In Nature, the double sensation of touch is explicitly accorded the ontological task of opening the body onto the world, and vision is explicitly positioned as a (higher order) derivation from it. What emerges as the crucial component of this more profound understanding of tactility is the demarcation of a bodily interiority, which is certainly significant in light of our previous exposure of the correlation of the skin boundary and primary tactility. Asking how the body can “have a reference to something other than itself," Merleau-Ponty quickly comes to what is distinctive about tactility: its boundedness "within" the body:
It [the body] is open in a circuit with the world, but it is open. It sees itself; it touches itself. The hand that I touch, I sense, could touch that which touches it. And this is no longer true past the limits of my skin. The block of my body thus has an “interior" which is its application to itself. By this application, it has not only affective states closed on itself, but also correlations [?]—the sensibles and the world. The flesh (the touching touched, as an innate body) as the visibility of the invisible (the touching hand, the look).21
This delimitation of a bodily interiority and a skin boundary comprises the payoff of Merleau-Ponty's deepening of the Phenomenology's analysis of the body as our access to the world as such. To say that the body is “the measurement of the world” or a “standard of things" is, simply, to recognize that its specificity, its singularity, as a kind of being (and as a part of Being) comes from its interiority, from its application to itself (its self-affection), which is, simultaneously, the agency for its openness to the world (hetero-affectivity). This complex self-relation, moreover, informs the duality of sensation characteristic of touch and vision as differentiated (nonoverlapping) senses.
Thus, when Merleau-Ponty discovers the condition of possibility for the duality of sensation “in the relation of the body to itself," noting that it is here that there is the touched-touching," he is simply unpacking the significance of primary tactility's role as the strict correlative to the skin boundary and the primordial interiority it demarcates (223). Primary tactility is that in virtue of which sensory reciprocity can "break down" or collapse"; it is the source of the “identity of touching and touched" that, as the analysis from The Visible and the Invisible made clear, can never appear in actuality, in the realm of empirical life, even as it expresses the ontological principle of bodily life as fundamentally noncoincident with itself, as sundered by its essential openness to the world.
BODIES IN CODE
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