Touch Recovering Our Most Vital Sense by Richard Kearney

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 vii
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 141
Index 197
Acknowledgments
I 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 per-
missions. And finally a special thanks to various members
of my family— especially my brother Michael, for provid-
ing 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.
viii
Touch
Introduction
Are We Losing Our Senses?
I grew up in a country— Ireland—where people only

touched when they were either drunk (south of the bor-
der) 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 rea-
son, 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 bod-
ies, 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
INTRODUCTION
return to “therapies of touch,” but suffice it for now to say

I grew up in a very affectionate family where siblings, par-
ents, and grandparents kept in close touch across genera-
tion, even as our surrounding Irish culture carried scars
of historical trauma (famine and colonization) and reli-
gious stricture (Catholic Jansenism and Protestant puri-
tanism). 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.
2 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 ques-
tion is: are we losing touch with our senses as our experi-
ence 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 epito-
mizes 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 inven-
tion. 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 entertain-
ment, offering a welcome escape from everyday pain, con-
fusion, and boredom— and, above all, offering “connec-
tion.” The World Wide Web links us virtually with other
people’s struggles and dreams in the furthest regions of the 3
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 expe-
rience? 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
INTRODUCTION
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 pass-
ing 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
4 sites, sexting, and social media platforms; while pornogra-
phy 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 entertain-
ment on this planet.
But all this should give us pause, for as cyber technolo-
gies 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 “dig-
ital” 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 down-
town 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 flash-
ing by. Technology overcomes distance, but it does not
always bring nearness.12 5
Our digital age of excarnation is suffering from an “epi-
demic 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 sus-
ceptible 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 spe-
cies loneliness: “the gnawing fear that we are alone in the uni-
verse with a desperate hunger for connection with other
INTRODUCTION
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 pre-
scriptions 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 trans-
formation of technology in light of a renewed interaction
with nature. The Symbiocene affirms the interconnection
between human life and all tangible sentient beings, signal-
ing a movement from the age of human exceptionalism to
6 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 pretechno-
logical 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 move-
ments. 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 Yel-
low 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 sub-
mit, 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 7
a new commons of the flesh.
The present essay is a plea for healing in an age of excar-
nation, identifying some contemporary anxieties and hint-
ing at possibilities of recovery. It is written in praise of the
desire for tactile proximity with our fellows on this earth.
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
L et us begin with some examples from ordinary lan-

guage 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 bear-
ings, 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. Tact-
ful 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
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 differ-
10 ence 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 some-
one 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 con-
strain (a “bear hug”). In sum, there is no uniform hug
canon. And the same can be said for the kiss, the caress,
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 auto-
mated firing of epidermal synapses that fly up to the brain,
it is invariably imbued with particular meanings and val-
ues. 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 ben-
eficial for the persons involved.3 Reciprocity is the golden
rule.
So there is touch and touch. And tact knows the differ-
ence. Respect requires discernment because touch, as
noted, is not always appropriate, especially where power
relations are concerned. Being tactful here means being 11
sensitive in our behavior with others, listening and respond-
ing to the other in a responsible way. Such two-way sensi-
bility 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 sur-
render 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 phe-
nomenologist Edmund Husserl calls “double sensation.” In
the reversibility of touch one has the feeling of both touch-
ing 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 partner-
ing, 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,
12 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 betray-
als of tact, enacting unilateral relations that violate the other-
ness 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. Per-
versions 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 common-
place 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—
leading, in extremis, to the systematic ostracization of oth-

ers 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, suscep-
tible 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 posses-
sion of rare talent. And we are all familiar with the term
touché, meaning: nice one, you hit the mark, you get it, 13
spot on. A usage dating back to the eighteenth- century lan-
guage of dueling when arms-length tactics of parry and
thrust failed and the opponent’s blade struck flesh, a mean-
ing carried into colloquial repartee to refer to a witty come-
back 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 includ-
ing 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 per-
formed countless acts of audacity, he finally succeeds in
his mission when he experiences the feeling of tiny min-
nows being poured onto his belly by the maid. Wisdom is
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 Alge-
rian 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
14 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 feel-
ings and emotions. Whenever outer behavior coincides
with inner experience, we find ourselves in touch with our-
selves 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 diges-
tive 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 West-
ern science has taken so long to appreciate them. In the
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. Emo-
tions 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 15
on another. In the beginning was tact. Think of the clas-
sic 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 hand-
shakes 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
inclusive way, as an embodied manner of being in the

world, an existential approach to things that is open and vul-
nerable, 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 sensi-
bilities, I repeat, are synesthetic— operating multilateral
relations between the five senses. Or, more precisely, touch
is implicit in every sense, for the “double sensibility”
16 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 sepa-
rated 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 indif-
ference or violence). In a healthy life the reversibility of
sense presupposes the omnipresence of universal tactility.
Without the transversality of touch, sensibility risks sensa-
tionalism: 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
17
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 acknowledg-
ment of things, tasted and tested in lived experience. Savvy
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 open-
ing 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 appre-
ciation of art, cuisine, eros.10 To have taste, at the sensory
18 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, drunk-
enness, addiction). Tactful taste— savvy— is about atten-
tion, 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 inges-
tion (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 infan-
tile fantasy of the “good and bad breast.”12 We first taste the
world through our tongues and only later translate these
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. Anthro-
pologist Claude Lévi-Strauss explains how the earliest soci-
eties 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 mov-
ing account of taste as tender initiation: 19
Gentleness belongs above all to the palate, to the new-

born’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
has its tale of primal tasting. For if ontogeny repeats phy-

logeny, it also repeats cosmogony. From the earliest wis-
dom 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 Pro-
metheus offering meats to Zeus or Eumaeus, the swine-
herd, feeding Odysseus in his hut. Not to mention the clas-
sic scene in Genesis where Abraham and Sarah share a
meal with strangers at Mamre, acquiring the wisdom of
20 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 Eucha-
rist). No doubt echoing the ancient psalm: “taste and see
that the Lord is good.”
Finally we might note that some of the greatest transfor-
mation 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
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 discrimi-
nation. 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. 21
Contemporary neuroscience has much to tell us about the
affinities between sensuality and scent, as in the erotico-
chemical 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 sub-
jects is brilliantly explored by Audrey Schulman in her
novel A Theory of Bastards. An experiment based on neuro-
scientic evidence concerning the relative location of key
brain factors such as the olfactory nerve and the insular cor-
tex, 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:
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)
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 doc-
tors 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
22 Hullah, stem from a special talent at scenting human secre-
tions, 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 psy-
chical. “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 radi-
cally in the mid-nineteenth century when clerics attuned to
Victorian values deemed the porcine odor of rural Irish par-
lors to be a sign of insalubriousness rather than largesse.
The nose alters according to historical and material circum-
stances; and odors have affective power because they are
charged with social conventions. Over time, smells take on

new connotations, eliciting varying emotional responses
that inform the way we interpret our world. Olfactory sen-
sation 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 23
smell in the end.
Many great works of literature bear witness to the power
of flair. One thinks of Homer’s moving account of Odys-
seus’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 hom-
age to scent and savor in the famous madeleine scene of
Remembrance of Things Past—where the fragrant sip of lin-
den tea and pastry triggers lost childhood memories. Not
to mention the extraordinary powers of fragrance inge-
niously 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
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 experi-
ence, so that one is touched by what the eye touches. I am
speaking of an intuition (Augenblick) where the split hori-
zons of past and future traverse and illuminate the pres-
ent.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 them-
selves through him. An account that Maurice Merleau-Ponty
cites as evidence of synesthetic perception or “tactile see-

ing.”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 sec-
ond naivete of renewed holistic insight: a doubled vision 25
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 acci-
dent 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.”
Nor, to rejoin a more contemporary discussion, should

we omit to mention here the accounts of heightened
“double perception” recorded by pioneers of natural psycho-
active 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 partici-
pants 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
26 beneath mono-optic perception signals an amplification of
all the senses at once, which has nothing to do with hallu-
cination, 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 dig-
ital 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 per-
ception 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
All persons—not just poets, mystics, and sages— are capa-

ble 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 musi-
cians, to have “a good ear.” To be sound is to be keenly
attuned to one’s inner feelings and to those of others. To lis-
ten 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 27
things. To resonate.31 To be in touch with reality by respond-
ing 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
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 perfor-
mance 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 spir-
itual, 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
28 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 dis-
crimination 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 heal-
ings, as mothers and lovers well know. Since the skin is
another ear— our first ear—it attunes us to musical elements
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 gesta-
tion 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 thera-
peutic 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 29
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 car-
nal 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 conversa-
tion 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
from her work with trauma survivors to show us that heal-

ing 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, hor-
rible as it was, and to hold it with them.”41 Here we find a
30 collusion of listening and holding where Bamber per-
forms 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 frequen-
cies, 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,
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”)
31
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. Pla-
tonism judged sight to be superior to touch since it was
considered closer to reason, rising upward to supersensi-
ble ideas rather than descending, with touch, to dark feel-
ings 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 sover-
eign. 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
PHILOSOPHIES OF TOUCH
by our efforts we shall know all that is pure, which is pre-

sumably the truth, for it is not permitted to the impure to
touch the pure.”2
The outcome of this battle of ideas was to character-
ize 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 reha-
bilitate the original Aristotelian discovery of touch, return-
ing our sensibility “to the things themselves.”3 The most
primordial things (phenomena) would now, once again, be
relocated in our embodied lived experience— our sensa-
tions, moods, and emotions prior to intellectual cognition.
34 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 every-
day tact, savvy, and flair tell us all the time. If only we dare
to know what we already know. In contemporary phenom-
enology 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
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 oth-
ers 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 vul- 35
nerability of skin. The thin-skinned person is sensitive
and perceptive, observes Aristotle, while the thick-skinned
is coarse and ignorant. Our first intelligence is epider-
mal.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 experi-
ence 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, Aristo-
tle made the radical counterclaim that touch does indeed
have a medium, namely “flesh”(sarx).7 For flesh is not
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 simpli-
fied the subtle dialectics of its founder, Plato. Platonism
was in many ways a forgetfulness of Plato.) Our first wis-
dom 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 gov-
36 erned by “the soul’s eye.” Sight came to dominate the hier-
archy 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 Chris-
tian 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.
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 break-
through insight—which is philosophy catching up with
lived experience—means that flesh harbors crucial spaces
and intervals through which touch navigates.11 Flesh is 37
full of holes, and that is a good thing. Touch is not imme-
diacy 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 negoti-
ate between various embodied beings, to respond to solici-
tations, 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 per-
fection 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
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
38 have seen, potentially in our other senses too—seeing, hear-
ing, smelling, hearing. Touch informs every human sensa-
tion, and its omnipresence throughout our corporeal expe-
rience 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 com-
mutes, 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 car-
nal hermeneutics.
▶▹▶
While I may seem directly present to what I touch and

directly touched by what is present, there is always some-
thing 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
from something other than ourselves. Flesh translates this

otherness, crossing back and forth between self and strange-
ness. 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 antici-
pates the insights of contemporary hermeneutics.14 Touch
remains, for the most part, preconscious or unconscious (as 39
we would say post-Freud), and is no less sensitive for that.
Au contraire, there is so much going on in our sensible expe-
rience 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 negotia-
tion of the world. Which is why Aristotle himself was com-
pelled 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
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 ear-
liest works of art. Cave drawings. Stone carvings. Touch-
stones. Murals and frescoes. Orbs and curves, lines and
crossings. All written on the body of the world.
SENSING THE WORLD— SKIN ON SKIN
But if touch is something we do to the world, it is also some-

thing the world does to us. It works both ways. As we reach
out a hand, touch is what first affects us, in a concrete, per-
40 sonal 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 evalu-
ates lived situations. Babies are moody little beings, their
babblings and probings already a play of testing and tasting.18
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 41
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, receiv-
ing, enduring others who come to us as this or that. Pas-
sion, 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 (expeausition) there is no real
experience.20 Through flesh—naked and tactile—we are
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 sur-
face 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 touch-
ing 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
42 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 hot-
ter or colder than the temperature of our skin. While the
organ of smell is odorless, and the organ of sound sound-
less, the medium of touch is always tactile. Touch is touched
by what it touches and can touch itself touching. This fun-
damental 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 origi-
nal 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.
But let me return here to the question of risk—what we

might call the wagering of flesh. Simply put: without the sen-
sitivity 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, vigi-
lance, finesse. “Man’s flesh is the softest of all,” notes Aris-
totle 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 supe-
rior 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 43
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 tan-
gible 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 can-
not 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
ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
There are important ethical evaluations at work here. Tac-

tile 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 vari-
ous 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, consum-
ing without caring, swallowing without savoring (what the
French call dégustation). “Self-indulgent people make no use
44 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 full-
ness of the tongue sensing. Good taste is integral, apprecia-
tive, 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
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 wel-
come 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, 45
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
existence, while the latter is considered a thing to be mea-

sured 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 relation-
ship. 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 pre-
cisely 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 disembod-
46 ied consciousness experiencing a mere thing amidst things,
but as flesh experiencing flesh in a fundamentally recip-
rocal 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 phenome-
non 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 some-
thing 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 descrip-
tions 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
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 trans-
fusion 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, insert-
ing 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 47
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- one-
another, and, as such, serves as the precondition of lan-
guage. 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 tac-
tile 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 phenom-
enologists” who, like him, offered deep contemporary
insights into our embodied being. These included Martin
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 Infin-
ity (1961), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s vivid account of
human relations as incarnate body-subjects in Phenomenol-
ogy 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
48 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 tast-
ing, 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
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 phe-
nomenology of touch to the question of healing. In Phenom-
enology 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) psycho-
logical 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 49
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 existen-
tial 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 phil-
osophically neglected dimension of tactility in sexuality,
50
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 pri-
mary 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
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 vulnerabil-
ity 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 dimen-
sion of psychic- corporal “semiotics” that needs to be
addressed for real healing to happen. She is particularly
strong on the formative postnatal relationship between 51
mother and child which she calls “reliance” (from the
French relier, to connect). This rapport of carnal “presub-
jectivity” has been ignored, she argues, by our overly calcu-
lative 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 moth-
ers 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 umbi-
licus signaling my inaugural separation from the mother
and my primal exposition to the world. Flesh is radical vul-
nerability, 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,
making the body a kind of book. To be tangible is to be read-

able. As when Lady Macbeth says to Macbeth—“Your face,
my Thane, is like a book where men may read stranger mat-
ters.” 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, pierc-
ings) 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 becom-
ing affective incorporations of meaning into action. From
52 Ezekiel eating the scroll that turned sweet in his belly to
modern readers imitating the lives of literary heroes. Cen-
sorship 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 fem-

inist phenomenology call us back into touch with tactual-
ity, the mainstream academy—in keeping with our opto-
centric 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
APPENDIX: THE PARADOX OF THE UNCANNY

AS EMBODIED KNOWING
A key sentiment addressed by contemporary phenomenol-

ogy 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 con-
ceptual clarification. Canniness connotes what might be
called a natural or native intelligence, a can-do ability to get 53
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,” know-
ing 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 wis-
dom 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
conventional knowing, cunnen is concerned with under-

ground 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 “coun-
try 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 sym-
bolically linked with hidden desires. (See, for example, the
depiction of rabbits and foxes in the Cluny tapestry of “The
54 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 trea-
sure 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 under-
ground 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, unheim-
lich or uncanny! In short, the intimately familiar becomes
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 cham-
ber (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 55
we hide them not only from others but even from our-
selves. 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 ulti-
mately 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 experi-
ences of generation and death that modern society has
repressed. The paradoxical feeling expresses a sort of
nocturnal conscience—what James Joyce called “night-
time consciousness”— that operates according to a logic
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 gen-
erations. The splitting of the self into conscious and uncon-
scious is the symptom of a defense mechanism whereby
the ego projects internal impulses and associations out-
ward 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,
56 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 repres-
sion. When we lose touch with our elementary feelings
about death, they flee underground and return as phan-
toms. The ghosts of the uncanny signal the return of the
repressed. And this phenomenon of doubling, while age-
less 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 imagi-
naries. 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
as repeat cycles of the felt unconscious. Such spectacles

are symptomatic of a repetition compulsion screening dra-
mas of our collective psyche. Suitable signifiers for a semi-
otics of doubling.
Our imaginary epitomizes the enigma of the uncanny.
And it does so not only in popular culture, where under-
ground 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 art-
ist 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 canni- 57
ness 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 hid-
ing places / . . . ferreting themselves out of their dark
hutch.” He speaks of the art of touch as a subterranean sen-
sibility, 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 indel-
ibly written into the nervous system.” And this retrieval of
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 com-
pares 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 some-
thing contrived or picked up in higher education establish-
ments. 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
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.
59
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 wound-
ing and healing through the art of touch. Most of these
TALES OF THE WOUNDED HEALER
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
One of the first wounded healers in Western literature is
Odysseus, whose name means “bearer of pain.” He car-
ries wounds both suffered and inflicted by his forebears.
In the beginning of Homer’s story, Odysseus seeks to
62 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 ambro-
sia) 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 recog-
nized 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 inci-
dent 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
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 rem-
edy 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 patho-
logical fear (phobos) into serenity. Compassion spells a
proper closeness to pain without being overwhelmed; while 63
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.
64
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 ances-
tors 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 trau-
mas of previous generations: Laios raped the son of his host,
Pelops, thereby committing a double transgression that rep-
licates 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
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 ter-
restrial 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. 65
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
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 blind-
folded 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.
66 By contrast, Hippocrates, the other patron of Greek med-
icine, 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 cur-
ing 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 cas-
trates his father Ouranos, Zeus castrates his father Chro-
nos). 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
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 inher-
ited from his father (Chronos was patron of saturnine mel-
ancholy). Chiron used love to salve and salvage time. Pin-
dar 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,
and the ingestion of curative herbs. Many supplicants

entered the temples, known as Asclepia, with terracotta fig-
ures of ailing body parts that were laid at the shrine. Sur-
rounded 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 sign-
post pharmacies to this day. (The serpent was called phar-
makos, with the double sense of venom-cure, informing the
later practice of vaccination). There are many ancient sculp-
68 tures 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 Hip-
pocrates’ followers. Asclepieia developed into sacred hos-
tels 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 pow-
ers of healing could meet.7
In his book A Place of Healing, Michael Kearney shows
how the Asclepian tradition of medicine practiced earth wis-
dom, 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
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 inter-
ventions, 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 mor-
tal 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 con-
temporary terms, one has a choice: to reach for the safe dis- 69
tance 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
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)
of the medical expert managing the one in need. Doctor

and patient now meet as two human beings, where the for-
mer 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 “convales-
cence”: 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 accompani-
ment.11 A fitting reminder given today’s crisis of solidarity 71
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 epi-
sodes 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 com-
ing from tactile contact with the Other. Jacob’s hand com-
bat 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.
72
3.5 Eugene Delacroix, Jacob Wrestling with Angel
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 por-
traits 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
through the centuries to this day. This custom was origi-

nally linked with Byzantine theories of the “haptic extra-
mission” of the gaze, where touch and sight were said to
cross synesthetically in a form of “tangible vision.” The Byz-
antines 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 expe-
rience 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 73
serpent (Numbers 21:4– 9).15
Christianity made Christ emblematic of the wounded
healer.16 The crucified body served as a paradigm of heal-
ing over the centuries, with madonnas and saints follow-
ing in its wake—from the heart-pierced Mater Dolorosa to
stigmata-bearing figures like Francis and Padre Pio: pil-
grims who healed others though they could not heal them-
selves. 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 incar-
national 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
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: “Tak-
74 ing 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: ‘Ephpha-
tha!’ 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 Syro-
Phoenician’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 tangi-
ble, and Christianity is a story of “double sensation”
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 por-
trayed 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) 75
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
3.6 Rembrandt, Healing of the Blind Man
3.7 Healing a bleeding woman, fourth-century catacomb

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 theol-
ogy 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. (Sev-
eral 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 break-
fast” are his words to them on Lake Galilee (John 21:12). 77
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 scep-
tic, 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
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.
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 iden-
tifications with wounded strangers, forgotten or remem-
78 bered. It signals the tangible reiteration of Christ—BC and
AD—bringing Jesus back to earth in a continuous com-
munity of solidarity and compassion.23 This is the king-
dom 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, teach-
ers from the basement, reminding Jesus that his divinity is
3.8 Thomas touching wounds, detail from Caravaggio,

The Incredulity of Thomas (photo by Sarah Kearney)
79
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 origi-
nal 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.
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 resul-
tant 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 con-
cerning 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, refus-
ing 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 corpo-
ral mercy toward the sick, and in sacred celebrations of
natural creation— epitomized in the ecological identifica-
tion 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
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 81
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
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,
82 reminding us of the difference between enabling and dis-
abling touch in all interpersonal relations—between touch
that liberates and touch that grasps. As many classic depic-
tions 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 “embrac-
ing his feet.” Instead of clinging to the illusion of a disem-
bodied 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
the eschatological promise of Christianity as anacarna-

tion: 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 tradi-
tion has a story to tell about the difference.34
83
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 compul-
sively than follow their normal “pleasure principle”? His
answer was the existence of a death drive (thanatos) that
accompanies our life drive (eros) and sometimes over-
whelms it.1 Curiously, the mature Freud played down the
role of touch in healing, privileging the intellectual interpre-
tation of words over more embodied approaches. And yet
HEALING TOUCH
Freud himself was a wounded healer in many respects. Not

only did he suffer from his outsider status as a Jew in anti-
Semitic 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 Princi-
ple. I am speaking of the much commented upon fort/da
scene where little Ernst plays with a cotton spool in imita-
tion 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
86 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 compen-
sation 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 tac-
tility 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
HEALING TOUCH
residue traces of such events. He conceded in a letter to

his colleague, Josef Breuer, that while verbal interpreta-
tion was primary, “reminiscence without affect almost
invariably produces no results.”4 But these initial conces-
sions 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 87
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 gen-
erations, 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
HEALING TOUCH
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 Bam-
ber. 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
88 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 com-
mitted against them and their loved ones. “I would be sit-
ting 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 recognize 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
HEALING TOUCH
element of embodied testimony, the inmates of the camps

could not rise from their beds and walk. They could not sur-
vive 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 tactil-
ity. The phrase “skin deep” actually means what it says. The
physiological response to touch goes like this: “Receptors 89
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 favor-
ably 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 show-
ing how physical touch activates areas of the cerebral cor-
tex, 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.
HEALING TOUCH
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 prereq-
90 uiste 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), Bes-
sel Van der Kolk presents cogent evidence for a therapeu-
tics 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 expe-
riential 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 West-
ern medicine the brain disease model has taken control out
HEALING TOUCH
of our hands. In the U.S., the Hippocratic method has side-

lined 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 Ascle-
pian 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 interac- 91
tive haptic healing process.14 As Peter Levine famously put
it: “I grew up in a profession where it was deemed unethi-
cal to touch a client. I await the day when it will be unethi-
cal not to.”15
Such an ethic of tactile therapy endorses a model of
“somatic dialogue” whose benefits in the form of affirma-
tive mutual mirroring between therapist and patient are
associated with nonverbal formative processes. These pro-
cesses are accessed through the therapist’s psycho-bodily
sense of their patients, as they register them via voice, ges-
tures, and touch still mostly ignored in standard therapy.
Good trauma therapists, attentive to projective identifica-
tions, 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, perform-
ing with tactile bodies on the stage of life.16
HEALING TOUCH
Faced with trauma, the mind often goes into denial and
proceeds as if nothing happened. Meanwhile stress hor-
mones continue sending signals to the muscles and tis-
sues of the body—resulting in certain forms of somatic ill-
ness. 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 ther-
apy and medication are not useful or necessary, only that
92 they are not sufficient. More is needed.
Van der Kolk cites current neuroscientific research show-
ing 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 prefron-
tal 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 neu-
ron” activity: a sensorium where we first respond to others
in terms of bodily imitation and empathy—thereby prefig-
uring the onset of language. The emotional brain records
our first steps in life, when mind and body are synchro-
nous, and continues to keep us in touch with others’
HEALING TOUCH
feelings—positive and negative—making us angry or vul-

nerable, calm or anxious.19 Respondeo ergo cogito. Contem-
porary neuroscience clearly confirms the claim of both phe-
nomenology 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 93
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 re-
accessed 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 ther-
apy is to get us back in touch with these pre-narrative sen-
sations so that we may re-live them (and re-tell them), even-
tually incorporating them into our future. The goal is to
reintegrate one’s bodily experience of past trauma without
HEALING TOUCH
being overwhelmed by the original pain and panic. A sur-

vey 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 “tact-
fully” 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
94 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 subcu-
taneous 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 hap-
pen, 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 uncon-
scious wounds take shape in time, and scars take shape in
space, bruises are where time and space meet.
HEALING TOUCH
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 95
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 cov-
ered. 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 return-
ing 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
HEALING TOUCH
REINTEGRATING TRAUMA
When it comes to healing trauma, the body is the bridge.

Flesh harbors places not easily entered by our rational, lin-
guistic 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:
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
96 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 trans-
lates into verbal-conceptual thinking.
The primary work of transmission is located in the amyg-
dala: 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
HEALING TOUCH
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 hap-
pening. And here the amygdala calls for supervisory exper-
tise from the “watchtower”—the medial cortex situated in
the prefontal brain area that offers rational “objective” guid-
ance 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 97
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 psy-
chological misery.”34 Post-traumatic stress disorder is symp-
tomatic of a blanking-out of pain where sufferers may opt
to replace the original wounding with numbness and eva-
sion (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
HEALING TOUCH
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 express-
ing 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 sig-
nal collapse, rigidity, rage or defensiveness.”36 Purely logi-
cal explanations—why you feel this way or that— do not
98 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 tradi-
tional 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
HEALING TOUCH
of narrative discourse. This is why so many trauma spe-

cialists today are working with breathing, movement,
rhythm, and touch to address basic somatic functions of the
sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and heart rate variabil-
ity (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 collab-
oration, 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 99
level that we find primary release.39 Most of our psychologi-
cal 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 well-
ness takes the form of a return to sensory sensibility.40 Neu-
rotic 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 gut-
wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skel-
etal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral com-
munication 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
HEALING TOUCH
100
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 actu-

ally 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 101
It seems that human health is intimately linked to ques-

tions of attachment. In what follows I rehearse a body of
research on this subject from doctors, therapists, and ecol-
ogists 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 con-
tact. We are profoundly social creatures; our lives consist of
HEALING TOUCH
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 (isola-
tion or quarantine)— can have a deep impact on its later
experience.45 On the other hand, it is well known that exces-
sive 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
102 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 capac-
ity 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 orphan-
age that went to great lengths in 1945 to prevent its chil-
dren from being exposed to disease, giving them excellent
nutrition and medical care, but minimizing physical con-
tact for fear of germs. Thirty-seven percent of the infants
HEALING TOUCH
died before reaching the age of two.48 Failings in the pri-

mary tangible attunement between mother/primary care-
giver and child can lead to malfunction in later life. Whence
the claim that infants lacking physical attunement are sus-
ceptible to missing feedback from their own body as pri-
mary site of pleasure and orientation.49
In his book The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emo-
tion in the Making of Consciousness (1999), neuroscientist
Antonio Damasio builds on the insights of former psychol-
ogists 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, 103
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 car-
nal 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
HEALING TOUCH
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 psycholo-
gist, founded the Touch Research Institute at the Univer-
sity of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, where she
extended her research of “touch deprivation and enhance-
ment” 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 popu-
104 lar 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 suffer-
ers, the most effective way of alleviating stress and suffer-
ing 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 paren-
tal figures know this well, as do most good primary care-
givers, 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
HEALING TOUCH
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 teach-
ing 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 expe-
rience of connection, warmth, and concern. Code 10-1993
of Meyniel’s medical instructions reads as follows: “It is 105
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 “embod-
ied” healing to be more effective and long-lasting. In my
case, these included Iyengar yoga practice, Shiatsu mas-
sage therapy, pranayama deep breathing, and regular phys-
ical exercises like swimming and fishing in the Irish Sea,
HEALING TOUCH
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 San-
tiago 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 person-

ally and communally. The implications of tactile embodi-
ment for public health practice and policy today are enor-
mous. 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 star-
tling 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 quick-
fix solutions like painkillers, antidepressants, short-term
behavioral therapy, or social work. But such solutions, while
HEALING TOUCH
satisfying the criteria of busy professional clinics and insur-

ance companies, do not always work in the long term, for
they rarely address the underlying causes; and they fre-
quently 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 “emotional-
engagement system” that is the register of our pain, con-
centrating 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. 107
▶▹▶
The need for healing through “contact” is evident at the col-

lective 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 vio-
lence. 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
HEALING TOUCH
instructive here, for example, is the testimony of Pumla

Gobodo-Madikizela, a founder of the antiapartheid move-
ment 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 forgive-
ness somehow triggering his retrospective empathy for
his victims, which no amount of legal or institutional retri-
bution could have achieved. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
challenged the senseless repetition of wounding where
108 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 mat-
ter how much talking sufferers of collective historical con-
flict 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
HEALING TOUCH
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 ulti-
mately embodied sense. A commons of the body.
APPENDIX: RECONNECTING WITH THE ANIMAL
Any commons of the body worth its salt includes the ani-
mal world—where we all began. Especially when it comes
to tactile healing. Somatic therapy focused on the mamma-
lian limbic brain has been known to benefit from work
with animals such as horses, dogs, and dolphins. Equine- 109
assisted 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 pro-
vides the natural-animal-human equivalent to hospital incu-
bation in developed medical cultures, permitting premature
HEALING TOUCH
babies not only to survive but to flourish better than in clini-

cal incubators with drips and feeds.66 The evidence sug-
gests that infant flourishing is as much about attachment
as alimentation.
In his book, Our Wild Calling: How Connecting with Ani-
mals Can Transform Our Lives— and Save Theirs, nature
scholar Richard Louv rehearses persuasive stories of how
humans and animals heal each other through mutual attun-
ement. “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
110 and the child, the boy and the jaguar, the fisherman and the
golden eagles on the shore.”67 Louv makes a plea for a ther-
apeutic 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 popula-
tion 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 aug-
ment 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 rep-
aration 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
HEALING TOUCH
be accomplished solely through technology or institu-

tional politics. It calls for a more affective connection to
the family of animals and plants, acknowledging the “ines-
capable 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 encom-
passing 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 111
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
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
RECLAIMING TOUCH IN THE AGE OF EXCARNATION
tangible persons with intangible personae—surrogates who

sate our fantasies, Alexa and other avatars who do our bid-
ding, GPS voices who tell us where to go, Amazon shop-
ping 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 cyber-
world of simulations?
I recently had occasion to debate these issues in a semi-
nar at Boston College. We were discussing the critical rap-
port between “Image and Eros” and I was interested in how
114 students related this to their own everyday experiences. Sev-
eral 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 becom-
ing 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
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 with-
out 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 after-
ward, than we were all back online. We were hooked, stu-
dents and faculty alike. 115
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)

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 bit-
ing 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
from a toxic pollutant invading their environment. But they

soon realize that such simulating technologies cannot res-
cue 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 expe-
rience 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 consum-
ing new versions of the expanding digital industry. Accord-
ing 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 “Amer-
icans Check Their Phones a Billion Times per Day,” citing 117
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 elec-
tronic 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.
On a global platform, the economic market for the deploy-

ment 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 plat-
forms.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, You-
Tube 1.5 billion, Instagram 88 million, Snapchat 250 mil-
lion. Such programs invite users to post photos, write sta-
tuses, and share videos, all of which can be managed
through filters, stickers, drawings, and other modes of edit-
ing. YouTube allows consumers to produce footage with
easy software, while Instagram hosts over a million postings
118 per day, often selfies doctored with user-friendly editing fea-
tures, removing the imperfections of real bodies in the
construction of ideal ones. By denying incarnate presence,
we promote excarnate absence. We collaborate in the pro-
liferation 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 pho-
tos published online with serious consequences in differ-
ent domains—from online intimidation to false accusations
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 infa-
mous 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 regard-
ing online violence, witnessed in the live-streaming of bar-
baric acts in the 2019 massacre in Christchurch, New Zea-
land, and other mass killings since. 119
This was not to deny, for a moment, that social media
also plays a positive role in our lives—inviting us to empa-
thize “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 out-
lasts 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 experi-
ence. The challenge, we agreed, is to heed the dynamic of
double sensation—not just to “view” pain through touch-
screens but to be touched by pain in turn. A major challenge
that certain experiments in haptic AR technology are cur-

rently 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 Amer-
ica 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 pornogra-
phy and puritanism display an alienation from flesh—
puritanism replacing sex with the virtuous, pornography
120 replacing it with the virtual. Each is out of touch with the
body. Though the parallel is not without paradox: pornog-
raphy promises pleasure of a surrogate kind while puritan-
ism 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 prod-
ucts at the tap of a screen. Just as Amazon is closing book-
stores (where one browses shelves, handles covers, turns
pages, and meets living authors), Pornhub is closing pub-
lic venues of erotica (most adult movies today being con-
sumed on private monitors rather than in red light cine-
mas). 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
This move from tactile contact to optical vision raises the

question, in turn, of communication. The flight of erotic-
romantic behavior, from communal rituals to digital fanta-
sies, 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 con-
gress between the sexes (and those of fluid genders). Gone
are the courtship rites of yesteryear—no bad thing regard-
ing sexist privilege— as we await a new ethic of sexual ped-
agogy 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. Unarticu- 121
lated attitudes of suspicion and confusion make genuine
erotic exchange more difficult as the vicarious “safety” of
Internet sex becomes more attractive. Experiencing prob-
lems 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
academia itself, many students noted, is heading the way

of excarnation, with more courses offered online in “dis-
tance 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 particu-
lar 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 technol-
ogies. Telepedagogy may soon be the new normal (espe-
cially after COVID-19).17 Indeed certain cyber engineers
122 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, regard-
ing 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
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 ques-
tions, 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 con-
temporary conflicts “TV Wars”—global spectacles witnessed
through digital transmission of “smart bombs” hitting tar- 123
gets 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 stu-
dents asked: How do we make peace if there is no hand to
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?
JUST GAMING?
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 symp-
tomatic signs of the relationship between the optical and
124 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 contro-
versial Grand Theft Auto (GTA). When first released, mas-
sive 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,
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 per-
form 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 surround-
ings. 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 ava-
tars with seeming total control. But the operative word here 125
is seeming, for the hyperrealist world remains totally unreal.
Intangible. It is but a simulacrum blurring boundaries
between actual and imaginary worlds. Hence the contro-
versy 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 enter-
taining, such games run the risk of one-way sensational-
ism 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
agreed that scholarly critique was not enough in the end. It

was one thing to critically engage with the gaming phenom-
enon 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 exam-
ple, 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 avant-
garde games that addressed the crisis of touch in our time.
I offer a brief sample here. One class presentation ana-
lyzed the film Don Jon, a critical parody of a porn addict
126 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 exper-
imentation 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)

