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.
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Notes
Grosz (1994, pp. 3–4).
See Fisher and Embree (2000). Of particular note is Linda Fisher’s contribution “Phenomenology and Feminism,” in which she calls on feminist critics to look more closely at Husserl’s analyses of the body in Ideas II (ibid., pp. 31–32).
Ibid., pp. 3–4. See, for instance, Olkowski (1999).
Weiss (1995) has addressed the potential richness of Husserl’s account of horizon and indeterminacy. She defends Husserlian phenomenology’s appeal to “rigor,” its attention to both the what and the how of experience, against feminist critics who would discount phenomenology altogether. Weiss is clear on both the promise and danger of phenomenological methodology for feminism (see Weiss 1999, pp. 39–43). More recently, Sara Heinämaa has shown the important influence that Husserl’s Ideas II had on Simone de Beauvoir’s work, and hence its potential advantages for feminist theorization (Heinämaa 2003, pp. 27–37).
For an articulation of these suspicions, see Oksala (2006), in particular her presentation of what she terms the “classical” reading of Husserlian phenomenology.
The danger of this belief in neutrality has been pointed out by Weiss (1999, p. 42).
Both interpretations have been offered of Merleau-Ponty’s claim in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception that “[t]he most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction.” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. xiv; 1945, p. viii. Hereafter cited as PhP with English then French pagination). See, for instance, Sara Heinämaa’s argument that this claim is not an abandonment of the phenomenological method of reduction (Heinämaa 2002, pp. 129–148).
The claim would be that the reduction has not been carried out in a sufficiently critical manner. In taking the transcendental ego to be its ultimate discovery, what are left invisible are structures of experience that have been “naturalized” to this ego. Here, the point is not simply that the transcendental ego still carries traces of the empirical ego; it is that there is no ontologically prior level of subjectivity that can be so conceived. Thus, the aim is not to try to find an ego unmarked by naturalizing and historicizing processes, but to use the reduction to critically reveal the naturalization and contingency of subjectivity—the way in which structures, meanings and norms of being are socially and historically sedimented so as to make our experience what it is. This may be understood along the lines of “generative phenomenology” as Steinbock (1995) develops it, drawing on Husserl’s Nachlass.
In “The Philosopher and his Shadow,” Merleau-Ponty points to the importance of this self-forgetfulness in constitution (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 173).
Grosz (1994, p. 19).
Husserl (1981, pp. 335–337). Henceforth cited as UT.
See Merleau-Ponty’s comment on Husserl’s “Universal Teleology” in a working note dated from February 1960 in The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1968, pp. 238–239). I agree with Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental insight in this working note that Husserl’s potential can be found in his turn to affectivity and sentir rather than his study of sexuality which remains subordinate to a philosophy of consciousness as acts.
Husserl’s writings have the character of a thought in process: tangents and possibilities are indicated even when excluded, doubts are expressed without necessarily being resolved, and the work is repeatedly resumed. This non-closure reflects the way in which Husserl’s texts aver their own difference, permitting readings of “the other Husserl” to take place. This is what makes his texts promising sites for feminist appropriation or intervention.
This is because the experience of my body as mine, in contrast to that of another’s, cannot arise on the basis of Empfindnisse alone, but requires a context of intercorporeity. Empfindnisse are founding of, but not sufficient for, my sense of “my” body. Hence the chapter on touch in Ideas II (section two, chapter three) calls for a supplement in the subsequent chapter on empathy (see Sect. 3 of this paper on the incomplete constitution of the body without others).
Husserl (1982, pp. 172–176 using German pagination). More precisely, sensings can be understood as a transformation in Husserl’s understanding of hyletic sensation, away from hyle as formless stuff in need of interpretation and towards an acknowledgement of the sensed as intrinsically meaningful. (See Zahavi 1999, p. 118).
For more on the centrality of kinaesthesis to Husserl’s understanding of sensation in Ideas II, see my article (Al-Saji 2000).
For example, if I move my hand over the table, I sense its smooth, cold surface (and I have corresponding affective sensations on my hand), but not if my hand is injured or my finger has a callus.
Merleau-Ponty deals with the question of “double sensation” repeatedly, and evocatively, in his work. The first attempt, in the Phenomenology of Perception, claims to be a reading of Husserl’s Ideas II and it is specifically this description of one hand touching the other that I find problematic. Later versions can be found in Signs (Merleau-Ponty 1964, pp. 166–167) and, famously, in The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1968, pp. 133, 141). In these formulations, Merleau-Ponty attempts to give an account of the reversibility of touching-touched which avoids subject/object dichotomies. It should be noted that Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodiment (within which the structure of touching-touched is understood) has shifted in these later texts from the framework of a philosophy of consciousness to a philosophy of the flesh.
