- SEEING THROUGH THE HAND
As a premodal or amodal dimension of the infraempirical that bootstraps itself into phenomenological existence, primary tactility or infratactility comprises a kind of primitive or not yet differentiated, virtual, or potential reversibility out of which arises not simply the division of the senses, but more fundamentally, the divisions that comprise sensation per se (activity-passivity, experiencing-experienced, subject-object, etc.). Infratactility would thus seem to furnish a source for the reversibility that, according to Merleau-Ponty's famous analysis of the chiasm, characterizes the “flesh." Indeed, it helps us to understand the apparent inconsistency in Merleau-Ponty's conception of reversibility, its teetering in the balance between something that cannot quite occur in fact and yet must, by right, be possible:
To begin with, we spoke summarily of a reversibility of the seeing and the visible, of the touching and the touched. It is time to emphasize that it is a reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the things, but I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization, and one of two things always occurs: either my right hand really passes over to the rank of the touched, but then its hold on the world is interrupted; or it retains its hold on the world, but then I do not really touch it-—my right hand touching, I palpate with my left hand only its outer covering. (1968, 147–48)
By what right, however, is the reversibility always imminent? What agency, what materiality, what form of being supports this imminence? This is a crucial question precisely because it foregrounds the divide separating the phenomenal domain, in which reversibility occurs as the experience of“double sensation," from the infraempirical domain, where reversibility remains in potentia.
If we follow Merleau-Ponty in making the move from imminence to double sensation as experienced, we obtain a certain conceptualization of the écart (the "fission," "gap," or "spread") constitutive of sensation. Specifically, the écart would seem to comprise the fundamental principle of the body's belongingness to the world (and of the complementarity of phenomenalization and ontology):
BODIES IN CODE
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