Modern French Identities Modern French Identities

Our sensory relationships with the social and biological world have Crispin T. Lee

Crispin T. Lee
altered appreciably as a result of recent developments in internet
and other mobile communication technologies. We now look at a
screen, we touch either the screen or a keyboard in response to
what we see and, somehow, an element of our sensory presence is
transmitted elsewhere. It is often claimed that this change in the way Haptic Experience
in the Writings of
we perceive the world and each other is without precedent, and is

•
solely the result of twenty-first-century life and technologies. This

Maurice Blanchot and Michel Serres

Haptic Experience in the Writings of Georges Bataille,
book argues otherwise. The author analyses the evolving portrayals
of ‘haptic’ sensations – that is, sensations that are at once tactile and
visual – in the theories and prose of the writer-philosophers Georges Georges Bataille,
Maurice Blanchot
Bataille (1897–1962), Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) and Michel
Serres (1930–). In exploring haptic perception in the works of Bataille,
Blanchot and Serres, the author examines haptic theories postulated
by Aloïs Riegl, Laura U. Marks, Mark Paterson and Jean-Luc Nancy.
and Michel Serres

Crispin T. Lee holds a PhD in French from the University of Kent. His
doctoral research, on which this book is based, included eight months

Peter Lang
at the École normale supérieure in Paris. His doctoral and MA studies
were funded by AHRC scholarships.

ISBN 978-3-0343-1791-7

www.peterlang.com
Modern French Identities Modern French Identities

Our sensory relationships with the social and biological world have Crispin T. Lee

Crispin T. Lee
altered appreciably as a result of recent developments in internet
and other mobile communication technologies. We now look at a
screen, we touch either the screen or a keyboard in response to
what we see and, somehow, an element of our sensory presence is
transmitted elsewhere. It is often claimed that this change in the way Haptic Experience
in the Writings of
we perceive the world and each other is without precedent, and is

•
solely the result of twenty-first-century life and technologies. This

Maurice Blanchot and Michel Serres

Haptic Experience in the Writings of Georges Bataille,
book argues otherwise. The author analyses the evolving portrayals
of ‘haptic’ sensations – that is, sensations that are at once tactile and
visual – in the theories and prose of the writer-philosophers Georges Georges Bataille,
Maurice Blanchot
Bataille (1897–1962), Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) and Michel
Serres (1930–). In exploring haptic perception in the works of Bataille,
Blanchot and Serres, the author examines haptic theories postulated
by Aloïs Riegl, Laura U. Marks, Mark Paterson and Jean-Luc Nancy.
and Michel Serres

Crispin T. Lee holds a PhD in French from the University of Kent. His
doctoral research, on which this book is based, included eight months

Peter Lang
at the École normale supérieure in Paris. His doctoral and MA studies
were funded by AHRC scholarships.

www.peterlang.com
Haptic Experience in the Writings of
Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot
and Michel Serres
M odern F rench I dentities
Edited by Peter Collier

Volume 116

PETER LANG
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
l l l l l l
 Crispin T. Lee

Haptic Experience
in the Writings of
Georges Bataille,
Maurice Blanchot
and Michel Serres

PETER LANG
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
l l l l l l
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the
Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Lee, Crispin T., 1978- author.

Haptic Experience in the Writings of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and
Michel Serres / Crispin T. Lee.
pages cm. -- (Modern French Identities ; 116)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-0343-1791-7 (alk. paper)
1. French literature--20th century--History and criticism. 2. Touch in literature. 3.
Visual perception in literature. 4. Senses and sensation in literature. I. Title.
PQ307.T68L44 2014
840.9’3561--dc23
2014022567

Maurice Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version, 1941) © Éditions Gallimard.

