Table Of ContentThe Language of Touch
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Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar, by Louise Nuttall
Mixed Metaphors, by Karen Sullivan
The Language of Touch
Philosophical Examinations in Linguistics
and Haptic Studies
Edited by Mirt Komel
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Contents
Introduction Mirt Komel 1
1 The Wave of the Sign: Pyramidal Sign, Haptic Hieroglyphs,
and the Touch of Language Mirt Komel 5
2 The Structure of the Phonetical Touch: Unsettling the
Mastery of Phonology Over Phonetics Tomi Bartole 19
3 Surplus of Touch: From the Forest of Symbols to the Jungle of
Touch Karmen Šterk 39
4 Ontology of Touch: From Aristotle to Brentano
Gregor Moder 55
5 Anatomical Aporia: Speculative Unity of Touch and
Language Goran Vranešević 73
6 The Category of the (Un)Touchable in Haptic Materialism:
Touch, Repetition, and Language Bara Kolenc 91
7 The Lick of the Mother Tongue: Derrida’s Fantasies of “the Touch
of Language” with Augustine and Marx Rachel Aumiller 107
8 On the Touch of Swear Words: Swearing and the Lacanian
Real Peter Klepec 121
9 Proper Names: Being in Touch with the Real
Jela Krečič 137
10 Ethics of Touch: Doctor Who’s Untouchable Touch
Eva Vrtačič 153
11 Haptic Contagion: The Scream Mutating Touch and
Language Zack Sievers 173
Index 195
Introduction
Mirt Komel
The question is not so much “to touch or not to touch,” but rather what does the
not in “not to touch” mean? What kind of touch does the negation imply? Is such
a negated touch still conceivable as touching, if no actual touch happens?
Apart from being an obvious paraphrasing of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and
Heidegger’s Being and Time, this introductory sentence’s purpose is not merely a
rhetorical word-p lay, but an attempt at transposing touch from its bodily,
physical, empirical, and phenomenological existence towards its distinctively
linguistic dimension. If we understand touch linguistically, then we can pose a
variety of questions, which come down to: how does language structure touching?
Of course we are not the first nor, we imagine, will we be the last to raise this
question. The first two extensive monographs that focused exclusively on touch
also posed this question, implicitly or explicitly, although from two very different
perspectives. It is one of those happy historical coincidences that the English
translation of Jacques Derrida’s On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, and The Book of
Touch edited by Constance Classen, rolled off the presses in the same year, that
is, 2005, a year that could be said to mark the birth of haptic studies strictly
speaking—by which I mean: thinking of touch in its own terms and not, say, as a
sense among other senses; a function of the body; a phenomenological curiosity;
an existential question; and similar ways of appropriating touch in a different
context where touch is not the sole or central object of inquiry.
Let me now reinforce and at the same time question the above demarcation
line: Derrida originally published his book in French in the year 2000, but it was
actually a reworking of an earlier essay from the beginning of the 1990s, itself
published as On the Work of Jean-Luc Nancy, in English, as the introduction, to a
special issue of the Journal of Modern Critical Theory dedicated to Nancy, whom
Derrida himself labeled as the “first great thinker of touch.” Interestingly, this
label and the related interpretation of Nancy’s work as the first haptic philosophy
2 The Language of Touch
came well before Nancy himself explicitly addressed the issue of touch. This he
did in his later works, most notably in his “essay on the resurrection of the body”
Noli me tangere (2003) that related to his earlier work, focusing primarily on
Corpus (1992). That is half of the reason why the English translation of Derrida’s
book marks the above-mentioned milestone, since it was only after Nancy
actualized his philosophy as haptic, that all Derrida’s speculative interpretations
of Nancy as the “first great thinker of touch” actually came true.
