Contact ! : The Art of Touch / L'Art du toucher (L'Esprit Créateur, automne 2007)

For more than forty years, L'Esprit Créateur has published studies on French and Francophone literature, film, criticism, and culture. The journal features articles representing a variety of methodologies and critical approaches. Exploring all periods of French literature and thought, L'Esprit Créateur focuses on topics that define French and Francophone Studies today.


Vol. 47, no 3 (automne 2007)


Crowley, Martin
Contact!

Didi-Huberman, Georges.
Moore, Gerald, tr.
Ex-Voto: Image, Organ, Time
Considering their historical persistence and various forms from the Middle Ages to the present day, Didi-Huberman opposes the relegation of votive offerings to the status of the primitive, arguing instead that they operate a material resemblance, in which the symbolic and the iconic are irreducibly contaminated by indexical contact.

Schehr, Lawrence R.
Feeling Dirty: Touched by the Post-War Erotic
This article is a theorization of the decline of the erotic in literature. Late modernist works by Klossowski and Réage are the vanguard of this decline, as they signal the post-modern, in which categories collapse. Criss-crossed by interplays of meaning and desire, the post-modern body both inside and outside literature is glimpsed in these works in statu nascendi.

Mathews, Timothy
Walking with Angels in Giacometti and Beckett
What kind of knowledge is offered by art? This essay discusses Giacometti together with Beckett and Benjamin. Giacometti and Beckett are concerned with relations and their collapse: between persons, between memory and forgetting. Together, they prompt questions about the compatibility of space and time which, in Benjamin, show the difficulty of writing history without triumphalism.

Ffrench, Patrick
Fantasizing Contact: The Freudian Object
The initial theoretical fantasy of an unmediated relation to objects is confronted here with the progressive devaluation of the object in Freudian psychoanalysis, where the ego appears as sovereign and relations to objects vicissitudes of a self-relation. However other moments in Freud's work hint at 'breaches' in narcissism, and the possibility of a determinative originary exposure.

Malt, Johanna
Impossible Contact: The Thing in Lacan and Rachel Whiteread
The article examines the work of contemporary British artist Rachel Whiteread in the light of Lacan's L'Éthique de la psychanalyse, and particularly his concept of 'la Chose', arguing that Whiteread's work illuminates this concept and the relationship Lacan establishes between the 'container' of signification and the empty space of potentiality it contains

James, Ian
The Evidence of the Image
This article examines Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking of 'evidence' as developed in his short work on the film of Abbas Kiarostami. In particular it examines the way in which Nancy's thinking 'evidence' engages with a phenomenological heritage surrounding the question of 'originary intuition' and through this affirms a specific mode of contact between images of art and worldly existence.

Landes, Donald A.
Le Toucher and the Corpus of Tact: Exploring Touch and Technicity with Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy
Although Derrida emphas touch in the thought of Nancy, he does not engage Nancy's thinking of touch regarding the plurality of the arts. By returning to Nancy's work on sensibility and materiality, touch and bodies, this article links Derrida's Le Toucher to the political and ethical challenges of Nancy's deconstructive project.

Gaudin-Bordes, Lucile
Peindre le toucher: la leçon de continence de Rubens mise en mots par Roger de Piles
Les notices rédigées par Roger de Piles sur Susanne avec les deux vieillards, La Madeleine chez Simon le Pharisien et La Continence de Scipion permettent de croiser les regards du théoricien et du peintre pour aborder la question du toucher en peinture, de ses figures, de ses effets, de ses enjeux. Cet article articule l'art de toucher, tel qu'il est décrit par les lexicographes du 17ème siècle et exploité par les théoriciens, et l'art du toucher dont témoignent à la fois les œuvres de Rubens et le texte de de Piles.

Trudel, Eric
La Résistance intime: contact et immédiateté du sens chez Jean Paulhan
Cet article s'intéresse à ce qui se présente dans le texte paulhanien et excède la représentation, excès que l'écrivain concevait comme un "effet" de lecture. Comment comprendre ce contact sans contact, ce sens au-delà de ce qui fait sens? Pour Paulhan, cette intimité n'est jamais autre chose que celle d'une "im-médiation," d'une résistance.

Cruickshank, Ruth
The Work of Art in the Age of Global Consumption: Agnès Varda's Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse
Identifying intersections with Benjamin's 1936 essay, this article considers the motif of the work of art in Varda's recent cinécriture. Analysing Varda's juxtaposition of gleaners motivated by need, ethics and aesthetics, it demonstrates how the self-reflexive filmmaker-gleaner invites questions about marginalization, waste and the critical potential of the work of art in the age of global consumption.

Mai, Joseph
Corps-Caméra: The Evocation of Touch in the Dardennes' La Promesse (1996)
Without the universalizing political ideologies of the European Left, the Dardenne brothers focus their cinema on creating a sense of touch between audience and the film. Their "haptic" cinema disrupts viewers' subjectivities and gives them a sensuous experience of other worlds, leading to an ever-shifting ethical bricolage.

Valazza, Nicolas
La Chair du Chef-d'œuvre inconnu
À partir de la phénoménologie de la chair de Merleau-Ponty, l'on montre comment « le chef-d'œuvre inconnu » de Frenhofer – le peintre inventé par Balzac – qui apparaît comme une « muraille de peinture » sous laquelle une figure est oblitérée, est le fruit d'un travail de la chair où le désir du peintre s'est superposé à son regard.

Bruyère, Vincent
Ossa Loquuntur ! : Sur une impression caribéenne
Cet article se propose d'interroger l'invention historiographique de l'écrivain martiniquais Patrick Chamoiseau dans sa relation rhétorique et poétique à la passion archéologique du toucher et de sa déliaison en autant de vestiges du contact que Jacques Derrida a identifié à partir de la signature du corpus freudien à un « mal d'archive ».