Touch is a characteristically paradoxical phenomenon of infinite play.
I am not touched by another when the distance between us is reduced to zero. I am touched only if I respond from my own center- that is, spontaneously, originally. But you do not touch me except from you own center, out of your own genius. Touching is always reciprocal. You cannot touch me unless I touch you in response.
The opposite of touching is moving. You move me by pressing me from without toward a place you have already foreseen and perhaps prepared. It is a staged action that succeeds only if in moving me you remain unmoved yourself. I can be moved to tears by skilled performances and heart-rending newspaper accounts, or moved to passion by political manifestos and narratives of heroic achievement – but in each case I am moved according to a formula or design to which the actor or agent is immune. When actors bring themselves to tears by their performance, and not as their performance, they have failed their craft; they have become theatrically inept.
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