Derrida, Nancy and the Digital

Abstract

If Derrida’s work is a response to the emergence of the digital in the technical sense, then it also concerns the other meaning of ‘digital’, particularly in relation to touch. In On Touching — Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida analyses what he describes as a ‘humanualism’ [humainisme] that pervades much Western thinking. He takes as an example the essay ‘Sur l’influence de l’habitude’ by the late eighteenth, early nineteenthcentury philosopher Maine de Biran, in which he finds the teleological hierarchy that privileges the human hand over the grasping organ of other animals. ‘Humans are the only beings who have this hand at their disposal; they alone can touch, in the strongest and strictest sense. Human beings touch more and touch better.’¹