The Forgotten Sense: Meditations on Touch by Pablo Maurette

Author:Pablo Maurette
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, General, Philosophy, Mind & Body, science, History
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2018-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

The kiss is the second most intimate form of touch. Like sexual intercourse, it involves the exchange of bodily fluids. The skin of our lips is one of the most sensitive areas in our body, and the tongue, a complex and hypersensitive muscular organ, combines the senses of touch and taste. Thanks to its mobility and flexibility, the tongue of the lover is able to explore the beloved’s body with exquisite precision, as well as receive tactile feedback that impacts both epidermically and affectively. Also, as in sexual intercourse, the kiss combines the faculties of all five senses. Touch operates as cutaneous, exteroceptive sensation through lips and tongue, hands that grip, arms that hold, noses that brush and press against each other, chin, cheeks, etcetera; but also as intraceptive and affective feedback, because during the erotic kiss the heart rate tends to increase, the sexual organs titillate, and the stomach reverberates and buzzes filled with proverbial butterflies. The reciprocity of the romantic kiss also illustrates with great brio the fact that tactility always implies tangibility: to touch is to be touched. The kiss engages too the sense of smell: the extreme proximity with the other gives us access to their scent, especially their breath. Leaving all discussion concerning the importance of pheromones aside, no one would argue that it is hard to enjoy a kiss if one doesn’t also enjoy the smell of the other person. Hearing also plays a role, for the sonorous range of the kissing marks its rhythm, its intensity, and thus directly affects the overall enjoyment. Although it is not a particularly visual affair, sight is not fully dispensed with during the philematic feast. In the almost absolute proximity of the kiss, lovers exchange intermittent glances—sideway glances that reveal askew glimpses of the mouth or the cheeks, an eye shut wide, a portion of the face, a close-up of the nose. Last and certainly not least, there is taste. Many have pointed out the relation between kissing and eating. Some believe that the kiss is the ancient vestige of habits related to nourishment, an atavistic oral fixation.3 Toward the end of this essay, I will come back to this connection between kissing and eating, and to the anthropophagous aspect of osculation.

To go back to Larry David’s point, the impossibility of accurately portraying or explaining what happens when two people kiss might be related to the fact that the only way to truly know what kissing feels like, and how one must do it, seems to be, simply, by kissing. If this were the case, philematology would be a purely practical form of knowledge, inaccessible to all language and logic. And yet, just like mystics throughout history have struggled to put into words the essentially ineffable experience of divine union, some have also attempted to describe, analyze, anatomize, and taxonomize the phenomenon of the kiss.

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