God after Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic

7. Touch Me, Touch Me Not

123 “There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown.” With these words Nobel laureate Elias Canetti opens his phenomenological study of social behavior. His observations on the fear of being touched are so revealing and pertinent to our following discussion that I shall quote from them at some length: There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic. Even clothes give insufficient security: it is easy to tear them and pierce through to the naked, smooth, defenseless flesh of the victim. All the distances which men create round themselves are dictated by this fear. They shut themselves in houses which no-one may enter, and only there feel some measure of security. The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness. seven Touch Me,Touch Me Not Pone me sicut signaculum in corde tuo, Sicut signaculum in brachiis tuis. —Cant, VIII, 6 God after Metaphysics 124 The repugnance to being touched remains with us when we go about among people; the way we move in a busy street, in restaurants, trains or buses, is governed by it. Even when we are standing next to them and are able to watch and examine them closely, we avoid actual contact if we can.1 For Canetti, a large part of the functions and customs of our civilized society , if not civilization itself, stem from the fear of all fears, the fear of being touched. Even our appreciation of the beautiful, in its basic traits of symmetry and proportion, would seem to have originated as defense mechanisms against the fear of being touched: “Symmetry, which is so striking a feature of many ancient civilizations, derives in part from man’s attempt to create uniform distances all round himself.”2 What sort of irrational instinct, however, or immemorial trauma fuels such an entrenched fear? Canetti alludes to the answer when he adds that these and many more examples of such phobic behavior prove “that we are dealing here with a human propensity as deep-seated as it is alert and insidious ; something which never leaves a man when he has once established the boundaries of his personality.”3 The fear of the Other’s touch is the fear triggered by the violation of the established boundaries of one’s personality. It is my subjectivity itself, the awareness of a distinctiveness demarcated by my body, which the proximity of another body threatens. How ironic, then, to realize that the very gesture that I now perceive as a threatening breach of the space that defines me as an “I” was the same as the original act that had earlier established my subjectivity over and against the Other. For it is by virtue of the violence of the hand (its grasping, seizing, and killing the Other) that I first became aware of myself as a separate and distinct self. The Birth of Subjectivity: Grasping The first Other, against which I defined myself, was—and in some sense, still remains—the animal. In my ability to turn the animal into the victim of my hunt and my hand (the two words are, in fact, related), I become nonanimal . The very activity of hunting has distinguished the hunter from the prey. Even before the hand throws the fatal stone, it is the hand, having prepared the tool suitable for killing, that has separated me from my prey. The man who makes the first tool is not anymore an animal. The man who hunts and eats his kill with his own hands is not anymore an animal. In eating the animal, the animal becomes part of me—it becomes incorporated into me, and thus I become more than an animal. I become a human. Other humans, however, have no indemnity against being treated as animals. The other human, once fallen to my hands, loses its human status and assumes that of an animal. I may have ceased long ago from eating other humans, but Touch Me, Touch Me Not 125 new ways have been invented to help me appropriate...