material differences among the arts reflect the different senses these arts stimulate. Nancy reverses this causality, suggesting that the arts produce the differences between the senses. If one adopts the intuitive identification of the differences between the senses and the differences between the arts, Nancy observes:
on se trouve trs vite conduit un autre genre de considration: la diffrence des sens, cest-dire celle des cinq sens et la ou les diffrences supplmentaires quy introduit toujours un dsir de groupement et/ou de hirarchisation, cette diffrence elle-mme plurielle et depuis longtemps atteste comme un nest peut-tre, en fin compte, que le rsultat dune opration artiste, ou lartefact produit par une mise en perspective technique de la perception. En un mot, non pas la sensibilit comme telle, mais la ou les distributions des sens seraient elles-mmes les produits de lart. (Pourquoi 25-26)

Yet despite his claim that the distribution of the senses is an effect, Nancy does not embark on an archeological inquiry into this production, a production which is neither ever complete nor reducible to a guiding principle. Rather, Nancys inquiry attempts to establish a place between archeology and speculative or phenomenological logic. Operating on a deconstructive level, he shows: 1) that the heterogeneity of the senses is not identical to the differences among the arts; 2) that the necessity of discovering a fixed division of the senses is an illusion of philosophy and common sense; and 3) that any division would require a principle of reunification that would itself be arbitrary. For a long tradition, touch has been thought of as the paradigme, voire comme essence des sens en gnral (Pourquoi 27), and yet Nancy begins to unravel the classical division of the five senses upon which this primacy naturally depends:
soit quon sinterroge sur la douleur comme sens spcifique, soit encore quavec la physiologie contemporaine on dborde largement les cinq sens pour envisager, au-del des sensibles communs dAristote, les sens de lacclration ou de la tension dorganes, et que par ailleurs, pour embrasser lensemble du rgne animal, on envisage des distributions par mcanorcepteurs (pression, contact, vibration, tirement, etc.), thermorcepteurs, photorcepteurs, chimiorcepteurs, lectrorcepteurs, ou bien encore, selon dautre critres, par exttorcepteurs, propriorcepteurs (actions du corps sur lui-mme), introrcepteurs (digestions, pression artrielle, sensations urognitales, etc.). (Pourquoi 27)

Although the usefulness of a taxonomy of the senseswhether they be five or any finite and essentially defined fixed distributionbecomes questionVOL. 47, NO. 3 81

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able, the receptive quality of this list perhaps suggests that touch retains something of its traditional essential status. In pursuing a different model and taking a cue from Freud, Nancy considers the contingent and flexible nature of erogenous zones. Rather than focusing on the function or object of a particular sense, the motif of the sensuous zone allows Nancy to stress the quasi-heterogeneity and discreteness of zones emerging from their self-touching and touching each other. We find Nancy hinting that touch, though not in a classical sense, is going to ground the sensuous as such:
Or le toucher [] nest pas autre chose, pour toute la tradition, que le sens du corps tout entier, comme le dit Lucrce. [] Mais le toucher lui-mme, en tant que sens et par consquent en tant quil se sent sentir, et plus encore, en tant quil se sent se sentir, puisquil ne touche quen se touchant aussi lui-mme, touch par ce quil touche et parce quil le touche, le toucher prsente le moment propre de lextriorit sensible, il le prsente comme tel et comme sensible. [] Le toucher fait corps avec le sentir, ou il fait des sentirs un corps, il nest que le corpus des sens. (Pourquoi 34-36)

Touch presents both the proper moment of sensuous exteriority and the individuation of each sense. By playing across the senses, touch provides the body with the unity proper to a corpus. Nancy thus begins to rethink the senses as zones of sensing, at root haptical, if not immediate. Since sensing is simultaneously sensing-oneself-sense, when a zone is sensing its object, it is also sensing other zones currently being left unattended: [c]haque sentir touche au reste du sentir comme ce quil ne peut pas sentir (Pourquoi 36). There is no pure sense zone. The set of sensing zones can be formulated in many ways, and art is what accomplishes the dislocations and interruptions of the world, as it touches by means of the htrognit principielle du sentir (Pourquoi 36). Art makes or activates a certain zoning of sensing, and in this forced self-touching of a zone of sensing, the world is revealed in its irreducible plurality. It would be impossible to provide a complete archeological or historical account of this production, but without the discreteness of zones and the distancing that allows for self-touching, there would be no world. The plurality of the arts does not reflect a natural plurality of sense (organs), but rather an active production of a distribution of sensing through the dislocation, isolation, and interruption of sensibility as such. The contingent corpus of the arts is a collection of the traces of the possibilities of sensing, and the passing of the worlds opened by those interruptions. Four main consequences can be drawn from this analysis. First, art isolates a zone of sensing from lunit vivante de la perception ou de laction 82 FALL 2007