5.4 The Truman Show (film still)
128
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 popu-
lar network series Black Mirror and Westworld, which also
address the relationship between virtual and carnal exis-
tence. 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 neg-
ative 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
indulge their libidinal fantasies with impunity. Here we wit-

ness a game in which lifelike creatures are manipulated by
their visitors until they revolt— eventually recovering mem-
ories of suffering and desire.22 The cyber-beings of West-
world 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 consider-
ation 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 heal-
ing 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 129
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 prom-
ising 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, criti-

cally 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
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 com-
pacts between the virtual and the lived. I am thinking espe-
cially of cutting-edge projects with digital storytelling and
VR technology at the MIT Open Doc Lab and Public VR Lab
130 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 life-
world.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 prosthe-
ses 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 produc-
tive possibilities of collusion between virtual and embodied
experience—ways in which our real and simulated worlds
may cooperate rather than compete, avoiding rigid dual-
isms of artificial versus tactile intelligence. For there is
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 emerg-
ing 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 heal-
ing 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 131
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 mov-
ies on computer screens while also visiting movie houses,
theaters, and live shows where a sense of shared commu-
nity can trigger unexpected feelings of solidarity and com-
passion. 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
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 find-
ing 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
132 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 sen-
sibility”: 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 alto-
gether. 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 dis-
tancing, mandated by the coronavirus, made us acutely
aware of how central touch is to our lives. The threat of con-
tagion through physical contact meant tactile encounters
were kept to a minimum, if not outlawed— everyone con-
sidered 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 quaran-
tine or to travel to visit a dying relative in person. I was
also no longer able to teach my students face-to-face— as
CODA
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 tangi-
ble 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
134 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. Feel-
ings 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, ani-
mals, 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 135
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
CODA
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 proj-
ects, 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 abso-
136 lutely 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 mush-
roomed on the Internet. Heartrending tales of dying loved
ones trended alongside clips of ingenious hilarity. Face-
time farewells and terminal appeals to Alexa were fol-
lowed by mischievous memes of irreverent wit.3 (A favor-
ite 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
CODA
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 hom-
age 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 pallia-
tive 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 imag- 137
inings, 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 ana-
lyzed 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 isola-
tion in front of screens. This has not abolished loneli-
ness, but has ensconced it in the social media, has com-
pressed it in messages and data. People already devastated
by loneliness find themselves more alone today, because
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
On a more positive note, Kristeva surmises that the viral cri-

sis has triggered a “revelation of life as a whole, starting
138 with everyone’s vulnerability with regard to pleasure and
sexuality,” and that it is preparing us “for a new art of liv-
ing 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 wit-
nessed 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 bar-
riers of entry, the program fostered multiple kinds of
inventive gatherings— social interactions, haptic journeys,
teletherapies, spiritual liturgies, synesthetic happenings.
CODA
Such multisensory events enabled spatially separated par-

ticipants 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 syn-
thetic skin were devised to allow a tactile sense of “felt”
empathy with far-away loved ones and friends.12 This inten-
sified use of social VR via Altspace and other telehaptic
projects served as a laboratory for new possibilities of con-
necting 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. 139
What I find most striking about these telehaptic experi-
ments 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 communi-
cation 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.
CODA
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 indis-
pensable 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 con-
vene in the interests of human well-being. If only we keep
in touch. Only connect.
140
Notes
Introduction
1. I first heard the term excarnation from my Canadian teacher, Charles

Taylor, who directed my graduate studies at McGill University, Mon-
treal, in 1976– 1977.
2. 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.
3. See Redmond O’Hanlon, “The Potential of Touch in Borderline Per-
sonality Disorder Therapy (BPD),” paper delivered at the British and
Irish Group for the Study of Personality Disorder Annual Conference,
INTRODUCTION
Lincoln, UK, 2014. See also the research of Jessica Smith, “Touch Hun-
ger,” graduate dissertation in art history, University of Lancaster, 2019.
4. 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 sci-
ence.” She goes on: “Touching another human being is such a com-
plex 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 neu-
rons conveying so many subtleties” (cited in Teeman, “Coronavirus Has
Killed the Power of Touch”).
5. Francis McGlone, in Teeman, “Coronavirus Has Killed the Power of
142 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.”
6. 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 scholar-
ships 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.
7. The term psy- ops (psychological operations in war theaters) was com-
monly used by U.S. secretary of state Donald Rumsfeld in military cam-
paigns waged in the Middle East after 9/11. See our “Thinking After
Terror,” in Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters (New York:
Routledge, 2002).
8. Pornhub.com is one of the most visited sites on the Net, while “Live
Jasmine” invites customers to command and control the sexual spec-
tacle of live cam performers. With the advent of broadband and video
INTRODUCTION
streaming, free online pornography became instantly accessible, and

is currently how many young people learn about sex. For a good criti-
cal 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: Navigat-
ing the Complicated New Landscape (New York: Harper, 2016).
9. It is curious, for example, that some iPhone/iPhoto visitors to Inter-
net 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 grow-
ing 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? Per-
haps it is to supplement digital vision with actual touch, in the same 143
way that many still like to supplement downloaded music with “live
performances” involving singers and bands.
10. 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.
11. Constance Classen, author of The Deepest Sense, notes that the contempo-
rary “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 previ-
ously 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”).
12. 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.
13. See Richard Louv, Our Wild Calling: How Connecting with Animals Can
Save Our Lives and Save Theirs (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2019).
14. Louv, 16.
INTRODUCTION
15. Richard Louv, citing ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht, 18– 19. For simi-
lar powerful pleas by ecological philosophers, see David Wood, Reoc-
cupy 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. Every interrogator knows the link between sensory deprivation and dis-
orientation. It is especially acute in solitary confinement: “The pris-
oner becomes more pliable, more submissive, more willing to take
144 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 Chit-
tister, Between the Dark and the Daylight: Embracing the Contradictions
of Life (New York: Image, 2015), 17– 19.
2. See, for example, the research of Urwa Hameed on the social and cul-
tural 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 discern-
ment regarding the appropriate space between the persons facing
each other in situ.
3. 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
1. COMING TO OUR SENSES
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, over-
whelmingly 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 shoul-
ders 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 reli-
gious 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 145
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, Janu-
ary 16, 2020, 6.
4. Some psychologists have extended the model of recursive “double sen-
sation” 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 Phe-
nomenological Psychology” (work in progress).
5. 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 inter-
nal 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
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).
6. De Waal, 84– 85.
7. See Fitzpatrick and Kearney, The Ethics of Hospitality.
8. See Richard Kearney, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Carnal
Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 15– 56.
9. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s description of this act in Phenomenology
of Perception (New York: Routledge, 1962).
146 10. See, for example, the detailed existential descriptions of sexual relation-
ships by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Being and Noth-
ingness 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 Phenome-
non (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007); and David Wood’s
“Touched by Touching,” in Carnal Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2015), 173– 81.
11. See Rachel Laudan, “Toward a Culinary Ethos,” Hedgehog Review 21,
no. 3 (2019).
12. See the work of psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and Jean-Bertrand Pon-
talis.
13. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Cooked and The Raw, first published by Gal-
limard in French in 1964.
14. Anne Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of
Living (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 67– 68.
15. 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,
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, Ste-
phen Mendelsohn, Christine Rojcewicz, and Richard Kearney, eds.,
Somatic Desire: Recovering Corporeality in Contemporary Thought (Lan-
ham, MD: Lexington, 2019). For more on this question of incarnation
as a tasting and eating, see chapter 3.
16. Joseph Nugent, “The Human Snout: Pigs, Priests, and Peasants in
the Parlor,” Senses and Society 4, no. 3 (2009). Throughout the nine-
teenth century, Ireland, Nugent argues, reeked from the pages of Eng-
lish 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 emblem-
atic figure of native Victorian propriety, the Catholic priest, this mod-
ernizing class carried the mantras of civility and hygiene to the coun- 147
tryside 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 cas-
tigation of Ireland’s domestic cottage by English observers and, in par-
ticular, 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 pecu-
liar 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
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 prop-
erly 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).
17. 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.
18. By contrast, most evil impulses were traditionally thought to stem from
what Augustine called the “lust of the eyes” (concupiscentia oculoram),
148 a one-way drive to conquer and consume, to seduce and subdue, refus-
ing to respond empathically to the other.
19. See this notion of Augenblick as an authentic vision of deep “kairologi-
cal” or “Messianic” time in thinkers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Mar-
tin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin.
20. 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 experi-
ences 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 tradi-
tion 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
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 out-
lines four stages for hearing the signals of ‘somatic inner knowing,’
namely, groundedness, alignment, openheartedness, and spaciousness.
21. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Percep-
tion (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
22. 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 exis-
tence containing several unexplored bodies within. Her physical
being comes to light as his exploring hands remove the curtains 149
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 Fin-
gers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh,” in Carnal
Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2004).
23. See Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of such double vision as a synesthetic
“tangible seeing” in The Visible and Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwest-
ern University Press, 1979), 130 ff. Reciprocal “vision” is a way of see-
ing 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.” See-
ing into the heart of things is not confined to human perception but
extends to our mutual interactions with all sentient beings in the ani-
mate world. Many Eastern and indigenous traditions extend this to the
inanimate world— as in the Hindu reverence for mountains and rivers
and the Native American invocation of “all my relations” (ranging from

human relations past and future to nonhuman relations such as ani-
mals, 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 encour-
ages 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.
24. 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
150 Heller and William Schiff, The Psychology of Touch (New York: Psychol-
ogy, 1991). The authors are particularly interested in tactile perception
in blind people.
25. See Paul Ricœur’s well-known distinction between first and second
naivete in The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon, 1992).
26. 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.”
27. 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 south-
ern 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 psychoac-
tive 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 Contempla-
tion, November 9, 2019. The implications of such reciprocal vision
are radical faced with our present climate emergency— calling for a
new resonance with the earth as powerful antidote to the unilateral

ravages of market capitalism and the fossil fuel industry.
28. 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 bibli-
cal 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 interest-
ing research on visual reading as touching: touchthispage.com.
29. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire.” For a
typical synesthetic verse in Hopkins— combining sight, taste, and kin- 151
esthetic 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, Mel-
ancholic Joy: On Life Worth Living (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), espe-
cially his readings of Annie Dillard and Nikos Kazantzakis.
30. Aristotle, De Anima (220b). We will return to Aristotle on this subject
in the next chapter.
31. See Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the
World (Cambridge: Polity, 2016) and “The Listening Society: Respon-
sivity as the Essence of the Common Good,” lecture given to the Uni-
versity 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.”
32. The related Italian term toccata, from toccare, to touch, is “a composi-
tion for a keyboard instrument, intended to exhibit the touch and tech-
nique of the performer, and having the air of an Improvisation”
(OED). See Vladimir Jankélévitch on discovering the soul of a piece of
Debussy music by touching les touches of the clavier in a playful man-

ner that ratiocination or calculation cannot do. Toucher in French ver-
nacular also has the sense of seductive erotic play.
33. See Richard Rohr, “Inner Silence,” Center for Action and Contempla-
tion, 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 reso-
nance,” and that of others (“Forward,” in In Touch, xi).
34. 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).
35. See Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, 50, 110. This point is reit-
erated by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove: “While good teaching can
152 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 Wilson-
Hartgrove, Reconstructing the Gospel (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity,
2018), 146. That is, “song” understood as a double sensation of chant-
ing and listening simultaneously.
36. See Redmond O’Hanlon, “Embodied Morning,” part of “The Art of
Mourning” (work in progress).
37. Colwyn Trevarthern, Infant Research and Psychoanalysis (Lecce: Frenis
Zero, 2018).
38. For a fuller discussion of this, see chapter 4.
39. The term auditory imagination is T. S. Elliot’s.
40. 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 see-
ing 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).
2. PHILOSOPHIES OF TOUCH
41. 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.
2. Philosophies of Touch
1. Plato, Cratylus, 229c. See also Fran O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in

