But this incessant escaping, this impotency to superpose exactly upon one another the touching of the things by my right hand and the touching of this same right hand by my left hand, or to superpose, in the exploratory movements of the hand, the tactile experience of a point and that of the “same" point a moment later, or the auditory experience of my own voice and that of other voices—this is not a failure. For if these experiences never exactly overlap, if they slip away at the very moment they are about to rejoin, if there is always a "shift," a “spread” [écart], between them, this is precisely because my two hands are part of the same body, because it moves itself in the world, because I hear myself both from within and from without. I experience—and as often as I wish—the transition and the metamorphosis of the one experience into the other, and it is only as though the hinge between them, solid, unshakeable, remained irremediably hidden from me. But this hiatus between my right hand touched and my right hand touching, between my voice heard and my voice uttered, between one moment of my tactile life and the following one, is not an ontological void, a non-being: it is spanned by the total being of my body and by that of the world.... (148)
The écart in this sense is a marker of reversibility as a necessary condition of phenomenal experience, of sensation per se. It is nothing other than the fundamental dehiscence that explains the body's need for the world (and also the world's need for the body, being's need for manifestation or phenomenalization). As such, écart also prevents the body from achieving pure immanence; it is that which renders it an essentially incomplete "unity;" a process of individuation that will never be fully accomplished.
The necessity for such an understanding of the body-world coupling and of its rootedness in the experience of the écart has been demonstrated by Renaud Barbaras in The Being of the Phenomenon. The divergence between touching and touched is the condition for the being of the tangible world (and something similar can be said for vision and for hearing—that is, those other senses characterized by doubleness):
[T]he touch is produced only insofar as it is immersed in a body; it advents only as this very corporeality. The touch is itself, that is, sentient, only to the degree that it is unaware of itself in or as the world that it reaches. The incarnation of touch corresponds to the fact that its object is not clearly laid out in front of it but is given only as the obscure presence of a tactile world, the presentation as tactile world of a dimension that is non-presentable by itself. The absence of this dimension to the world responds to the absence of touch to itself, that is, to its carnal being. ... touch can proceed only from a subject which is its own absence, which is outside of itself.xxxvii,20
BODIES IN CODE
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