the tactile "Tactile" is an adjective. But does "the tactile" in the following text mean "the sense of touch" or "the thing that is touched"? Text: Again, we might see this object as grotesque and, in the terms we are looking at here, exemplifying the deficiencies of an ego skin, but, as I argued in the chapter on abjection, such objects allow us the opportunity to renegotiate our bodily and cultural boundaries of inside and outside and between protection and defence. By being forced to confront in the visual register the traces of the tactile that we have forgotten, we may begin to question the projections and fantasies that underlie our belief systems more generally. Or, in a strictly psychoanalytic sense, we might begin to reactivate the rigidity of our own defensive ego skin mechanisms.