Tous les droits d’auteur de ce texte sont réservés. Sauf autorisation, toute
utilisation de celui-ci autre que la consultation individuelle et privée est interdite.
<www.gallimard.fr>

ISSN 1422-9005
ISBN 978-3-0343-1791-7 (print)
ISBN 978-3-0353-0655-2 (eBook)

© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2014

Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
info@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

Printed in Germany
Contents

Foreword vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1
Bataille and the Haptic: Fleshy Transcendence 41

Chapter 2
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 105

Chapter 3
Serres: Haptic Perception, Touching Knowledge 185

Conclusion 275

Bibliography 295

Index 301
Foreword

In spite of their relative brevity, the writings of Georges Bataille, Maurice

Blanchot and Michel Serres are rarely a ‘quick read’; they enquire into
areas of philosophy and perception which defy concision and sometimes,
challenge the idea that language is even capable of articulating intellec-
tual ideas and/or physical sensations. The writers’ negotiations of these
difficulties require time and consideration on their part and on our own.
It is for this reason that I have included extended quotations from the
works of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres where possible. (Particular thanks
to Éditions Gallimard for granting me permission to reproduce excerpts
from Blanchot’s Thomas l’obscur (première version).) When added to the
fact that haptic perception is a concept that inspires significant debate in
its own right, I have been forced to be rather briefer in some of the analyses
contained in this book than I would have liked. My examination of the
sociopolitical and spiritual dimensions of the works of Bataille, Blanchot
and Serres has had to be particularly selective in order to ensure that my
commentary does not spill over into a second volume.
On the subject of selectivity, anyone who reads my analyses of Bataille’s
Histoire de l’œil or Le Bleu du ciel and experiences a sense of déjà vu is quite
right to: a handful of phrases from these subsections appeared in my first
published article, ‘Georges Bataille or the Theory and Fiction of Apocalyptic
Visions’, which was included in Visions of Apocalypse: Representations of the
End in French Literature and Culture, ed. by Leona Archer and Alex Stuart
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013), pp. 165–75.
These are not the only acknowledgements I have to make. I begin
by highlighting the AHRC’s financial support of my doctoral studies in
French and the taught MA that preceded it. I thank Dr Tom Baldwin,
Prof. Lorenzo Chiesa and Prof. Peter Read of the University of Kent,
Canterbury, for their supervision of the doctoral thesis from which this book
is derived. Thanks also to Prof. Patrick ffrench of King’s College London, and
viii Foreword

Dr Lucy O’Meara of the University of Kent, Canterbury, who were the

highly attentive examiners of my thesis. I proffer a further nod of recog-
nition to Hannah Godfrey, Dr Peter Collier of Sidney Sussex College,
Cambridge, and the Oxford branch of Peter Lang for their oversight of
this, my first monograph.
I reserve a final vote of thanks for my friends, my family, Miss K. and
most of all, Miss N.; without their encouragement and support, I would
never have completed this project.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain
their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apolo-
gises for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful
for notification of any corrections that should be incorporated in future
reprints or editions of this book.

C. T. L., London, July 2014

Introduction

In this book, I will be analysing how the critical and literary works of
Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) and Michel
Serres (1930–) portray instances of haptic perception. As I shall explain
shortly, the term ‘haptic perception’ (or ‘perception haptique’ in French)
may describe a number of different sensory processes. Even the definition
of what haptic perception in fact is tends to vary from one theory of per-
ception to the next. Later in this introduction, I shall be undertaking a
detailed examination of this problem and explaining the contrasting defi-
nitions of haptic perception that I intend to use in my analyses of Bataille,
Blanchot and Serres’s works.
Until then, let us content ourselves with two dictionary defini-
tions relating to the haptic. We begin with the prefix ‘hapt(o)-’, which is
described in the Larousse Lexis of 1989 as an ‘élément, du grec haptein,
saisir’.1 The same dictionary gives us the following definition of the term
‘haptique’: ‘[aptik] adj. (v. 1950). Relatif au toucher, à sa mesure en
psychophysique’.2
I have chosen to consider the manifestation of haptic perception in
Bataille, Blanchot and Serres’s works partly because, at the time of writ-
ing, there are no other in-depth studies of how these writers’ approaches
to haptic perception interconnect. My other motivation for writing this
book is more pragmatic. We live in an age in which the internet exerts a

