Being Touched from the Inside: Pregnancy as Paradox and Paradigm

Abstract

By exploring the phenomenology of being touched from the inside with the help of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and others, this essay argues that pregnancy is paradoxical and paradigmatic. The paradox consists in having a body inside a body when I normally experience my body as just mine. The paradigm is to realise that as finite beings, having a body means having always already been touched by others. While pregnancy is the experience of having the other literally under my skin, the experience also reveals that on the metaphorical level, others always touch us, get to us and impose the ethical obligation to respond to being touched and moved by others. In this way, pregnancy turns out to be a paradoxical paradigm for what it means to be an embodied human, namely, being touched by others from the inside.

Touch means being touched by the other. In this essay, I will explore how pregnancy revolutionises our idea of having a self-contained body. For a self-contained, individuated body, pregnancy seems paradoxical. Yet pregnancy reveals that my body is not closed; I can be touched from the inside. The potential of being touched from the inside proves paradigmatic for wider senses in which others touch me and impose on me the responsibility to carry their world. As we will see below, there are different ways in which humans can be touched by others, and most of them are much more metaphorical than the literal touch in pregnancy. However, while pregnancy has often been seen and is still sometimes seen as an aberration or pathology, it actually reveals on a literal level what holds true of existence more generally in the less literal sense: my existence has always already been penetrated by others who got under my skin.

My approach in this article will be phenomenological, that is, my approach will focus on describing the lived experience of being pregnant and giving birth with respect to being touched from the inside. Phenomenology was initiated by philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I acknowledge that there are risks to addressing a gendered experience by drawing heavily on the philosophies of white, male philosophers. Yet there are two main reasons as to why I consider it necessary to proceed in this fashion: First, it is inevitable for me to go back to those authors who introduced phenomenology as a research method and the main phenomenological concepts for this article. Second, those female authors whose work I draw on – Luce Irigaray, Iris Marion Young, Alison Stone and so on – are explicitly building their philosophies on the works of those same authors I rely on for method and concepts. My hope is that future generations of philosophers, including non-white, non-male philosophers, will take these ideas further, as phenomenology has always been intended as a work-in-progress. Of course, the lived experiences of Black women, queer perspectives and so on need to also be considered, and two very helpful examples of such discussions can already be found in the work by Fannin (2019) and Holland (2019).

Being Touched from the Inside

This essay will show that pregnancy is a paradigmatic experience because it discloses how essential touched and touching bodies are to human existence, in the literal and more metaphorical sense. To show this, I will begin with an exploration of the perceptual sense that is best suited to reveal the significance of embodiment: touch. Before I got pregnant, I tended to ignore touch. There are many reasons as to why humans in general tend to focus on vision rather than touch: vision appears to put us more in control of our surroundings. Arguably, the predominance of vision has grown even stronger through contemporary information technologies. ¹ By contrast, pregnancy brings us face-to-face – rather, skin-to-skin – with the importance of touch.

Touch is the most basic or elemental sense (as we will see in more detail below) because it corresponds directly to the experience of being a body – it is the most bodily sense, and being a body is the most basic fact of my existence. Because of these fundamental connections, some of the ideas presented in this section will sound self-evident, if not tautological. At the same time, these fundamental connections to some extent remain alien to me: despite the fact that much philosophical work on the significance of touch has already been accomplished, the fact remains that on the everyday or common sense level, my body remains alien to me, for a number of reasons. It is alien to me because it brings home some uncomfortable truths about my existence as finite and vulnerable.

‘Touch is finitude’, Jacques Derrida says in discussing the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (Derrida, 2005a: 138). He points out that a ‘finite living being can live and survive without any other sense’ (Derrida, 2005a: 139), as is the case with a number of very basic animals. It is important to read such a statement in a phenomenological (that is, experience-based) rather than biological fashion (as we will see in a similar fashion with respect to Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray below).

Vision directs me away from myself and into the world. Since Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty argue that existence is being-in-the-world, this could be fine – except that the body is forgotten, and the body is my point of access to the world. Vision orients me away from the body; I am drunk in by world. Touch brings me back to the body, pulls me towards my own materiality. Then again, is it helpful to become alerted to the body? There are a variety of reasons as to why the body has to fade into the background for us to function in everyday life, as Drew Leder has shown with respect to various dimensions of existence (Leder, 1990). However, it should also be obvious that a forgetfulness of the body can cause severe problems where my handling of sickness, ageing, and death but also sexuality, pregnancy, birth, and being with infants are concerned. Due to my forgetfulness, these experiences are often alien and sometimes even shocking to me when I undergo them. Moreover, we are lacking concepts and a familiar discourse that would allow thematising them.

