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Please refer to the fourth page of the volume prelims or visit Journal of Phenomenological Psychology’s
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Journal of Phenomenological Psychology (print ISSN 0047-2662, online ISSN 1569-1624) is published
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 Journal of Phenomenological Psychology

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 JOURNAL OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Aims & Scope

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology publishes articles that advance the discipline of psychology
from a phenomenological perspective as understood by scholars who work within the Continental
sense of phenomenology. Within that tradition, however, phenomenology is understood in the
broadest possible sense and it is not meant to convey the thought of any one individual. Indeed,
our hope is that by means of articles appearing in this journal, radical breakthroughs in phenom-
enological thought will be possible. Therefore, the journal especially seeks “breakthrough” articles
and the reporting of research findings that contain the broadest possible significance for the field of
phenomenological psychology. Otherwise, however, articles may be theoretical or empirical, academic
or applied, clinical or experimental, individual or social, and so on. Any legitimate psychological
phenomenon may be researched, reflected upon or theorized about. The overall aim is to capture a
psychological understanding of the human person in relation to his or her self, the world, or others.
The assumption is that this field is still in the process of developing, and thus articles depicting
creative, innovative applications or phenomenological approaches to concrete psychological problems
are the type being sought.

Editor-in-Chief Review Editor

Frederick J. Wertz Mufid James Hannush
Chair, Department of Psychology Department of Psychology
Fordham University Rosemont College
Bronx, NY 10458 Rosemont, PA 19010
USA USA
Wertz@Fordham.edu

Editor Emeritus
Amedeo Giorgi, USA

Advisory Editors
Wolfgang Blankenburg, Marburg/Lahn,
Germany
J. H. van den Berg, Rhenen, The Netherlands
Carl Graumann, Heidelberg, Germany
Alexandre Métraux, Basel, Switzerland
Ib Moustgaard, Copenhagen, Denmark
Jacques Taminiaux, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Georges Thines, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

Consulting Editors
Christopher Aanstoos, University of West Georgia
Peter Ashworth, Sheffield Hallam University
Carol Becker, California State University, Hayward
Roger Brooke, Duquesne University
Scott Churchill, University of Dallas
Thomas Cloonan, Marymount College, Tarrytown
Erik Craig, Pacifica Graduate Institute
Larry Davidson, Yale University
William Fischer, Duquesne University
Steen Halling, Seattle University
Bernd Jager, Université de Québec à Montréal
Ann Johnson, College of St. Thomas
Steinar Kvale, University of Aarhus, Denmark
Joseph Lyons, University of California, Davis
Bertha Mook, University of Ottawa
Donald Moss, Haight Clinic, Michigan
Gerald Peterson, Saginaw Valley State College
Donald Polkinghorne, University of Southern
California
Richard Rojcewicz, Duquesne University
John Scanlon, Duquesne University
Kenneth Shapiro, Animals & Society
Institute, Washington Grove, Maryland
M. Guy Thompson, San Francisco, California
Richard Zaner, Vanderbilt University Medical
School

Notes for Contributors

Please refer to the fourth page of the volume prelims or visit Journal of Phenomenological Psychology’s
website at www.brill.nl/jpp.

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology (print ISSN 0047-2662, online ISSN 1569-1624) is published
2 times a year by Brill, Plantijnstraat 2, 2321 JC Leiden, The Netherlands, tel +31 (0)71 5353500;
fax +31 (0)71 5317532.

JPP 38,1_prelims_upd.indd ii 5/23/07 5:11:22 PM

 Journal of Phenomenological Psychology

VOLUME 38 

LEIDEN • BOSTON

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 Notes for Contributors
Authors should submit three hard (paper) copies of the article for blind review to the Journal’s
editor, Dr. Frederick Wertz.
All submissions must be double spaced and fully justified. Each submission should include a 100-200
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BRILL
LEIDEN • BOSTON
© 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by the
publisher provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to
Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive,
Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.
Printed in the Netherlands (on acid-free paper).

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 pheno
jour menol
nal ogical
of psych
ology

Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 38 (2007) 1–6 www.brill.nl/jpp

Contact: Tact and Caress

Alphonso Lingis
The Pennsylvania State University

Abstract
Through words and gestures we communicate with one another about the outlying
environment, and we also form representations of one another. But we also make
contact with one another. Through tact we make contact with the anxieties, rage,
shame, shyness, and secrecy of another. In caresses we make contact with the
pleasure of the other. Our caresses are moved by the other, by the spasms of
torment and pleasure in the other.