1 Dictionnaire de la langue française: lexis, ed. by Jean Dubois and others (Paris:
Larousse, 1989), p. 883; emphasis in original.
2 Ibid. All of the theoretical explanations of haptic perception that I shall examine
in this book discuss haptic perception in broader terms than the definitions given
above. Moreover, the majority of the texts by Bataille and Blanchot that I shall be
exploring were written before 1950.
2 Introduction

major influence upon our lives. In fact, technology has advanced so consid-
erably that visual, audio and even tactile sensory data may now be encoded
and uploaded to – or downloaded from – a computer hard drive several
thousand miles away. The process of perception, which was once uniquely
corporeal, has begun to transcend the human body.
As this introduction will show, theoretical understandings of
haptic perception have kept pace with these major technological and
ontological evolutions. As a result, the descriptions of haptic percep-
tion that I shall analyse shortly tend towards a less and less corporeally
centred definition of what this perception actually is. Synergy between
sight and touch remains important in each case. Simultaneously, however,
the variety of philosophical and empirical circumstances under which such
synergy takes place also becomes increasingly relevant. The question of
whether the human body may be transcended or otherwise superseded
through the use of modern technologies has also become appreciably more
significant.
The particular importance of philosophical and empirical context
to matters of visual and tactile perception is a theme to which Bataille,
Blanchot and Serres return on a number of occasions. All three write
about this issue in philosophical treatises and in literary prose. My analysis
will illustrate how the writings of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres plot literary
and philosophical arcs, evolutions in the philosophical and literary
treatments of sight and touch in twentieth- and twenty-first-century
France. One way in which I suggest these philosophical and literary arcs
are entwined is that they foreshadow evolutions in haptic theory over the
last fifteen years (even if Serres alone makes any direct reference to haptic
perception).
It is clear that there are many possible ways in which to structure my
readings of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres and their portrayals of haptic
perception. Since relatively little secondary material concerning any of
these authors and haptic perception is available, the theoretical perspec-
tives on haptic perception that I present below will determine the thematic
preoccupations of my readings of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres. I have
chosen to consider the various forms of haptic perception posited by Riegl,
Marks, Paterson and Nancy because they offer us the most concise means
Introduction 3

of appreciating the manifold possibilities of haptic perception portrayed

in the works of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres.3

Defining Haptic Perception: Aloïs Riegl

The first use of adjective ‘haptic’ (or haptisch) in an art historical context is
often attributed to Aloïs Riegl, a Viennese academic and one-time museum
curator who died in 1905.4 Though Riegl popularised the term haptisch,
which is derived from the Greek verb haptein (‘to fasten’),5 his application
of the term is somewhat erratic, alternating between use as an adjective
and a noun. Moreover, the term only appears in any form in two rela-
tively late works, Das holländische Gruppenporträt (The Group Portraiture

3 It would be possible, for example, to analyse the works of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres
through the haptic theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Maurice Merleau-
Ponty and/or Georges Didi-Huberman. Unfortunately, the evolving phenomeno-
logical explanations of haptic perception presented by Merleau-Ponty in texts such
as Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945; repr. 1976) or the post-
humous, unfinished Le Visible et l’invisible: suivi de notes de travail (Paris: Gallimard,
1964; repr. 2006) cannot be summarised easily or briefly. Merely reconciling Merleau-
Ponty’s changing perspectives with the psychoanalytical and sociopolitical contexts
in which Deleuze and Guattari situate their postulation of haptic perception in Mille
Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980) would require more space than is available here. Trying
to include Didi-Huberman’s art-historical interest in the haptic (see for example
La Ressemblance par contact: archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte
(Paris: Minuit, 2008)) would complicate this task further.
4 As Margaret D. Iversen points out, however, a number of Riegl’s characterisations
of the haptisch are subtle evolutions of theories put forward by nineteenth-century
scholars including Hegel, Adolf von Hilderbrand and Johann Friedrich Herbart (see
Iversen, Aloïs Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press,
1993), pp. 9, 34–35, 62–63).
5 The lexical origins and subsequent usages of the verb ‘haptein’ can be found in
A Greek-English Lexicon (New Edition), ed. by Henry Stuart Jones and others
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 231.
4 Introduction

of Holland; 1902) and ‘Der moderne Denkmalskultus: sein Wesen und

seine Entstehung’ (‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and
Its Origin’; 1903).6 Elsewhere, Riegl uses the adjectives taktisch, tastbar or
greifbar in place of haptisch, apparently doing so on an interchangeable
basis. As may be guessed from this list of substitutive adjectives, Riegl often
employs the term haptisch to refer to painted, sculpted or built surfaces
which exhibit overtly tactile, visible detail. Such detail creates a proximal
impression of space within the mind of its observer. Riegl’s clearest defini-
tion of the haptic object is presented in his lengthy analysis of sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century painters of group portraits in the Netherlands,
Das holländische Gruppenporträt. (For ease of reading, I include English
translations of Riegl’s words.)