The other half of the reason is that in order to have haptic studies “proper,”
philosophy did not suffice, since neither the starting point nor the aim of Derrida
and Nancy’s works was ever to constitute such a field, nor build their respective
philosophies around touch, or anything similar. While, on the other hand, that was
precisely the scope of Classen’s editorial endeavor that aimed at constructing a
“cultural history of touch”. Let us not polemicize how much the book succeeded in
this particular aspect, but what it indeed succeeded in was the establishment of “a
culture of researching touch,” thus elevating touch to become a respectable object
of academic research (not at all a commonplace back in 2005). Many of the authors
from The Book of Touch later focused on touch even more, either through their
own monographs (such as, most notably, Mark Paterson’s The Senses of Touch), or
by editing special journal issues (for instance, David Howes with a special issue of
The Senses and Society dedicated to the topic of Remediating Touch).
Apart from the happy historical coincidence there is one more important
reason for paralleling the two books by Derrida and Classen already mentioned,
since they paradigmatically, methodologically, and epistemologically defined all
further inquiry on touch and formed the core of what is nowadays consolidating
as haptic studies: all the current approaches towards touch follow—consciously
or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly—either Derrida’s or Classen et al.’s
thinking: touch is, in the final analysis, defined either by language (Derrida) or
culture and society (Classen), or a combination of both (if you understand
language to be the essential part of culture and society or if you understand
language to be an essentially cultural and social phenomenon).
If this book claims anything then it claims to make a step forward from the
current state of affairs in haptic studies by posing the opposite question from the
one proposed at the beginning, namely, that our interest is not only in how does
language structure touch, but also in how does touch structure language? And
consequently, what is the specific haptic quality of language that allows such
metaphoric articulations as “to be touched by a poetry,” or, for that matter, “to be
touched by a swearword”? And, if there is a haptic quality to language, are such
metaphors really just metaphors?
Introduction 3
Such questions could not have been raised either in ancient times or in the
Middle Ages, but only afterwards and not without considering the linguistic turn
that began at the beginning of the twentieth century with Ferdinand de Saussure
and his followers, and that showed its full philosophical potential later on in the
middle of the century with the structuralistic revolution, nowadays unavoidably
referred to through the doubtful prefix “post-.” However, the contribution that
linguistics made to haptic studies is not a one-s ided gift, and much like in
touching where one supposedly cannot “touch without being touched back,”
haptic studies wants to touch linguistics back precisely through this book by
discerning a tactile quality of language. Such an endeavor can put forward a
completely different set of questions that are linguistically still pertinent: why are
the minimal materialistic entities of language defined only in acoustic
(phonemes) and visual (graphemes) terms, and not also in haptic ones?
These and similar questions are precisely those that we posed ourselves
during the research project on touch and language for which we coined the term
haptolinguistics and which was the springboard for the book on the Language of
Touch: Philosophical Examinations in Linguistics and Haptic Studies. The
academic circumstances in which this project was born are, I presume, not
interesting for the reader of such a book, so let me cut this part off this
introduction, and rather sketch the general framework and governing principle
that structured our contributions.
My own contribution (Chapter 1) is meant to lay the fundamental approach
towards a materialistic understanding of our topic through the development of a
hapticity of language via Saussure’s linguistics, Marx’s conception of commodity,
and Hegel’s concept of concept, enhanced by Lacan’s understanding of language
as material, consolidated in the concept of lalangue. Tomi Bartole’s contribution
(Chapter 2) continues the linguistic line of inquiry by focusing on the history of
phonetics through an anthropological examination of kinaesthesia and similar
phenomena in order to demonstrate a distinctive haptic quality of language.
Karmen Šterk continues the anthropological approach (Chapter 3), and takes on
the more general problem regarding the material status of the symbolic, as
developed from anthropologist Lévi-Strauss and as taken over by Lacan. Gregor
Moder’s contribution tries to take into account all of the above and founds such
a concept of linguistic touch in the traditional philosophical tradition of ontology
from Aristotle to Heidegger and Brentano (Chapter 4), while Goran Vranešević
(Chapter 5) continues this endeavor by following another line of inquiry that
takes us from Hegel’s conception of language to Lacan’s structural linguistics. On
this basis, Bara Kolenc’s contribution can develop the concept of haptolinguistics