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(Pourquoi 42), forcing it to se toucher, to touch itself at its proper limit where it no longer is the sense that it is. The zone is not merely a set or selection of sense-data, but rather organizes a multiplicity of relations into a world: non pas visuel ou sonore, mais, prcisment, pictural ou musical. Par exemple, de la rgion sonore ou auditive il fait un monde compos de valeurs, de hauteurs, de gammes, de rapports harmoniques, de successions mlodiques, de tonalits, de rythmes, de timbres, etc. (Pourquoi 42). As such, art makes a new world within the plurality of the world, and this power is la force des Muses: elle est la fois de sparations, disolement, dintensification et de mtamorphose (Pourquoi 43). Second, if this account of zoning is correct, then neither synaesthesia, as a crossing of well-defined senses or the general condition of lived perception, nor common sense, as the unification of the senses through common objects, can explain the multiple shades and pulsations of sensing. Rather, art causes common sense to se toucher elle-mme en une infinit de points ou de zones. (Pourquoi 44). As such:
[l]a diffrence prolifre, non seulement entre de grands registres sensoriels, mais travers chacun deux: couleur, nuance, pte, clat, ombre, surface, masse, perspective, contour, geste, mouvement, choc, grain, timbre, rythme, saveur, parfum, dispersion, rsonance, trait, duction, diction, articulation, jeu, coupe, longueur, profondeur, instant, dure, vitesse, duret, paisseur, vapeur, vibrations, tournure, manation, pntration, effleurement, tension, thme et variation, et ctera, cest--dire linfini des touches dmultiplies. (Pourquoi 44)6

In the isolation and folding of zones of sensing, we discover a proliferation of difference that is irreducible to the continuity of synaesthesia or to the unity of common sense. Third, all zones se promettent la communication de leurs interruptions, chacun fait toucher la diffrence de lautre (dun autre ou de plusieurs autres, et virtuellement de tous, mais dune totalit sans totalisation) (Pourquoi 45). The communication involved takes place as a response, and thus each zone [a] lieu dans llment du hors-de-soi, dune ex-position de lexistence (Pourquoi 46). We find Nancy suggesting a rhythm of the coming and going of presenceart is the forced syncopation of the sensible as such. The general rhythm of the sensuous is affected as every other element answers the call. The players adjust to each other, and the ensemble manages to communicate and play together across the incommunicable. Finally, we find art to be first and foremost technical. The arts do not just rely upon a basic technicity, they install the technical, and thus are inseparaVOL. 47, NO. 3 83

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ble from the very essence of technics. This co-implication emerges as Nancys deconstruction of the ars/techne binary:
La technique, cest de savoir sy prendre pour produire ce qui ne se produit pas de soi-mme. La technique est un cart et un dlai, peut-tre infinis, du producteur au produit, et ainsi du producteur lui-mme. Cest la production dans lextriorit soi et dans la discrtion de ses oprations et de ses objets. ce compte, le singulier pluriel de lart stend aussi bien lincessante dmultiplication de la dcision technique de lartiste. (Pourquoi 49)