Touch is the most bodily sense to the extent that philosophers go so far as to call it the sense. Nancy states: ‘Sense is touching’ (Nancy, 2003: 110). Derrida proposes: ‘This sense transcends the others; it also grounds them; it makes them possible, but to the extent that it is not quite a sense any longer’ (Derrida, 2005a: 146 f.). As Suzanne Cataldi (1993) puts it: ‘Touch is the mother of the senses; and our skin is the oldest, largest, and most sensitive of our sensory organs’ (p. 125). Touch grounds the other senses, not only by being temporally earlier than the others but because all senses are in some way concerned with world touching me (even vision, though it goes furthest in giving me the illusion of distance and mastery). Being touched is the original meaning of what it is to sense things. As a result, touch is also the most existential sense that makes me aware that existence means being-in-the-world and being touched by world.

What does a phenomenology of touch yield? In early phenomenology, touch has been discussed under the heading of double sensations. Both Edmund Husserl (1989) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) focussed on the possibility of double sensations, such as one of my hands touching the other hand, or more generally, one part of my body touching another part. Double sensations are important because they designate one of the crucial ways in which my body is different from mere physical objects. ² At the same time, they are somewhat problematic for my thesis that touch is (originally) the touch of the other, so I will need to examine them.

In relation to my topic of pregnancy specifically and female corporeality more generally, there is a particular kind of double sensation which has been pointed out by Luce Irigaray, namely, that of lips touching. This is a key phenomenon which Irigaray takes up in many of her writings (e.g. 1993); yet one cannot fail to wonder how the fact that all humans have at least two lips impacts on Irigaray’s emphasis. Granted, having four lips or two pairs of them does not come down to a simple doubling of numbers since we are concerned with an experientially very different bodily region (mouth vs genitals). Nonetheless, I would like to propose that there is another phenomenon which is as crucial if not more crucial to female corporeality than that of lips touching: the experience of being touched from within. This corrective does not undermine Irigaray’s philosophy since she herself points out in an interview that it makes a crucial difference whether you carry somebody inside or outside your body and whether you have sex inside or outside your body. ³

Irigaray’s statement prompts an important clarification. It is certainly not my intention here to claim that pregnancy is essential for female corporeality. This is clearly not true since not all women get pregnant, and it is also not my intention to propose it as any kind of norm or ideal, since this could appear to undo or ignore crucial feminist efforts to detach femininity from motherhood. What is important is rather the potential or possibility to be touched from the inside, and the example of sexual activity raised by Irigaray makes it clear that this is not limited to pregnancy. Acknowledging sexual difference has implications for the literal sense of being touched from within, and for those who work with pregnant women in a professional healthcare capacity (though also for the metaphorical sense of being touched from within) because the potential to be touched from the inside elucidates our vulnerability, on the physical and psychological level. It also has implications for our relations to disability, ⁴ sickness, ageing and death.

To describe better what it means to be touched from within, we will benefit from a concept which Merleau-Ponty introduces as he himself overcomes his early account of the body which strikes him in retrospect as too subject-orientated. This is the concept of flesh (la chair) which Merleau-Ponty (1968) explores in his late philosophy and especially in The Visible and the Invisible. One of the main Merleau-Ponty commentators, Martin Dillon (1995), points out that double sensations play a crucial role for understanding the concept of flesh, both in terms of the development of Merleau-Ponty’s thought and in terms of a propaedeutic. That is true especially as far as the idea of reversibility is concerned that designates the way in which perception is not a one-way street, as it were. The idea of reversibility perhaps finds its most elucidating formulations in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of art; it emerges in the descriptions of painters (e.g. Paul Klee) who state that the trees and mountains look at them. On the everyday level, the best indication for reversibility comes from the phenomenon of attention: when something draws my perceptual attention to itself, there indeed seems to be a call coming from the object.

Perception, according to the model of Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy, thus indeed resembles the touching/touched relation of double sensations, including the way in which such roles can become exchanged. Yet there are at least two problems with this connection that Dillon uses. First, the question arises whether the reference to trees or other objects looking at me can be anything but metaphorical, and a subtle discussion of metaphors ⁵ would be needed to prove such a conversation useful. Second and even more importantly, there is a risk in losing some of the self-critical force of Merleau-Ponty’s revisions when mapping the late onto the early philosophy. Merleau-Ponty wants to go back behind the subject–object–division that we take for granted and ask whether it might be possible that on the most fundamental level, everything is of the same flesh.

