Bodies and sensings: On the uses of Husserlian phenomenology for feminist theory

Abstract

What does Husserlian phenomenology have to offer feminist theory? More specifically, can we find resources within Husserl’s account of the living body (Leib) for the critical feminist project of rethinking embodiment beyond the dichotomies not only of mind/body but also of subject/object and activity/passivity? This essay begins by explicating the reasons for feminist hesitation with respect to Husserlian phenomenology. I then explore the resources that Husserl’s phenomenology of touch and his account of sensings hold for feminist theory. My reading of Husserl proceeds by means of a comparison between his description of touch in Ideas II and Merleau-Ponty’s early appropriation of this account in the Phenomenology of Perception, as well as through an unlikely rapprochement between Husserl and Irigaray on the question of touch. Moreover, by revisiting the limitations in Husserl’s approach to the body—limitations of which any feminist appropriation must remain cognizant—I attempt to take Husserl’s phenomenology of touch beyond its initial methodologically solipsistic frame and to ask whether and how it can contribute to thinking gendered and racialized bodies. The phenomenology of touch, I argue, can allow us to understand the interplay between subjective, felt embodiment and social-historical context. In opening up Husserl’s account of touch to other dimensions—intersubjective and affective—sociality is revealed as residing within, and structuring of, touch. Such touch can allow us to think embodiment anew.

What does Husserlian phenomenology have to offer feminist theory? More specifically, can feminisms of embodiment find resources in Husserl’s account of living bodies for rethinking traditional philosophical representations of “the body” in its passivity, instrumentality and subordination to consciousness? In the past three decades, feminist thinkers from diverse philosophical backgrounds have forcefully argued that the project of critically reconceiving embodiment is one that feminist theory cannot afford to ignore.¹ If, as Elizabeth Grosz points out, the body has been the silenced side of a dichotomy upon which the supremacy of the (masculinist, patriarchal) mind has been constructed—and if woman has been representationally correlated with that body—then feminisms that disavow embodiment risk upholding the dichotomy that has traditionally subordinated women.² This is not to say that feminism should accept the body as traditionally defined (as the negative mirror or other to mind). What Grosz calls for is a rethinking of embodiment that overcomes the dichotomy of mind/body and, I would add, activity/passivity and subject/object. This work has been done by feminists drawing on different philosophical methodologies: phenomenological, psychoanalytic, Bergsonian-Deleuzian, etc. My paper aims to continue this rethinking of embodiment in a specifically Husserlian phenomenological vein that has so far been largely disregarded by feminists. This despite several calls in recent years to look at Husserl more closely,³ and despite potential openings from within Husserlian phenomenology owing to the posthumous publication of manuscripts on affectivity and time. In general, feminists have seen more potential for rethinking embodiment in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, though they have also rightly been critical of Merleau-Ponty’s failure to address sexual difference.⁴ Exceptions are to be found in the works of Gail Weiss and Sara Heinämaa, both of whom have shown how different aspects of Husserlian phenomenology can be re-read in productively feminist directions.⁵

In this paper, I first address why I think feminists have had reason to be reticent about appealing to Husserlian phenomenology for support. Second, I elaborate the resources that I think Husserl’s phenomenology of the living body (Leib) and his account of touch, in particular, hold for feminist theory. My reading of Husserl proceeds by means of a comparison between his description of touch in Ideas II and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s early appropriation of this account in the Phenomenology of Perception, as well as through an unlikely rapprochement between Husserl and Luce Irigaray on the question of touch. Third, by revisiting the limitations in Husserl’s approach to the body—limitations of which any feminist appropriation must remain cognizant—I attempt to take Husserl’s phenomenology of touch beyond its initial methodologically solipsistic frame and to ask whether and how it can contribute to thinking gendered and racialized bodies. The phenomenology of touch, I argue, can allow us to understand the interplay between subjective, felt embodiment and social–historical context. In opening up Husserl’s account of touch to other considerations and dimensions—social, intersubjective and affective—I find a sociality within, and of, touch. Such a touch can allow us to think embodiment anew.

1 Feminist doubts

At first view, Husserlian phenomenology seems to uphold a disembodied structure of consciousness. The tendencies to logicism and transcendental idealism found in early Husserlian texts reinforce a view of consciousness as an empty and abstract pole of intentional activity, and inscribe Husserl within a history of philosophy that has suppressed embodiment. In this context, feminists have reason to regard with suspicion not only the phenomenological picture of consciousness, but more seriously, the Husserlian methodology of reduction that generates such a theory of disembodied consciousness.⁶ After all, the phenomenological reduction claims to bracket not only the object-in-itself, but also, on the subjective side, the empirical ego—with all that this includes of concrete body, personal historicity, and, not mentioned by Husserl, gendered and racialized difference. The consciousness that results is not only an empty, pure ego, it is also a universalized (masculine) consciousness that has been produced by the exclusion of (feminine) body, and hence implicitly relies on the elision of sexual difference. The phenomenological method’s claim to “neutrality” thus appears rooted in a form of double forgetfulness that serves to normalize, and validate, the standpoint of the phenomenological observer.⁷ Not only is the empirical ego explicitly put out of play, this exclusion is based on a more profound forgetting of embodied dimensions of difference—dimensions of sex, race, gender, culture and class—which, without being universal, already structure subjectivity and potentially motivate the activity of reduction. It could be argued that this self-forgetfulness reinscribes Husserlian phenomenology within the “natural attitude” it has sought to bracket. Depending on one’s aim, this can be taken to show the impossibility of the reduction, or the need to carry the project further.⁸ In the latter case, the “true” reduction would reveal such operative dimensions to be constitutive conditions of experience (without assuming their universality or ahistoricity).⁹

