Touching Contact and Emotional Value

Certain “contacts” at a distance, such as catching each other’s eye or a telephone call, can be said to be “touching”: an emotion is felt when perceiving the activity of the partner during the interaction. In order to understand how and under what conditions a contact can be “touching”, we raise the question of the general use of the vocabulary of touch in order to describe these emotional relationships. A minimalist experimental study will allow us to analyse the dynamics of perceptual crossing at the root of this feeling of contact. Then, in order to understand how such contact can be touching, we analyse e-motion as the effect of a force which evokes a movement. We will thus show that this force which is transmitted in touching contacts, even at a distance, is based on the duality of the perceiving body (Leib) and the perceived body (Körper). The fact that the subject is ignorant concerning his body as perceived by the other is then revealed by the breaking of perceptual symmetry which occurs in the course of a touching contact. These results provide guiding principles for the design of interfaces and interaction structures favourable for emotional encounters via the networks.