Merleau-Ponty claims that:

he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it, unless, by principle, according to what is required by the articulation of the look with the things, he is one of the visible, capable, by a singular reversal, of seeing them – he who is one of them. (p. 134f.)

In other words, the possibility of bridging the gap between perceiving and being perceived would be inexplicable if I were not already part of the perceptual landscape, being perceivable myself. Flesh is meant to designate a third dimension more elemental than subject and object, and it is thus not surprising that Merleau-Ponty describes flesh as doubled, like two sides or two leaves: seeing and seen, touching and touched.

Merleau-Ponty (1968) refers us to the ancient term ‘element’ to understand flesh better (p. 139). An element belongs to a particular location or region without being tied to it: air is usually, but not always, ‘above’ earth. My body is made up of these elements, thus inhabiting an intermediate position. Furthermore, the element in the ancient sense is not, strictly speaking, material but ‘midway between spatiotemporal object and idea’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 139). The character of this ‘midway’ is difficult to capture; it is a materialised idea or an ‘incarnate principle’ which introduces a certain ‘style of being’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 139). The concept of flesh provides a good opening for a discussion of alterity and embodied pregnancy; yet I need to first respond to a possible objection: it might seem that the concept of flesh would be exactly the wrong step towards showing that touch is the touch of the other. So far, our idea of flesh points in the direction of sameness, especially if we also consider crucial statements like this: ‘What we are calling flesh, this interiorly worked-over mass [masse intérieurement travaillée], has no name in any philosophy’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 147). The only name that can be used, as we saw before, is element (and element is also a good reminder that the mention of ‘mass’ in the citation, though it points in the direction of materiality, does not exclude a spiritual dimension or a kind of inner principle). Something that is said to be ‘interiorly worked-over’ does not appear to have a dimension of otherness but only internal differentiation.

However, if we consider our example of pregnancy more specifically, there is an otherness that emerges out of an interiorly worked-over mass. Pregnancy is indeed the experience of being touched by the other while also containing the other. It means being touched by something that is partly not me but is nonetheless in me. The trope ‘otherness in the same’ dominates Levinas’s philosophy in such a way that pregnancy becomes a paradigm example for him (Levinas, 1981: 75–8). An otherness within me, yet still an otherness? Yes, in terms of an inaccessibility or radical unavailability, and as something that resists my grasp.

When it comes to otherness that is nonetheless contained in the same (initially literally, and then in a way still to be discussed), Merleau-Ponty’s idea of flesh becomes more promising again. It accommodates otherness by way of folds. Folds of flesh designate a ‘coiling over’ of the visible upon the visible (Merleau-Ponty, 1968: 140) in such a way that vision comes about. In vision, the seeing and the seen come to touch, like a fold in which inside and outside touch each other. ⁶

In pregnancy, being touched by the other emerges as being touched by the other from the inside. The pregnant body’s capacity to touch and be touched (or to undergo double sensations) acquires an additional dimension. However, I need to examine this experience more closely since it is not a double sensation in Merleau-Ponty’s sense. Double sensations involve two parts of my body touching each other, such that I sense each part from the inside (as touching) and from the outside (as being touched). In pregnancy, my body acquires an additional surface since I can now be touched from the inside. Yet what is touching me is not a part of my own body and yet has come from my body; it is a creature with its own movements which are not in my control, as becomes increasingly clear.

The experience of being touched from the inside involves various layers which can be distinguished. When I touch my pregnant belly from the outside with my hand, there are initially two layers, connected by a double sensation: the hand touching the surface of the belly, and the belly touching the hand. Yet at certain moments, there is a movement under the skin, and as the belly is being touched from the inside, I can direct my hand to the right spot. A friend or partner who tries to trace the movement merely from the outside will most likely not be successful because the third layer, the inside of the belly, is missing for them as a point of identification. The fourth layer is the touch from the inside, the touch by the alien body inside me. Because I know (on the level of theory rather than experience) that this alien body has the same body parts as my body, I try to identify and attribute the touch to a foot, a hand, the head, the bottom – but most likely, I will fail, unless somebody (e.g. a midwife) has already informed me that the body on the inside is in a definite position.

