The Mediation of Touch

A conversation between Emma Jones and Luce Irigaray.

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Emma Jones: - I am intrigued by the role of desire in this text, which you invoke in a variety of ways. What is the role of desire here in allowing us to evolve and become our unique selves as living beings?

Luce Irigaray: - Desire is a human way of passing from a physical attraction to a psychic and even a spiritual feeling. Being rooted in nature, desire can transform a merely natural belonging into a psychic or spiritual belonging which can remain sensitive [capable of feeling], thus peculiar to each. Desire builds bridges between our body and our psyche and our mind, but also between us as living beings, in particular between us as naturally, thus sexually, different. As longing for the naturally different other, desire aspires after transcendence, a transcendence which can remain sensitive, and not be abstractly universal. Unlike needs, desire as such cannot be satisfied by consumption, thus it compels us to evolve and to maintain transcendence, notably the one resulting from difference, as a horizon never completely overcome.

As the overarching theme of the book is touch, how does desire animate touch? Desire motivates touch. It provides touch with dynamism, finality, warmth and other qualities. Desire resorts to touch as a telling before any articulated language, a telling which can speak to the whole being and be heard by it. Desire makes touch an original language which has to do with our natural forms to express itself and its search for reciprocity. Thereby, desire uses touch as a language which speaks to the body and allows bodies to talk to one another, even if they are different and live in different worlds.