In his development of the skin ego as the “agent” of a generalized anaclisis, Anzieu privileges the tactile precisely as the point of oscillation, the pivot, between the sensible-transcendental écart and the infraempirical ground of experience:
In relation to all the other sensory registers, the tactile possesses a distinctive characteristic which not only places it at the origin of the psyche, but allows it permanently to provide the latter with something which one might also call the mental background. This is the backdrop against which psychical contents [contenus] stand out as figures, or alternatively the containing envelope which makes it possible for the psychical apparatus to have contents. (84)
In this figuration, the tactile comprises the modality for the reversibility of psychic life, for a higher order reversibility grounded in the primordial anaclitic indifference of the skin. Yet, to function as a kind of privileged über-sense, an “infrasensory sense," the tactile must continue to harbor something of the more primordial skin container function. Thus, tactility is at once the most primitive sense formation and the sensible-transcendental origin of the sensible per se; it must simultaneously instance two divergent ontological formations and must also bridge the gap between them, forming some kind of passage across the empirical-transcendental divide.
This is precisely why Anzieu furnishes two apparently incompatible accounts of the tactile, both of which, however, serve to foreground the reflexivity of sense. On one hand, there is the reflexivity of touch as a distinct sense:
The skin possesses a structural primacy over all the other senses and this is true for a least three reasons. Firstly, it is the only sense organ that covers the whole body. It itself also contains several distinct senses (heat, pain, contact, pressure ...) whose physical proximity entails psychical contiguity. Lastly, as Freud allusively remarks (1923), touch is the only one of the five external senses which possesses a reflexive structure: the child who touches the parts of its body with its finger is testing our two complementary sensation[s], of being a piece of skin that touches at the same time as being a piece of skin that is touched. It is on the model of tactile reflexivity that the other sensory reflexivities (hearing oneself make sounds, smelling one's own odor, looking at oneself in the mirror), and subsequently the reflexivity of thinking, are constructed. (61)
BODIES IN CODE
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