The mediation and multiplicity of techniques is the essence of technicity and the root of the haptical zoning of sensibility as such. But there is no one technique, no unity or form of the technical.7 As production itself, the production of the non-self-produced, technicity is a ground that is neither ultimate nor solid, but a ground paradoxically at the whim of the technics of its own production. The zoning of sensing reveals that each spacing or opening of a world implies an innumerable multiplicity of worlds, heterogeneous and discrete, and yet in communication across the incommunicable that divides them. Touch is not one sense among the five, nor (in any classical sense) the ground of the other four senses. Nancys analysis instead reveals zones self-touching and touching each other in a dis-location and spacing of sensibility as such that opens the cascading production of the plurality of worlds. Touching Bodies: Nancys Tactile Corpus Nancys rethinking of the senses as zonal suggests the possibility of nonclassical configurations of sensibility as such, and this possibility brings together the notions of corps and corpus, as in a passage quoted above: Le toucher fait corps avec le sentir, ou il fait des sentirs un corps, il nest que le corpus des sens (Pourquoi 36). Inevitably, this raises the question of the body and its materiality, and thus leads us to the Corpus du tact (Corpus 82) at the heart of Nancys material ontology. Since we are denied the unification of essential taxonomies, we might think of corpus in a literary sense: a collection of the various contributions of a singularity, not unified by an intentional self-aware cogito, but produced as the loose collection of the traces of a lifetime. The moments of this corpus communicate, but are not reducible to a single pure voice. They rethink each other in a paradoxical temporal logic, touching each other at their limits, each coming as a reconfiguration of the whole, while remaining discrete heterogeneous events in the field. Perhaps the concept corpus offers a post-deconstructive strategy for understanding experience, bodies, and subjectivity. 84 FALL 2007

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The text Corpus involves a rejection of the unity required by discourse. A corpus of the body, for instance, would be a passive recording or collection of des entres du corps: entres de dictionnaire, entres de langue, entres encyclopdiques, tous les topoi par o introduire le corps, les registres de tous ses articles, lindex de ses places, postures, plans et replis (Corpus 50). In a corpus of impenetrable bodies (partes extra partes), there is nothing to discourse about, nothing to communicate. A community of bodies (Corpus, Eng. 190). Nancy is offering a new dislocated locus for philosophyphenomenology would seem to fall silent without the immanence to that is capable of isolating the object of inquiry and defining the scope of evidence.8 And with another partial yet interminable list, Nancy begins this registry: pied, ventre, bouche, ongle, plaie, frapper, sperme, sein, tatouage, mange, nerf, toucher, genou, fatigue... (Corpus 52). In this early formulation of his deconstruction of Christianity, Nancy identifies the existing philosophical-theological corpus of bodies (Corpus, Eng. 192): the glorious-body (image of God); the cave-body (Platos prison for the soul); the body-proper of phenomenology; the bodymachine (perhaps Descartes, perhaps the medical-body, and interesting in that the future of the body-writing-Corpus would one day be in a position to write LIntrus). Resting on forms of representation or the projection of sense, these body-discourses are attempts to establish a normative or dominant account, usurping the corpus and making the body the site of a contradiction: Le corps signifianttout le corpus des corps philosophiques, thologiques, psychanalytiques et smiologiquesnincarne quune chose: labsolue contradiction de ne pas pouvoir tre corps sans ltre dun esprit, qui le dsincorpore (Corpus 62). In finding sense shared immanently between bodies, Nancy begins to shift his language from the body to bodies:
Body is the total signifier, for everything has a body, or everything is a body [] and body is the last signifier, the limit of the signifier, if what it says [] is nothing other than the interlacing, the mixing of bodies with bodies, mixing everywhere, and everywhere manifesting this other absence of name, named God, everywhere producing and reproducing and everywhere absorbing the sense of sense and of all the senses, infinitely mixing the impenetrable with the impenetrable. (Corpus, Eng. 195)9

Yet although Nancy rejects discourses that find the value of the body in its signification or projection of sense, he is certainly not proffering a completely reductive materialism. Addressing this opposite danger, and foreshadowing his political use of ecotechnics,10 Nancy recognizes that the practices of VOL. 47, NO. 3 85

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modern war, torture, capitalism, and subjugation are forms of violently reducing bodies to the merely partes extra partes:
It is the deported, massacred, tortured bodies, exterminated by the millions, piled up in charnel houses. Here too, the body loses its form and its senseand sense has lost all body. These bodies are not even signs any longer, nor are they at the origin of any sign. These bodies are no longer bodies, spiritualized into smoke, as an exact reversal of, and response to those who evaporate into spirit. Similar, even though different, are the bodies of misery, the bodies of starvation, battered bodies, prostituted bodies, mangled bodies, infected bodies, as well as bloated bodies, bodies that are too well nourished, too body-built, too erotic, too orgasmic. (Corpus, Eng. 195)11

