Haptic Aesthetics: Don't Stand So Close to Me

In On Touching (2000), Derrida dwells on the loving gaze and wonders: ‘can eyes manage to touch, first of all, to press together like lips?’ For Laura Marks, the ‘haptic is a form of visuality that muddies intersubjective boundaries’… it is ‘predicated on closeness, rather than the distance that allows the beholder to imaginatively project onto the object’. Deleuze describes a new clarity that comes from ‘the formation of a third eye, a haptic eye, a haptic vision of the eye’. Relating to the sense of touch, haptic visuality implies an intimate form of looking, where meaning is formed with the graze of the eye over an object. What can it mean to see through touch? What does touch look like? Can we touch in order to see and what happens when the two senses of touch and sight join together? This paper explores themes of subjectivity and haptic vision, the trace and the surface, visibility, touch and the untouched