There are […] two modes of planar phenomena: the haptic mode, in which objects
seen at close range stand tangibly side by side in height and width, and the optic
mode, in which objects seen from a distance are presented to the eye even though
they are tangibly behind each other at different depths.7

As can be seen in the quotation above, Riegl’s presentation of the haptic

stems from what he considers to be an opposition between two forms of
perception which he terms haptic (or objectivist) and optic (which Riegl

6 All subsequent German quotations from these texts will be taken from the follow-
ing editions: Aloïs Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, 2 vols, I (Textband), ed.
by Karl M. Swoboda (Vienna: Österreichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1931); Riegl, ‘Der
moderne Denkmalskultus: sein Wesen und seine Entstehung’, in Riegl, Gesammelte
Aufsätze mit einem Nachwort zur Neuausgabe von Wolfgang Kemp, ed. by Karl M.
Swoboda (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag (Edition Logos), 1995), pp. 144–93.
7 Aloïs Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. by Evelyn M. Kain and
David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Center for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1999), pp. 281–82. All subsequent English translations of Das holländis-
che Gruppenporträt are also taken from this volume. (The original text is as follows:
‘es gibt zwei Arten von Erscheinungen der Ebene: die haptische, in welcher die aus
der Nähe gesehenen Dinge tastbar in Höhe und Breite nebeneinander stehen, und
die optische, in welcher die aus der Ferne gesehenen Dinge sich dem Auge darbieten,
wenngleich sie tastbar in verschiedenen Raumtiefen hintereinander zerstreut sind’
(Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, p. 208).)
Introduction 5

considers to be synonymous with the subjectivism). The haptic object is

visually perceptible in the height and broadness of a given visual plane.
The haptic (art) object is discernible first and foremost through the vis-
ibility of the tactile qualities of its constitutive materials. Moreover, these
materials are arranged so as to be representative of something more than
their mere presence. Haptic objects exist in an extrapolative form of three-
dimensionality which is inspired by the visible possibility of proximal tac-
tile contact between a beholder and the observable tactile details of part
of the surface being observed (‘in which objects seen at close range stand
tangibly side by side in height and width’).
As his emphasis upon appearance above suggests, Riegl’s account of
haptic artistry is focussed most heavily upon the mental impression that the
Dutch painters’ canvases leave upon their beholder. By overpowering the
viewer’s rational, visual understanding of painted two-dimensional space
through its physical proximity to the beholder’s eye and its representations
of space and form, the sight of a section of the painted surface impresses
itself directly upon the viewer’s mind. This rationally unmediated impres-
sion leads the viewer to experience a sensation of tactility. Because this
impression occurs without conscious reordering or processing of visual
data, Riegl refers to the haptic as also being objectivist.8 In this way, the

8 I refer here to Riegl’s article from 1904, ‘Über antike und moderne Kunstfreunde’
(‘On the Ancient and Modern Art Connoisseur’), which is reprinted in Riegl,
Gesammelte Aufsätze, pp. 194–206. Because I have been unable to find any docu-
mented English translations of this article, the following and all subsequent English
translations of Riegl’s original German text will be my own: ‘Two characteristics can
be distinguished in all earthly things represented in human art: 1. Those character-
istics which things emanate under all circumstances, whether those characteristics
are observed by a human subject or not. These are objective characteristics. 2. Those
which are perceptible by a certain human subject at a certain moment. These are
subjective characteristics (of which a few, but not all, might also be considered objec-
tive; the same can be said of those characteristics which do not emanate from things
objectively, such as their lighting)’. (In Riegl’s words, ‘An allen Dingen in der Welt,
wie sie ja auch die menschliche Kunst nachbildet, sind zweierlei Eigenschaften zu
unterschieden: 1. solche, die den Dingen unter allen Umständen zukommen, ob sie
nun von einem menschlichen Subjekte betrachtet werden oder nicht. Das sind die
6 Introduction

sensation of tactile immediacy incited by visual cues that he postulates is a

product of unthinking feeling. In spite of its unreasoned nature, the same
sensation can also be schematised through rational analysis of the visual
stimuli that incite it.
Above all, haptic space as Riegl postulates it is inextricably linked
to our sense of corporeal presence. (Elsewhere, he qualifies this intimate
association of concepts as the result of an ‘inevitable flavour of the haptic
and concrete’.)9 Riegl continues:
We call art whose principle intent is to reproduce the objective characteristics of
things, objectivist; art whose fundamental intent is to reproduce the momentary
appearance of things on the retina of a single observing subject is called subjectivist.10

