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The theme of intense probity associated with the workplace in Péguy in Chapter 2 is extended here through analysis of Marie Ndiaye’s La Cheffe, roman d’une cuisinière (2016). The novel’s narrator describes the eponymous heroine, who is to become an award-winning chef, as being involved in vital ministry. As with Péguy, the hymn to labour in Ndiaye, far from being oriented towards an emancipatory view of class struggle, acquires a near-delirious, often private character. In Ndiaye’s novel, where work is associated with ceremonial and nostalgia, class and the practice of language intersect. In a fluent, confident prose narrative, oral inhibition forms, paradoxically, a recurring thematic feature. The eponymous heroine displays a reticence about language and more precisely about the patter associated with bourgeois ritual around culinary pleasure. A particular feature of the chapter is how the channelling of the artisanal through a highly wrought literary language shows how literary poiesis aligns with meticulous craft as practised via bodily kinetics and the manual.

This chapter undertakes a tactile exploration of the sense of touch in modern American culture and religion. After briefly recalling the denigration of tactility in Western thought, the discussion considers the usefulness of the work of two theorists, Emmanuel Levinas and Walter Benjamin, in recovering the sense of touch—the intimate caress, the violent shock—as deep background for tracking basic modes of religious tactility. By paying attention to sensory media and metaphors, the chapter proceeds from cutaneous binding and burning to kinaesthetic moving and to haptic handling in order to enter this field of tactile meaning and power. Specific cases of tactility are quickly considered, including binding covenants, firewalking, flag burning, alien abduction, global capitalism, and cellular microbiology. By exploring the religious dynamics of the sense of touch, this chapter points to the presence of a tactile politics of perception circulating through religion and popular culture.

The American writer Ezra Pound explored a range of genres, disciplines, and cultural contexts throughout his career. The chapter focuses on a neglected area of interest—his engagement with movement and dance, both in the formation of his poetics and in his essays on ballet, music, and sculpture. Although critical of aspects of Diaghilev's ‘orientalism’, his role as arts reviewer for the New Age and the Athenaeum provoked his interest in the relationship between human and machine movement. His praise for Massine's ‘impersonal’ choreographic style for the puppets of La Boutique fantasque leads to a re-evaluation of the Ballets Russes and to later enquiries into the human interaction with machines in industrial production. Pound's explorations intriguingly match the innovative dance theories of the expressionist Rudolf Laban, and show the extent to which dance and writing of the twentieth century inform the discourses of modernity.

This chapter draws on Deleuzian thought in order to think through the role of experience within dance and the activity of dancing more generally. It contrasts phenomenological approaches to dancing, which appeal to notions of subjective agency, with a Deleuzian re-reading of subjectivity. In the process, it refers to Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, using Nietzsche’s concept of force to account for the many ways in which forces combine to produce movement. The notion of force is able to explain the way action unfolds without being the product of human agency. It offers a way of rethinking phenomenological notions of agency. According to this account, relations of force underlie action, as well as the many modes of interiority (subjectivity). But these two kinds of formation (of force) are different in kind. They belong to differing types (of force). The pursuit of action, including the utilisation of experience in action, constitutes a certain type of ethos, which Deleuze calls the active type, whereas the formation of experience belongs to ‘the reactive apparatus’, that which reacts but does not act. The active type drives a wedge between the dancing and the dancer. Deleuze’s treatment of Nietzsche can be adapted to account for the variety of dance practices, their production of training and technique, custom and virtuosity. In particular, it is able to account for the specific ways in which postmodern dance displaces the subjectivity of the dancer.