Thus, when Husserl does address embodiment in later texts such as Ideas II, is it not a generalized (masculine) body that is presented?¹⁰ This representation of embodiment derives not only from the phenomenologist’s own (masculine) experience, but also from his necessary forgetfulness in the natural attitude of the structure and intersubjective constitution of that experience—a self-forgetfulness that Husserl himself evokes at the beginning of Ideas II (p. 55).¹¹ It does not, then, seem to be bodies that one finds in Husserl, but a living body (Leib) that is defined eidetically, within invariable parameters. At worst, the body Husserl describes is accidental and external to consciousness, at best it is the body of a transcendental and universal subject. Hence, at first view, Husserlian phenomenology seems to be unable to respond to Grosz’s demand in Volatile Bodies that philosophies of embodiment acknowledge bodies in their multiplicity and unquantifiable difference.¹²

A further concern arises when one looks more closely at Husserl’s rare accounts of sexuality, in particular the short text entitled “Universal Teleology.”¹³ The advantage of Husserl’s theory is its attempt to conceive sexuality as an “intersubjective drive” (UT, p. 335), a social bond understood within the context of human community. (UT, p. 337) Husserl puts forward the idea of intertwined intentionalities, each of which takes as its goal the other—a unity that is constituted from the reciprocity of feeling. (UT, p. 335) But Husserl’s account also repeats assumptions about sexuality imported, it would seem, from the patriarchal and masculinist “natural” attitude on sex. Thus, the essential sociality of sex is reduced to a desire for procreation. After initially admitting that sexuality may be an “indeterminate” drive, Husserl moves to theorize sex teleologically as a kind of hunger to be fulfilled, which has “its modality of realization in the mode of copulation.”¹⁴ (UT, p. 335) It is within the framework of reproduction that the significance of sex for human community is understood, a heterosexist assumption that imaginatively excludes other forms of sexuality. In addition, although Husserl suggestively alludes to the mother–child relation as “obtaining before a developed constitution of the world” (UT, p. 336), and though he is careful to say that “[t]he intersubjective ‘act of reproduction’ ‘motivates’ natural processes [of pregnancy] in the life of the other” (UT, p. 337), his view of sexuality as procreation has the effect of naturalizing “biological” reproduction to motherhood and of excluding other modes of being a mother or primary caregiver. Significantly, there is little mention of embodiment in this theory of sexuality (except for a brief allusion to “the physiology of pregnancy”). (UT, p. 337) Sexuality is “viewed transcendentally” and hence understood by Husserl as an intentional form of consciousness (UT, p. 335).¹⁵

2 Re-visiting touch in Husserl’s theory of embodiment

Is it still worth looking to Husserlian phenomenology for resources to rethink embodiment? Besides the obvious point that a feminist reading of Husserl would not be a blind appropriation, but a selective and nuanced reading with, and sometimes against, the text, the important question is, I believe, whether Husserlian phenomenology can be considered a self-identical and totalizing enterprise.¹⁶ Reading Husserl’s manuscripts and notes points, I think, to a self-questioning and fluid thought in genesis, rather than to any fully worked-out system. In the posthumously published manuscripts such as Ideas II and Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, ¹⁷ Husserl often thinks against himself, revises his position, and considers alternatives without committing to any one. It is this style of thinking and writing that can make Husserl a potential resource for feminist theory.¹⁸

Thus, rather than looking to his theory of sexuality, which remains anchored to a philosophy of consciousness, I believe that it is in Husserl’s account of sensation and affectivity that his originality with respect to embodiment can be found. Whatever Husserl’s intent, his phenomenology allows us to see the body differently and to conceive of bodies in more nuanced, fluid and dynamic ways than is initially apparent. In particular, I see in Husserl’s work several sites for productive, feminist re-reading. I offer a study in what follows of one such site: the theory of sensings found in Husserl’s description of touch in Ideas II. My concern is not simply with the potential of Husserlian phenomenology to offer a methodological framework or toolbox for feminist theory. My concern is more deeply with how certain of Husserl’s “discoveries” and descriptions of embodiment can allow feminist phenomenologies to rethink bodies beyond dichotomies of subject/object and activity/passivity, thus opening new avenues for understanding the complex interplay of social positionality and felt embodiment.

2.1 Husserlian sensings

Husserl discovers in Ideas II an experience crucial to embodiment that has no name in philosophy and that he calls, in the plural, sensings (Empfindnisse). Sensings occur at the intersection of touch and kinaesthesis. This neologism represents Husserl’s attempt to rethink sensation as multifaceted and dynamic (rather than hyletic) and to understand the ways in which bodies are tacitly aware of themselves, i.e., become lived bodies. The term “Empfindnisse” brings together the notions of both Erlebnis (lived experience) and Empfindung (sensation).¹⁹ Empfindnisse are sensuous experiences that are lived through but not objectivated. They are the lived body’s reflexive, non-intentional experiences of itself, while being at the same time the ground, or other side, of the lived body’s intentional experiences of the world. Husserl first mentions Empfindnisse in the following example:

Moving my hand over the table, I get an experience of it and its thingly determinations. At the same time, I can at any moment pay attention to my hand and find on it touch-sensations, sensations of smoothness and coldness, etc. In the interior of the hand running parallel to the experienced movement, I find motion-sensations, etc. Lifting a thing, I experience its weight, but at the same time I have weight-sensations localized in my Body. And thus, my Body’s entering into physical relations (by striking, pressing, pushing, etc.) with other material things provides in general not only the experience of physical occurrences, related to the Body and to things, but also the experience of specifically Bodily occurrences of the type we call sensings. Such occurrences are missing in “merely” material things. (Ideas II, p. 146)

Sensings give the particular self-awareness that characterizes the lived body at a level prior to its being objectified as mine. It is a tacit bodily awareness that is lived through without self-ascription or objectification.²⁰ This reflexivity can be made explicit by directing a ray of attention through it, and in this way a phenomenological description is possible.

