Balım İslamoğlu (Bio)

The Suspension of Touch: AI Lovers and the Flesh of Reversibility

The hierarchy of Enlightenment thought elevated vision while relegating touch to the background, associating intellectual respectability with purification from bodily pleasures. The claim that “overly tactile” societies cannot think deeply forms part of this epistemic regime. Diderot’s ranking of sight as “most superficial,” hearing as “most proud,” smell as “the most voluptuous,” and touch as “the most profound and philosophical” may be read as an attempt to invert this hierarchy. With the integration of AI assistants into everyday life, disembodied AI figures have replaced autonomous robots in contemporary science fiction cinema. When constructed as lovers, AI appears either with a humanoid body or solely as voice or projection, marking a reconfiguration of the sensory organization of desire. This study argues that the suspension of tactile reversibility in disembodied AI lovers does not eliminate embodiment; rather, it reveals, through absence, the constitutive role of the body in perception and meaning-making. Through the withdrawal of tactility and the interruption of intentional arc, perception is reduced to an auditory and holographic plane shaped by technologically mediated affective relations. Yet this reduction functions as an aesthetic strategy that makes indispensability of embodied reversibility perceptible. An analysis of Samantha in Her (2013) and Joi in Blade Runner 2049 (2017) shows how narratives without material contact become audio-visual choreographies. Samantha’s existence as a disembodied voice and Joi’s presentation as a digital construct dramatize the impossibility of tactile reversibility. In the context of digital loneliness, the delegation of emotional decision-making to algorithmic systems reanimates Diderot’s inversion: as sight and hearing intensify, absence of touch becomes most visible trace of desire. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of flesh and the intentional arc, and Sobchack’s account of embodied spectatorship, the loss of tactility is framed not as deprivation but as an exposure of embodiment’s foundational role in cinematic exchange.