Sarah Jackson
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748685318
- eISBN:
- 9781474412360
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748685318.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter addresses the ‘law of tact’ that pervades our everyday professional, social and familial exchanges. Focusing on the parallel taboos against touching in psychoanalysis and in the ...
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This chapter addresses the ‘law of tact’ that pervades our everyday professional, social and familial exchanges. Focusing on the parallel taboos against touching in psychoanalysis and in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it discusses the ‘Noli Me Tangere’ scene when Jesus says to Mary Magdalene ‘Touch me not’, stressing the spacing and withdrawal that always interrupt contact. The chapter explores these biblical resonances in H.D.'s account of her psychoanalytic encounter with Sigmund Freud in Tribute to Freud, a prohibition that is replicated in her letters to Bryher. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, the chapter re-reads the psychoanalytic relationship through the figure of Freud's dog, Yofi, arguing that H.D. and Freud perform the instruction to touch and at the same time demonstrate a tactful withdrawal.Less
This chapter addresses the ‘law of tact’ that pervades our everyday professional, social and familial exchanges. Focusing on the parallel taboos against touching in psychoanalysis and in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it discusses the ‘Noli Me Tangere’ scene when Jesus says to Mary Magdalene ‘Touch me not’, stressing the spacing and withdrawal that always interrupt contact. The chapter explores these biblical resonances in H.D.'s account of her psychoanalytic encounter with Sigmund Freud in Tribute to Freud, a prohibition that is replicated in her letters to Bryher. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, the chapter re-reads the psychoanalytic relationship through the figure of Freud's dog, Yofi, arguing that H.D. and Freud perform the instruction to touch and at the same time demonstrate a tactful withdrawal.
Emily McLaughlin
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- March 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198849582
- eISBN:
- 9780191883675
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198849582.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter investigates how Bonnefoy experiments with spacious ways of entering into contact with the material world in the snow poems of Début et fin de la neige, published in 1991. It compares ...
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This chapter investigates how Bonnefoy experiments with spacious ways of entering into contact with the material world in the snow poems of Début et fin de la neige, published in 1991. It compares how both Bonnefoy and Nancy use the biblical scene of Noli me tangere to reflect on the human desire to grasp a metaphysical essence and on the exhaustion of this desire by the endlessly shifting forms of material existence. Exploring how the loss of an absolute principle inspires a newly spacious conception of touch, the chapter analyses how both Bonnefoy and Nancy foreground the loose and airy interactions that occur between language, sense, and matter in the scene of writing. It explores how they present a spacious form of textual performance as an immersive way of exploring the world’s dynamics of exposition ‘de l’intérieur’.Less
This chapter investigates how Bonnefoy experiments with spacious ways of entering into contact with the material world in the snow poems of Début et fin de la neige, published in 1991. It compares how both Bonnefoy and Nancy use the biblical scene of Noli me tangere to reflect on the human desire to grasp a metaphysical essence and on the exhaustion of this desire by the endlessly shifting forms of material existence. Exploring how the loss of an absolute principle inspires a newly spacious conception of touch, the chapter analyses how both Bonnefoy and Nancy foreground the loose and airy interactions that occur between language, sense, and matter in the scene of writing. It explores how they present a spacious form of textual performance as an immersive way of exploring the world’s dynamics of exposition ‘de l’intérieur’.