This interminable list is of bodies sacrificed to nothing. Nancys engagement with Elaine Scarrys work on the disarticulation of the world of the tortured body,12 the dissolution of the world, de-creation of the created world, calls for us to rethink the created world that can suffer this decreation as nothing other than a world of bodies, a world in which bodies come to presence. That is, a world in which bodies are the bodies they are (Corpus, Eng. 196).13 Nancy poses the question: What is the space opened up between our 6 billion bodies? Humanity is becoming tangible, and also tangible in its inhumanity (Corpus, Eng. 196).14 And yet, [t]out est possible. Les corps rsistent, dures partes extra partes. La communaut des corps rsiste (Corpus 73). Bodies are always calling again for their birth as the bodies they are, not grace, but merely le partage des corps:
Non plus des corps employs faire du sens, mais du sens qui donne et qui partage des corps. Non plus le pillage smiologique, symptomatologique, mythologique et phnomnologique des corps, mais de la pense, de lcriture livres, adonnes aux corps. Lcriture dun corpus en tant que partage des corps, partageant leur tre-corps. (Corpus 73)

This corpus will not be a normative prescription for bodies, but a passive registration of the configurations of bodies, which are first to be touched. Bodies are first masses, masses offered without anything to articulate, without anything to discourse about, without anything to add to them (Corpus, Eng. 197). Although Nancy seems to be precluding any discourse resting on the essential dignity or value of bodies as a rhetorical weapon against oppression and torture, he is also removing the scapegoat of an elsewhere of sense that would justify suffering or sacrifice. If Nancy is correct, then the real suffering of bodies cannot be explained away, but demands a response even more insistently. The difficult starting point for an ethics post-deconstruction must be the complicated nature of the corpus of bodies. 86 FALL 2007

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Beyond his deconstruction of sense and Christianity, Nancy begins the registration of bodies through the very weight and weighing of their interrelations, what he calls the corpus du tact: effleurer, frler, presser, enfoncer, serrer, lisser, gratter, frotter, caresser, palper, tter, ptrir, masser, enlacer, treindre, frapper, pincer, mordre, sucer, mouiller, tenir, lcher, lcher, branler, regarder, couter, flairer, goter, viter, baiser, bercer, balancer, porter, peser (Corpus 82). Body is first the experience of its own weight (Corpus, Eng. 200), and so the question of consciousness or interiority must be continually displaced. There is no concentration of spirit or experience in the body, but the body is the ex-centration of existence. Existence does not presuppose itself and does not presuppose anything: it is posited, imposed, weighed, laid down, exposed (Corpus, Eng. 200). And weight and touch are reconnected in the quasi-metaphysics of Corpus:
Le corps jouit dtre touch. Il jouit dtre press, pes, pens des autres corps, et dtre cela qui presse, et pse, et pense les autres corps. Les corps jouissent et sont jouis des corps. Corps, cest--dire aroles retires, partes extra partes, de la totalit indivise qui nexiste pas. Corps jouissable parce que retir, tendu lcart et ainsi offert au toucher. (Corpus 102)

Nancy continued this thought in the English version as follows: Touching one another with their mutual weights, bodies do not become undone, nor do they dissolve into other bodies, nor do they fuse with a spiritthis is what makes them, properly speaking, bodies (Corpus, Eng. 203). Through this connection between touch, bodies, and weight, Nancy opens the possibility of an open ontology that is always in motion:
Nothing ever becomes the sum or the system of the corpus. A lip, a finger, a breast, a strand of hair are the temporary and agitated whole of a joy that is each time temporary, agitated, in a hurry to enjoy again and elsewhere. This elsewhere is all over the body, in the corpus of the parts of all the body, in the body of all the parts, and in all other bodies, which each can be a part for another, in an indefinitely ectopic corpus. (Corpus, Eng. 203)

The indefinitely ectopic corpus, infinitely displaced, refuses a center of unification or a total account of its parts. As a consequence, Il ny a pas le corps, il ny a pas le toucher, il ny a pas la res extensa. Il y a quil y a: cration du monde, techn des corps, pese sans limites du sens, corpus topographique, gographie des ectopies multiplieset pas du-topie (Corpus 104). Just as the senses were interruptions in sensibility as such, selftouching zones touching all others as that which they are not, bodies are moments of materiality as such, interruptions in the continuity of being, selftouching and in communication in an open quasi-metaphysics of bodies. VOL. 47, NO. 3 87