This is how Merleau-Ponty interprets Husserl’s famous claim at the end of the chapter on touch in Ideas II that the lived body is “a remarkably imperfectly constituted thing” (Ideas II, p. 159)—in Merleau-Ponty’s words, not “completely constituted” (PhP, pp. 92/108). Because the hand as subject escapes objectification—as touching it cannot be touched—a lacuna is opened up in the body. For Merleau-Ponty, this does not prevent the other hand from being touched and objectified; it is just not both hands (the whole body) that can be objectified at once. I will offer an alternative explanation of this “imperfect” constitution below.
This does not mean that my left hand cannot feel the tips of its fingers touching the surface of the table, while the back of the left hand feels itself scratched by my right hand. (A simple experiment will confirm this.) The fact that one of these sensings may be more prominent than the other does not reduce the other sensation or affection to nothingness. The hand has its own affective relief (to employ a term from Husserl’s Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis).
“In the case of one hand touching the other,… we have then two sensations, and each is apprehendable or experienceable in a double way” (Ideas II, p. 147). Specifically, “each part has its own sensations” (ibid., p. 147).
In other words, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on absolute non-coincidence (either touching or touched, subject or object) results in the elision of the heterogeneous and non-oppositional difference between sensings (and within the body) that would allow touching and touched to coexist without collapsing into a single sensation.
To say that my body is being touched by objects (rather than touching them) would require, according to Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception, such a situation: “I can say that they [objects] ‘touch’ my body, but only when it is inert, and therefore without ever catching it unawares in its exploratory function.” (PhP, pp. 93/109).
As Zahavi notes, “the localization does not suspend or negate the subjectivity of the body.” (Zahavi 1999, p. 107).
As Levinas points out with respect to Husserl’s project in Ideas II. “The attention paid to psychophysical and psychophysiological investigations ends up discovering a corporeal sphere refractory to the subject/object schema… It ends up discovering a Spirituality… inseparable from localization.” (Levinas 1998, p. 147).
In contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Husserl in Signs highlights this blurring or duality of the body as “a ‘perceiving thing’, a ‘subject–object.’” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 166) It should be noted that to the degree to which the passages from the Phenomenology cited above are in tension with this later appropriation, they are also in tension with the Phenomenology’s ostensible project of conceiving the body as a perceiving thing.
Though I have chosen to emphasize the way in which touch functions as a non-specialized contact of the body with the world, a different, and more critical, reading of Husserl is possible based on the exemplarity of the hand and the immediacy of self-touch in his descriptions. Cf. Derrida (2005, pp. 162–172).
“We must also note that the fields of sensation in question here are always completely filled, and each new stimulation does not provoke a sensation as if for the first time, but rather, it provokes in the sensation-field a corresponding change in the sensation.” (Ideas II, p. 155).
The surface of the lived body folds on itself in places. For the mouth is also a touch surface, as is the tongue which localizes Empfindnisse that are produced through the intertwining of taste-sensations, touch and texture-sensations, and kinaesthesis. In addition, the surface of the body has a certain depth: “When I press the surface of the Body ‘around the heart,’ I discover, so to say, this ‘heart sensation’… It does not itself belong to the touched surface, but it is connected with it.” (Ideas II, p. 165).
Lanei Rodemeyer emphasizes the future-oriented, protentional temporality that structures affectivity for Husserl (Rodemeyer 2006, p. 159).
“By affection we understand the allure given to consciousness, the peculiar pull that an object given to consciousness exercises on the ego; it is a pull that is relaxed when the ego turns toward it attentively, and progresses from here, striving toward self-giving intuition” (APS, pp. 148–149). Also, “[w]here the object is concerned, we can also characterize affection as the awakening of an intention directed toward it [i.e., the object].” (APS, p. 151).
As Zahavi notes: “To be affected by something is not yet to be presented with an object, but to be invited to turn one’s attention toward that which exerts the affection.” (Zahavi 1999, p. 116).
Ibid., p. 116.
As Christina Schües points out, “for Husserl, similarity and contrast are not objective relations, but phenomenal givens which achieve a form of sensible pre-constitution insofar as similarity and contrast make possible the intuition of succession and configuration, which then bring on a thing-apprehension.” (Schües 1998, p. 151). See Ahmed (2006) for the hidden significance of orientation in Husserl’s phenomenology.
Though, in this case of thematized affection, the ray of attention does not make the body into a mere object.
Husserl notes: “Certainly, we do not always have an affection that is actually noticeable. But if we reflect upon the essential character of affection which is obviously relative, whereby something noticeable becomes unnoticeable, and something unnoticeable can become noticeable, then we will hesitate in interpreting something unnoticeable as something that does not exercise an affection at all.” (APS, p. 163).