With sensings the concept of sensation is productively redefined, away from Husserl’s earlier understanding of sensation in terms of senseless and undifferentiated hyle calling for apprehension.²¹ First, an element of movement and change is introduced into sensations by their incorporation of and dependence on kinaesthesis; the kinaesthetic infrastructure gives sensings a temporal continuity and flow.²² According to Husserl, kinaesthesis, or the body’s self-awareness of its own movement (e.g. “[m]oving my hand” or “[l]ifting a thing”), has a motivating relation to the way in which the body senses itself and the world, and hence to the appearance of the sensed. Movement and touch are intimately linked, tied together not by natural causality but by the phenomenal conditionality of an “if–then” structure (Ideas II, p. 57).²³ This means that sensings are at once internally differentiated—in terms of “two correlatively related functions” (Ideas II, p. 58)—and dynamically continuous, since these functions are held together by relations of motivation. More so, this motivational system should be expanded to include the affective pull of the world that solicits my movements in the first place, so that bodily movement, while “spontaneous” (Ideas II, p. 152), is itself situated and conditioned by context.

Second, the emphasis on touch can be seen as an emphasis on affectivity. In presenting (or intending) aspects of the world through what Husserl calls presentational-sensations, the touching body also feels itself touched by the world (Ideas II, p. 145). Presentational-sensations have as their other side affects (ibid., pp. 146–147). Experiencing the weight of the thing raised by my hand means feeling the correlative pressure sensations in my hand (ibid., p. 146). Through touch, body and world are given in necessary proximity and reciprocity. It is due to this intimacy of touch and because the entire body is a touch surface, continuously in contact with itself and its surroundings, that touch has primacy for Husserl (Ideas II, p. 148). The body is that sensible and concrete surface in touch with the world—a surface with folds and depth, a surface that is perhaps more fluid than solid and that expands and contracts depending on its involvement with the world. Through touch, the body is a surface that is sensitive to the world and affected by it. As with the dependence of touch on movement, the belonging of touch to the world is not a causal relation but a phenomenal “if–then” conditionality (Ideas II, p. 155). Although Husserl speaks mainly of “physical” events that are undergone by my body (“if my hand is touched or struck, then I sense it”) (ibid., p. 155), the affectivity of the body can be taken as the point of departure for understanding its social, and not merely material, positionality (as I will argue in the next section). Specifically, this affectivity means that, while perceiving or being-acted upon by the world, the body feels and undergoes this experience in terms of sensings.

“Sensings” is a concept that, I think, can be used to undermine the dichotomies of activity and passivity and of subject and object as applied to living bodies. It offers a conceptual tool for feminism in its theorization of embodiment as affectively lived in whatever it does or undergoes, as dynamic and resistant while at once objectified. To see this, we need to turn to Husserl’s account of how sensings are localized and come to constitute a living body. Husserl’s description of the peculiar phenomenon of “double sensation”—the experience of one hand touching the other—illustrates this:

Touching my left hand, I have touch-appearances, that is to say, I do not just sense, but I perceive and have appearances of a soft, smooth hand, with such a form…. But when I touch the left hand I also find in it, too, series of touch-sensations, which are “localized” in it, though these are not constitutive of properties… If I speak of the physical thing, ‘left hand,’ then I am abstracting from these sensations (a ball of lead has nothing like them and likewise for every “merely” physical thing…). If I do include them, then it is not that the physical thing is now richer, but instead it becomes Body, it senses. (Ideas II, pp. 144–145)

Although the experience of my hand lifting the weight (cited above) already involves the localization of sensings on or in the body (as affects in the hand), the localization of sensings in the form of an appearing living body—a body that is not only felt from within but also perceived from without—becomes possible through the “special case” of the body touching itself. (Ideas II, p. 144) What is significant in Husserl’s account is that this self-perception gives the body to itself as living body (Leib)—as a field or spread of sensings—and not as a mere extended, physical object. This is because “[t]he touch-sensing is not a state of the material thing, hand, but is precisely the hand itself, which for us is more than a material thing.” (Ideas II, p. 150) Not only does the touching right hand feel itself to be sensing and living, but the touched left hand appears as Leib, and feels itself as such. As Husserl notes, “[o]n this surface of the hand I sense the sensations of touch, etc. And it is precisely thereby that this surface manifests itself immediately as my Body.” (Ibid., p. 150)

2.2 Subject and object

Here, a comparison may be drawn to Merleau-Ponty’s initial presentation of the phenomenon of “double sensation” in the Phenomenology of Perception. Though critics have assumed Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s versions to be the same and taken Merleau-Ponty’s account to be superior because of the attention he generally pays to the lived body (and because of the richness of his later work on touch), I will argue that Husserl’s account in Ideas II avoids several dichotomies which characterize Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation in the Phenomenology. ²⁴ This not only brings Husserl’s description of the sense of touch surprisingly close to Luce Irigaray’s, it also presents his concept of sensings in a new light.

In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes “double sensation” as follows:

[I]f I can, with my left hand, feel my right hand as it touches an object, the right hand as an object is not the right hand as it touches: the first is a system of bones, muscles and flesh brought down at a point of space, the second shoots through space like a rocket to reveal the external object in its place. Insofar as it sees or touches the world, my body can therefore be neither seen nor touched. (PhP, pp. 92/108)

We have just seen that the two hands are never simultaneously in the relationship of touched and touching to each other. When I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but of an ambiguous set-up in which both hands can alternate the roles of ‘touching’ and being ‘touched.’ What was meant by talking about ‘double sensations’ is that, in passing from one role to the other, I can identify the hand touched as the same one which will in a moment be touching. In other words, in this bundle of bones and muscles which my right hand presents to my left, I can anticipate for an instant the integument or incarnation of that other right hand, alive and mobile, which I thrust towards things in order to explore them. (PhP, pp. 93/109)

Merleau-Ponty reads the touching-touched experience as a relation of subject and object—of for-itself and in-itself which are mutually exclusive to one another. In this context, my hand can be either absolute subject, “alive and mobile,” touching and exploring the world; or it can be touched by my other hand, and descend into a passivity that does not even feel itself as such. It seems that the touched hand loses its affectivity; it cannot feel its being touched while my other hand consciously palpates it. At that moment, the touched hand becomes an object, a “bundle of bones and muscles.” Its power to touch, and its awareness of itself, is there only in memory and anticipation, waiting for the next instant when it can regain this power and, touching the other hand, reduce it to the status of an object.²⁵

