Derrida and Husserl’s Phenomenology of Touch: “Inter” as the Uncanny Condition of the Lived Body
Derrida and Husserl’s Phenomenology of Touch: “Inter” as the Uncanny Condition of the Lived Body

Summary/Abstract: By closely examining Derrida’s reading of Husserl’s phenomenology of touch in Ideas II, this essay will complicate the view about deconstruction’s supposed critique of phenomenology, and will argue, following Derrida, that the relation between the two philosophers is rather more intricate. The first section will focus on the phenomenological experience of the lived body [Leib] and its reliance on an axiomatic network of concepts (immediacy, self-evidence, etc.). The primordiality and irreducibility of these phenomenological values is attested by a series of other Husserlian motifs such as the epochē, the reduction and the delimitation of a sphere of transcendental ownness. The second section will explore the instrumentality of touch and, more specifically, of the immediate and auto-affective act of manual touching in the constitution of the lived body. Derrida’s response to Ideas II in On Touching–Jean-Luc Nancy revolves around Husserl’s rigorous distinction of touch from sight. While glossing On Touching–Jean-Luc Nancy in the final section, I will identify a certain “inter” qua originary spacing toward which Husserl’s treatment of touch obliquely gestures, and which Derrida conceptualizes in terms of an essential possibility of visible exteriority. I will explain how this aporetic “inter” undercuts the alleged immediacy and pre-eminence of touch over against sight, and also why it constitutes the condition of both possibility and impossibility for the lived body.

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