Face to Face with Levinas

12. The Fecundity of the Caress

LUCE IRIGARAY 12. The Fecundity ofthe Caress: A Reading ofLevinas, Totality and Infinity section IV, B, ((The Phenomenology ofEros" On the horizon of a story is found, once again, that which was in the beginning: this naive, or native, sense of a touch, in which the subject does not yet exist. Submerged in pathos or aisthesz's: astonishment, admiration, sometimes terror, before that which surrounds it. Eros prior to any eros defined or measured as such. The voluptuousness of being born into a world where the gaze itself remains tactile - open to the light. Still carnal. Voluptuous without knowing it. Always at the beginning and not based upon the origin of a subject that sees, grows old, and dies, from no longer being in the enthusiasm and innocence of a perpetual beginning anew. A subject already "fixed." Not "free as the wind." A subject that already knows its objects and controls its relations with the world and with others. Already closed to any initiation. Already involved in initiatives that exclude the unknown. Already solipsistic. In charge of a world that it enjoys only through possession. With neither communion nor a childlike acceptance of that which gives of itself. A consumer who consumes what he produces without admiration for what offers itself to him in its unfinished state, before it becomes a finished product. Voluptuousness can reopen and reverse this conception and construction of the world. It can return to the evanescence of subject and object. To the lifting of all schemas by which the other is defined. Made graspable by this definition. Eros can arrive at the innocence 231 232 LUCE IRIGARAY that never took place with the other as other. At that nonregressive in-finity of pathetic feeling for the other. At that appetite of all the senses, which is irreducible to any obligatory consumption. At that indefinable attraction to the other, which will never be satiated. Which will always remain on the threshold, even after entering into the house. Which will remain a dwelling, preceding and following the habitation of all dwellings. This always still-preliminary gesture, which precedes any union and comes first in all nuptials, which weds without consuming, which perfects while abiding by the outlines of the other, this gesture may be called: the touch of the caress. Prior to and following any positioning of the subject, this touch binds and unbinds two others in flesh that is still, and always, untouched by mastery. Dressing the one and the other withoutwithin , within-without, in a garment that neither evokes, invokes, nor takes pleasure in the perversity of the naked but contemplates and adorns it, always for a first time, with in-finite, un-finished flesh. Covering it, uncovering it, again and again, like an amorous impregnation that seeks out and affirms otherness, while protecting it. In that place, nothing attests to the subject. The ever prolonged quest for a birth that will never take place, whose due date still, and always, recedes on the horizon. Life always open to what happens. To the fleeting touch of what has not yet found a setting. 1"0 the grace of a future that none can control. That will or will not happen. But while one waits for it, any possession of the world or of the other is suspended. A future coming, which is not measured by the transcendence of death but by the call to birth of the self and the other. For which each one arranges and rearranges the environment, the body, and the cradle, without closing the least dimension of a room, a house, an identity. The fecundity of a love whose most elementary gesture, or deed, remains the caress. Before orality comes to be, touch is already in existence. No nourishment can compensate for the grace, or the work, of touching. Touch makes it possible to wait, to gather strength, so that the other will return to caress and reshape, from within and from without, flesh that is given back to itself in the gestures of love. The most subtly necessary guardian of my life being the other's flesh. Approaching and speaking to me with his hands. Bringing me back The Fecundity of the Caress 233 to life more intimately than any regenerative nourishment, the other's hands, these palms with which he approaches without going through me, give me back the borders of my body and call me back...