This is a puzzling account. We learn from Husserl that the same hand cannot feel itself at once touching and being-touched in the same place on its surface; these sensations alternate “with a different direction of attention.” (Ideas II, pp. 146–147) There is therefore a lack of simultaneity of sensations in the same locus on the same hand.²⁶ But Husserl clearly holds that sensings are doubled in the body when one part of the body touches the other. These sensings do not fuse, nor is it a matter of the same sensation transferred back and forth. There is rather a doubling of sensings, localized in two sites of the lived body—a doubling that is indeed constitutive of the differentiated and lived structure, the felt two-ness, of the body. As Husserl describes this, “the sensation is doubled in the two parts of the Body, since each is then precisely for the other an external thing that is touching and acting upon it, and each is at the same time Body.” (Ideas II, p. 145) Significantly, in Husserl’s account both hands, whether touching or touched, continue to sense, though with different directionalities.²⁷

How can we understand the difference in Merleau-Ponty’s formulation? What Merleau-Ponty wants to emphasize is the non-coincidence of the sensations of touching and being-touched, but the price he pays is to eliminate the experience as a doubling of sensations. We are left with one sensation, albeit ambiguous, which alternates between the two hands, as they exchange the roles of subject and object, of activity and absolute passivity.²⁸ This is due, I believe, to the model of consciousness that frames the example of “double sensations” in the Phenomenology of Perception—consciousness understood as objectivating intentionality. Such an intentionality cannot be directed to itself in the living present, but can only grasp itself, objectify itself, as past or as other (this is not the lived through reflexivity of Erlebnis). As Merleau-Ponty notes, “[t]he body catches itself from the outside engaged in a cognitive process; it tries to touch itself while being touched, and initiates ‘a kind of reflection.’” (PhP, pp. 93/109) This reflection is not the bodily coexistence and reversibility of sensings found in Ideas II. It is a reflection carried out by consciousness, which in its present remains absolute subject, and for which its own objectification constitutes a paradox.

The lived body is, however, a subject in a different way. Never absolutely subject, nor mere object, the sensing body lies on the other side of this dichotomy and this paradox. This is because the tactile experience of localization works differently from reflective consciousness. The question is whether being touched in fact renders one an object, i.e., is the schema of subject/object an appropriate framework for understanding touch (and for sensings in general)? For Husserl, the fact that the lived body can be touched by the world, and can touch itself, does not mean that the touched part of the body is transformed into a mere object. This would only be the case if being-touched meant becoming inert, insensible—becoming a material body, or Körper, that could be perceived from without but had no ability to sense itself.²⁹ But being-touched implies neither the reification of the body nor the suspension of its subjectivity according to Husserl.³⁰ Being-touched implies more than presenting the appearance of a soft, smooth hand that is part of the world; it means that this hand has at the same time the affective sensation of being-touched, an experience of which objects or Körper are incapable (Ideas II, pp. 144–145, cited above). Being-touched or sensed from without makes a difference to my body, affects it, as it senses this from within. And this is precisely what is involved in being a lived body or Leib.

Thus the lived body is, for Husserl, both sensing and sensed, subject and object—or rather I would argue that these dichotomies are rendered indeterminate through the concept of sensings.³¹ It should be noted that Husserl sometimes speaks of the lived body as “object” in Ideas II (pp. 145, 147). This seems to imply that the body is like “external” objects—that it is given as a spatiotemporal or material thing “constituted through a sensuous schema and manifolds of adumbrations.” (Ideas II, p. 149) Yet Husserl is clear that one’s own body cannot be immediately and completely given through such perspectival distance; it is “a here which has no other here outside of itself, in relation to which it would be a ‘there.’” (Ibid., p. 158) The constitution of the body as an object for tactual or visual self-perception is not only necessarily partial—due to the limitations in seeing one’s whole body directly or touching it all at once, limitations that render it “a remarkably imperfectly constituted thing” (Ideas II, p. 159)—this self-perception is also different in kind from the perception of external objects. This difference in kind owes to the nature of touch-sensings, which constitute the tacit self-awareness and lived-ness of the body. Sensings are not the material determinations or qualities of the extended object, body; they are “nothing given through adumbration and schematization.” (Ideas II, p. 150) Sensings, rather, are on this side of objectivity. Although their affective and kinaesthetic structure means that they motivate and condition the appearance of objects, sensings cannot themselves be given as “objects.” This difference in kind between the givenness of the body and the perception of “external” objects allows Husserl to say that the lived body is not a thing like others in the world (Ideas II, pp. 144, 158). When he speaks of it as an object, then, Husserl already understands the body to be an object that possesses sensings, and this immediately transforms its status: the body (or any part of it) is never mere object.

The body is, rather, a sensing-sensed object, a living and lived-through object. It is in this sense that Husserl can speak of an appearing Corporeal body, or Leibkörper (Ideas II, pp. 144, 155). By bringing together the concepts of living body (Leib) and material body (Körper), normally opposed, this term points to the materiality and exteriority of the life of the body. Although Husserl underlines the difference between lived bodies and merely material things in Ideas II—Leib being the ground of the constitution of material nature and objectivity—lived bodies are yet embedded in the material world and affected by it. They are bodies that are both material and lived, both subject and object.

Since objecthood does not exclude subjectivity for Husserl, the body need not fall on one side or the other of the subject/object dichotomy (as it does in Merleau-Ponty’s examples above).³² The body is, rather, a field or spread of sensings. The difference between the two hands, touching and touched, is not a matter of subject and object roles, but of different sensings differently localized and simultaneously lived in the body. For the body of sensings is plural. It can do several things at once. It is a subject through affectivity and movement as well as through perception—all functions which coexist and intertwine in the body in a relief that defines different layers or ways of being subject. My argument is, then, that the body constituted through touch can be understood as a subject not defined in opposition to an object. Moreover, as I will show below, it is a subject whose activity hinges on, and cannot be disentangled from, passivity—a point that brings Husserl surprisingly close to Irigaray. This owes to the peculiar structure of touch for Husserl—its continuity, affectivity, reciprocity, and flow.