From this explanation, it is clear that Riegl believes the characteristics of a

piece of objectivist art will be perceptible in the same way by any observer of
any epoch because it is capable of reproducing ‘the objective characteristics
of things’. Contrarily, subjectivist works of art seek to convey faithfully a
uniquely individual vision of a particular moment. The emphasis of such
artistry is its momentary appearance, the visual impact that it exerts upon
the eyes of an individual observer; the universal comprehensibility of the
vision conveyed is of markedly less importance.11

objektiven Eigenschaften. 2. solche, die ein bestimmtes menschliches Subjekt in einem

bestimmten Momente an ihnen wahrnimmt. Das sind die subjektiven Eigenschaften
(darunter werden immer auch einige objektive sein, aber nicht alle; dafür immer
auch solche, die nicht objektiv den Dingen zukommen, wie z. B. die Beleuchtung)’
(Riegl, ‘Über antike und moderne Kunstfreunde’, p. 202).)
9 Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, p. 339. (‘[U]nvermeidlichen haptisch-körper-
lichen Beigesmacke’ Das holländische Gruppenporträt, p. 256.)
10 My translation. (‘Eine Kunst, die grundsätzlich darauf ausgeht, die objektiven
Eigenschaften der Dinge wiederzugeben, nennen wir eine objektivistische; eine
Kunst, die grundsätzlich die momentane Erscheinung der Dinge auf der Netzhaut
der Augen eines einzelnen betrachtenden Subjektes wiedergeben will, nennen wir
eine subjektivistische’ (Riegl, ‘Über antike und moderne Kunstfreunde’, p. 202).)
11 Riegl’s allusion to ‘Erscheinung’, translateable here as appearance, vision, phenom-
enon or figure in ‘Über antike und moderne Kunstfreunde’ should also warn us that
we are not to equate subjective comprehension of an artwork with indisputable
Introduction 7

Having established these principles, let us now consider Riegl’s expla-

nation of how the concepts of objectivist and subjectivist art interact with
those of the tactile and the optical:

The characteristics of things reveal themselves through stimuli which exert

themselves upon the senses of the perceiving subject. There are two forms of these
stimuli: 1. Purely optical, colourful characteristics which stimulate the eyes exclu-
sively; 2. So-called tactile, which are the physical characteristics of things, spatial
prolongation and demarcation which stimulate the subjective observer’s tactile sense
but which are also conveyed visually at distance.12

As we see from this extract, Riegl believes that all things exude certain
stimuli which are perceptible by a self-aware subject. These stimuli fall
into two categories. The first such category is purely optical in nature
because it stimulates the eyes specifically. The trigger for this stimulus is
the colouring of the ‘thing’ being observed. The second, so-called tactile
category of stimuli is based around the visible expanse of materials used
in the construction of the ‘thing’ and how that expanse is framed in space.
This encompassing of space not only renders that space finite, but localises
it appreciably. This visible and proximal confinement of space solicits the
observer’s tactile sense whilst also creating a specifically visual impres-
sion of spatial distance. (Riegl does not use the term ‘haptic’ (haptisch) in
‘Über antike und moderne Kunstfreunde’ (‘On the Ancient and Modern
Art Connoisseur’). As I have shown already, however, the qualities that

truth; even a concise German-English dictionary includes no fewer than seven pos-
sible English translation of the word ‘Erscheinung’. (The other possible translations
include ‘sign’, ‘apparition’ and ‘symptom’, according to the Collins Concise German-
English, English-German Dictionary (Second Edition), ed. by Peter Terrell and others
(Glasgow: HarperCollins/Pons, 1996), p. 165.)
12 My translation. (‘Die Eigenschaften der Dinge verraten sich in Reizen, die sie
auf die Sinne des wahrnehmenden Subjektes ausüben. Diese Reize sind zweierlei
Art: 1. rein optische, das sind die farbigen Eigenschaften, die ausschießlich auf
die Augen einen Reiz ausüben; 2. sogenannte taktische, das sind die körperlichen
Eigenschaften der Dinge, ihre Ausdehnung und ihre Begrenzung im Raume, die den
Tastsinn des beschauenden Subjektes reizen, aber auf Distanz auch durch die Augen
vermittelt werden’ (Riegl, ‘Über antike und moderne Kunstfreunde’, pp. 202–03).)
8 Introduction

