Revues électroniques université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
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“This warm scribe, my hand”: John Keats’s Tactile Poetics
Get PDFThis article purposes to argue that Keats’s tactile poetics demonstrates the poet’s willingness to embody both human experience and the experience of writing itself. By figuring the sense of touch, his poems display a desire to meet with the other and with the world (both literally and metaphorically) in order to make sense of the duality of touch. The article will first return to Jean-Luc Nancy’s conception of the body as a point of contact and separation. This theoretical frame will contribute to outlining Keats’s poetics of touch, focusing on the role of contact and affect in the comparison between poetry and the beloved woman. More specifically, the article will consider Keats’s “Ode to Psyche” in light of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus and Jacques Derrida’s focus on Psyche. In both Nancy’s essay and Keats’s poem, the goddess Psyche “lies unaware” — she is observed and touched by a gaze. Psyche’s body represents the body “that we try to touch through thought”, as the poet endeavours to build a tangible yet entirely immaterial temple for her inside his brain
Foreword: The Criticality of Touch
Get PDFThough long considered as a minor sense, the sense of touch is now reclaimed as the “first sense”, embodying intersubjectivity from embryonic formation to social emotions and interactions. As such, the tactile sense offers the privileged sensorial entryway into affective experience. “If anything, the association between touch and affect may be too obvious”, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes, reflecting on the semantic doubling of the word “touching”. For Kosofsky, the “particular intimacy [that] seems to subsist between textures and emotions” justifies a reorientation of hermeneutics towards phenomenology and affect, leading Rita Felski, in much more trenchant terms, to promote affective hermeneutics beyond “the limits of critique”. However, touch matters to aesthetic criticism precisely insofar as it materialises the criticality of care, attachment, tact, and closeness. While touch constitutes an ontological form of affirmation — the confirmation of material reality and a reparative form of presence —, let’s not place haptics beyond or after critique, and engage instead with haptic criticality as a way of reading touch against the grain and registering its ability to disrupt and remodel relationality across social and sensory hierarchies. In other words, there may be unexpected affinities between touch and critique
L’ Haptique déléguée : Gustave Roud et le toucher par procuration
Get PDFSoutenue par une sensorialité exacerbée, par un rapport au monde aussi intense que fébrile, l’œuvre du poète suisse romand Gustave Roud (1897-1976) fait une large place à l’expression du corps. Poésie métaphysique, certes, mais poésie pleinement située. Poésie ancrée dans un territoire, le Jorat — ou plus précisément encore, le Haut-Jorat — la poésie roudienne est également ancrée dans une expérience corporelle intime. Si les sphères intellectuelles, affectives et spirituelles sont puissamment investies, la sensorialité la plus immédiate affleure constamment. Sensorialité immédiate en effet, car le sujet lyrique des proses roudiennes ne manque jamais d’exalter la beauté et la force délicate des corps paysans à-demi vêtus et pleinement désirés. Sensorialité médiate aussi, car précisément ce sont ces corps, contemplés mais inaccessibles, qui cristallisent l’expression sensorielle voire sensuelle de la vie corporelle. Toucher au sens littéral, dès lors, ne caractérise plus prioritairement un sujet lyrique dont l’expérience tactile tend vers une idéalisation, une métaphorisation ou, à tout le moins, une abstraction : toucher devient figural, perdant son sens premier, sensitif, pour acquérir de nouvelles valeurs, imagées et spirituelles. Par conséquent, la réalisation haptique est presque tout entière contenue chez l’autre : celui que l’on regarde, celui qui vit — c’est-à-dire, dans l’esthétique roudienne : chez ce paysan non pas pur symbole mais être réel et incarné
Amputated Limbs and the Politics of Touch in Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille
Get PDFThis paper explores the poetics and politics of touch in Claude McKay’s recently recovered modernist novel Romance in Marseille (1929-1933, published in 2020). Through an emphasis on the protagonist Lafala’s “dancing legs”, the narrative posits strong connections between black identity and touch — both the sensuality of dancing and the ability to touch the African soil. Yet these connections are irrevocably severed by the traumatic experience the novel opens with: stowing away on a transatlantic liner, Lafala is discovered and locked up in the glacial latrines, in conditions evocative of the triangular trade, which causes him to lose his legs to frostbite. Adopting an intersectional viewpoint, I analyze the novel’s ambivalent reflection on how disability intersects with and transforms Lafala’s racial identity and class status in unexpected and paradoxically empowering ways, resulting in a “Pyrrhic victory” that becomes the catalyst of new, more heightened touching experiences (in the combined senses of haptics and affect)
“We’ll be in touch all the time”: Touch and/as Resistance in Burnt Shadows (2009) and Home Fire (2017) by Kamila Shamsie
Get PDFShamsie’s novels Burnt Shadows (2009) and Home Fire (2017) centre on touch and skin, be it in the former’s depiction of a heroine who bears on her body the “touchable” traces of the bombing of Nagasaki in 1945 or in the latter’s staging of an unwanted corpse, that of a criminalised terrorist, whose body has literally been construed as impure, and one could say by extension, untouchable. In this article, I wish to analyse the articulation between touch and resistance in the two novels which focus on traumatic historical events, with both personal and collective repercussions. In these historical contexts characterised by enduring coloniality and complex geopolitics, touch sometimes partakes of a form of resistance against hegemonic power and may even consist of a reparative process in the face of oppression and discrimination — a process that is not solely related to memory but that can ultimately lead to a reconfiguration of society
So Present, Yet Unreachable: Phenomenological Aesthetics of Distant Touch
Get PDFAs touch remains commonly defined by the closeness it physically implies and it rhetorically evokes, the mere notion of distant touch and of distal haptic perception seems peculiar. But Aristotle’s perspective, which I wish to take as a point of departure, is firm: we perceive the objects of touch, the hot and the cold, the hard and the soft, the curved and the sharp, through other things: δι' ἑτέρων. In this article, I would like to explore this ἕτερος by showing how the otherness of perception always implies an intermediary, a middle point (μέσος), i.e. an other not so other, an other that is able to translate the much more distant otherness of the perceived object. To explore these forgotten layers of alterity that fall into what we commonly conceive of as the impalpable emptiness of distance, I propose to study the idea of distant touch from the perspective of phenomenological aesthetics. In order to do so, I will first examine some aspects of the Husserlian account of perception and will then focus on the phenomenology of distant touch in Alejandra Costamagna’s novel El Sistema del Tacto [The System of Touch] (2018)
Restoring Touch in Ecofeminist Speculative Fiction
Get PDFFocusing on The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk and The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson, this article intends to map out the ways in which touch is restored as a reliable yet complex epistemological path in ecofeminist speculative fiction. While touch is a sense that boasts immediacy between the touching subject and the touched object, The Fifth Sacred Thing portrays it as a mode of knowing that requires effort and proceeds gradually, following its own regime and geography and literalizing the spacing at the heart of touch theorized by Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. While it produces instantaneous effects, it also induces stases which allow both texts to frequently feature touch as a place, or the touched thing as a pattern, which gives literary presence to the neuroscientific hypothesis of a tactile field. The interpenetration in which touch often results in the two novels also sets touch as an exemplary sense to meet the universe halfway
Brave New Humans and Incongruous Bodysuits: On Surveillance and its Modes in Dave Eggers’ The Every (2021)