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Le ToucherJean-Luc Nancy We have now seen the importance of establishing Nancys thinking of touch for properly delineating his concurrently developed material ontology. Touch, in its non-classical sense, initiates a rethinking of the senses and of bodies. Yet Derridas silence on Nancys specific analysis of touch explored above does not render his reading obsolete. It does, however, lead him to stay on the level of Nancys paradoxical logic rather than reaching the insights Nancy offers for the post-deconstructive exploration of experience and sense in a shared materiality. The value of Derridas text is his emphasis on exteriority (without interiority) and his placing Nancy into conversation with the tradition. Thus, let me draw out Derridas analysis of interiority/exteriority (and the paradoxical logic of tact) and his own Nancean deconstruction of phenomenology. As we shall see, Nancys rethinking of aesthetics through technicity and the zoning of sensing and sensibility as such is an essential supplement to the deconstruction of phenomenological immediacy. Derrida begins by exploring Nancys repeated use of one of Freuds posthumously published notes, Psyche ist ausgedehnt, weiss nicht davon. Psyche is stretched out, out-stretched, extended, and yet she knows nothing of it (Le Toucher 21-31). This introduces Derridas understanding of exteriority in Nancy, through Psyches impassiveness:
Cette impassibilit ne tient pas seulement lextriorit pure de son tre. Elle ne tient pas seulement au dehors absolu o elle se tient: tout est au dehors dun autre dehors, dit-il, formule dun pli quil faut prendre en compte: ltre au-dehors dun autre dehors forme la pliure dun devenirdedans du premier dehors, etc. Do, en raison de ce pliage, les effets dintriorit dune structure qui nest constitue que de surfaces et de dehors sans dedans. (Le Toucher 26)

Even though the notions of folding and interiority effects do not occupy many of Derridas pages, he recognizes that if everything is outside another outside, then partes extra partes is the condition of the technical relations between bodies. As Derrida rightly suggests, Nancys reflections on Psyche and technical mediation resist any tradition that pretends to discover a pure interiority properly prepared by incarnation, while la techn des corps, lcotechnie ou lintrusion de LIntrus are the Nancean corpus of responses to this tradition (Le Toucher 31). Through his exploration of the paradoxical logic of touch and the Law of tact, Derrida begins to reveal why touch has perplexed the tradition, a tradition that cannot decide if touch is a proper sense or the foundation of the senses. The law or the commandment comes to be both conjunctive and disjunctive, that is, it brings into touch whatever it commands not to touch. Lan88 FALL 2007

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guage finds itself contorted in the shadow of the law of tact, for il est certes toujours possible de produire et de reproduire sans peine ces formules paradoxales. Derrida goes on to explain as follows:
Par Loi, avant toute autre dtermination (religieuse, thique, juridique ou autre), nous entendons ici le commandement, savoir linterruption du contact ou de la continuit avec ce quon a appris appeler nature. Or on ne peut parler de tact (par exemple), et de contact sans contact, que l o une loi vient dicter ou prescrire, enjoindre ce qui nest pas (naturel). Et cela se produit dans la nature, bien avant lhomme, toujours avant la distinction entre des tants et des vivants. (Le Toucher 83-84)

The continuity of what we will later call nature is broken by the law, and this tactfulness is a know-how that is born in this nature that never existed. Nancys rethinking of the zoning of sensing explored above sustains this paradoxical logic, for touch is the interruption of the continuity of being that only is after it has been interrupted. Since this logic resists unification, we must always return to le qui et le quoi, le touchant ou le touch []. Il ny a pas dabord le toucher, et ensuite des modifications secondaires (Le Toucher 84). Rather than a phenomenology of touch, we ought to remain in pursuit of a corpus of touch, never closing off the passive recording of its entries, which are the proliferation of self-touching and folding that produce such important effects. Indeed, even though Nancy seems to be speaking to us about experience, and peut-tre de lexprience en gnral (Le Toucher 129), this is neither the constituting nor passive experience of individual consciousness. To self-touch is to feel oneself touching, to touch oneself at ones own limit, and lexprience en gnral commencerait par l: elle commencerait se sentir toucher une limite, se sentir touche par une limite, et sa propre limite (Le Toucher 129). Experience becomes a placeholder for the relations between self-touching bodies touching each other in the ectopic corpus. Self-touching, which immediately suggests the impropriety of masturbation, se toucher le sexe (Le Toucher 129), is to lose both the proper object and the propriety of touch, to lose the proper at the moment of touching what is most proper, le corps propre:
Et sur le fond sans fond de cette originarit sans ge, cest lhistoire csure des vnements, des irruptions, des mutations sans mesure, sans commune mesure, les singularits incommensurables dont nous parlons depuis le dbut. Mais plus jamais lintrusion dite technique de lautre, lcotechnie des autres corps ne se laissera rduire. (Le Toucher 131)