Cyphers of Transcendence (Dublin: Irish Academic, 2019).
2. Plato, Phaedo, 67.
3. 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 153
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 Aris-
totle to account for Christian resurrection, Aquinas and the scholas-
tics remained largely captive to a dualist metaphysics of spirit versus
matter. (It is a great irony that the residual “Platonism” of Augustian-
Thomistic-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 “incarna-
tional” in attitude (see chapter 3 on biblical healing), notably Francis
of Assisi and later Franciscans and Celtic mystics like Eriugena, Pela-
gius, 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 Ital-
ian Renaissance thinkers like the early Ficino (Commentary on Lucre-
tio’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
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 reduc-
tionist 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 rela-
tionship; but that is work for another volume.
4. Aristotle, De Anima, 2, section 11. Touch for Aristotle is universal inso-
far 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 phenomenological-
154 hermeneutic reading.
5. Aristotle, De Anima, 2, 418.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Aristotle, De Anima, 2, 421–23.
9. Aristotle, 2, 418.
10. Aristotle, 2, 428.
11. 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 vol-
ume, “The Wager of Carnal Hermeneutics.”
12. 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.
13. Chrétien, 85. It is also worth noting that in an enigmatic passage in
the Metaphysics theta, chapter 10, 1051b 23–25, Aristotle speaks of
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.
14. 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” (Verstehen-
Befindlichket in Heidegger’s Being and Time). The hermeneutic as-
structure is never absent from flesh. See Iris Murdoch on Heidegger’s
recognition of Aristotle’s hermeneutics of the body, “Sein und Zeit: Pur-
suit of Being,” in Justin Broackes, ed., Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Col-
lection of Essays (New York: Oxford University Press 2012), 95: “Hei-
degger reasonably claims that the basic ontological interpretation of
the affective life in general has been able to make scarcely one forward 155
step worthy of mention since Aristotle.”
15. 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).
16. See the work of Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis.
17. 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 Univer-
sity 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,
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).
18. 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 phe-
nomenologies 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
156 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).
19. Chrétien, “Body and Touch,” 98.
20. Chrétien, 98. On the hermeneutic readings of scars and wounds (trau-
mata), 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).
21. On the importance of the handshake for the primal turning of hostil-
ity 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-to-
hand encounter between Diomedes and Glaucus in Homer’s Iliad and
Abraham’s greeting of the strangers at Mamre. See also “Double Hos-
pitality” in Imagination Now: The Richard Kearney Reader, ed Murray
Littlejohn (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020).
22. Cited and commented by Chrétien, “Body and Touch,” 101– 5. “The deli-
cacy 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
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 reinterpreta-
tions of Aristotle’s notion of mediality, “Metaxu: Figures de la médial-
ité chez Aristote,” in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, no. 62 (Novem-
ber 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 man-
ual 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. 157
23. Chrétien, “Body and Touch,” 108.
24. Chrétien, 110– 13.
25. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, book 2
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 155 ff.
26. Husserl, 155 ff.
27. Husserl, 155 ff.
28. Husserl’s phenomenology shows how synesthesia is the mark of gen-
uine experience—where two-way tangibility turns sight into insight,
taste into savor, smell into flair, sound into resonance.
29. Husserl, 155 ff. This initial insight of Husserl’s is born out by recent
experimental work on “mirror touch synesthesia” at the Empathy Proj-
ect’s Social Brain Laboratory in Amsterdam.
30. 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 con-
sciousness itself as a double reversible intentionality of projection-
reception. 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 par-
adigm of single intentionality, it is arguable that it is the reverse
intentionality of touch that gives rise to consciousness as such, ensur-

ing a nondualist continuity between body and mind. On the revers-
ibility thesis, see also Dermot Moran, “Vision and Touch: Between
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty,” in Kearney and Treanor, Carnal Herme-
neutics, 214–34.
31. See for example Levinas’s description of the “caress” in Totality and
Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) and of “sensi-
bility” in Discovering Existence with Husserl (Evanston, IL: Northwest-
ern University Press, 1998): “The new way of treating sensibility con-
sists 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 “terrestrial-
corporeal” embodiment (as acting-suffering beings) in relation to sci-
ence fictions of AI technology, Oneself as Another (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1992), 149– 52. For a more detailed discussion of these
158 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 Psy-
chopathology (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), especially chap-
ter 2, “Depression: Disruptions of Body, Mood, and Self” (23–36).
32. 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 expres-
sive “style” that resonates in every sensation, movement, and act. “What
unites ‘tactile sensations’ in the hand and links them to visual percep-
tions of the same hand . . . is a certain style informing my manual
gestures and implying a certain style of finger movement and contrib-
uting, in the last resort, to a certain bodily bearing” (174).
33. Merleau-Ponty, 133. See Jacques Derrida’s critique of what he calls
Merleau-Ponty’s “haptocentrism” in On Touching (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2005).
34. 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 inter-
vening 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 159
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.
35. 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).
36. 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 Sex-
ual 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 Levi-
nas.” For another powerful phenomenology of the sensual, see Anne
Dufourmantelle, Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), especially the sections

entitled “The Sensory Celebration,” 1, 2, 3, and 4.
37. Irigaray, 232.
38. 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 pro-
cess of ‘signification through the senses,’ opens the way to the con-
struction of subjectivity, which reclaims our ‘ante-predicative’ expe-
rience (as understood by Husserl) and ‘transubstantiation’ (as
understood by Proust), in order to rejoin, through one’s own flesh,
160 the flesh of the world” (http://www.kristeva.fr/philosophie_maga
zine_135.html).
39. Anne O’Byrne, “Umbilicus: Towards a Hermeneutics of Generational
Difference” in Kearney and Treanor, Carnal Hermeneutics, 182 f.
40. 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 Rich-
ard Kearney, eds., Somatic Desire: Recovering Corporeality in Contempo-
rary Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019). For more on the book-
as-body applied to the practice of reading as ingesting, see chapter 1,
note 40.
41. In addition to Husserl and the phenomenologists and feminists
mentioned here, see also the analyses of phenomenological embodi-
ment by thinkers like Didier Frank, Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel
Falque, Jean-Luc Nancy, as well as a whole new generation of phe-
nomenologists 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
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 philo-
sophical rethinking of carnal embodiment we need both the phe-
nomenological and cognitive-scientific approaches.
42. Resmaa Menakem speaks about “bodily knowing” and the transmis-
sion of trauma from a historical perspective. “Our bodies have a form
of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains. This knowl-
edge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expan-
sion, pain or ease, energy or numbness. Often this knowledge is stored
in our bodies as wordless stories about what is safe and what is dan-
gerous.” Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized 161
Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas:
Central Recovery, 2017), xvii.
43. In the Gospels, the Greek verb for describing how Jesus is touched
emotionally, feeling mercy or compassion, is eusplagchnos, from splagch-
non 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.
44. 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.
45. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in New Literary History 7, no. 3 (1976):
622–30. See my “Heaney and Homecoming,” in Richard Kearney, Nav-
igations: Collected Irish Essays, 1976– 2006 (Syracuse, NY: Lilliput/Syra-
cuse University Press, 2006), 228–34.
46. Freud, “The Uncanny, ” 623.
47. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991), chapters 8 and 9.
48. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), para-
graphs 26–27, 40, and 57. “As Dasein falls, anxiety brings it back from
its absorption in the ‘world.’ Everyday familiarity collapses. . . . Being-in
enters into the mode of the ‘not- at-home.’ Nothing else is meant by our
talk about ‘uncanniness’ (Unheimlichkeit)” ( paragraph 40).
49. 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 uncon-
scious 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” pro-
ducing 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
162 navel reaching the reredos of Ramasbatham.” James Joyce, Finnegans
Wake (London: Faber, 1975), 18. Joyce goes on to celebrate the “stom-
ach language” of a “prepronomial funferal, engraved and retouched”
to become the “aural eyeness” providing the “keys to dreamland”
(cited in Hederman, 74).
50. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 26.
51. Seamus Heaney in an interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones
(London: Faber, 2008), 475.
3. Tales of the Wounded Healer
1. Aristotle, Poetics(Montreal: McGill- Queens Universtity Press, 1997),

book 1.
2. 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. Because his wound was incurable, and unbearably painful, Chiron vol-
untarily relinquished his immortality and underwent death, eventu-
ally being assigned a place among the stars as the constellation Cen-
taurus. On Philoctetes, see Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy (New
York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1990). On Thales, see John Manous-
sakis, “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).
4. 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 Suffer- 163
ing in Living and Dying (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000),
48–45, 53– 54.
5. 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 pio-
neered in France as a program of professional formation in kines-
thetic caretaking (“soins d’accompangment centrés sur la personne
plutôt que sur sa pathologie”).
6. For the original texts, see Emma and Ludwig Edelstein, eds., Asclepius:
A Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies (Baltimore: John Hop-
kins University Press, 1945). See also “Asclepius and His Animals’
Role in Healing” (2018), https://www.ukdiss.com/examples/asclepius
-animal-roles-healing).
7. See “Asclepius,” in Oxford Classical Dictionary (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1996), 188.
8. 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
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 doc-
tor 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.
9. Michael Kearney, The Nest in the Stream, 48– 50. The author cites the
thirteenth- century Sufi poet Rumi: “Don’t turn your head. Keep look-
ing 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,
164 that’s where the light gets in.”
10. 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.
11. 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 med-
icine. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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 bib-
lical and Christian traditions in this section— since that is the
hermeneutic tradition I am familiar with—I am aware that the notion

of the wounded healer is present in many nonbiblical spiritual tradi-
tions also.
14. Cited by Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaim-
ing an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart (New York: Jossey-
Bass, 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 165
by the ego’s sense of self, without fear or agenda.”
15. I am indebted here to Stephanie Rumpza’s excellent analysis of the rela-
tionship 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 pres-
ence,” 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 discus-
sion of the synesthetic “intertwining” of visibility and tangibility in
chapter 4 of The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968).
16. I focus here on Christian—rather than Jewish, Islamic, or other non-
Abrahamic— 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 superces-
sionist intent.
17. See Shelly Rambo, Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma
(Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2018).
18. 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 construc-
tion 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.”
19. See also Mark 3: “He had cured many and as a result those who had
diseases were pressing upon him to touch him.”
20. 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
166 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).
21. See Giorgio Agamben, “The Glorious Body,” in Nudities (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009).
22. 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.
23. 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,
Consciousness, and the Mapping of the Body,” Theological Studies 72,

