The Mediation of Touch

The first communication between human beings, the one between the newborn and the mother, happens through touch. Strangely this first way of relating to each other has barely been considered by our education and our culture, which have favoured sight to the detriment of touch. And yet touching and being touched means experiencing ourselves as living beings. For lack of such a touch, we do not perceive the limits nor the sensitive potential of our bodies. Then we remain immersed in a natural or a cultural universe, incapable of reaching our own individuation and of knowing our fundamental difference from the other(s).

Desire, in particular sexuate desire, is a call for touching one another anew. But this touch requires us to have gained our autonomy and to be able to open up to and commune with the other as transcendent to ourselves while staying in ourselves. This book unveils and explores how touch can act as a basic living mediation in love and, more generally, in our comprehensive individual and collective human becoming. It also considers how touch can contribute to founding a culture respectful of difference instead of subjecting them to an ideal of sameness. We need touch as mediation to fulfil our humanity and to build a truly human thinking and world.

Luce Irigaray is a retired director of research in philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche scientifique (C.N.R.S.), Paris. She has doctorates in philosophy (1974), in linguistics (1968) and in philosophy and literature(1955). She is trained in psychoanalysis and in yoga. She has written more than thirty books translated in various languages. She has also co-edited three books composed of texts by early career researchers as part of a long term undertaking to give birth to a new human being and construct a new world.