3.80
Sensitivity drives and orients the activity of thinking that we’ve been attempting throughout this text. Through these words.
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.
My language trembles with desire.”[1]
So, too, my behaviour is a skin; my gestures, tone, glances – my inhalation, other senses, thoughts that go out to meet phenomena, and other forms of attentiveness — these are all skins, sensitive skins, rubbing against and touched by the other. Reaching out is sensitivity, for we at once sense, make-sense, and respond to our world.
[1] Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), p. 73, line break added.
[2] Webb, from “Some Final Questions,” in The Vision Tree, p. 101.