Get PDFThis paper builds on Pierre Jourde’s definition of the incongruous as something insignificant which emerges out of discrepancies and heterogeneous encounters, often appears superfluous and carries connotations of impropriety to examine a seemingly unimportant detail in Dave Eggers’ novel The Every: the lycra bodysuits worn by the inhabitants of his near-future dystopia. Their unexpected appearance at the heart of the world’s leading surveillance corporation threatens to derail the protagonist’s plan to sabotage the company from the inside. In a world where eye-tracking is the norm and everything is permanently recorded, Delaney Wells fears she may be discovered. The paper first locates The Every and its focus on norms – sartorial and others – in the tradition of utopian literature to show that it is the clash with the new standards set at the Every that produces the incongruous. It then studies the functioning of the incongruous on the levels of referentiality, textuality and narrative to lay bare the inherent tension in any attempt to make sense of the incongruous, something which readers are nevertheless encouraged to do. The final section examines the question of mode in The Every. Indeed, the incongruous produces comic effects, thereby thwarting the expectations of readers whose surveillance imaginary may have been shaped by bleak dystopias. The Every thus raises questions about how established literary forms and genres can accommodate twenty-first century surveillance in late-capitalist societies where it seems to be whole-heartedly embraced and where it is rather invisibility that is perceived as threatening.Cet article part de la définition que Pierre Jourde propose de l’incongru comme de quelque chose d’insignifiant qui est du côté de l’écart, de la rencontre hétéroclite, du superflu et de la malséance afin d’analyser la fonction d’un détail du roman The Every de Dave Eggers : les combinaisons en lycra que portent les habitants de la dystopie. Leur apparition inattendue au cœur de la plus grande société de surveillance mondiale menace de mettre en déroute le projet de sabotage de la protagoniste. Dans un monde où l’oculométrie est la norme et où tout est enregistré de façon permanente, Delaney Wells craint d’être découverte. L’article situe d’abord le roman et la question des normes dans la tradition de l’utopie littéraire pour montrer que c’est le choc entre deux systèmes de normes qui produit l’incongru. Il étudie ensuite le fonctionnement de l’incongru au niveau de la référentialité, de la textualité et du récit pour mettre au jour la tension inhérente à toute tentative de donner du sens à l’incongru, ce que les lecteurs sont néanmoins encouragés à faire. Il examine enfin la question du mode. En effet, la présence de l’incongru produit des effets comiques qui déjouent les attentes des lecteurs dont l’imaginaire de la surveillance a pu être façonné par des dystopies sombres. The Every permet de s’interroger sur la façon dont formes et genres littéraires établis peuvent accueillir la surveillance des sociétés du capitalisme tardif, où elle semble être adoptée presque sans réserve et où c’est plutôt l’invisibilité qui est perçue comme menaçante
Transference: A Cliché?
Get PDFThis essay approaches the difficult notion of “transference” by considering the general implications and connotations of the word, which vary significantly from German to English and to French. The differences are revealing of the complexity of the notion of “transference” itself, which appears as a kind of “pharmakon” in regard to psychoanalytic therapy. But not only the concept itself involves significant interlinguistic overdetermination — Freud’s invocation of a French word to describe it in German is perhaps no less ambiguous. Freud designates transference as a kind of “Klischee”, which itself already entails a linguistic and conceptual “transfer” from French to German. That Freud should resort to this (for him) rather unusual linguistic transfer in order to characterize the psychoanalytic notion of “transference”, provides a useful point of departure for reflecting on how a movement of linguistic transference is already at work in denominating one of the defining concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis — and one of its most problematic
Poétique (et politique) de l’incongru
Get PDFStarting from the figure of syllepsis, considered as the characteristic of the incongruous, this article takes the path of the jubilation of the incongruous as a jouissance of language to outline a poetics of the incongruous and trace its political force. It shows how the incongruous is a linguistic, literary and political inscription capable of exposing and countering the need for narrative and axiological propriety.À partir de la figure de la syllepse, considérée comme la caractéristique de l’incongru, cet article emprunte la voie de la jubilation de l’incongru comme jouissance de langue pour dessiner une poétique de l’incongru et en tracer la force politique. Il montre comment l’incongru est une inscription langagière, littéraire et politique à même d’exposer et de contrer la nécessité des convenances narratives et axiologiques