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An extended essay on Claire Denis’ L’Intrus acts as a companion piece to the chapter on Frances Barrett. Dealing with similar themes of care, hospitality, and feminism, it expands on an aspect that sat at the edges of Curator, the questioning of received ontological boundaries or defining categories. Denis covers both formerly and conceptually a taxonomy of borders, which are both physical and psychological. Her source material, Jean Luc Nancy’s essay about his heart transplant, is considered in relation to the way Denis produces a moving image work from a philosophical text, with particular concern for her treatment of narrative to produce bodily sensation. The ‘Other’ or figure of the stranger is pitted against the disintegrating power of patriarchy referenced in Denis’ casting of the actor, Michel Subor, who appears in L’Intrus and Beau Travail (1999) as well as Jean Luc Godard’s Petite Soldat (1955). [145]

This chapter confronts Humboldt's innovative post-Kantian thought with Locke's contribution to the human understanding. It explores the way different languages build concepts. Language is taken as the space in which individuals think together and create concepts, redefining them and discussing their complexity. The concept of language as a ‘mirror’ which ‘reflects’ ideas is critiqued. Perception and sensation, following Kant, are considered by Humboldt to be active processes. Impressions are not imprinted upon the mind. The mind actively constructs experience based derived from sensation. But unlike Kant, Humboldt holds the activity of the mind to be an interactive process. Individuals carve concepts together, and assert their relation to them in their speech together and their writing.

This chapter pairs two formative, but often disregarded novels, Desperate Remedies and The Rescue, on the basis of their shared interest in sensation. Also showing that sensation is a fundamental consideration in contemporary physiology, the chapter explores a correlation between popularised studies of nerve transmission and energy circulation and the way that the two novelists construct scenic events in their fiction. The enforced solipsism which Walter Pater embraces is distinguished from the necessary participation in a medium which the characters in the wider physics of the novels of Hardy and Conrad undergo. Through an examination of a number of highly sensory scenes, both novels are shown to dramatize the threat of passivity and the requirement of activity.

This chapter examines the three great mature works in which Hardy and Conrad most fully explore the indeterminate sensory boundaries between individual organisms and their circumambient world. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Nostromo are seen to create margins within which the conventional relations between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds are reimagined. The Mayor is shown to provide two ways of finding identity in the world – that of Elizabeth Jane and that of Henchard – which is illuminated by G. H. Lewes’s discussion of Vorstellung and Empfindung. The intensity of Tess’s sensory participation in the energies of the world of Talbothays is seen to correspond to the revolutionary study of physics and the senses conducted by Ernst Mach. The tragedy of Tess lies in the extinction of this plenitude by the atomising mechanised forces of modern society. In Nostromo, individual identity is called upon to face nature’s silence, and the chapter examines the different courses of Nostromo and Decoud in doing so. Whilst Hardy is drawn to propagation of energies, Conrad’s novel concerns resistance to disintegration, but both authors are shown to establish a new relationship between psychological and material space.

This chapter points out that the term ‘worldview’ unfortunately stresses the visual nature of understanding and perception at the expense of the other senses. Perception and sensation involve smell, touch, taste and hearing. These senses themselves are cultivated by the interaction of experience and understanding, and language plays a role in this process. The author stresses that languages offer widely different ways of speaking about sensation, concepts for taste and so on. At a metaphoric level experience is explained in terms of senses when we speak of ‘loud’ colours’ and ‘the bitter truth’. And these expressions do not coincide in all languages. Although the author stresses, that Humboldt's understanding of Weltansicht included all the senses, he does point out that the German terms stress seeing over the other senses, as does the French translation of them, vision du monde.

‘Figures of Life’ examines time and death via Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of power, freedom, figure, sensation and counter-actualisation or productive re-enactment. Through an ostensibly shocking contention, this chapter contends that Alain Resnais’s Nuit et Brouillard creates and even affirms life and movement through series of audio-visual images that testify not only to the Event of the Holocaust but also to the virtual remains, the lingering affects and events of fear, sadness and hope that pervade each image, archive, stone and artefact. Deleuze’s concept of counter-actualisation is explained and conceived as a redoubling of a past actual wound for a ‘revolutionary becoming’, man’s only hope of response, as claims Deleuze, to human shame in the face of the intolerable. This chapter is the most demanding of the book with respect to an affirmative ethics and philosophy of life as it most directly confronts the interstice between personal and impersonal life and death through the Holocaust Event and its challenge to art, thought and survival.

This chapter argues that while marathon swimming is commonly understood through the lens of suffering, swimmers are also drawn to it by its potential for intoxicating pleasures. The chapter explores the different kinds of pleasure experienced by marathon swimmers. This challenges conventional sporting narratives of mind over matter, opening the way instead for a more nuanced account that emphasises the process of becoming not only as transforming what the body can do, but also how it feels. The chapter argues that the autotelic pleasures of swimming constitute a form of ‘existential capital’ among swimmers, which can only be known by those within that social world.

