On Touching—Jean-Luc NancyUsing the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy as an anchoring point, Jacques Derrida in this book conducts a profound review of the philosophy of the sense of touch, from Plato and Aristotle to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose ground-breaking book Corpus he discusses in detail. Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Didier Franck, Martin Heidegger, Francoise Dastur, and Jean-Louis Chrétien are discussed, as are René Descartes, Diderot, Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, and others. The scope of Derrida's deliberations makes this book a virtual encyclopedia of the philosophy of touch (and the body). Derrida gives special consideration to the thinking of touch in Christianity and, in discussing Jean-Luc Nancy's essay "Deconstruction of Christianity," devotes a section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels. Another section concentrates on "the flesh," as treated by Merleau-Ponty and others in his wake. Derrida's critique of intuitionism, notably in the phenomenological tradition, is one of the guiding threads of the book. On Touching includes a wealth of notes that provide an extremely useful bibliographical resource. Personal and detached all at once, this book, one of the first published in English translation after Jacques Derrida's death, serves as a useful and poignant retrospective on the work of the philosopher. A tribute by Jean-Luc Nancy, written a day after Jacques Derrida's death, is an added feature. |
Contents
When our eyes touch I | 1 |
SI Psyche II | 11 |
Spacings | 20 |
This Is My Body | 36 |
4 The Untouchable or the Vow of Abstinence | 66 |
5 Tender | 92 |
Theres no the sense | 111 |
7 Tangent I | 135 |
To selftouch you | 265 |
S13 And to you The Incalculable | 281 |
Salve | 300 |
Χαῖρε | 313 |
375 | |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
already animal aporias Aristotle auto-affection body proper caress Chair et corps chapter Chrétien cited comes constitution Corpus death deconstruction Descartes différance difference discourse Edmund Husserl Emmanuel Levinas Eros essence example experience extended eyes feeling feminine figure finger Finite Thinking flesh Franck French Giorgio Agamben give hand haptical heart Heidegger human Husserl ibid incarnation intuition intuitionism Jacques Derrida Jean-Luc Nancy Kant kiss L'intrus language Leib Levinas limit logic Luce Irigaray Maine de Biran Merleau Merleau-Ponty metonymy motif mourning mouth movement Nancy's never object oneself ontotheology opening organ originary passage Peggy Kamuf pensée perception Peri psuches phenomenology philosophy possible precisely present privilege Psyche pure question quoted Ravaisson remains seems self-touching sensation sense of touch sensible sight singular soul space speak syncope tact tactile thing thought tion touchable toucher trans transcendental translation truth untouchable Unum quid visible vision weighing word writing