This description started from the phenomenon of double sensations which then allowed identifying the four layers involved in experiences of touch during pregnancy, and in that sense, Merleau-Ponty’s discovery was helpful for the current examination. Furthermore, two realisations emerge from this description. First, the description of the different layers and particularly of the fourth layer confirms the otherness or alienness of the body on my inside. Pregnancy places the other in my middle; we seem to share the same ‘zero point [Nullpunkt] of orientation’, as Husserl would call it, emphasising our perpetual point of navigating the world – but in fact, we do not. The spatial separation, the relation of being ‘next to each other’ that characterises and determines my normal relation to other human beings is missing in the case of the unborn baby. As a result, it becomes more difficult to describe my relationship to this peculiar other. Yet although the other in my middle is indeed rather inaccessible to me, I can determine that we do not actually share the same zero point of orientation because the unborn baby does not have a world in the same way as I do. My body makes up a peculiar, quite limited world for the baby. Although it has been shown that, from a certain stage onwards, the baby perceives sounds and light, this is not sufficient for full fledged world orientation. In sum, I fail to relate to the unborn other as a separate entity that occupies its own place in the world, and the unborn other fails to relate to the world in a more encompassing sense. The inaccessibility of this other is substantially different from common analyses of intersubjectivity, and yet, there is an essential inaccessibility: a kind of intimate, inner inaccessibility. In the second half of this article, I will discuss how the transgression from this intimate inaccessibility to the normal accessibility of separate entities takes us from the literal meaning of otherness in the same to a non-literal continuation of this relationship.

Second, the experience of a perceptual landscape that involves layers and folds which we discovered in relation to pregnancy could provide the basis for a different description of perceptual experience in general. This alternative description would come quite close to Merleau-Ponty’s late concept of ‘flesh’. We have seen from the beginning how pregnancy can reveal certain features of experience in general. The description of pregnant experience as being touched from the inside strengthens the sense that our common model of perception in terms of subject and object causes a misplaced dilemma, namely, the dilemma of how to bridge the gap between subject and object. Not only is the subject always embodied, always already out there; but it also feels itself, by way of double sensations – and it can even undergo a more complex layering of experience, up to the extreme case of feeling something alien inside oneself.

To continue my exploration of being touched from within, I will now try to describe the ‘in’-character of the scene where the touching happens, that is, the experience of being-in. Can this ‘being-in’ be described as a kind of ‘dwelling’? Yes and no. From a phenomenological perspective, pregnancy can be conceived as a kind of dwelling; but it does not fulfil our everyday expectations towards an experience of dwelling. Phenomenology allows us to acknowledge and describe the significance of being embodied and dwelling in the world. Starting from the initial insight that my body provides my inseparable zero point of orientation, the process of orienting ourselves in the world continues as we rely on different versions of ‘earth-ground’ (Erdboden), as Husserl calls it, or simply ‘earth’ (Erde), in Heidegger’s terminology. The full significance of these concepts cannot be developed here; suffice it to say that earth (which is not to be conflated with soil, but names every form of basis or ground for my dwelling) is so important because it allows me to ground my dwelling and establish orientations such as below/above, right/left, and close/far. Furthermore, earth affords me the possibility of defining a home for myself – even if it is as unstable as a nomad’s tent – and establishing concepts of rest and motion – even if the version of earth-ground under discussion is itself moving, like the spaceship or arc that Husserl discusses (Husserl, 2002). Movement would be defined as a movement towards or away from this point of (relative) rest.

This short list of features indicates already that the mother’s body can constitute a kind of earth, dwelling ground, or home for the child, despite its temporary and spatial limitations and despite being in movement. In terms of immediate perception, these surroundings are the only world and the only earth which the unborn baby knows. Although the unborn baby also perceives sounds and light from the outside, it cannot develop a perception of this outside as an extended perceptual space.

The idea and awareness of my body serving as a dwelling ground for another creature is certainly intriguing and might even be experienced as empowering – but there are definite limitations to this experience. As we have seen, the most severe limitation concerns our inability to imagine what the unborn baby’s dwelling in the uterus ‘is like’. I have already described and designated this inability above as unavailability. At the same time, the unborn baby’s dwelling place fulfils the criteria of a phenomenological description of dwelling as outlined above. The structure of being inhabited is thus fulfilled, but we have to think dwelling in a new way. The phenomenological concept of dwelling in terms of earth, grounding and orientation would be compatible with the kind of layering described by Merleau-Ponty: my body is grounded by way of earth, but it is also of the same nature as earth and can thus serve as earth for another being – a being which is not really experienced as a clearly delimited being until it is born.

Being Touched by the Other: Paradox and Paradigm

I have hinted at several ways in which pregnancy might serve as a paradigm, both in terms of our perception and in terms of the realisation that there is otherness in me. In this section, I will first summarise how the realisation that touch is the most elemental and bodily sense impacts on our conception of perceiving the world. In a second step, the non-literal meaning of being touched by the other from the inside will be explored by first attending to pregnancy as paradox, then as paradigm.