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of the technical relations of the body in its being shared, and a passive recording of these contingent events of the production of experience in the interruption and spacing of technical mediation. The importance of Nancys exploration of the technical becomes clear if we consider Derridas consideration of immediacy:
elles clatent de rire, ces singularits, sur une limite. Mais cette limite-ci fait se toucher le toucher et les autres sens, confirmant ainsi le privilge quasi transcendantal du tact, en vrit de lespacement. Et de lespacement comme ce qui donne lieu la tekhn et au substitut prothtique. Car le contact alors nopre ni fusion, ni identification, ni mme contigut immdiate. Nous devons une fois de plus dissocier le toucher de ce que le sens commun et le sens philosophique lui accordent toujours, comme lvidence mme, comme le premier axiome dune phnomnologie du toucher, savoir limmdiatet. (Le Toucher 137)

Rejecting the first axiom of a phenomenology of touch amounts to rethinking phenomenology altogether. Bodies are related to other bodies, and even to themselves in self-touching, through a folding back that implies this quasitranscendental of mediation, which is touch itself. In the midst of the deconstruction of Husserls understanding of touch in Ideas II, Derrida suggests that even the most solipsistic reduction of phenomenology finds that it must pass through the other, and thus through the technical, in order to secure its illusory pure interiority. In phenomenology,
cette exprience nest pas dj hante, au moins, mais constitutivement hante, par quelque htro-affection lie lespacement, puis la spatialit visible [] ne faut-il pas distinguer plutt entre plusieurs types dauto-htro-affection sans aucune auto-affection pure, purement propre, immdiate, intuitive, vivante et psychique? Il y aurait sans doute des effets dauto-affection mais leur analyse ne peut pas, nous semble-t-il, esquiver lhtro-affection qui les rend possible et continue de les hanter mme l o cette htro-affection en gnral (celle qui vient de la chose transcendante ou de lautre vivant) semble seffacer. (Le Toucher 205-06)

This deconstruction of the reification of auto-affection is the heart of both Nancys rejection of phenomenology and his deconstruction of Christianity. If we follow Derrida in drawing together Nancys deconstructive gestures into the logic of there is no the X, then the role of recognizing the seemingly transcendent or universal as merely the produced effects of some spacing provides a link from Derridas understanding of Nancys Corpus to Nancys own particular exploration of touch. Nancys general haptology (or the ectopic Corpus, or the proliferation of differences between sensing zones, or the paradoxical logic of tact) would be grounded not on the classical sense of touch, but on a sense of the tactile as it comes to suggest the technical or mediated relations between bodies and the 90 FALL 2007

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senses as the contingent interruptions of contact and continuity. Thus, although Derrida arrives at the rejection of immediacy through a deconstruction of phenomenology, this rejection also follows from Nancys analysis of touch and the installation of the technical in the tactile. As Derrida phrases it:
La constitution du corps propre ainsi dcrite supposerait dj le passage par le dehors et par lautre [] et par lcotechnie et par la techn des corps. Elle supposerait linterruption en gnral, un espacement davant la distinction entre plusieurs espaces, entre dploiement ou propagation psychique (Ausbreitung, Hinbreitung) et extensio de la chose rale. On devrait alors rintroduire tout ce que cette rduction phnomnologique la sphre dappartenance pure du corps propre solipsiste tente de maintenir au-dehors, le dehors mme, lautre, linanim, la ralit matrielleet la mort, le non-vivant, le non-psychique en gnral, le langage, la rhtorique, la techniqe, etc. (Le Toucher 206)