2.3 Affectivity, passivity, activity

The continuity and spread of touch on the surface of the body—the fact that touch is not compartmentalized to a particular organ of sense (despite Husserl’s emphasis on hands³³)—means that there are no breaks in the field of touch, as there are in vision when I close my eyes.³⁴ This does not imply that the tactile body is a homogeneous surface structure. Rather, tactile flesh has thickness and folds, interpenetrating with and permitting the localization of other “senses” (as in Husserl’s example of the localization of the eyes, which he claims occurs primarily by means of touch, Ideas II, pp. 148–149).³⁵ The tactile body could be characterized as a qualitatively differentiated scene—a relief where touch-sensings overlap and intertwine. Within this relief, “objects” in touch with my body cannot be isolated or sharply delimited as they can be in the visual field, where a figure can become isolated as Gestalt form and detach from the background. The intervals and gaps between things, which are usually invisible to vision, are present for touch, and have positive existence. The imperceptible fluid media surrounding objects can still make a difference to touch; the hand as it passes through air or water feels the breeze or wave, as well as the lightness or density of the medium. And the medium of my own flesh has tactile existence for itself. In touch everything is given against the ground of the body and embedded relative to it; for the lived body is constituted as a tactile field.

The tactile body is, however, more than a field of coexistence, where the touching of one hand coexists with the other hand’s being-touched (in Husserl’s example of two hands touching); it is also a temporal and diachronic field. The intertwining of touch with movement insinuates this temporal horizon. Kinaesthesis, which motivates the direction and order of touch-sensations, gives these sensations as a concrete flow. (Ideas II, p. 158) But the affect of being-touched can also call for kinaesthetic elaboration and thematization of that which has, so far inattentively, touched me and been retained on the cusp of my bodily experience. This opens up a futural, or protentional, dimension to the tactile field.³⁶ It is this anticipatory power to which Merleau-Ponty appears to allude in his example of the two hands: “in this bundle of bones and muscles which my right hand presents to my left, I can anticipate for an instant the integument or incarnation of that other right hand, alive and mobile…” (PhP, pp. 93/109). The question here is how to understand the passivity of the touched hand and its affective power.

Turning to Husserl’s Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis can deepen our understanding of the affective structure of touch. What gains prominence within the tactile field are not “objects” in the usual sense (as syntheses of perspectives), but affections that are differentiated relative to one another, and that exercise different affective pulls: a pain that calls my attention versus an itch which I learn to ignore. This reference to “affection” brings with it a certain ambiguity, one that was already contained in the description of the affectivity of touch above: in touch the body feels itself touched. In other words, affection can be understood from both subjective and objective points of view. Affection can be described as the force of the sensed, the touch or pull of an “object” on the body. But it can also be understood as something subjectively undergone by the body, which feels itself being affected and being-touched, and turns toward that which is affecting it.³⁷ In this sense, affections are not yet objects. Rather, affection motivates a ray of intentionality that strives, through kinaesthetic processes, to disclose that which affected me and to constitute it as object—to make that which was only implicit come to perceptual focus.³⁸ It is hence possible to say that affection has as its other side kinaesthetic and presentational-sensations. This reveals affection to be a level of subjectivity that precedes the explicit constitution of objects, a level where passivity is on the verge of turning into activity.

More precisely, however, not all affection becomes responsive in this way. Affections towards which my body has turned define the sphere of receptivity for Husserl—the lowest level of intentional activity³⁹ (Ideas II, p. 335)—but affectivity is both more and less than this. Affectivity is less than thematized affection, since it defines that passivity which must be pregiven for any activity to take place (APS, p. 84). Such passivity is not absolute inertia, but already feeling or tendency. Affectivity is also more, since not all affection is attended to. Husserl distinguishes “actual affections,” which motivate my body to pay attention to something, from unnoticed affections or “tendencies towards affection,” which remain unconscious or implicit (APS, p. 149). The difference here cannot be understood to belong to the content of affection alone; rather, “[w]e stand in a relativism of affective tendencies” (APS, p. 150). The main condition for the “prominence” of an affection is, then, contrast. But contrast remains a contextual matter for Husserl, dependent not only upon the interrelation of affective forces within the field of experience, but also upon the direction of my interest, sensibility, and desire which condition what constitutes a prominence for me.⁴⁰ (APS, p. 150) Contrast can thus be understood to be configured in terms both of a spatial context and of a temporal, habitual and historical, horizon; it is open to reorganization when these contexts shift. To speak of an affective relief constituted through contrast is to indicate that affections are neither isolated and indifferent to one another, nor static in their meaning and motivating force. In the temporal flow of experience, what were mere tendencies can be “awakened” through associations, while prominent affections may fade away or be “drowned out” by others.

