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L'Art du toucher (revue L'Esprit Créateur)

L'Art du toucher (revue L'Esprit Créateur)

Publié le par Camille Esmein (Source : Daniel Brewer, Maria Minich Brewer)

Contact! The Art of Touch / L'Art du toucher
Recent work in philosophy, film theory, literary criticism, and the visual and plastic arts has begun to address a topic that for some time seemed taboo, namely, the notion that the work of art might effect a form of contact with its recipient, and with the world created or captured by the artwork. In harmony with Jean-Luc Nancy's approach to both sensory and artistic contact as an interrupted rhythm of proximity and distance, there has emerged a disparate sense among leading critics that the artwork, precisely as medium, might produce at least the fantasy, and perhaps the intermittent effect, of a kind of immediacy. Revisiting Peirce's work on the index, or Benjamin's concepts of the aura and the trace, developing Deleuze and Guattari's figure of the haptic, Bataille's account of communication, the Barthesian punctum, or the Lacanian/Žižekian Real, these investigations - by thinkers such as Hal Foster, Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks, Mary Ann Doane, Georges Didi-Huberman, or Giuliana Bruno - have sought to explore both the spaced relation between the work and its object, and the syncopated contact between the work and the receiver.

This issue of L'Esprit Créateur will engage with these questions by exploring ways of discussing, specifically from within French Studies, both the forms of contact that might or might not be thought to be effected by the artwork, and the ways in which such forms of contact have been conceptualized by particular movements, figures or periods.