Perhaps this notion of a general haptology, an ecotechnics of bodies that is not related to an elsewhere of sense or a pure interiority but is rather sense sharing bodies, brings us back to the folds. The auto-affection that grounds phenomenological inquiry is constitutively haunted and invaded by all that the phenomenological reduction tries to bracket. What is needed is an ontology of bodies open to the production of experience as the interruption of the continuity of sensibility, and as such, the passive recording of the ectopic corpus of tact and its many folds. By returning to Nancys rethinking of touch as it develops in the context of his aesthetics, we have been able to understand better the logic underlying his deconstruction of the haptocentric tradition, and specifically the technical mediation he discovers located in the very moment of the production of experience. Further, the structure of the self-touching zones of sensing, and their role of interruption and isolation, reemerges in Nancys ectopic ontology. This emphasis on touch and the real bodies coming in and out of technical relations refuses to let us keep aesthetics, ontology, and ethics on separate registers, and puts us in a position to take Derridas contribution as having more than merely academic scope. With Derridas emphasis on the interiority effects and his recognition of Nancys interruption of the Western tradition, the ethical implication of Nancean aesthetics and of deconstruction begins to emerge. Let me return to the epigraph of this article, drawn from LIntrus, where Nancy reflects on the contingent and technical elements of the survival of his own body in light of his heart transplant surgery. The techne of bodies is in no way an abstract metaphysics, but a real attempt to think the crossing of the contingent personal, local, and global histories of bodies. As such, mediation and technicity emerge from aesthetics and ontology as a call for an ethics after VOL. 47, NO. 3 91

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the deconstruction of Christianity and phenomenology. The je of the passage is an effect of the proliferation of these differences, an effect tightly woven into the crevice or gap of technical possibilities. This je is an effect of the contingent and elusive play of the interruptions and mediations of bodies-sharing-meaning. There is no the je, there is only thinking, healing, hurting, underestimating, relief, sensing, surviving, sleeping, wanting. . . , an interminable and open list of the ectopic corpus.15 State University of New York at Stony Brook Notes
1. Jean-Luc Nancy, LIntrus (Paris: ditions Galile, 2000), 14. 2. Jacques Derrida, La Dissmination (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1972), 71. 3. Jean-Luc Nancy, Pourquoi y a-t-il plusieurs arts, en non pas un seul?, Les Muses (Paris: ditions Galile, 2001), 9-70. 4. Jacques Derrida, Le ToucherJean-Luc Nancy (Paris: ditions Galile, 2000), 63. 5. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus (Paris: ditions Mtaili 2000), 78. Although an earlier version of this text was published in 1992, an English essay of the same name (originally presented in 1990) appears as Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, The Birth to Presence, Claudette Sartiliot, trans. (Stanford: Stanford U P, 1993). Entire passages from the English text appear in the French text, but the French text is a more developed statement of Nancys understanding of bodies in relation to his deconstruction of Christianity. All quotations in French are from the French text, and I occasionally quote the English text when materials there are helpful but omitted, greatly altered, or not located by this author in the French text. 6. Nancy is a master of these registries of bodies or ectopic experiences. This particular list continues ad infinitum, as Nancy clearly intends for them all (even though occasionally we find a typographical period rather than suspension points. . .). The importance of this practice of registration will be explored below in relation to the concept corpus. 7. Although it would be impossible to explicate fully Nancys particular deconstructive gestures, it might be noted that this logic of there is no the X can be discovered in many places in his texts. This practice allows Nancy to make quasi-ontological claims as to the essence of things while continuing to operate in a post-deconstructive and hence open metaphysics. For Derridas analysis and suspicion of this Nancean deconstruction, see Derrida, Le Toucher, 322-25. 8. This mirrors the logic behind what Leonard Lawlor identifies as Gilles Deleuzes challenge (to a phenomenology) of immanence. See Leonard Lawlor, The End of Phenomenology: Expressionism in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2003), 80-83, and passim. 9. Similar passages can be found at Nancy, Corpus, 66. 10. It would be important to sort out the political and the quasi metaphysical uses of ecotechnics in Nancys work, a project important for avoiding a misreading of Nancy that collapses his project into phenomenological technoscience or Heideggerian reflections on technology. This, however, is beyond the scope of the present text. 11. Similar passages can be found at Nancy, Corpus, 68-69. 12. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1985). 13. Similar passages can be found at Nancy, Corpus, 77-78. 14. Similar passages can be found at Nancy, Corpus, 72-73. 15. I would like to thank Hugh J. Silverman for comments on an earlier version of this paper, and the Social Studies and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their continued support.

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