To gain a living economy cannot amount to suddenly reach a autonomous existence and know, by some currents of our blood, how to live. Our birth and the later stages of our life bring us in always greater intricacies of relations which ought to develop a tactile relationship between the mother and the newborn. However, in societal and thinking developments and histories, the maternal and the tactile dimensions of such beginning of our life are not taken into consideration. Thispoint  is important for certain sections of my PhD project, in which I explore the nexus between places, speed, and the relationship between touch and gaze. 

My participation in the annual Luce Irigaray’s seminar was animated by the intention of uncovering the domains in which the forgetting of the maternal origin, constitutive of Western metaphysics, coincides with the forgetting of touch as the precondition and the structuring principle of the emergence of the subjects as well as the basis of their ethical functioning. In The Mediation of Touch, Irigaray insists on the idea that a human being and becoming corresponds to a “coming to the other” (Irigaray, The Mediation of Touch, p. 8), notably through touch, and she invites the reader to remember and be faithful to the ‘altricial’ character of the human being, which entails touch and warmth between the (m)other and the child but has been harshly repressed in favor of sight and locomotion, which characterize ‘precocial’ beings ( cf. Introduction of The Mediation of Touch ). In contrast to the traditionally privileged  “coming into the world,” which has more to do with a solipsistic and sight oriented outlook on human nature, Irigaray emphasizes the qualities  of touch which, as she remarks, individualizes through “restoring to the body its natural properties and forms”, (Irigaray, The Mediation of Touch, p. 14) but also “gets into contactwithout taking anything,” (ibid.) bringing each back to their natural belongingwhile giving it a human status. Touch mainly happens between two naturally different beings assuming the negative of a difference of which germ cells are the most fundamental cause (Irigaray, The Mediation of Touch, p. 13). In fact, the original existence of these two in placental relations is approached by Irigaray in a dialogue with a Helene Rouch in a chapter of her book  Je, tu, nous. 

Ways of being to which the contemporary humans surrender themselves  have been tragically successful in smothering their altricial beginnings (Irigaray, The Mediation of Touch, p.1). Thus, in our risk to become — or in our rapid approach to be  —atomized object-scanned entities, we deprive ourselves, as Irigaray remarks, of a triple transcendence:  ours, that of the  other(s), and that of the union between ourselves and the other(s),  which can be mediated by touch (Irigaray, The Mediation of Touch, p.1). Indeed, touch procures a linkage between self-affection and hetero-affection, which is in an endless motion. This is so because of the ways  in which touch carries out its mediating nature: touch can connect the inside with the outside  of the body, and the active with the passive, allowing a form of self-consciousness to exist which emerges from self-affection as well as from  tactile relations with other’s self-affection, giving birth to non-ossifiablerelationships with the other made possible by the physical character of  the human touch (Irigaray, The Mediation of Touch, p. 27; p. 306).

Because the initial communication between human beings happens thanks to touch between the mother and the newborn, and because thinking desire in a way that remains faithful to  touch and sexuate difference arisen from germ cells, a desire, which “longs for uniting with the different both to surmount and preserve the negative,” (Irigaray, The Mediation of Touch, pp. 20–21) and which overturns the interpretation of the emergence of subjectivity as a “split,” the forgetting of touch cannot be unfixed from the forgetting of the mother. The exile from the maternal as that which must be left aside inan adult subjectivity is forcefully mold against the hospitable economy of touch.   

In the wake of the current development of technology and the diminishing of co-presence of people in a physical way, touch and the awareness of its importance for (inter)subjectivity seem to desert human lives. Then, the relation of our activity online and in the physical space is in the best case a vague choreography between these two worlds, the body,being presented as an object, always coming after our implication in the online space. Unlike some other abstracted philosophies of touch, Irigaray’s writings speak of touch as what preserves the unity of two sexually different beings andits layers of functioning, notably between the germ cells and the soma. As a sort of dialectics between the spiritual and the physical, the germ cells and the soma should be acknowledged together as that which bears witness to the dynamism of difference as well as to the physical nature of the “I” (The Mediation of Touch, p. 9; pp. 12–13). Instead, the silenced role of germ cells in philosophy of touch safeguards solemnly the discourse on the “I”, of which the soma is the carrying object, and causes the forgetting of the fact that this “I” can only exist when it is capable of opening up to the other and returning to itself, notably thanks to a touching through the permeable mucous tissues. This is why the maternal is separated from touch and touch is excised from the sexuate and the difference which need it as mediation. To think the maternal, touch, and sexuate difference together, as does Irigaray, is an attempt to re-awake the link between ontology and phenomenology of touch and the constitutive vitality of an/our embodied being, but also to de-objectivize the body in anage of digital technology. 

Human beginnings happen through touch. To return to touch and cultivate our altricial  belonging seems all the more relevant in Irigaray’s perspective that touch extends beyond mere need for survival. The newborn searches for the mother’s breast not only with the mouth, but also with a caressing hand (Irigaray, The Mediation of Touch, p. 4). Our search for intersubjectivity is in a way already incarnated through this gesture that expresses a desire for communion. Nurturing self- and hetero-affection through touch, in faithfulness to our altricial beginnings, can revive the neglectedontological premises of the human being which have to do  with the maternal and the tactile.