The Caress Consists in Seizing upon Nothing, in Soliciting What Ceaselessly Escapes its Form
The caress, like contact, is sensibility. But the caress transcends the sensible. It is not that it would feel beyond the felt, further than the senses, that it would seize upon a sublime food while maintaining, within its relation with this ultimate felt, an intention of hunger that goes unto the food promised, and given to, and deepening this hunger, as though the caress would be fed by its own hunger. The caress consists in seizing upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes its form toward a future never future enough, in soliciting what slips away as though it were not yet. It searches, it forages. It is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search: a movement unto the invisible. In a certain sense it expresses love, but suffers from an inability to tell it. It is hungry for this very expression, in an unremitting increase of hunger.
~Emmanuel Levinas
Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Trans. Alphonso Lingis) ~ Pittsburgh : Duquesne UP, 2007 / pgs 257-8
