Page 159 - Cyberculture and New Media

150 The Implicit Body
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147
In “Tangent Three,” Derrida critiques Merleau-Ponty for figuring touch as
direct contact with the other’s body and, thereby, the appropriation of the
other’s alterity. In the classic haptocentric move, Merleau-Ponty also
conflates sight and touch occasionally, while subordinating touch to sight for
the most part. (Although there are later Merleau-Ponty’s who deliver this
critique to earlier Merleau-Ponty’s, the latter work still, for Derrida, stumbles
on the “anthropology of touch” (Naas, p. 560). In Tangents Four and Five,
Derrida looks at the work of Chrétien and Franck who are credited with
radicalizing our understanding of touch and “showing the way the non-proper
(what is other or from the other) always interrupts the proper of ‘my flesh’
[thereby rupturing] the auto-affection of a phenomenology” but ultimately
end up affirming the privilege of man’s hand by not taking into account “the
role of the techno-prosthesis located as the ‘heart’ of the so-called ‘lived’ or
‘body proper’” (Ibid).
148
Naas, p. 559.
149
Derrida, pp. 96-7.
150
Ibid, p. 113 and p. 273.
151
Ibid, p. 127. Derrida most often, although not always, uses Nancy’s terms
- the ‘techne of the body’ or ‘ecotechnics’ - instead of those more commonly
used - ‘the technical,’ of techne, and ‘technology’ or even ‘the question of
technics’ - “in order to follow him and warn against the general-singular
(‘the’ technical) and against the modern doxa always prone to misusing this
conceptual bent or alibi.” Nancy in “A Finite Thinking” calls for vigilance
with regards ‘technology’ as a ‘fetish-word’: “There is no ‘the’ … here …
there is not ‘the’ technical, merely a multiplicity of technologies.” Earlier he
has marked his analysis with these two other propositions: “‘The’ technical is
nothing other than the ‘technique’ of compensating for the nonimmanence of
existence in the given”; or: “‘The’ technical - understood this time as the
‘essential’ technicity that is also the irreducible multiplicity of technologies -
compensates for the absence of nothing; it fills in for and supplements
nothing’” (Ibid, pp. 286-7).
152
Ibid, p. 129.
153
Perpich, p. 6.
154
Is this problematic for bodies that have had the privilege of being seen as
self-identical and whole? Nancy, as so many, pays scant attention to gender,
for example. But, argues Perpich, his account address “those bodies
considered borderline without having to position them at the outer limits (or,
for that matter, at the center)” (p. 7). His work also augments the work of
feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler in its movement beyond the a
priori instantiation of social constructionism - the sexed body that is prior to
the social inscription of gender.