Page 157 - Cyberculture and New Media

148 The Implicit Body
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124
S Sorial, ‘Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the Question of Dasein’s
Embodiment: An Ethics of Touch and Spacing,’ Philosophy Today, Volume
48 Number 2, Summer 2004, p. 218.
125
Perpich, p. 78.
126
Sorial, p. 221.
127
JF Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, G Van Den Abbeele
(trans), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988, p. 112 quoted in
N Sullivan, ‘Being-Exposed: ‘The Poetics of Sex’ and Other Matters of
Tact,’ Transformations, Issue 8, July 2004,
<http://transformation.cqu.edu.au/journal/issue_08/article_04.shtml> (viewed
2, December 2005). What is at stake for Nancy in this is far-ranging and
paramount: “The body, as an expression of meaning by virtue of its
singularity or alterity, is the site where both ethics and community take
place.” (Sorial, p. 4) “We” is, for Nancy, the expression of a plurality. It
expresses “‘our’ being divided and entangled: ‘one’ is not ‘with’ in some
general sort of way … a ‘we’, even one that is not articulated, is the condition
for the possibility of each ‘I’” (Nancy in Sorial, p. 3). While the subject is
always singular, she is not isolated in her difference, but is rather exposed to,
affected and touched by, the other. The central point here is that “we” are
always in relation; we are always “I” as something shared with others, not as
a fused collective or a collection of autonomous individuals. This is an ethical
mode of being that seeks out and affirms otherness. It is a tactful, rather than
tactical response, “the testimony of a fracture, of the opening onto the other,”
rather than “an experience conducted by an I in the quest for self-knowledge”
(Lyotard in Sullivan, p. 6). Touch then, for Nancy, opens up spaces
strangeness. An ethics that is tactful recognizes the need to maintain the
space between self and other, and to make contact.
128
Nancy, Corpus, np. quoted in Perpich, p. 82.
129
Derrida, p. 41.
130
Ibid, p. 39.
131
Ibid, pp. 121-123. See also pp. 124-125 for a brief discussion of Deleuze
and Guattari’s attempt to open up a non-optical haptic.
132
Ibid, p. 53.
133
See Ibid, pp. 300-303 for Derrida’s discussion of the virtualization of
touch and the examples he gives from contemporary digital technologies.
134
Nancy, Corpus, p. 104 quoted in Ibid, p. 288.
135
M Naas, ‘In and Out of Touch: Derrida’s Le Toucher,’ Research in
Phenomenology, Volume 31, 2001,
<http://proquest.umi.com.innopac.wits.ac.za:80/pqdweb?did=785059751&si
d=2&Fmt=3&clinetid=57035&ROT=309&VName=PQD> (viewed 3 August
2005), p. 258. Partagé refers to both that which is shared in common and that