496 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
Around the theme of touching, Derrida develops a series of ‘tan-
gents’ in which he mentions Aristotle, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, as well as authors to whom he had
not previously referred, such as Maine de Biran, Ravaisson, Jean-
Louis Chrétien, and various others, before returning to Nancy.
Derrida, who had always drawn attention to the privilege granted
to sight in much of the philosophical tradition, modifi ed his position
somewhat:
Intuition means gaze; intuitionism is the thinking which grants
to the gaze, to immediate vision, access to truth. [.. .] What I
realized, in writing this book on touch and rereading all those
texts, is that an even more powerful tradition, ever since Plato,
subjected the gaze to the touch and that intuitionism became
the experience of immediacy, of immediate contact, of the
continuous, of plenitude and presence, the privilege of presence
being granted even more to touch than to sight itself. I then
talked in terms of a haptocentric intuitionism, which marked a
change in the story of my little career, since the deconstruction
of intuitionism had already been in progress since the begin-
ning, but it was not addressed directly to touch but rather to
sight. I was led to rearrange things in a diff erent order.^3J. Hillis Miller was struck by the singularity of this work,
which he viewed as one of the most important of Derrida’s fi nal
years.
Usually, Derrida waited until his friends were dead before he
wrote an essay or a book on them. He did it at the time of their
death, or very shortly thereafter. In almost all these homages,
especially in the one on Levinas, you can see a double move-
ment at work: he emphasizes their importance, but at the same
time he places them or puts them in their place. So every time,
structurally, he is the one to have the last word. The book On
Touching is a quite particular case. Derrida had started to write
a long article when Jean-Luc Nancy was waiting for a heart
transplant and so was in danger of dying. But luckily, Nancy
survived; we could almost say that he rose again. And, years
later, Derrida took up his text again, greatly extending it. It’s
the only book of this type that he published while the author
he was discussing was still alive. And so Nancy had an oppor-
tunity to reply to him, on the question of the deconstruction of
Christianity, in a note in Noli me tangere. One might even say
that he had the last word. Derrida had criticized him for being
too Christian. And Nancy replied to Derrida that he was too
rabbinic.^4