L'Atelier

Foreword: The Criticality of Touch

2024-05-27T13:11:33+00:00

Though 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.

So Present, Yet Unreachable: Phenomenological Aesthetics of Distant Touch

2024-05-27T13:48:54+00:00

As 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).

“This warm scribe, my hand”: John Keats’s Tactile Poetics

2024-05-27T13:33:35+00:00

This 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.

Amputated Limbs and the Politics of Touch in Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille

2024-05-27T15:36:54+00:00

This 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).

L’ Haptique déléguée : Gustave Roud et le toucher par procuration

2024-05-27T14:49:30+00:00

Soutenue 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.

“We’ll be in touch all the time”: Touch and/as Resistance in Burnt Shadows (2009) and Home Fire (2017) by Kamila Shamsie

2024-05-27T15:00:53+00:00

Shamsie’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.

Restoring Touch in Ecofeminist Speculative Fiction

2024-05-27T15:17:21+00:00

Focusing 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.