My body is a thing that reveals other things

My body is a thing that reveals other things, and can do so only because it is of the same fabric as they. My flesh is where the lines of direction of the world are inscribed on a fold in their midst. The movements of the eye and hand that are not desultory, are movements where – like the red that precipitates because the red of bishop’s robes, gypsies’ dresses, flags of linemen and of the revolution, lips of lovers haunts it – each phase of the movement recalls and refers to the eyes and hands that folded over or will fold over those robes, dresses, flags, lips. Its tissue, like that of the structured layout of a world, is made of these cross-references.

Alphonso Lingis, 'Bodies That Touch Us' in Thesis Eleven no 36 (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993) p. 163