This chapter explores hunger and the anorexic body in Amélie Nothomb’s autofictional work. It analyses relations between hunger, desire and pleasure, sensation and immanence, investigates the making of a Deleuzian Body without Organs through the dematerialisating structures of anorexia, and opens out the possibility of the rematerialisation of the body alongside literary experimentation with corporeality. The chapter shows how Nothomb’s work both resonates with and reorients Deleuze’s thinking, with particular regard to notions of molarity, to the politics of beauty and illness, to experiments with body and art, and to the location of the limit.

Sensation writer Mary Elizabeth Braddon makes plenty of jokes at the expense of the suburbanites reading her novels, poking fun at the interests they shared, the ambitions they nursed. Yet the suburbs function narratively in her works as places of movement, opportunity, and change. Braddon deploys the plot arc of the suburban popular novel (first discussed in chapter 3) to lift worthy heroines out of the lives into which they were born. Striving heroines begin in dusty, down-at-heel Camberwell; if they work hard, and are lucky, they are rewarded with the pleasures of upper-middle-class Richmond.

In this chapter, the relation between biological and political life is discussed in light of the ideal of a philosophical life as a life that approximates a materialist, anti-spiritualist conception of “eternal life” as found in Aristotle, Spinoza and in contemporary post-Deleuzian conceptions of the thinking body. This conception of eternal life is contrasted with Heidegger’s existential idea of philosophical life as being-toward-death.

This chapter introduces the notion of embodied mathematical cognition by reviewing some neuro-cognitive theories of mathematical concept formation. It first considers the neuro-cognitive debate on the mental representation of numbers, focusing on Stanislas Dehaene's notion of “number sense” and Vincent Walsh's ATOM (acronym for a theory of magnitude), before presenting the cognitive theory of mathematical metaphor and relating it to Water J. Freeman III's theory of meaning. It also examines Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sensation in the context of mathematical practice, the link between the history of mathematics and neuro-cognition through an analysis of theories that explicitly engage the formation of higher mathematical concepts, and some challenges to the theory of mathematical metaphors.

Levinas utilizes the term “trauma” to refer to the pre-original unsettling of the auto-identification of the ego, a project that takes center stage in his final masterwork, Otherwise than Being. This chapter begins with some deliberations concerning the use of the term “trauma” to refer to this unsettling, particularly in light of contemporary psychological and medical uses of that term. Building from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Heidegger’s work on unconcealment, it argues that whereas for Heidegger and Plato trauma occurs through unconcealment of sensation, for Levinas trauma occurs as an interruption of sensation’s appropriation into perception itself. The chapter focuses principally on the event itself, the encounter with the other, which at times he calls “inspiration” instead of trauma, and the way this event occurs in a time-before-time that initiates the very possibility of responsibility.

The introduction provides an overview of the intertwined strands which run through Creating character. Sensation fiction is introduced as a genre which was itself seen by Victorian literary critics as a negative determinant which could corrupt readers, and which both Victorian and modern critics have identified as predominantly concerned with plotting rather than characterisation. Contrastingly, I argue that sensation fiction is in fact very concerned with the creation of character and is sensitive to the varied ways in which the personality can be formed, modified and corrupted; the emphasis on plot is in fact an acknowledgement of the many uncontrollable factors which can dictate the course of a person’s life. Next, the relevant contextual background of ongoing scientific, medical and educational debates is explained, ranging from early theories of moral management, through Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and onwards to the development of degenerationist and eugenicist thought. Recurring topics of criminality, insanity and education are also introduced here, as are the theories of some of the prominent Victorian medical people whose work is drawn on extensively in future chapters. The Introduction ends with a summary of what the reader can expect in the rest of the book.

This chapter outlines how writing on film has frequently privileged particular moments that can be extracted from the flow of a film's time; the temporal continuum of film emerges in much analysis, explicitly or implicitly, as a threatening force. Mroz considers how the momentary has been privileged in many theories of cinema, including early formulations of cinematic experience such as the discourses of photogénie and cinephilia. This chapter then explores in more detail the concepts used in the analyses contained in the book: sensation, affect and duration. Mroz identifies a spectrum of theoretical thought related to embodied viewing and the sensory appeal of cinema, examining the writing of theorists such as Laura Marks and Vivian Sobchack. The chapter argues that, while it is important to be sensitive to the ways in which images can resonate with materiality and hapticity, film analysis should also consider the wider temporal context in which such responses might arise. This chapter posits that in the duration of film viewing sense and thought intertwine. Mroz introduces a Bergsonian concept of duration with variegated rhythms, suggesting that it can be used to explore the way in which temporal strands and rhythms interweave in the duration of a film.