“But that something should gain an affective force at all where nothing of the sort was available; that something which was not there at all for the ego—a pure affective nothing—should become an active something for the first time, precisely that is incomprehensible.” (APS, p. 163).
Touch can of course also be an objectivating perception—an exploratory movement that seeks to define the contours of things. But I want to argue that experiences of touch can be conceived on another model, one that allows the possibility of a non-objectivating touch. (Touch as object-perception would then be a kind of misperception, a touch that forgets its affective roots.).
It should be clear at this point in my account that the concept of passivity, and hence that of “being-touched”, have different senses for Husserl than for Merleau-Ponty. While Merleau-Ponty’s notion in the passages from the Phenomenology cited above relies on the idea of being made object, Husserl sees passivity as the lowest level of activity of the subject. According to his Leibnizian understanding, “[t]he lowest Ego-spontaneity or Ego-activity is ‘receptivity.’” (Ideas II, p. 335) That is, activity and passivity are for Husserl intertwined. (In Merleau-Ponty’s later course notes and texts, a different concept of passivity is to be found than that in the passages from the Phenomenology).
“As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two—but not divisible into one(s)—that caress each other.” (Irigaray 1985, p. 24; 1977, p. 24).
This becomes clearer when we consider, in the next section, the significance of touching and being-touched in intercorporeal experience. The greeting, the handshake, the kiss and the caress are all gestures that are inscribed within social contexts and that define intersubjective experience in significant ways. Touch may help nurture the subjectivity of another, or may turn into a relation of dominance. (For an analysis of the significance of the caress, see Irigaray’s reading of Levinas in “The Fecundity of the Caress” (Irigaray 1993a, 1984)).
To give an example: “The localized sensations are not properties of the Body as a physical thing, but on the other hand, they are properties of the thing, Body, and indeed they are effect-properties. They arise when the Body is touched, pressed, stung, etc., and they arise there where it is touched and at the time when it is touched” (Ideas II, p. 146). Despite the particular gestures described here (and in particular the omission of the caress from the list), my point is that it is the experience of the touched hand that is highlighted by Husserl.
Namely, Natalie Depraz, Anthony Steinbock, Donn Welton, and Dan Zahavi, to give a non-exhaustive list. Husserl’s genetic (and generative) phenomenology has a large part to play here. Though these readings are not feminist, they contribute to opening the field of Husserlian phenomenology to alternative visions. It is Donn Welton who coined the term “the other Husserl” (Welton 2000).
Weiss (1999, pp. 41–43).
The transcendental subjectivism of the phenomenological reduction represents a more general challenge for feminist appropriations of Husserlian phenomenology. As noted in Sect. 1, the reduction can be read in different ways. (1) The primacy of the phenomenological over the naturalistic (or natural scientific) attitude for Husserl—and the relative adequacy of the personalistic attitude in comparison to the naturalistic—allows lived bodies to be extracted from biologistic and naturalistic discourses that would relegate them to inert materiality and mechanism, to third-person processes. (See Heinämaa 2003, pp. 27–37). (2) The eidetic reduction can be read not as the search for essential sameness, but as a recognition of shared and generalized, contingent structures of subjectivity. As Linda Fisher proposes, this general account searches for “structural invariance within variance” (Fisher and Embree 2000, p. 29). (3) Rather than locating shared or normalized structures, the critical role of the reduction may be its ability to uncover the naturalization of what are taken to be “normal” ways of being. Johanna Oksala argues that, though such a reduction would be transcendental (in revealing the constitutive conditions of one’s own system of normality), it is not a reduction to transcendental subjectivity alone. It must reveal contingent, sedimented schemas tied to language, history and culture. (Oksala 2006, pp. 239–240).
“[I]n the child the self-produced voice, and then, analogously, the heard voice, serves as the first bridge for the Objectification of the Ego or for the formation of the ‘alter’.” (Ideas II, p. 95n).
It remains a question whether Irigaray’s critique of Merleau-Ponty’s example of one hand touching the other may be transferred to Husserl. In “To paint the invisible,” Irigaray describes Merleau-Ponty’s example of self-touch as an attempt to constitute a self-enclosed body, “cut off from others, giving himself to be seen as a separate ‘object’… exclud[ing] his mother by closing up through tactile self-affection… In order to forget the time when he was touched without touching.” (Irigaray 2004, p. 396). Husserl, in contrast, acknowledges the hetero-affectivity of touch and takes being-touched as a phenomenon in its own right. His solipsistic framing of touch means, however, that being-touched is construed as contact with the world rather than with other living bodies.
