It’s a basic inside/outside problem. I don’t know where I end and the world begins. My best guess? Skin. It’s the only actual boundary between the body and the world, between a body and any other body. Crush, at its core, is about rupture. The desire to touch, the gesture of touching, becomes dangerous, damaging, after the hand, withheld for so long, finally makes an attempt at contact. Simultaneously, and without pity, the natural world and its physical laws restrict the human form and its capacities. All of us are trapped in our skins and drowning in gravity. Physics is unforgiving. Nature is predatory. We do not walk through a passive landscape.
‘Touch’ is a word that comes from the old French ‘toucher,’ which is related to the Italian ‘tocco,’ to knock, stroke, and ‘toccare,’ to strike or hit, both of which emphasize the violence of contact. The violence of touch is a refusal that may be overcome in some other place, in some other way, perhaps by someone else. Touching contains within it an entire critique of Descartes; it is a force that makes us confront the fact of our mortality, our need for each other, and, as Butler puts it, the fact that we are undone by each other.
Touch is a memory.
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