Keywords
caress, pleasure, respect, responsibility, tact

Close Contact
Caresses fondle the sleek surfaces of a body, feel the warm and supple sub-
stance of flesh.
The body that the sensual hands uncover and the caresses discover is not
the effective, operative body, the body whose postures and diagrams of move-
ments are oriented toward objectives and manipulate implements. The body
caressed abandons its purposive posture, its limbs roll with gravity, its sub-
stance offers no resistance. Caresses avoid limbs where the mechanics of bones
and striated muscles are salient and settle rather on cheeks and lips, breasts,
belly, and thighs. Caresses are not gathering information or aiming at an
objective. Caresses also do not prolong the momentum of movements and
initiatives of the immediate or remote past; they are aimless and repetitive.
Hands tease, ignite eddies of pleasure and torment in other hands, in
flanks, bellies, breasts, and lips. Caresses feel the shivers of sensitivity and
pleasure they awaken. The pleasure of the other excites the caressing

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/156916207X190210

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 2 A. Lingis / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 38 (2007) 1–6

hands; their pleasure is pleasure in the pleasure of the other. They are
moved by the other, by the spasms of torment and pleasure in the other.
Pleasure is presence, fills the present, disconnects the past, obturates the
future. Nothing is learned, nothing is gained from voluptuous caresses.
What we caress, what we feel is not a sign or trace of something intan-
gible: the psyche, the alter ego, the person. We feel a living, sensitive and
sensuous, body present in flesh and blood, substantially there, whose real-
ity is beyond any doubt.
Under the caresses the body of another is not expressive, the posture
and body kinesics are no longer designating means and objectives in the
environment. A face caressed ceases to be a place where questions, appeals,
demands, indications, and information materialize in focused eyes, raised
brows, lips shaped. The body of another no longer speaks, the lines of its
discourse breaking into nonsense and laughter. Vocalizations are mur-
murs, cries, sighs. Under the caresses the body of another is infantile. Our
hands that caress our own body are infantile and animal hands.
We caress horses and cats and cockatoos as we caress one another and
as horses and cats and cockatoos caress one another and us. We also caress
trees, wooden furniture, cotton plants and cotton garments, which do not
return our caresses.
Responsibility is experienced when we find ourselves before someone
who singles us out, appeals to us and puts demands on us, someone whose
needs are important, urgent, and immediate. The sensual involvement
with another occurs when there are no such needs, no such demands.
When one’s hunger and thirst, cold and homelessness have been satisfied.
In sensuality someone presents himself or herself disarmed, denuded,
needing nothing from me, surrenders himself or herself to me. Not to my
deliberating and instrumental will but to my body, to pleasures that are
not divided between mine and the other’s.
Sensuality is an irresponsible responsiveness to pleasure and discom-
fort. This responsiveness is immediate, it occurs on contact. This respon-
siveness is pleasurable, a pleasure in the caressing hand that responds to
the pleasure in the body caressed. In the giving of pleasure there is no ask-
ing for return, for remuneration. And the aimless and irresponsible caresses
are heedless of consequences.
The sensual touch becomes erotic when there is violation of the person
of another. There is a breaking down of the public and decent presence

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 A. Lingis / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 38 (2007) 1–6 3

and functioning of someone in the ordered and regulated roles of the

social field. There is a specific excitement in the collapse of posture and
wariness, the divestment of functions, roles, and self-respect. In the sur-
render, the exposedness to another, there is assent to the passivity and the
excitement of pain. The exposing of oneself, disarmed and denuded,
invites, Marguerite Duras says, “insults, blows, whole deadly passions. . . .”
(1982, p. 21).
The sensual, erotic caress gives way to the hold of bodies held tight in
support, and to the touch of consolation, which does not effect or prom-
ise healing or deliverance but is afflicted with all the grief of the other,
accompanying the other who is going no where.

Contact over Distance

In speech we face someone and utter words from a distance. Speech is not
only indicative, informative, but also vocative and imperative. Words are
stored up in books and computer files and broadcast at large, but first
words are addressed to someone who faces and calls for our attention and
requires a response. That which orders our response and our behavior is
not a categorical imperative found in the nature of our own faculty of
reason, but the voice of another who singles us out and requires some-
thing of us. The ethical imperative concretely appears at a place and time
in our phenomenal environment. It is singular, singling me out and des-
ignating concrete needs and demands.
It is not the perceivable material form and color of a face but the act of
facing that makes appeals and demands break through the spectacle of
colors and forms arrayed about me. What gives vocative and imperative
force to another’s words is the move by which he singles me out and
faces me.
It is not so much the content of another’s words that circumscribe what
I am held to answer for, but the exposure of his vulnerable and needy
body. His susceptibility to the hard edges of things are visible on his skin;
his mortality visible in the wrinkles and wounds of his skin.
I do not observe the vulnerability and mortality on the face of another,
and do not construct it by interpreting perceptual data. They affect me
immediately. I make contact with his pain and I feel it in my own body.
My eyes do not look at the sensitivity of his bare skin and its wounds; they