In Husserl’s narrative (of the tabletop and of the two hands in Ideas II, pp. 144–146), the touched hand belongs to the sphere of receptivity. Its experience can be located at the turning point where an as yet indeterminate touch on, and of, the body becomes thematized and localized in terms of the sensation of “being-touched.”⁴¹ Beyond the noticeable affectivity and receptivity of both touched and touching hands, Husserl is able to recognize the affective existence of the rest of the tactile body. The tactile field of the body is not simply made up of affections to which I explicitly attend (e.g. the painful callus on my writing hand), it also consists of affective tendencies that are present without being thematized (e.g. “the pressure and pull of my clothes,” Ideas II, p. 145). From Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, we know that these tendencies are not nothing for Husserl. Though they may be implicit and unconscious, they configure the tactile body as a felt schema or affective relief—as a differentiated system of affections. Parts of my body, which are not directly touched or attended to, cannot be construed as inert; they still have affective existence. This is not only because affective tendencies could become prominent in the future; it is also because that which now has prominence depends on these tendencies to put it in relief. In other words, tendencies already function to define the relativism of the affective field.⁴² In contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s narrative of the touched hand in the Phenomenology seems to construe the passivity of this hand as inertia (PhP, pp. 92–3/108–9); it is hence neither affection nor tendency in Husserl’s terms. Though Merleau-Ponty wants to acknowledge the way in which passivity is the condition of possibility for activity—by positing activity as the future of passivity—his narrative belies this. Indeed, the protention of future activity is represented not as a feeling found within the touched hand, but as an anticipation belonging to an “I” who is identified with the activity of touching rather than the passivity of being touched. It becomes difficult to understand how affectivity, let alone receptivity, could emerge from such a nil of activity as is the touched hand, “this bundle of bones and muscles.” In this vein, Husserl had questioned how a passivity that was nothing could become affection in the next moment.⁴³ Husserl’s solution lies in destabilizing the binary of activity and passivity, so as to understand their intertwining. Between absolute passivity and clear-cut activity a range of bodily experiencing then becomes conceivable. This was also Merleau-Ponty’s project, but it is one with which the model of perception, employed in the examples of self-touch in the Phenomenology, stands in tension.

The continuity and spread of touch on the surface of the body implies an intricately woven affective and temporal contact within the body and in its relation to the world. In this sense, that which is touched affects me, touches me, prior to—or correlative with—its being recognized as a particular object. Touch can therefore be distinguished, not from all vision, but from a particular model of vision and more generally of perception, which Merleau-Ponty seems to be relying on in the passage on “double sensation” in the Phenomenology. In that passage Merleau-Ponty attempts to conceive touch on the model of exploratory, objectifying and surveying perception (a kind of perception he will criticize in his later work in favour of the more affective and implicated painter’s vision). Touch is thus presented as an active and possessive power. The touching hand, alive and mobile, is thrust towards things and grasps them, rendering them its objects in a directed striving for knowledge. This seems to occur without the hand itself being touched, since “[i]nsofar as it sees or touches the world, my body can… neither be seen nor touched.” (PhP, pp. 92/108) As a result, there is no reciprocity between touching and touched—the touched having been reduced each time to the inert passivity of an object.

But touching is not only an exploratory function that the subject employs to determine the contours of its world; it is a receptivity and, as such, the whole body is already responsive to the world’s qualities and moves itself accordingly.⁴⁴ In this sense, touching and being-touched are not hierarchically organized sensations or situations of the body. Touching is inseparable from the susceptibility to be touched. When one hand touches the other, the relation enacted is not one of mastery, but of symmetry and reciprocity between the two hands. This is not an exchange of subject and object roles where one has dominance over the other (as in Merleau-Ponty’s examples); nor does it imply the sameness of the sensations within the two hands (despite what Husserl sometimes says in Ideas II, p. 146). It is a reciprocal touching that each hand senses in its own way, a symmetry where neither is purely active nor passive. There are two sensings, different in kind, localized reciprocally within the two hands as they share the experience of touch. The possibility for such an experience of touch is best described by Luce Irigaray:

Which brings about something very particular in the relation feeling-felt. With no object or subject. With no passive or active, or even middle-passive. A sort of fourth mode? Neither active, nor passive, nor middle-passive. Always more passive than the passive. And nevertheless active. The hands joined, palms together, fingers outstretched, constitute a very particular touching. A gesture often reserved for women (at least in the West) and which evokes, doubles, the touching of the lips silently applied upon one another. A touching more intimate than that of one hand taking hold of the other. A phenomenology of the passage between interior and exterior.⁴⁵

Neither pure activity, nor absolute passivity, the touching-touched hands have the peculiar status that distinguishes sensings for Husserl. They are characterized by a receptivity which is itself a level of activity.⁴⁶ These active–passive hands go beyond and undermine the traditional dichotomy of activity and passivity, subject and object. For Irigaray, this reenacts the touching of the two lips, or two pairs of lips, which she takes as an image for female sexuality (undermining the phallocentric image of woman as lack).⁴⁷ In the touching of the lips there is no way to distinguish activity from passivity, “what is touching from what is touched.”⁴⁸ The lips embody a caress, a touch which is affective without being inert, invisible without being privative, and double without hierarchy or objectification.⁴⁹

In the above passage, Irigaray describes a particular gesture of the two hands: joined at the palms with fingers stretched, a kind of face-to-face of the hands. However, Merleau-Ponty considered not only this gesture (PhP, pp. 93/109), but also another, which he took to be interchangeable with this one. In the second gesture, one hand takes hold of the other whose attention is directed to things; it performs a grasping motion (PhP, pp. 92/108). But these two gestures are not the same; they do not provide the same experience, nor the same model for touch. And my analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s account of touch in the Phenomenology of Perception has shown the difference that a gesture can make.⁵⁰ Husserl also uses the example of one hand touching the other. But in comparison to the passages from the Phenomenology, Husserl’s examples cannot be easily divided along lines of activity and passivity; the hands resist immediate categorization, giving a potentially more nuanced theory of touch. In Husserl’s example of the right hand touching the left, being-touched is not presented as an interruption of the left hand’s previous activity. It is rather an augmentation and expansion of the left hand’s being—allowing it to feel itself, to have sensations elsewhere on its surface, and to be localized as lived body or Leib. (Ideas II, pp. 144–145) Correlatively, touching is not without its affective sensations: “The hand that is touching… likewise has its touch-sensations at the place on its corporeal surface where it touches (or is touched by the other)” (Ideas II, p. 145). Moreover, the touching-touched experience is often described by Husserl from the point of view of the touched hand, which becomes Leib and becomes subject in being touched (see Ideas II, pp. 145, 146, 154).⁵¹ Whereas for Merleau-Ponty being-touched interrupts the subjectivity of the hand, identified with its intentional activity, for Husserl this generates a subjectivity inseparable from passivity and affectivity. “Objectification,” in this sense, also makes subject. What we find in these descriptions is a different theory of touch. A touch that is more receptive than exploratory and, reciprocally, the possibility of being-touched without being made a mere object. This is what is allowed for in Irigaray’s and, I believe, in Husserl’s accounts of the touching of the two hands.

