Conclusion Departing Bodies: Between Doubting Thomas and Noli me Tangere

Abstract

The obsession with ascertaining presence or holiness through touch is given its most graphic realization in the Doubting Thomas scene of John’s Gospel.¹ Peggy Phelan’s reading of the representation of this scene in Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Thomas points out the pornographic quality of this image. She writes that “[i]n Caravaggio’s painting and in the spectacular penetrations of the body given to us in photographic porn, we are made to see that there is an injury, a wound, a hole, that makes all we see incomplete, partial, painful.” ² Thomas cannot trust his eyes, and instead must thrust his finger into the wound in order to verify that this is in fact the risen Christ. It is a form of blindness, driving his need for haptic certitude. The insertion of the finger and the wound itself are both signs of the limits of vision. As Phelan goes on to suggest, the wound in Christ’s body opens up an interiority that painting cannot expose, thus underscoring the limit of the look. ³ The skin of the body becomes the skin of the painting and the wound or tear in its surface reveals the limits of vision. This “blindness” is associated with the viscous and tacky inner space of the human body. I use the word tacky here to denote the liquid viscera that the body produces, and, at a conceptual level, the notion of touch implies an affirmation of the real, of visceral presence and immediacy—an ideology that is also a fantasy of homogeneity, of assimilation, of reduction, and which Nancy’s warns against: a touch that turns into a grip.⁴