Abstract

In the era of the «to touch», the essay reflects on "le toucher", dwelling on the notion of the caress. Going beyond the relationship between Merleau-Ponty's the visible and the invisible, Sartre's petrifying look and Irigaray's ethics of difference, and via a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, it intends to show how is it possible to reach a new understanding, starting from the stimulus originating from Levinas' thought. From intentional touching to a gesture that initiates the «between the two», does the caress, taken as patience, perhaps not revive the original meaning of le toucher in what it is intact? Eros is to time as the caress is to patience: isn't this the underlying equation of the «conscience bouleversée» of the flesh-and-blood ego that answers: «Me voici» to the other?