The first communication between human beings, the one between the newborn and the mother, happens through touch. Strangely this first way of relating to each other has barely been considered by our education and our culture, which have favoured sight to the detriment of touch. And yet touching and being touched means experiencing ourselves as living beings. For lack of such a touch, we do not perceive the limits nor the sensitive potential of our bodies. Then we remain immersed in a natural or a cultural universe, incapable of reaching our own individuation and of knowing our fundamental difference from the other(s).

Desire, in particular sexuate desire, is a call for touching one another anew. But this touch requires us to have gained our autonomy and to be able to open up to and commune with the other as transcendent to ourselves while staying in ourselves. This book unveils and explores how touch can act as a basic living mediation in love and, more generally, in our comprehensive individual and col-lective human becoming.It also considers how touch can contribute to founding a culture respectful of difference(s) instead of subjecting them to an ideal of same-ness. We need touch as mediation to fulfil our humanity and to build a truly human thinking and world.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Expelled From The Nest.- Part I: Merged With The World.- Chapter 2: Born Of Soma And Germ Cells.- Chapter 3: Space-Time Of The Living.- Chapter 4: The World Of Human Beings.- Part II: Domination Of Spirit Over Soul.- Chapter 5: The Burial Of Touch.- Chapter 6: Anesthesia Of Soul By Spirit.- Chapter 7: A History Cut Off From Germ Cells.- Part III: The Question Of Being.- Chapter 8: Confusion Of The Living With The Made.- Chapter 9: To Be As A Conjunctive Verb.- Chapter 10: An Ontology Of The Living.- Part IV: Feeling Nostalgic For The Dynamism Of Germ Cells.- Chapter 11: What Desire Grants Us Life?.- Chapter 12: 'My Dear Little Soul'.- Chapter 13: Dynamism Necessary For Our Becoming.- Part V: Emergence Of Germ Cells At Individual And Collective Levels.- Chapter 14: The Touch Of Grace.- Chapter 15: From Individual To Couple And To Community.- Chapter 16: Importance Of Touch For Democracy.- Part VI : Approach To Touch As Such.- Chapter 17: An Immediate Access To Transcendental.- Chapter 18: The Communion Between Beings.- Chapter 19: Elements Of A Culture Of Touch.- Chapter 20: By Way Of Epilogue: The World Born Of Our Embraces.

Luce Irigaray is a retired director of research in philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche scientifique (C.N.R.S.), Paris. She has doctorates in philosophy (1974), in linguistics (1968) and in philosophy and literature(1955). She is trained in psychoanalysis and in yoga. She has written more than thirty books translated in various languages. She has also co-edited three books composed of texts by early career researchers as part of a long term undertaking to give birth to a new human being and construct a new world.

"Irigaray will be holding a seminar for PhD Researchers from September 8th-14th. For more information, please explore the following link: https://workingwithluceirigaray.com/the-seminar/"