Phenomenology of the kiss

In the same 2005 Critical Inquiry article where he quotes Freud on kissing, he gives a brief, provocative phenomenology of kissing. The mouth, he asserts, is the most intimate part of the body that is generally public. Eyes traditionally reveal the soul, but the mouth is a yawning entry into the body. Hence:

“The lips are a boundary. They are portals where the inside is exposed to the outside, where the breath of life passes in and out, where food is taken in, and speech breathed forth.” The mouth is the most variegated gateway into the interior of the body, taking in all sorts of things from outside the body and throwing out things from inside, and the lips are the guardians. To kiss is to draw near to that boundary between me and you.

And it has to be “me and you,” as Miller goes on to say, since “It is impossible to kiss one’s own lips . . . .

“and even the kiss of another part of one’s body does not seem to work as a form of auto-a?ection, though George Eliot, in a brilliant moment of psychological insight, represents the narcissistic Hetty Sorrel, in Adam Bede, passionately kissing her own arms when she cannot bring herself to drown herself: ‘The very consciousness of her own limbs was a delight to her: she turned up her sleeves, and kissed her arms with the passionate love of life.’ A Western tradition a?rms that you must touch your lips with your ?ngers in order to initiate speech. A children’s myth in the United States, however, asserts that if you succeed in kissing your own elbow (which you cannot) you will change sexes magically. You will become a girl if you are a boy, a boy if you are a girl, in a satisfaction of the curiosity children have to know what it would be like to be of the other sex. In any case, you need the other for a kiss to be a real kiss. A kiss can be a greeting between friends or family members, or it can be a goodbye kiss. Intimate family members, and others, too, characteristically kiss one another good night, in implicit recognition that sleep is a little death. The good-night kiss may always be the last kiss. The invitation to a kiss can also be an insult, as in the gesture of thumbing one’s nose, which means kiss my ass, or, as Joyce puts it in the Aeolus section of Ulysses, ‘K. M. R. I. A., which stands for kiss my royal Irish arse.’ Finnegans Wake contains a little drawing of a nose being thumbed. The kiss of death is a modern form of the Judas kiss. The ma?a capo kisses the subordinate or rival whom he marks for execution. In an episode in The Simpsons, Big Tony kisses a character and tells him to transmit that kiss as a gift to another character, who is horri?ed to receive the relayed kiss because he knows it is the kiss of death.”