no. 4 (Summer 2016), where he explicitly engages our project of car-
nal hermeneutics.
24. Nietzsche, The Anti- Christ, cited in Alice Miller, The Untouched Key
(New York: Anchor, 1990), 112.
25. 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 transpo-
sition 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). 167
26. See my discussion of the theoerotic mystical visions of John and Teresa
in “The Shulamite’s Song: Eros Ascending and Descending,” in Vir-
ginia Burrus and Catherine Keller, eds., Toward a Theology of Eros: Trans-
figuring 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.
27. 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
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).
28. 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 part-
ners in favor of a binary alternation between dominant subject (sadism)
and dominated object (masochism). S-M partners take it in turn to sub-
168 mit 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 submission-
aggression into an erotic dance-play of seduction and surrender, of
leading and being led. The role of ludic fantasy is central here.
29. In his Spiritual Canticle, John describes the relation between the lov-
ers 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 mysti-
cal 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.
30. Cited Living with Christ 20, no 10 (October 2019): 134.
31. 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
4. HEALING TOUCH
to the guest (also called hôte). And this double sense of carnal hospi-
tality— 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 Phi-
losophy: A Comparative Approach (London: Blackwell, 2018).
32. See Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli Me Tangere (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2008).
33. 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 mak-
ing Christ democratic and Socratic in a single gesture— one with the 169
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.
34. 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. Relating this dialectic to the discussion of digital excarnation (see chap-

ter 5), we may ask if it parallels the repeated return to our digital
devices rather than savoring the pleasures of the flesh. Digital obses-
sion as compulsive repletion of the death drive?
2. 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).
3. “Touch is the bête noire of therapy since Freud, even though the lay-
ing on of hands was commonplace in traditional healing.” See
4. HEALING TOUCH
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.
4. Freud letter to Breuer, 1893 in Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1973– 1939 (New
York: Dover, 1960).
5. 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., Con-
temporary Body Psychotherapy: The Chiron Approach (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2009), 106–20. Asheri, like Babette Rothschild (The Body Remem-
bers) 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
170 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 pos-
itive signal of intersubjective relational engagement, trust, and contain-
ment. 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”).
6. Helen Bamber, “Personal Touch,” BBC interview, October 6, 2002. On
this double gesture of catharsis as a “hearing” and “holding” of suffer-
ing, 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. Helen Bamber, The Good Listener (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson,

1998), 88– 89.
8. Bamber, 228.
9. James Hamblin, If Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Main-
taining a Human Body (New York: Doubleday, 2016).
10. 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 nur-
tured and securely held sorely lacking in patient’s “attachment” histo-
ries, regarding parents or primary caregivers. But it is also important
to acknowledge that if touch, in the right therapeutic setting, can aug-
ment a basic sense of trust and containment— followed by cathartic
release—it can also do great harm in the wrong circumstances, trig-
gering damaging retraumatization. This requires a professionally skill-
ful discernment between therapist and patient at the level of both 171
body and mind. Once again, we see the need for a highly sensitive car-
nal hermeneutics.
11. Bessel Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (New York: Penguin,
2015), 27 and 246–47, henceforth BKS, where he discusses the neces-
sity for certain zones of safety or refuge within the body when victims
cannot give full accounts in words. I am deeply indebted to the remark-
able 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.
12. In one year alone (2008), almost twenty thousand children aged five
and under were prescribed antipsychotics (cited in BKS 37).
13. BKS 38.
14. See here the excellent contributions to Hartley, Contemporary Body Psy-
chotherapy, especially Michael Soth, “From Humanistic Holism via
the ‘Integrative Project’ Towards Integral-Relational Body Psychother-
apy,” 64– 88.
15. I am grateful to Irish psychologist Tony Bates for this citation, Under-
standing and Overcoming Depression (New York: Random House, 2001).
4. HEALING TOUCH
16. 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-pituitary-
adrenaline axis and capacity to apprehend experience rhythmically
through timbre and tempo. Speaking of our “archaic histrionic sensi-
bility” 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.
17. BKS 46.
18. Earl Grey, Unify Your Mind: Connecting the Feelers, Thinkers, and Doers
of Your Brain (Pittsburgh: CMHW, 2010).
172 19. BKS 56– 58. See also Mariana Van Mohr, “The Social Buffering of Pain
by Affective Touch,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (2018):
1– 10.
20. BKS 274 and 276. See also O’Hanlon, “The Potential of Touch”: “Treat-
ing 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 trust-
enhancing, since so much unconscious pain, loss, absence or abuse
are encoded in the involuntary muscles. Touch stimulates the produc-
tion 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.”
21. See the pioneering work of thinkers like Eugene Gendlin and Peter
Levine. Gendlin’s writings on “felt sense” and “experiential psychother-
apy” (Focusing and Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams) have proved
very influential, while Levine’s works on “somatic experiencing” (Wak-
ing 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
4. HEALING TOUCH
manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with

medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incor-
ruptible as a child, who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compro-
mises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evad-
ing the truth” (cited in O’Hanlon, “The Potential of Touch”).
22. 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 condi-
tions 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 nec-
essary for the proper storage and integration of incoming information,
such as the hippocampus and the thalamus. As a result, the imprints 173
of traumatic experiences are organized not as coherent logical narra-
tives but in fragmented sensory and emotional traces: images sounds
and physical sensations” (178). See also the author’s excellent discus-
sion 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).
23. EMDR (eye movement densitization and reprocessing) is a therapy
method practiced successfully by Van der Kolk and his colleagues at
Boston University.
24. 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 “embod-
ied healing” to the phenomenon of “long standing recurrent painful pat-
terns” (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).
25. See Merleau-Ponty on “infra-sensation,” discussed in Richard Kearney,
“The Recovery of the Flesh in Ricœur and Merleau-Ponty,” in Sarah
4. HEALING TOUCH
Horton, Stephen Mendelsohn, Christine Rojcewicz, and Richard

Kearney, eds., Somatic Desire: Recovering Corporeality in Contemporary
Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019).
26. Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index (New York: Harcourt, 2008).
27. I am grateful to Sheila Gallagher for this observation. See her multi-
media performances around memory healing, Twinsome Minds (Ham-
den, 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 cover-
ing of wound by means of granulation— granulocytes that contract
from the peripheries of the wound, forming a connective tissue and
174 new blood cells (vascularization); here the bruise is marked by the for-
mation 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 her-
meneutic 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.
28. Patrick Hederman, Living the Mystery (Dublin: Columba, 2019). See
also BKS 236–37: “Communicating fully is the opposite of being trau-
matised.”
29. Cited Hederman, p 237.
30. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Knopf, 1994), 146.
31. BKS 240.
32. BKS 60 f.
33. BKS 62– 63 f.
34. BKS 65. James Prescott, Origins of Love and Violence (audio CD, 2008)
argues that hyperreactivity to touch and abnormal social behavior, char-
acteristic of maternal deprivation, are side effects of the brain damage
4. HEALING TOUCH
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 attach-
ment with others. When an infant lacks trust due to sensory stimula-
tion 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 hav-
ing higher rates of aggression and social violence. See also Tamar
Swade, The Touch Taboo in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (New York,
Routledge, 2020).
35. BKS 66– 73. See also Marina Von Mohr, “The Soothing Function of
Touch: Affective Touch Reduces Feelings of Social Exclusion,” Scien-
tific 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 neuroplas- 175
ticity: chosen neural pathways gradually grow stronger; unused
pathways die away” (Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contempla-
tion, 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 reso-
nant 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 phys-
ical holding, where the therapist, as stand-in primary carer, enables
the patient to become aware of how and where their feelings resonate
4. HEALING TOUCH
in their body, sometimes acknowledging that while one half of the body
goes toward the healer, the other half contracts in pain. See Tom War-
necke, “The Borderline Relationship,” in Hartley, Contemporary Body
Psychotherapy, 205– 6. Here once again we witness how the basic phe-
nomena of touch as “double sensation” and “reciprocal attunement”
are key.
36. BKS 206– 7. See also here the important work of the Paris psychoso-
matic school, osteotherapy, and sensory processing disorder move-
ments, 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 alto-
gether, 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 heal-
ing moment in which her therapist broke the no-touch taboo and took
176 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.
37. 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.”
38. BKS 207– 8.
39. Adam Rutherford, Humanimal (New York: Experiment, 2019).
40. 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. 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 ordi-
nary sensory experiences so that they can live with the natural flow of
feeling and feel secure and complete in their bodies.”
42. Cited in BKS 92. See also William James’s emphasis on the role of emo-
tions and affect in our basic religious behaviors, positive and negative,
in Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, 1902).
43. 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.
44. 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 177
Pain Reduction” in the Proceedings of National Academy of Science,
March 13, 2018.
45. 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 prac-
tice. It is a moment I recall to this day.
46. 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 mater-
nal “holding.” Limiting analytic interpretation, he allowed sessions to
evolve with a sense of bodily immediacy, trust, surprise, and spontane-
ity, encouraging the patient to relive its primary childhood environ-
ment and become a reconstructed embodied subject. Writing of Win-
nicott, 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.
47. BKS 122.
4. HEALING TOUCH
48. BKS 122.

49. BKS 116.
50. Cited in BKS 95– 97.
51. See Tiffany Field, Touch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
52. 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.
53. See Dr. James Hamblin, “Can We Touch?,” Atlantic, April 10, 2019.
178 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 nec-
essarily changing, he says, they are just starting to be heard. As people
are becoming more isolated, touch is more important than ever. Ham-
blin 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.”
54. BKS 217. Such somatic holding corresponds to the Chiron-Asclepian
therapies of massage and the laying on of hands discussed in chap-
ter 3, this volume.
55. BKS 217.
56. See Dominique Meyniel, Le Couloir des urgences (Paris: Cherche Midi,
2015), 157. Conseil 10– 1993: “It is forbidden for nurses, interns, and
4. HEALING TOUCH
students not to touch elderly patients. In addition to clinical examina-

tion they should regularly hold their hands at the very least” (157). As
Dr. Bertrand Lukacs, Meyniel’s close colleague, reported to me: “Pro-
fessor 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 cor-
roborates this in her account of the positive impact of touch on aging
and dying patients in her work at St. Christopher’s Terminal Care Hos-
pice in London. But all ages are eligible for body therapy in our digi-
tal culture of excarnation. For if digital hyperconnectivity can lead
to isolation, touch combined with other therapies— medical and 179
psychological— can lead to reintegration.
57. Such therapeutic medical practices call for a new carnal hermeneutics
enabling us to read bodies as books and books as bodies. As Katie Can-
non 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 Rojce-
wicz, and Richard Kearney, eds., Somatic Desire: Recovering Coporeal-
ity in Contemporary Thought (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019); and
McKendrick’s writing on the therapeutic implications of reading bod-
ies as books and books as bodies: Karmen McKendrick, Word Made
Skin (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004).
58. BKS 351. In fact, the abuse of oversubscribed or trafficked addictive opi-
ates now causes more deaths yearly in the U.S. than guns or car acci-
dents.
59. 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 gut-
wrenching sensations, then our first priority is to help people move out
of fight-or-flight states, reorganize their perception of danger, and
4. HEALING TOUCH
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.”
60. 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).
61. BKS 350. Here once again we must be careful not to isolate or literal-
ize “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
180 visage but an alterity that expresses, communicates, and commands
our sensibility; see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1979).
62. “Finding words to describe what has happened to you can be trans-
formative, 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 vari-
ous forms of hands- on art-making with materials like clay, stone,
sand, paint, paper and ink, celluloid, etc. These ways of reinhabit-
ing the body and nature enable patients to overcome the numb-
ness 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 eat-
ing and kissing of crosses and icons, Buddhist breathing and
chanting, Hindu bowing, pranayama, and pilgrimage, Confucian tea
4. HEALING TOUCH
ceremonies, etc. In most indigenous cultures, across the globe, embod-

ied healing ceremonies are equally if not more pronounced. See BKS
246–47 and 335–37 on the importance of theatrical acting and move-
ment 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.
63. 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 cam-
paign. 181
64. I am grateful to Dr. Helena Lategan of Stollenbosch, South Africa, for
her insights into the research results of equine-assisted therapy. Simi-
lar therapy applies to work with primates, as Audrey Schulman sug-
gests 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 futur-
istic 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 cog-
nition and extend beyond the human world to other animals.
65. 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
4. HEALING TOUCH
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 cul-
ture 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
182 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).
66. Nathalie Charpak did most of her research in the Instituto Materno-
Infantil, Bogotá, Colombia, in the 1990s. In 1993, she and neonatolo-
gist 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 impor-
tance of the KMC’s foundation in 2002, commissioning world guide-
lines for KMC practice that are now operative in all five continents. See
Nathalie Charpak, Kangaroo Babies: A Different Way of Mothering (Lon-
don: Souvenir, 2006).
67. Richard Louv, Our Wild Calling: How Connecting with Animals Can
Transform Our Lives— and Save Theirs (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin,
2019), 273.
68. Louv, 272.
69. 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. There are medial positions between the extremes of gain and loss, for
example, the use of biometrics and touch-identification/authentifica-
tion 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: Bod-
ies, Technologies, Biopolitics (London: Taylor and Francis, 2012).
2. 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).
3. See Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (New York: Fontana, 1977).
Some of these ideas were already explored in our essay, Richard Kear-
ney, “Losing Our Touch,” in the New York Times, Opinionator,
August 30, 2014, moderated by Simon Critchley. 183
4. The seminars I am citing in this chapter were conducted annually at
Boston College over recent years, and I am very grateful to my stu-
dents for their questions and presentations. They were timely teach-
ers 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.
5. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Viking, 1985), 51.
6. “Mobile Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center: Internet Science and Technol-
ogy, February 5, 2018.
7. See Lisa Eadicicco, “Americans Check Their Phones a Billion Times
per Day,” Time, December 15, 2015.
8. 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.
9. 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).
10. See for example the outing of U.S. congresswoman Katie Hill in 2019
with the online posting of intimate texts and photos.
11. See our discussion of this ethical use of mass media reporting of suf-
fering in the conclusion to Richard Kearney, Wake of Imagination (Lon-
don: Hutchinson, 1988).
12. See the discussion of such experiments in our “Concluding Thoughts”
and “Coda,” this volume.
13. See Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000);
and Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
14. 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,
184 “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 atti-
tudes 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.
15. See here the timely work of Kerry Cronin on the sexual codes of hook-
up culture, “Intimacy—It’s Complicated,” C21 Resources, Boston Col-
lege, 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 sex-
ual 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
“smarter we get about technology, the dumber we get about relation-

ships” 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 185
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.”
16. 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 experi-
ence of touch— depending on gender, history, culture, language, and
religion. Different societies have varying hermeneutic codes deter-
mining when it is appropriate and inappropriate to touch certain cat-
egories 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
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 con-
trolled scenarios where the interaction isn’t loaded with potential for
escalation, or imbued with subtext or meaning based on prior interac-
tions. In the real world, the exact same hug might cause blood pres-
sure and heart rate to increase, and stress hormones to surge. If it
can be said that touch has medicinal properties, then, like any medi-
cine, 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 enhanc-
ing acts for both partners. Namely, our double sensation or reciproc-
ity principle. And many supported Field’s suggestion that, in the
186 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 sensi-
ble new pedagogies of touch— an urgent task for carnal hermeneu-
tics today. See also here the insightful reflections of Shoshi Asheri,
“To Touch or Not to Touch: A Relational Body psychotherapy Per-
spective,” in Linda Hartley, ed., Contemporary Body Psychotherapy: The
Chiron Approach (New York: Routledge, 2009), 106–20.
17. The implications of COVID-19 are radical here, as we note in our coda.
18. My brother, Peter Kearney, a cardiac surgeon in Ireland, has reported
this personally to me, and the medical evidence is persuasive. Ham-
blin cites numerous studies that show how “physical touch acti-
vates 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.
19. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington: Indi-
ana 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 mythologi-
cal 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 auton-
omously. 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 mis- 187
sion, 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 bot-
tom 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.”
20. See our earlier discussion of this in “On Terror” in Richard Kearney,
Strangers, Gods and Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002).
21. The challenge, we will argue in our conclusion, is to introduce multi-
ple entrances and exits to the digital labyrinth so that it may become a
living laboratory of reversible sensations and computations.
22. This raises the critical question— ontological as much as
technological—regarding the relationship between neuroplasticity and
machine learning.
23. 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 multi-
media immersion by Arthur Ganson and other artists at the MIT
Museum, and innovative digital works shown at Boston Cyber arts
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, Mar-
git Galanter’s Projects-body, Olive Bieringa’s Body Cartography
project, and Bill Viola’s seminal experiments with multi-media sen-
sation, 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.
24. 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
188 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 expe-
riences, 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 Night-
mares II, Welcome to Little Hope. We also observed how these mega-
games— both progressive and regressive— often exploited motifs
from Nordic and Indo-European mythologies in their appeal to a col-
lective unconscious, in keeping with the popular success of epic con-
temporary 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).
25. We await a definitive developed philosophy of both the toxic and ther-
apeutic 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
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 edi-
tor, 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 Ques-
tion Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Cam-
bridge, 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 tech-
nology in the causation and curing of trauma, contemporary psychol-
ogy 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 189
uses/abuses of cyber technology (as explored in a series like Black Mir-
ror, for example). There are many new possibilities of healing through
digital mediation, narrative refiguration, and virtual association for
future therapies to explore.
26. Elsewhere I have proposed the idea of anatheology as a way of think-
ing about religion after religion, see Anatheism: Returning to God After
God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
27. 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.
28. 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 trans-
form them into living memories and gestures. Recent Guestbook
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 digi-
tal 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 empa-
thy 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
190 with hidden hurts, they give a future to our past.
29. I am thinking particularly here of the work of Kathy Bisbee, an interdis-
ciplinary artist producing immersive social documentaries in the pub-
lic interest. She is executive director of Brookline Interactive Group
(BIG), research fellow at MIT Open Doc Lab, and founder of the Pub-
lic VR Lab, where she is the lead creative designer/producer of Arrival
VR, a national participatory immigration/migration storytelling expe-
rience in VR. See also our discussion of haptic technology in our coda,
this volume.
30. 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 tech-
nology, such as Pear Therapeutics, which uses iPhone apps that inter-
act 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)
CODA
Coda
1. 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.
2. 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 191
that the symptoms through which COVID-19 manifests itself— apart
from those that it shares in common with the rest of respiratory infec-
tions, such a coughing and fever— are precisely anosmia and ageusia,
that is, the inability of the infected person to smell and to taste. With-
out such tactile senses that operate by de- distancing, to borrow Hei-
degger’s expression, the virus compromises one’s health by depriving
one of one’s sense of proximity. It has been speculated that the charac-
teristic 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.”
3. 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 con-
trast, there were many moving stories of “frontline” carers holding and
touching dying patients painfully deprived of their families and friends.
4. 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
CODA
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 Philoso-
pher 108, no. 3.
5. 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.
6. Julia Kristeva, “Humanity Is Rediscovering Existential Solitude, the
Meaning of Limits and Mortality,” in Corriere del Serra, March 29,
2020.
7. Kristeva. On the pandemic’s radical disclosure of our morality and fra-
gility, see the challenging piece by Simon Critchley, “To Philosophize
Is to Learn How to Die,” The Stone, New York Times, April 11, 2020.
8. In a survey report entitled “Coronavirus Has Killed the Power of
192 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 hun-
dred 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” includ-
ing 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
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.
9. 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.
10. 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 vir-
tual life” (cited in Teeman, “Coronavirus Had Killed the Power of 193
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.
11. See https://www.ign.com/articles/mother-plays-with-deceased-daughter
-in-vr-recreation and https://www.vrfitnessinsider.com/haptics-thrilling
-prospect/.
12. 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 visceral-
ity, 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: Uni-
versity of Helsinki Press, 2018), 121–52; Paul Martin, “Carnal Herme-
neutics and the Digital Game,” Journal of the Philosophy of Games 2, no.
1 (2018): 1–20.
CODA
13. 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 mov-
ing in the wind. The tree carries a basic archetypal power for humans
from the beginning of time, manifest in all wisdom traditions. Refer-
ring to COVID-19, Richard Rohr notes that the desire for tactile con-
nection represents a fundamental need to go beyond oneself to “oth-
erness,” 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,
194 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 dis-
tancing 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 Hid-
den Life of Trees (Vancouver: Greystone, 2015). For a pioneering plea
for a symbiotic collaboration between the ecological and the techno-
logical, 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 Ani-
mal 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), moder-
ated by Claudia Hammond.
195
Index
Abraham, 20 Barry, Kevin, 190

Abraira, Victoria, 141, 142, 191 Barthes, Roland, 36, 126, 183
Adams, Philip, 167 Bates, Tony, 171
Agamben, Giorgio, 166 Baudrillard, Jean, 123, 126, 186, 188
Aho, Kevin, 158 Bauer, Nancy, 143
Albrecht, Glenn, 144 Becker, Brian, 162
Alloa, Emmanuel, 154, 157 Begin, Menachem, 15
Aquinas, Thomas, 20, 153 Benedict, Saint, 27
Aristotle, 33–37, 39, 41–47, 63, 151, Benjamin, Walter, 148
153, 154, 155, 156, 157 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 81
Asclepius, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, Biden, Joseph, 145
71, 91, 94, 107, 123, 140, 162, 163, Bieringa, Olive, 187
181, 182 Binswanger, Ludwig, 159
Asheri, Shoshi, 169, 185 Bisbee, Kathy, 188
Augustine, 148 Boadella, David, 171
Autolycus, 62 Bosnak, Robert, 173
Averroes, 153 Bourgeault, Cynthia, 148, 149, 152, 164
Bowlby, John, 101
Balfour, Lindsay, 182 Bowles, Nellie, 183
Bamber, Helen, 29, 88, 100, 152, 170 Brooks, David, 183, 184
Barmakian, Aram, 183 Burrus, Virginia, 166
INDEX
Camus, Albert, 14, 23, 148 Eadicicco, Lisa, 143, 182