3 Husserlian feminism in question: The sociality of touch

My aim has been to read Husserl differently, not only to reveal an “other Husserl” whose thought on embodiment and affectivity has become a generative focus for phenomenologists in recent years,⁵² but also to inflect this other Husserl in a feminist direction. In this vein, I have argued that an analysis, which is at once feminist and Husserlian, can carry out the task of overcoming the conceptual dichotomies of subject/object and activity/passivity in order to think bodies differently. The critical feminist project of rethinking embodiment is able, I believe, not only to find resources in Husserlian phenomenology, but also to provide a reconfiguration and re-enactment of this phenomenology beyond its initial frame. To do so, however, this project must be at once attentive and critical. As Gail Weiss has shown, although there are risks for feminists in adopting a phenomenological methodology, these problems are not insurmountable.⁵³ In order to protect against them, the limits of Husserl’s approach need to be made visible. In the context of my reading of Ideas II, it is the solipsism of Husserl’s account of touch that needs to be addressed.⁵⁴

Husserl’s description of the constitution of the lived body through touch is initially framed as a solipsistic consideration in Ideas II (p. 144). This starting point puts Husserl in tension with a feminist, and specifically Irigaraian, recognition of the role of intercorporeal and loving touch in the constitution of subjectivity; the limits of the rapprochement between Husserl and Irigaray are located herein. A partial defense of Husserl is possible: the initially solipsistic method can be read as pointing, by means of its self-avowed gaps, to the need for an intercorporeal conception of embodiment. For the solipsistic approach reveals the impossibility of fully constituting one’s body in isolation; the solipsistically constituted body remains, in Husserl’s words, “a remarkably imperfectly constituted thing.” (Ideas II, p. 159) In the next chapter of Ideas II (section two, chapter four), Husserl turns to intercorporeity, examining the role of empathy and vision not only in other-perception but also in the formation of one’s bodily sense of self, or body image, as mediated through the perception of other bodies. (Ideas II, p. 167)

Despite this corrective, and provisional though Husserl’s solipsism may be, it raises three lingering concerns. First, positing initial bodily formation as self-constitution abstracts from concrete developmental processes of childhood experience and overlooks the role of the mother or primary caregiver in such development. Although Husserl seems cognizant of the mother’s and caregiver’s primary role in the formation of the child’s sense of self and of other—acknowledging the importance of the mother’s “heard voice” in a footnote in Ideas II ⁵⁵—the structuring role of other-touch is elided in Husserl’s account. Where Husserl acknowledges an other-touch, or hetero-affection, this is identified with the touch of the world on my body (e.g. the tabletop’s touch on my hand). Within the solipsistic frame, the living touch of the maternal body, to which the localization, sustenance and sociality of the tactile body seem to primarily owe, becomes a methodological blindspot.⁵⁶

Second, the affect of being-touched, produced through my body’s own movement (e.g. my hand moving across the tabletop or touching my other hand), seems different in important ways from feeling oneself being-touched by another. We have to do with phenomenologically asymmetrical experiences of touch. Though the first is conditioned by my felt self-movement, or kinaesthesis, the second is dependent on another’s movement. This is hence experienced not as motivated but as undergone. It includes an unpredictable and unwilled dimension that gives my felt body as not of my own making, as both mine yet other. This does not mean that the body is constituted as object or inert thing, for being-touched is still felt as passive, subjective undergoing; Husserl’s notion of receptivity as minimum of activity applies here. It does, however, mean that decentered and intercorporeal dimensions of the constitution of tactile embodiment, dimensions irreducible to self-touch, are elided by Husserl’s solipsistic approach.

Finally, it is unclear what effect solipsistic abstraction has on the theory of the lived body thus conceived. We must ask whether Husserl’s prioritization of self-touch over other-touch, and of touch over vision and hearing, can be sustained once this abstraction is put aside. Notably, it should be asked whether the position of intercorporeity, empathy and vision as supplementary to the study of touch in Ideas II allows their central and constitutive role in structuring lived embodiment to be thought.⁵⁷ Even if we acknowledge that touch cannot be conceived prior to a social context, the role of sociality and intercorporeity in tactility still needs to be addressed. By way of a response to this concern, I will examine the ways in which Husserl’s theory of touch can be employed (or reconfigured) to think the relation between felt embodiment and social–historical context.

To be precise, the merit of Husserl’s account of touch consists in its theorization of a dynamic and non-essentialist embodiment that runs prior to dichotomies of subject/object and activity/passivity. Too often the body is considered a neutral slate where differences of gender, race, class, and sexuality (to name but a few axes of social construction) are imprinted or inscribed. The model that I believe is made possible by Husserl’s analysis of sensings and localization (though not developed by him) is one where social forces not only mark bodies, but bodies form themselves intercorporeally within the social, cultural, and political field. This is not a top–down inscription (culture or discourse imprinting nature or body), nor a bottom-up causality (biology causing representation). It is rather a question of bodies that are affectively differentiated and intersubjectively constituted as forces in social interaction. For Husserl, sensings and, in particular, affects are what first open up the dimension of subjectivity for bodies. But the subjectivities that emerge are motivated by other conditions and develop through further dimensionalities. Sensings, then, can help us answer the question of how objectification and social positionality are generative of particular modes of embodiment and lived experiences, without those bodies being the mere mirrors of their oppression. An understanding of the lived body as a network or system of sensings allows us to answer this question without presuming either that the body preexists its situation, its positionality within a social world, or that social norms have ontological priority to bodies, which they come to imprint as form to matter.

