2 quotes on eyes

March 10 2026

"These desires for distance and distinction underwrite man's ancient investment in sight, and the evidence of his eyes. 'He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it,' writes Canetti. 'In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic.' Sight is the sense of security. Touch is the feeling that nothing is safe.
While sight is organized around the organs that see and the things that are seen, touch is not a localized sense. It is dispersed and distributed across the skin, every one hundred square millimeters of which is said to have some fifty sense receptors … the skin is both a border and a network of ports; a porous membrane, riddled with holes; perforated surfaces, intensities."

Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture

"Work constrains the slippage towards death, but it conspires with visibility. Scopic representation and utility are mutually sustained by objectivity, which Bataille -- unlike Kant -- understands as transcendence; the crystallization of things from out of the continuum of immanent flow … vision is so pregnant with incipient rationalization that it tends to involve an inherent negative reflex, exaggerating its difference from touch. This is why scopophiliac investments are not libidinal tropisms like any other, but compromises; coaxing drives into the domesticated state associated with representation."

Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism