In Being and Nothingness, Sartre claims that it is due to the male subject’s caress that the female subject comes into being.

Otherwise, it turns into something other than what it is: a wound, or even a penetration, especially in the case of an overly tight grip.1 Irigaray’s insistence on the respect for limits in touch comes by way of her reading of Sartre’s take on touch in relation to subjectivity. Touch cannot be a permanent grip, therefore. It is via such touch that there can effectively be a respect for the limits separating the bodies in contact, limits that safeguard the integrity, dignity, and well-being of the involved bodies, as well as their freedom to detach themselves from any established contact. Nancy has constantly argued that touch must always be a matter of tact, which is to say, touch must always know when to withdraw itself. Without going into details, let it be said that whenever touch is in question, these thinkers would call for a respect for limits.

In that regard, her text stands apart from contemporary theories of touch as proposed by French thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous. As will be shown, Lispector goes far with touch in that text, transgressing limits to the point of even committing violence against an animal other. In this essay, I am concerned with the question of touch in Clarice Lispector’s Passion according to G.H.

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