It should be noted that my use of sensings to understand embodiment does not constitute an appeal to an uncritical, or unproblematized, experience—to an immediacy that, Joan Scott has argued, “precludes analysis of the workings of [the ideological] system and its historicity.”⁵⁸ It is rather an attempt to overcome another dichotomy, sometimes repeated in feminist theory, between lived experience and discourse, body and social structure.⁵⁹ It is an attempt to think together lived experience and its situated nature. In other words, feminist phenomenology can show how we have the bodily experiences that we do given the social and historical structures of which we partake—and how our bodies are not mere constructs, epiphenomena of ideological systems, but the encumbered and thick nexus of meaning (often implicit) through which sociality, historicity, materiality and subjectivity intertwine. Bodies (speaking, thinking, feeling, objectified subjects) are, then, more than mere objects. Bodily experience can be the ground of our awareness of social structures of oppression and the site where complicity, subversion or resistance are enacted. Here, we need to reflect on how social–historical context is implicated in the phenomenology of touch—to ask after the sociality of touch.

In affirming the interdependence of self-affection and hetero-affection,⁶⁰ the Husserlian theory of affectivity can be read as presenting one avenue for thinking the sociality of touch. The receptivity of my body—the affections towards which I turn—are a matter of contextual contrast and interest, as we have seen. I think that historicity, sociality and culture can be understood to condition this contrast in at least two ways: (1) The affective relief of the world can be understood as a sedimented social space. This space has not only been configured by the repeated movements, actions and gestures of multiple bodies within it—mapping out possible routes for my body while foreclosing others—it is also a space mediated by representations, discourses, and structures of power. (2) My body finds itself situated within this social world, an intersubjectively and historically constituted affective relief, to which it is called to respond in already mapped (though not fully determinate) ways. Social positionality is inscribed in the lived body through habit. Habit works differentially; habit is at once a function of my body’s location within different systems of oppression and it is generative of my concrete embodiment as receptivity, felt capacity (“I can”), and style. My body’s way of touching, what it feels available to its touch, and how it responds to being-touched are configured accordingly.

It is in this sense that women’s bodies, in many modern Western cultures, are perceived to be more touchable than others, to be objects for a reifying and sexualizing, particularly masculine, touch.⁶¹ In response to this possessive touch, feminine embodiment seems habituated to a certain defensive, tactile self-containment. Drawing on Iris Marion Young’s work on feminine spatiality, we may say that, within a social field where it constantly risks unwanted and intrusive touch, feminine embodiment becomes constituted as occupying a narrow and enclosed space, inhibited from touching upon the space of others.⁶² What is important to notice is the way in which a particular mode of touching becomes normalized as the model of touch (as in Merleau-Ponty’s examples in Sect. 2). Thus, exploratory and reifying touch, which treats what it touches as a mere object, becomes the norm for touching (assumed neutral but in fact naturalized as a capacity of male, white, heterosexual and “able” bodies).⁶³ Within this schema, being-touched is identified with a passivity that cannot at once be subject.⁶⁴ While recognizing the deformative violence of reifying touch on women’s bodies, it is important to understand the experience of undergoing or feeling oneself being-touched to already imply a certain subjectivity, a passivity inseparable from activity. Gender, but also race, sexuality, class and culture are what bodies do and feel, not only how they are positioned and objectified socially. This is not to deny the alienation produced by social objectification. In undergoing (or feeling oneself at risk of) being touched, objectification comes to be felt (or “interiorized”⁶⁵) as the tactile sensible exposure of my body—a lived ground that can motivate gestures of protection, conformity or subversion, but also of empathy, feminist reflection and activism. The protective gesture of holding one’s body close, limbs touching—as well as the gesture of two hands touching described by Irigaray above—can thus be read as more than the passive effects of an oppressive situation. Though they are certainly products of objectification and habituation, they also reveal possible ways of living, thematizing, and subverting or confirming such an alienating situation at the level of felt embodiment. ⁶⁶ These gestures of self-touch are hence neither natural to female bodies, nor purely ideological effects of their social positionality; they are ways for bodies that feel themselves objectified to live through and respond to an oppressive social context.

In this vein, it is important to question the identification of subjectivity and activity with one mode (or metaphysics) of touch, an identification that elides other experiences of touching and being-touched, in turn constructed as deficient or marginal. Rather, it is objectifying touch in its forgetting of the indeterminacy, affectivity and heterogeneity of touch that distorts touch, positing the mutual exclusion of touching and being-touched in one body.⁶⁷ Here, we may ask whether touch can continue to be spoken of as a generic sense—the same touch instantiated in different contexts.⁶⁸ If sociality, historicity and culture are not external to touch, but configure its shape, texture and sense from within, then it is not simply the social context of touch that is in question. What is at stake is the social reference and positionality constitutive of touch⁶⁹; the relation of touching and being-touched, whether inter- or intra-corporeal, has to already be conceived as social. Touch, then, is not a solipsistic “sense.” It is not first self-given only to be afterwards molded by social relations. If touch were not already openness to, and a call for, sociality (as co-conditional with it), then its situatedness within the social world would remain accidental to it. In this sense, sociality and historicity should not be understood to fracture touch, but to structure it from within.⁷⁰ These dimensions are not merely mediating of touching and being-touched, they are formative of how touch takes place. To say that touch is mediated by sociality is to assume two things, touching and touched, between which a relation is needed. But touching and touched are generated through their relation, an interval which is spanned by the affectivity of touch-sensings. Touch cannot be abstracted from the sensings which embody and materialize it. In this sense too, a revolution in the economy of touch requires social change. But if touch is already insinuated within social space, then the power of touch to render indeterminate the schemas of subject/object and active/passive can also work to destabilize that space—neither alone, nor mutely, but in the form of gestures that seek to touch against the grain of dominant and objectifying norms.⁷¹ Another hitherto forgotten touch, to which both Husserl and Irigaray point, can then be recognized at the core of embodiment.