On the literal level of touch, touch has emerged as a sense that designates contact: with world, with others, with myself. It is a sense that, unlike vision, does not create an illusion of mastery, distance, surveillance and control. Instead, we arrive at a sensory landscape in which there is a dimension of reciprocity or reversibility. This interdependence in my relationship to world, along with an experience of layers and folds, points us to concepts like Merleau-Ponty’s ‘flesh’ that designates how, on the most elemental level, I share many basic features with the perceptual landscape around me, without this leading to an elimination of differences.

If we learned to take touch as our paradigm and built a phenomenology of perception on it, this would also mean that we would be much more in touch with our bodies. Jean-Luc Nancy attempts such a project (as does Derrida, inspired by him) and comes to pertinent conclusions such as: ‘an other is a body because only a body is an other’ (Nancy, 2008: 31). Taking touch as our paradigm also means that the other will from the beginning be involved in conceptualising my relationship to the world and will not need to be re-introduced as an afterthought. In fact, it even turns out that the touch of the other is constitutive to my sense of corporeality before as well as after birth. What emerges is thus a more sensuous, interrelated model of existence.

To move on to the non-literal understanding of touch and the way in which the other on a more general level proves to be ‘in’ me, it will be useful to describe the seemingly paradoxical character of pregnancy. We usually think of a paradox as a statement in which two contradictory positions or features are held as combined. In terms of its etymology, a paradox is something that goes against [Ancient Greek: para] our opinion [Ancient Greek: doxa] or common understanding. Pregnancy, if contemplated from the outside, goes against our common understanding, or appears impossible if assessed by common sense standards, especially the concept and experience of the individuated, single body. Yet it is proven a possible reality all the time, and in that sense, the paradox has always already been overcome.

On the level of biology, this paradox takes the shape of the question: why does the mother’s body not reject the foetus? Research into this question and the related issue of microchimerism (that is, the retention of foetal cells in the maternal body for extended periods of time) evoked a paradigm shift in thinking about our bodies. Aryn Martin calls this the ‘ontological shift from contained selfhood to relational coexistence’ (Martin, 2010: 44). In other words, the paradox is only a paradox if I conceive of my body as self-contained, which we are taught to do as we learn to protect our bodies from injuries and intruders. Yet both biology and the actual lived experience of pregnancy show that embodiment indeed means relational coexistence (Stone, 2019, ch. 3), or that the other has already touched me from within.

Before I got pregnant, I always thought that it must be a really strange experience and indeed paradoxical from the perspective of how I normally experience my body – because of the incommensurability between the being inside and the being which is then born and thus outside. It seemed to me that at least one of the two experiences must be very strange, if not grotesque: either the experience of having an actual creature in one’s body (and for an extended period of time) or, if that happens to feel quite familiar and normal, then it must be really odd to later on see this creature out there – this creature that was somehow a part of me. In actual fact, although both experiences exhibit a certain level of strangeness, neither one proved as odd as I had imagined or feared. Why? Because despite knowing that the creature outside is, or must be, the same that was inside, they do not match in actual experience. The creature inside feels smaller, softer, less differentiated, and not even really like a creature. Sometimes, it feels more like a bubble, at least initially; at other times, like an organ; sometimes like a bone stuck in an odd place. The movements of the unborn baby are clearly indicative of an alien creature inside, but it does not feel like a creature with a normal human body, or at least, as the phenomenological description of the touch has also revealed, it does not feel like I am being touched by a hand or a foot. Once the baby is born, it is almost impossible to imagine that this was indeed the creature inside. As Iris Marion Young puts it, I end up ‘amazed that this yowling, flailing thing, so completely different from me, was there inside me, a part of me’ (Young, 1984: 49).

This makes pregnancy and birth such intriguing experiences: I did not really know the baby before being separated from it. At the same time, there was clearly something in me, an otherness – yet not the otherness of a creature I could access. In that sense, the experience of pregnancy confirms what has been established by phenomenology for all experience, pregnant or not: that there is an ‘otherness within myself’. Such a statement would seem less surprising for pregnancy and more surprising for ‘normal’ experience; yet since the ‘otherness within myself’ that determines pregnancy has turned out to not be exactly the otherness of a clearly delimited baby within me, it can confirm and add to the general structure of the ‘other in me’.

Despite the radical change in my relationship to the other, as far as touch in the literal sense is concerned, there is also the realisation that my relationship to the other has not changed as dramatically on the general level (where touch in the non-literal sense is concerned). There is a sense in which the other is still in me, as far as my sense of the other and my responsibility goes. This is corroborated by my body memory of having the other in me.