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 4 A. Lingis / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 38 (2007) 1–6

flinch, they feel his pain within my gaze. In the handshake of greeting
and the arm extended in support, I feel the exposedness and mortality of
the other.
The word “tact” designates a light touch, supple and agile, a holding
back. It contrasts with the touch involved in the apprehension, appropria-
tion, and manipulation of tangible things and also of others. Tact that
holds back one’s forces and intentions is a supremely sensitive form of
receptivity. It’s the body in the room that imposes tact! In tactful dealings
with another I am aware of his or her anxieties, rage, shame, shyness, and
secrecy.
Contact with another in his or her vulnerability and mortality becomes
ethical when we make contact with the things the other cares about and
worries about, the things that delight—the patch of land on the moun-
tainside the refugee longs to return to, the vibrant warmth of the slum the
captured and imprisoned guerrilla loves, the frogs and wildflowers of the
marsh the child loves and that is being drained for industrial development.
Contact with the other in his vulnerability and mortality can produce
the pity that is simply the contagion of misery and debility. And the simple
impulse to help, to supply, to cure of itself is a will to power. Tact under-
stands that the other may need and want his suffering, in pursuing his
destiny. The lover needs the anxieties and torments of love: love is rare
because we fear it, knowing that we are never so vulnerable, never so easily
and deeply hurt, as when we are in love. The mother has to grieve for her
son. The mother has to grieve for the suffering her son plunged himself
into in devoting himself to the suffering of his people, devoting himself to
armed revolution. Celia de la Cerna was dragged from the cancer ward to
prison for being the mother of her son, being the mother of Ernesto “Che”
Guevara.
In ordinary language we refer to tactful behavior—tactful ways of
approaching someone or keeping at a distance from him or her, and espe-
cially we speak of tactful language. It may seem that the notion of touch in
the word tact is only metaphorical. But there is a speaking that from a
distance makes contact with the heartache, fury, mortification, wariness,
and secrecy of a body.
Is it not astounding—really our so sophisticated philosophies of lan-
guage do not account for it—that when out of the crowd in the street
someone cries “Hey Al!” these words aimed at me reach me, penetrate

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 A. Lingis / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 38 (2007) 1–6 5

through my outer appearance, even my socially coded pantomime and

role, to me, to everything I can mean by “me”? Whenever I do answer,
answer for myself, I acknowledge that that is what has happened. Even
when I deliberately respond with the voice of my social personage, my
office, answer as the dean, the policeman, the father, I sense that the real
me has been touched. Touch in that contact was made with the reality, the
substance, and not only with signs or traces of me.
And my words too touch the other. With everything I say to him or her,
I sense how I affect him, trouble her, question, distress, probe, anger, sup-
port, amuse, console him or her. I see it on his or her face, on the quivers
and spasms of her skin, on the tightening or recoil of her hands. My words,
my responses—not only their content but their tone, their pacing—are
moved by the other’s vulnerability and distress.
Tact does not simply express respect for the other, as a caress does
not simply express erotic pleasure in the other. Respect for the other,
ethical behavior, is real, is realized in tact, as eroticism is realized, is real
in caresses.
There are words that keep in touch and that touch, and words that
caress, sensual words, the words Roland Barthes (1978) studied in his Lov-
er’s Discourse. But both eroticism and ethics especially require silence. In
erotic contact, the coherent lines of discourse break up into teasing, non-
sense, and laughter. Erotic contact disconnects from the rational language
that seeks to establish truth, that is, what is true for everyone; erotic utterances
are a private language. Nothing is to be learned from listening in to lover’s talk.
And in the ethical relationship that makes contact with the other’s vul-
nerability and mortality but also his inmost wellsprings of energies and
exhilarations, tact is made of silence. The silence that is listening in, recep-
tivity, sensitivity to what the other feels and dreams. In fact this silence,
this listening is in all the words we say; it modulates their tone; it puts
forth whatever we say as subject to the other’s consideration, judgment,
refusal, and assent.
We do succeed in finding the right touch, the right words, the right
tone, or the right silences when speaking with someone whose complex
situation and confusion we touch. We can see this tact in practice among
refugees, among victims of famine and of the plagues, among peasants
laboring on harsh lands in uncertain climates. We can see this tact in prac-
tice in every friendship.

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 6 A. Lingis / Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 38 (2007) 1–6

With words we stay in touch with things. We also recognize and respect
those who have long and deep experience with things. Thought that has
dwelt long and intimately with a painting by Rembrandt, a temple in
Cambodia, a willow tree in one’s back yard finds the right words with
which to speak of them.
Tact, that finding the right words and the right silences, is not only a
relationship with real people; it is also a relationship with real things. The
language that seeks to make contact and stay in touch with the Colca Can-
yon, with the baobab plains of the Sahel, with Angel Falls, with the Kala-
hari desert, with a hamlet glowing in the Himalayan twilight, finds the
right tone and the right silences and is laconic. It is not the web site that
stores everything anyone has been able to say about them, but poetry or
words of a song that keeps us in touch with the real things we have made
contact with. Unrestrained garrulousness is as much a lack of tact about
things as it is about people. How coming into the real presence of sequoias,
opals, fossils silences us.

References
Barthes, R. (1978). A lover’s discourse: Fragments, trans. R. Howard. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
Duras, M. (1982). La maladie de la mort. Paris: Ed. de Minuit.

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