Being Touched from the Inside: Pregnancy as Paradox and Paradigm

By exploring the phenomenology of being touched from the inside with the help of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and others, this essay argues that pregnancy is paradoxical and paradigmatic. The paradox consists in having a body inside a body when I normally experience my body as just mine. The paradigm is to realise that as finite beings, having a body means having always already been touched by others. While pregnancy is the experience of having the other literally under my skin, the experience also reveals that on the metaphorical level, others always touch us, get to us and impose the ethical obligation to respond to being touched and moved by others. In this way, pregnancy turns out to be a paradoxical paradigm for what it means to be an embodied human, namely, being touched by others from the inside.