Furthermore, there is the realisation that before pregnancy had reached the stage of me being literally touched, there was a sense in which the other was already affecting me. Even though it is a really special moment to start feeling something moving inside, there is an initial stretch of pregnancy without such feeling during which the relationship to the foetus might nonetheless already be strong, or where in any case it feels like the experience of being touched does not seem to alter the relationship but confirms something that was already sensed before (by way of changes to my bodily experience, whether morning sickness, sore breasts/nipples, and/or vague sensations of discomfort in my abdomen): the other is in me. And will be, when pregnancy is over. In other words, pregnancy was from the beginning only the paradigm case of the more general observation that the other is in me. How does the other manifest itself on the non-literal level? By way of inaccessibility, unavailability, imposition – and this imposition is ultimately the imposition of a whole world, as we can see with the help of Derrida.

Derrida provides a plausible link between otherness in the same and the imposition of the other that proves to have ethical implications, though in a reconceived sense of ethics. Derrida points out that the otherness in the same manifests itself as me being for the other – yet this is not to be taken in a simplistic sense either. More precisely, the scenario which seems to be a matter of literal being-in, namely, pregnancy, turns out to be more multifaceted. It remains an issue of the other in me, even after the baby is born, and it is already a matter of being for the other, even while the other is still in me. To see the deeper level of this responsibility for the other, it helps to introduce a third element into the relation between me and the other, between me and you: world.

For Derrida, world takes on an ambiguous role which he explores with the help of a line from Paul Celan (1995): ‘Die Welt ist fort, ich muss Dich tragen’ [‘The world is gone, I must carry you’]. This line, the last line of a poem from the collection Atemwende (Breathturn), is interpreted by Jacques Derrida in Rams, a text devoted to the memory of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Derrida explains how death each time means the end of a world, of a unique world tied to the singular other. Phenomenologically more revealing than my own death is thus the death of the other. While the world becomes irrelevant in anxiety before death, the death of the other means that I can experience a world disappearing. However, is it merely a world? One among many? Celan writes, the world is gone, and the phenomenological analysis also shows the situation to be more complex. A bit similar to the way in which anxiety (according to Heidegger) reveals everything in the world to be irrelevant such that the world disappears – and yet, in disappearing, is revealed as it says farewell – there is also an impression that the death of a human being affects not just one world among many, but actually makes the world disappear. ⁷ As the world disappears, it leaves its traces. It imposes a responsibility on me, the responsibility to carry or bear the other. Yet this responsibility not only emerges with the death of the other. It is present throughout life, already because the death of the other is always a possibility.

In the case of pregnancy, there is also a multifaceted world relation. As the world of a new human being originates, my relation to the world is transformed in various ways. These ways are so closely connected that here, as well, it does not make sense to draw a clear distinction between a world and the world. To discern the different modalities of world relation, we need to first consider Derrida’s explicit description which emerges from his interpretation of the verb ‘tragen’ [‘to carry’]:

Tragen, in everyday usage, also refers to the experience of carrying a child prior to its birth. Between the mother and the child, the one in the other and the one for the other, in this singular couple of solitary beings, in the shared solitude between one and two bodies, the world disappears, it is far away, it remains a quasi-excluded third. For the mother who carries the child, ‘Die Welt ist fort’. (Derrida, 2005b: 159)

Initially, this description struck me as implausible, prejudiced and romantic: mother and child as self-sufficient, self-absorbed, not interested in any other human beings or in the world. I wanted to object and ask: does not the impending arrival of the child exactly return me to the world since I know that the baby will (initially) share my world, and I will need to show and explain this world to him or her? To be sure, there seems to be some world removal through pregnancy, on the practical level: world is more difficult to access during pregnancy (Young, 1984). Yet since Derrida is interested in the ethical dimensions of the relations between mother, child and world, there is a shift of perspective in relation to classic phenomenology. We need to examine the situation more closely before assessing his statement about the disappearance of world. Ethics should be understood here in a rather wide sense, perhaps best starting from Levinas who conceives of ethics as follows: ‘We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics’ (Levinas, 1969: 43). The other calls me into question because he or she always exceeds my expectations and concepts; this holds particularly for the unborn child whom I cannot really anticipate at all, and who will continue to surprise me even after it is born.