Cannon, Katie, 178 Eckhart, Meister, 149
Caruth, Cathy, 88 Edelstein, Emma, 163
Cézanne, Paul, 124 Edelstein, Ludwig, 163
Charpak, Nathalie, 109, 181 Elliot, T. S., 152
Chiron, 65, 66, 67, 162, 169, 173, Enright, Anne, 190
178, 181 Equicola, Mario, 153
Chittister, Joan, 144 Eriugena, John Scotus, 153
Chrétien, Jean-Louis, 154, 155, 156, 157 Euryclea, 62
Classen, Constance, 141, 143, 191
Clemente, Matthew, 145, 158 Falque, Emmanuel, 160
Cleopas, 25 Ficino, Marsilio, 153
Cohen, Leonard, 163 Field, Tiffany, 103, 104, 141, 177, 184,
Cohen, Sheldon, 177 185, 191
Critchley, Simon, 182, 190 Figuera, Zita, 181
198 Cronin, Kerry, 183 Fitzpatrick, Melissa, 144
Francis of Assisi 73, 153
Dagen, LouAnn, 190 Frank, Didier, 160
Damasio, Antonio, 102 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 54, 55, 57,
Davis, Bret, 168 85– 87, 156, 161, 167, 169, 172, 183
Davis, Phyllis K., 177 Fulkerson, Matthew, 155
Davoine, Françoise, 88
de Beauvoir, Simone, 49, 146 Galanter, Margit, 187
Debord, Guy, 182 Gallace, Alberto, 187
de Klerk, F. W., 15 Gallagher, Shaun, 160
DeLillo, Don, 116, 182 Gallagher, Sheila, 173
Derrida, Jacques, 158 Ganson, Arthur, 187
de Waal, Frans de, 14, 145, Gendlin, Eugene, 172
180, 181 Ginsberg, Allen, 26
Diderot, Denis, 42 Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla,
Didymus, Thomas, 166 108, 179
Diekman, Kristine, 187 Goldstein, Pavel, 176
Dillard, Annie, 151, 152 Gomes Silva, Sonia, 170
Dubreuil, Maroussia, 183 Goodman, David, 162
Dufourmantelle, Anne, 19, Gregious, Justin, 183
146, 159 Grey, Earl, 171
INDEX
Hafiz, 167 Jacob, 164

Halik, Tomas, 113, 143, 166 Jakobson, Roman, 156
Hall, Thomas, 183 James, William, 99, 176
Hamblin, James, 89, 144, 170, 177, Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 151
184, 185 Jesus, 20, 73, 74, 75, 77, 82, 140
Hameed, Urwa, 144 Johnson, Mark, 160
Hamlet, 54 Jonze, Spike, 113
Hạnh, Thích Nhất, 149 Joyce, James, 29, 55, 152, 161
Hartley, Linda, 169, 171, 176, 185 Jung, Carl, 87
Heaney, Seamus, 27, 57, 157, 161,
162 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 151
Hederman, Patrick, 142, 174 Kearney, Michael, 68, 162, 163
Heidegger, Martin, 48, 53, 54, 55, Kearney, Peter, 185
148, 155, 161, 190 Kearney, Richard, 142, 146–47, 154,
Heitzler, Morit, 176 155, 158– 63, 166, 168, 170, 173,
Herman, Judith, 88, 175 178, 179, 182, 186 199
Hermes, 38, 45 Keller, Catherine, 144, 166
Higgins, Michael D., 151 Keller, Helen, 95
Hill, Katie, 183 Kierkegaard, Søren, 148
Hippocrates, 66 Kim, Christie, 183
Homer, 15, 23, 62, 63, 162 Klapes, Peter, 183
Hooper, Jane, 61 Klein, Melanie, 146
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 26, Kristeva, Julia, 49, 51, 53, 55, 137, 138,
149 159, 161, 190
Horton, Sarah, 147, 160, 178 Kurzweil, Ray, 122, 188
Howe, Fanny, 173
Hughes, Langston, 95, 174 Laird, Nick, 190
Huizinga, Johan, 169 Lakoff, George, 160
Hume, John, 15 Lambert, Joseph, 188
Husserl, Edmund, 11, 45, 46, 47, 157, Laplanche, Jean, 155
158, 159, 160 Lategan, Helena, 180
Huxley, Aldous, 26 Laudan, Rachel, 146
Leary, Ryan, 183
In, Glorianna, 183 Lenoir, Jean, 22
Irigaray, Luce, 49, 50, 51, 159 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 19, 64,
Isaac, 164 146
INDEX
Levinas, Emmanuel, 48, 158, 179 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 41, 155, 160, 168
Levine, Peter, 91, 172 Ní Riain, Nóirín, 152
Lingis, Alphonso, 158 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27, 80, 166,
Louv, Richard, 5– 6, 110, 143, 144, 153, 176
182, 189 Nugent, Joseph, 22, 147
Lukacs, Bertrand, 178
Luther King, Martin, 111 O’Byrne, Anne, 159
O’Brien, Flann, 147
Magdalene, Mary, 82, 83, 164, 168 O’Hanlon, Redmond, 141, 152, 159,
Malabou, Catherine, 155 169, 170, 171, 174, 177
Mandela, Nelson, 15 O’Rourke, Fran, 153
Manoussakis, John, 146, 155, 160, O’Shea, Andrew, 156
162, 178, 189 O’Toole, Fintan, 145
Marion, Jean-Luc, 146, 160 Odysseus, 20, 62, 63, 65, 156
Mayi, Mata Amritananda, 180 Oedipus, 25, 64, 65
200 McCann, Colum, 186 Ophelia, 54
McGlone, Francis, 141, 142, 191 Orbach, Susie, 169
McGrath, Sean, 144 Orenstein, Peggy, 143
Mckendrick, Karmen, 160, 178, 179
Meiring, Jacob, 166 Paul, Saint, 25, 74
Melandri, Francesca, 190 Paz, Octavio, 25
Menakem, Resmaa, 160 Pelagius, 153
Mendelsohn, Stephen, 160, 178 Philyra, 67
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 25, 48–49, Pio, Padre, 73
146, 149, 156, 158, 159, 165, 173 Pizer, Barbara, 175
Merton, Cynthia, 148 Plato, 33, 35, 36, 153
Merton, Thomas, 148 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 146, 155
Meyniel, Dominique, 105, 278 Portnoy, Michael, 186
Miller, Alice, 172 Prendergast, John, 148, 152, 163
Mitchell, Joni, 7 Prescott, James, 174
Mitchell, Juliet, 88 Prometheus, 20
Moore, George, 147 Proust, Marcel, 23, 29
Moran, Dermot, 156 Pugliese, Joseph, 182
Morley, James, 145
Murdoch, Iris, 155 Rand, Richard, 155
Myriel, Monseigneur, 20 Reich, Wilhelm, 88, 169
INDEX
Ricœur, Paul, 158 Spitz, René, 102

Rogers, Annie, 175 Stackle, Erin, 155, 154
Rohr, Richard, 148, 152, 164– 66, 174, Steenkamp, Yolande, 179
192, 193 Stevens, Wallace, 31
Rojcewicz, Christine, 147, 160, 178 Sullivan, Karen, 177
Rosa, Hartmut, 151, 177 Süskind, Patrick, 23
Rothschild, Babette, 169 Swade, Tamar, 174
Rumi, 163, 167
Rumpza, Stephanie, 164 Taylor, Allegra, 178
Rumsfeld, Donald, 142 Taylor, Charles, 141
Rutherford, Adam, 176 Taylor, James, 168
Teeman Tim, 141, 190
Sacks, Oliver, 176 Telemachus, 63
Sadat, Anwar, 15 Teresa of Avilla, 81, 166, 167
Sallin, Karl, 188 Teresias, 25
Sanders, Daniel, 54 Thomas, Saint, 77, 78 201
Sarah (Genesis), 20 Thompson, Evan, 155, 160
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 48, 146 Thurman, Howard, 192
Schulman, Audrey, 21, 180 Tiresias, 25
Scotus, Duns, 153 Treanor, Brian, 144, 148, 151, 154, 155,
Serres, Michel, 148 159
Severson, Eric, 162 Trevarthen, Colwyn, 29, 152
Shakespeare, William, 21, 162 Trimble, David, 15
Sheehan, Thomas, 154, 155 Turtle, Sherry, 188
Shelly, Rambo, 166
Shizutera, Ueda, 168 Valjean, Jean, 20
Schott-Billmann, France, 176 Van der Kolk, Bessel, 90, 92, 96,
Slimani, Lëila, 137, 190 98, 100, 106, 170, 172, 176, 180,
Sobchack, Vivian, 149 181
Socrates, 162 Van Mohr, Mariana, 171, 174
Soloman, 164 Veldsman, Danie, 179
Sontag, Susan, 190 Viola, Bill, 187
Soth, Michael, 171
Sparrowe, Linda, 180 Warnecke, Tom, 174, 175
Spence, Charles, 187 Watts, Alan, 26
Spielrein, Sabina, 87 Weinberger, Eliot, 149
INDEX
Weineger, Radhule, 173 Wolfe, Cary, 188

Wickersham, Joan, 94, 173 Wood, David, 144, 146
Wilson-Hartgrove, Jonathan,
152 Zahavi, Dan, 160
Wiman, Christian, 41 Zeus, 20, 66
Winnicott, D. W., 100, 102, 177 Zizek, Slavoj, 183
Wohlleben, Peter, 193 Zuboff, Shoshana, 189
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Touch Recovering Our Most Vital Sense by Richard Kearney

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Touch

Edited by Costica Bradatan

The most important questions in life haunt us with a sense of

Mark C. Taylor, Intervolution: Smart Bodies Smart Things

Columbia University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Columbia University Press books are printed

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

Introduction: Are We Losing Our Senses? 1

I have many friends, colleagues, and family I wish to

Lochner, Costica Bradatan, Susan Pensak, and Lowell Frye.

I grew up in a country— Ireland—where people only

return to “therapies of touch,” but suﬃce it for now to say

pandemic eclipse of the tactile is a deﬁning moment to

So how do we get back in touch with touch? How do we

contemporary phenomenon of “touch hunger”— a telling

I touch you with my eyes, I watch you with my hands

L et us begin with some examples from ordinary lan-

The term tact derives from the Latin tango-tangere-tactum

and more intimate modes of contact, each being subject

12 1.1 Hands (drawing by Sarah Kearney, after Louise Bourgeois)

even the simple instance of tickling always involves another

leading, in extremis, to the systematic ostracization of oth-

West, we love the mind, while giving short shrift to the

As I hope is clear by now, when we speak of touch we are

inclusive way, as an embodied manner of being in the

1.2 Le Toucher, Lady and the Unicorn Tapestry

perceived. Its presence or absence is what distinguishes

A person with tactful taste is a person with savvy. Savvy is a

is a carnal know-how— a savoir faire or savoir vivre echoing

inﬁnitesimal sensory tastings into words and thoughts. We

Gentleness belongs above all to the palate, to the new-

Many foundational myths bear witness to the primary

has its tale of primal tasting. For if ontogeny repeats phy-

such savvy is “true” to the extent that it provides a reciprocal

What do we mean when we say that someone has ﬂair? We

She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

Flair is also related to medical tact. Jean Lenoir, author

charged with social conventions. Over time, smells take on

bottle . . . the soft feel of the smooth glossy pages of certain

24 When is seeing tactful? Seeing into the heart of things is

cites as evidence of synesthetic perception or “tactile see-

Nor, to rejoin a more contemporary discussion, should

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd,

All persons—not just poets, mystics, and sages— are capa-

And sound? Hearing is tactful when it resonates with what

listen to the call of others—human, animal, or divine—is a

like volume, timbre, and tempo when caressing or being

from her work with trauma survivors to show us that heal-

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

That was not ours although we understood. . . .

Touch knows differences.

A ﬁrst philosophy of touch was sketched by Aristotle at

by our eﬀorts we shall know all that is pure, which is pre-

RECOVERING OUR SENSES WITH ARISTOTLE

In the ﬁrst great work of human psychology, the De

of the senses. Even when we are asleep, he noted, we are

just a material organ but a complex mediating membrane

Let us take a closer look at Aristotle’s argument.

most “basic” here does not mean the most transparent. In

While I may seem directly present to what I touch and

from something other than ourselves. Flesh translates this

SENSING THE WORLD— SKIN ON SKIN

But if touch is something we do to the world, it is also some-