Adam Phillips' metaphor describing the language of children as a route 'back to bodies' (Phillips, 1999: 29), that is to an organismic wholeness paradoxically both lost and regained in the movement into speech, is given a new resonance when read alongside Roland Barthes's meditation on language as somehow corporeal: 'Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words' (Barthes, 1978: 73). The evocative language in Barthes's version of the metaphor brings us, once more, back through words to bodies.

But not just to our own bodies – for, if we play a little with Barthes's words, we can wonder how the skin-that-is-language rubs against the skin of another, the other's language. Our skin touches the skin of the other, yet it also holds us within ourselves, holds our selves within us, within the 'individuating system that individuates itself' that for Gilbert Simondon constitutes the 'living individual' (Simondon, 1992: 305; italicised in original). It is what keeps us contained, but it also touches the world, at once both connecting us and preventing our connection with what is other to us – both on the inside and on the outside.

So too does our language touch the language of the other. Yet it also holds us within ourselves, holds our selves within us.