Derrida describes the same findings about the otherness of the other in slightly different terms: he calls the other a secret. Two essential features pertain to the other’s secrecy. First, ‘I cannot be in the other’s place’ (Derrida, 2005b: 165); this observation refers to the inaccessibility of the other which shows different dimensions and reflects a basic inaccessibility already at the core of the self, as we have seen above. Second, there is an ‘overabundance of meaning’ on the side of the other, that is, an excess of meaning which surpasses my concepts and expectations. In this sense, the other resembles the structure of world as a context of meaning which cannot be exhausted. The other means an origin of world (and death, correspondingly, the disappearance of world). Derrida states this quite explicitly elsewhere, namely, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other: ‘The other who calls and to whom one must respond is always another origin of the world’ (Derrida, 2007: 61). ⁸

If we bring these ideas to bear on the issue of the relation between mother and child, and the relations between pregnant and post-pregnant bodies, we arrive at three different dimensions of impact on my world relation, each of which can be explained further with the help of the initial Celan citation. Derrida’s original statement thus proves to be true, but incomplete.

A child relates to world in three ways:

1. As an origin of world, opening up a new context of meanings and possibilities. At the same time, this origin opens up a realm of responsibilities which do not even cease in death, but acquire yet a stronger dimension: ‘(If) the world disappears, I must carry you.’ Even before the child is born, I sense my responsibility for supporting the possibilities of this new origin. This possibility of possibilities, this opening of world is in me, during pregnancy, and it is on me to bring it out into the world as safely as possible, and look after it. Given how tremendous this responsibility is, it should not surprise us that it can eclipse other possibilities, as the second sense has it.

2. As an eclipse of world, as described by Derrida when he writes that for mother and child, the world disappears or becomes a quasi-excluded third. One reason for this disappearance of world seems to lie in the excessive vulnerability which the child exhibits before being born and in the initial period of life: ‘If I must carry you, the world disappears’. Derrida (2005b: 158) proposes that this inversion of the sentence is permissible and plausible. For the mother, this disappearance of (ordinary) world is inevitable. For others around her, it can be a difficult experience, and they might well express their frustration. Little do they know about the radical changes to the mother’s world in which now even basic bodily tasks become a project to be accomplished.

3. As a new encounter with world because I start imagining (already before the baby is born) what it might be like to encounter world for the first time. In this attempt at imagining such initial encounters (which can never quite succeed because I can only partially abstract from my familiarity with world), some essential phenomenological characteristics of world come to the fore: world always precedes me as a meaningful context that I did not bring about, and this is one dimension of the world’s uncanniness. Derrida (2005b: 147), following Celan, refers to the ‘unreadability’ of world which becomes manifest in its complexity, preventing full comprehension. To be sure, this is one of those paradoxical moments where it holds true that we always already have read the world, and will need to read it to the child, despite the ultimate unreadability of world. This time, we need to transform the initial sentence a bit more: ‘The world is unreadable, I must carry you’. At the same time, going beyond Celan but following the general phenomenological finding that a disappearance of world (as in anxiety) can mean a revelation of world because concealment and disclosure are in general closely linked: ‘If I must carry you, the world (re)appears’.

Considering the relations between me, you and world – or, in our case, mother, child, and world – it turns out that pregnancy is not simply about two entities, one being located in the other. Rather, it involves a number of complex relations between these two beings and their respective relations to the world.

Speaking from the perspective of phenomenology, the above considerations are interesting also because they show different dimensions of the concept of the world. While classic phenomenology moved from the concept of the world to that of a world (e.g. the world of a historical people), we have now seen how the world of a singular being can impact on our relation to the world in such a way that a simple distinction between world in the singular and a plurality of singular worlds is undermined.

Both touch and carrying are metaphors of sorts in this essay, but rather than ‘merely’ metaphorical, I would like to introduce them as paradigmatic for our being with each other, from body to body. To explore this paradigmatic role further, I will now attend to the final stage of touch and carrying, as far as pregnancy goes: giving birth. Giving birth is the limit case of pregnancy, having the other still in me but literally on the verge of being outside of me, and yet still my responsibility, still a world for me to carry, into the world.

The way in which the birth canal is touched during vaginal birth is not, of course, part of what we normally call being touched from the inside. However, I believe nobody would deny that touching also happens, and still from within. Moreover, being touched from within still strikes me as the most appropriate description to capture the entire range of how we would otherwise describe this traversing, this passing through. It is, of course, in most cases experienced as painful, and sometimes as properly torturous. ⁹ However, we also have accounts of gentle and smooth traversing. Even evidence of orgasmic births appears to exist (Gaskin, 2003). Touch thus seems appropriate for this range, as does the Merleau-Pontian concept of flesh. This interiorly worked over mass is particularly folded, enveloping and chasmic in the vaginal region. It seems highly likely to me that Merleau-Ponty will have (also) thought of vagina when he described flesh as folds.

In case the theme of orgasmic birth stayed with you as a big question mark: the potential possibility thereof can be explained exactly in terms of folds and touch, albeit internal touch. The explanation of the G-spot phenomenon is that the G-spot is not a spot, place or entity, but a touch from within: it refers to the possibility of touching, not directly but indirectly, by way of folds and pressures, the clitoris (Jannini et al., 2014). This, so it would seem, could in principle happen during the birth process. Experiencing this as pleasurable would, however, in most cases simply be impossible for practical reasons: the presence of strangers and the overall stressful situation.

More important in terms of practical implications would be cases in which the birth-giver’s prehistory creates difficulties around the birth process, especially where this has to do with violence or abuse. Research indicates that episodes of abuse create chronic shame and other difficult feelings which make gynaecological examinations difficult to endure (Robohm and Buttenheim, 1997). A practical response to this problem could be for midwives to hand out a brief sheet on which women in labour could indicate by simply ticking that they find it difficult to be touched inside their vagina or find it difficult to speak about genital matters and so on. It would be very helpful if healthcare professionals, despite admittedly being overstretched, could extend extra help to those for whom carrying somebody inside their body is especially hard due to previous experiences.

Returning to more general cases, here is a narrative account of giving birth which emphasises how exactly the movement of pushing the baby out calls for the concept of world: ‘A new world opened up: pushing felt very different; finally I could really do something! A new world!’ ¹⁰ The multifaceted ambiguity of the world is brought out in this exclamation: as the mother is bringing a new world into the world, there is also a new world being opened up for the birth-giving body. This body no longer has to passively endure the extreme points of being touched from within during labour, the extreme stretching of flesh, but can actually participate by pushing out an entire world. The mother’s body is no longer just being touched, but is touching, enveloping, pushing and contributing.

Vivian Sobchack describes the relevance of such autobiographical observations for a phenomenology of the lived body very well when she states: ‘[A]s our lived-body experience – through gesture and action – is being concretely “figured” in the world, it is always also being imaginatively and discursively “figured out’’ (Sobchack, 2010: 54). It is indeed amazing how the mother in this narrative who will have never heard of phenomenology spontaneously exclaims the key concept of world. Equally amazing is how Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the ‘flesh of the world’ can help us ‘figure out’ through concepts how flesh, in the literal and metaphorical sense, supports this new world, carries it, opens up world through its own flesh.

In the course of this essay, we have seen how, in pregnancy, in addition to the world as moving away from me (on the practical level), world has also come close, by way of experiencing a layered and folded perceptual landscape: the elemental flesh of the world. In pregnancy, there is an innermost layer in which I am being touched by something which is alien and inaccessible to me. This inaccessible creature is dwelling in me, provided the notion of dwelling is understood in terms of an orientation and ground rather than implying a ‘container’ relation between two separate entities.

Being inhabited by a secret of sorts means a strange kind of carrying. It means to carry something which, when I face it, is already different from the creature inside. Tragen, bearing or carrying, means to enter into a process of transformation which transforms both of us and the world. It is a kind of tragen which will continue, albeit in a different shape. I must carry you: you, an origin of world, a new world which eclipses and reveals world. I must carry you, and in turn, you are inviting me to explore the world, its readability and unreadability yet again. The paradox of pregnancy thus indeed serves as a paradigm for our experience of others and of world, informing us of a more interrelated existence in which we carry the other and their world: the other who has always already touched us. Describing pregnancy as paradigmatic for our relationship to others is not meant to imply that women who do not experience pregnancy are in a deficient position when it comes to their relations. Rather, the idea is that descriptions of the experience of pregnancy can be instructive in a more general sense – not just for those who are planning to get pregnant or who are dealing with pregnant women in a professional capacity, but for anybody who takes our embodied existence and our emergence from female bodies seriously. Although the experience of being touched by the other is in most cases a metaphorical rather than literal sense of having the other under my skin, I would like to suggest that the crucial roles of pregnancy and childbirth for our human world relation are so fundamental that we benefit from considering the literal situation to understand the metaphorical implications better.

These implications allow us to see that intercorporeality is paradigmatic of human ontology and constitutive of our existence. While female intercorporeality has served here as the phenomenological starting point for exploring the elemental significance of touch, all bodies start from the position of touching the other, and all existence is intercorporeal. The idea of an isolated individual is always an abstraction that fails to do justice to our intercorporeal genesis. These considerations also mean that the journal title Body & Society combines two of the most central concepts for understanding our existence, and that pregnancy indeed turns out to be a paradoxical paradigm that can shed crucial light on body and society (or world shared with others).