This book thematizes the so-called senses of proximity,
locating them in most diverse contexts: from the anal eroticism
and the amorphous perversity of the small child (analyzed
through her sense of smell), through the blissful state of being
tipsy which allows for the triumphal return of all that culture has
stigmatized (viewed through the prism of the sense of taste), up to
the opposition between ‘the city of pain and compassion’ and ‘the
city of cosiness and isolation’ (in the aspect of the tactile sense).
The starting premise is that in comparison to the senses
of distance (vision and hearing), the senses of proximity, also
called ‘lower’ senses, are related to disgust and pleasure to a much
greater degree. Putting the focus on the topos of disgust, but in
a specific, primarily psychoanalytical, aspect, it is regarded as a
former desire. The desire itself is conceived as being peculiarly
coupled with pleasure (which may be seen e.g. in the ambivalence
of the German word Lust that means simultaneously desire and
pleasure): thus pleasure becomes expectation, the foretasting of a
future pleasure.
208
In early childhood, senses of proximity dominate over sense
of distance. The child tastes, smells and touches much earlier and
much better than she perceives by her vision and hearing. To get
to genuinely know something or someone, she must touch, smell
and put it in her mouth as she has first done with her mother’s
nipple. Thus she cognizes the world by literally tasting it – an
intersensory experience where olfactory, tactile and gustatory
sensations are merged.
The emphasis on senses of proximity shifts to senses of
distance very slowly and gradually in the course of individual
development, and this is done by the strict tabooing of gustatory,
olfactory and tactile perceptions. Her parents categorically
don’t want the baby to put everything in her mount and they
stubbornly teach order and cleanliness to her, in decisively and
insistently demonstrating their disgust with the objects she craves
most, these of the body and its excretions. In fact the child doesn’t
want but feels that she must abstain from the pleasure that these
sensations bring. As a result of upbringing, pleasure is going to be
repressed and become disgust, while desired objects are going to
evoke aversion.
Simultaneously, the research interest as so defined also
presupposes a specific perspective to the body. It is treated in a
phenomenological context as in-der-Welt-sein [being-in-theworld],
as Heidegger would say, or, speaking in Merleau-Ponty’s
terms, as être de porosité [being of porosity]. Speaking otherwise,
this is a question of the body as penetrated by the world and as
penetrating into the world, as located in a peculiar fleshly (in the
sense of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘flesh’) symbiosis with the
world. An example of such a symbiosis is the space of ‘genuine,
affective-phenomenological proximity’ as a space of the so-called
‘(atom)sphere’ (in the understanding of M. Diaconu which I
am discussing in the book), dominated precisely by ‘senses of
proximity’ – in it, the Other is inhaled, touched, even ‘tasted’.
209
Thus when talking of a ‘sociological’ analytic, what is meant
here is a rather unconventional understanding of sociology as
far as, as I have shown, the reflexive sociological approach is
articulated, on the one hand, with the psychoanalytic research
vision and, on the other, with the phenomenological one.
Enriched in this manner, the sociological strategy becomes far
more sensitive, or, to permit myself a pun, far more sensory for
the human senses.