This question draws on Derrida’s reading of Ideas II in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy. Derrida’s concern is with the way in which visibility, and worldly extension, are taken to be supplementary to the tactility of hands in Husserl’s analysis. This supplementarity hides their role as constitutive outside (Derrida 2005, p. 179).
Joan Scott levels this critique at methodologies that rely on a direct appeal to experience (Scott 1992, p. 25). This objection is sometimes repeated against feminist phenomenology: phenomenology describes experience but cannot critically point to its underlying social conditions.
Central here is Linda Martín Alcoff’s response to Scott (Alcoff 2000, pp. 44–51). Moreover, the body-representation dichotomy is undermined in different ways in the work of Gatens (1996), Grosz (1994), and Lloyd (1993). Though presented as a critique of this dichotomy, the work of Butler (1993) arguably also intensifies it. (See Colebrook 2000, pp. 76–93).
Zahavi (1999, pp. 123–124).
Bartky (1990, p. 68).
Young (2005, pp. 44–45). I am extending Young’s analysis of women’s habituated bodily “self-reference” in “Throwing Like a Girl” to the tactile body (Young 2005, pp. 35–37) in order to understand how a feminine body can constitute itself in terms of a form of protective self-touch—by holding my body tightly, keeping my limbs close around me, and avoiding contact in public spaces, for instance. It should be clear that I attribute this confined embodiment not to female bodies in general, or in themselves, but to the social space that positions female bodies as mere “objects” available for masculine touch. As shown in Sect. 2, this grasping and reifying touch is itself a deformation of what touch can do.
Touch is not only gendered but also racialized in modern social contexts. Interracial touch is sometimes represented as exoticism, sometimes aggression and transgression, and at other times pollution, depending on who is touching whom. This requires a consideration of how racialized feminine bodies are positioned as objects of discovery and exploitation for male, imperialist touch. Though it is usually read as a desire to expose Muslim women’s bodies to the male gaze, the colonial French project to unveil Algerian women, with its emphasis on the exotic, could also be read as a desire for tactile possession. (See the analysis of the everyday attitudes and violent dream content of French colonial subjects in Fanon (1965, pp. 44–46)). In addition, see Ahmed (2006, p. 107) for the ways in which compulsory heterosexuality orients touch, and can be disoriented through it.
This at once excludes the subjectivity of touched bodies—or bodies positioned as “feminine”—and posits the affective closure of “masculine” bodies to being-touched, constructing them as absolute subjects that owe no debt to passivity. What I am pointing to here is the way in which the economy of touch works to constitute both feminine and masculine embodiment in patriarchal society.
“Interiorization” may be an inadequate term to designate this process, since it is a term that presupposes an inside-outside or consciousness-body split.
Crossing one’s legs, for instance, is not only a gesture of defensive, enclosed self-touch, but also one that is produced through reinforced social habituation—as a socially sanctioned route to respond to the objectifying male gaze and touch. Often, then, the lines between conformity and protection blur.
Thus the critique, drawn from Heidegger, of the metaphysics of objects as a historicized Western construction should not be limited to vision. It is important to recognize how a particular objectifying touch—where touching is absolute subject and touched is mere object—has become naturalized in our culture; this covers over and renders determinate the indeterminacy of subject-object that is the promise of bodily touch. It is hence not sufficient, in order to rethink embodiment, to appeal to touch over vision, as in Iris Marion Young’s imaginative construction of “Breasted Experience” (Young 2005, p. 81). Touch, too, must be subject to feminist critique.
As has been asked by other readers of Husserl, notably Derrida (2005, pp. 161–162, 180).
I borrow the term “social reference” from Weiss (1999, p. 47). Linda Martín Alcoff, Kelly Oliver and Gail Weiss address this question of the relation between subjectivity and social context or positionality, thinking social horizon not as external to but as formative of subjectivity. My work owes to theirs. See Alcoff (2006), Oliver (2001) and Weiss (2008).
This is an attempt to negotiate two different accounts of the place of sociality in felt embodiment: that of Jacques Derrida where language, sociality and others are the “constitutive outside” that fracture the immediacy and self-givenness of touch (Derrida 2005, pp. 180–181), and that of Dan Zahavi for whom sociality accompanies but cannot be said to mediate my relation to my own body (Zahavi 1999, pp. 134–137).
Frantz Fanon points to this socially transformative power of touch at the end of Black Skin, White Masks when he asks: “Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?” (Fanon 1967, p. 231).
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The author wishes to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Al-Saji, A. Bodies and sensings: On the uses of Husserlian phenomenology for feminist theory. Cont Philos Rev 43, 13–37 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-010-9135-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-010-9135-8