Riegl associates with the tactile sense and tactility in this short essay from
1904 are the same as those which he terms ‘haptic’ in Das holländische
Gruppenporträt.) Riegl summarises that, ‘we shall call optical any art which
intends to show things as pure, colourful appearances; that other art, which
seeks first and foremost to make the physicality of things clear to see, we
shall call, tactile’.13 In spite of his careful explanation of the roles that vision
and tactility play in his understanding of art history, Riegl is of the opinion
that it is optical, subjectivist artistry which dominates modern art:

One can now understand easily what optic subjectivism is to be taken to mean: an art
which intends to portray things as momentary, colourful stimuli of a lone, observing
subject. […] We encounter much of the predominantly optical subjectivism of the
era of the Roman Empire in modern art.14

What is unexpected about Riegl’s remarks is that while he believes

tactilely objectivist and optically subjectivist artistry to be temporally spe-
cific, he portrays the influence of optical subjectivity detectible in early
twentieth-century artistry as being a modified echo of late Roman artistic
sensibilities.15 In spite of their temporal continuity, the concepts of tactile
objectivity and optic subjectivity are therefore also avatars of anachronism,
of temporal disorder and creative repetition. Still, Riegl believes the Europe
of the early twentieth century to have embraced exclusively optical artistry:
‘The dominant tendency nowadays is to let the work of art vanish as a
physical object and become absorbed into the inner subjective experience

13 My translation. (‘Eine Kunst, die die Dinge als rein farbige Erscheinungen zeigen
will, nennen wir eine optische; jene andere, die vor allem die Körperlichkeit der
Dinge anschaulich machen will, nennen wir eine taktische’ (Riegl, ‘Über antike und
moderne Kunstfreunde’, p. 203).)
14 My translation. (‘Nun wird man mühelos verstehen, was unter einem optischen
Subjektivismus zu denken ist: eine Kunst, die die Dinge darstellen will als momen-
tane farbige Reize eines einzelnen betrachtenden Subjektes. […] Diesem optischen
Subjektivismus begegnen wir [,] übereinstimmend sowohl in der Kunst der römis-
chen Kaiserzeit als in der modernen Kunst’ (Riegl, ‘Über antike und moderne
Kunstfreunde’, p. 203).)
15 Riegl discusses this enduring yet modified aesthetic influence in detail in ‘Über
antike und moderne Kunstfreunde’, pp. 203–05.
Introduction 9

of the viewer’.16 This means that Riegl considers the Western European
art of his era to have divorced itself from representation. When viewed,
the arrangements of material which define the optical artwork’s physical
presence appear to be no more than surface colours which are visibly dis-
tinct from the surrounding space in which they are seen. Simultaneously,
however, the surface colours of the optical artwork appear as if they are
interconnected with the wider space in which they are observed:

When modern aesthetics says that objects are colours, what they really mean is that
objects are plain surfaces: however, not the haptic, polychrome kind associated
with the old masters, but the optical, colouristic kind that allows the object to be
depicted as a whole together with its surroundings without completely suppressing
its individuality.17

In ‘Der moderne Denkmalskultus’, by contrast, Riegl applies the terms

‘optic’ and ‘haptic’ to built structures. The main thrust of Riegl’s argument
in this text is that conservation should not obscure or attempt to undo
natural wear upon a built structure’s surfaces. One aspect of this position
is that the more visible that such signs of ageing are, the more a monument
becomes a remnant of a bygone age and the more valuable it becomes as a
fading relic of – rather than as a faithful preservation of – the moment in
history that it seeks to commemorate: ‘The traces of this process testify to
the fact that a monument was not created recently […], and the age-value
of a monument therefore rests on the obvious perception of these traces’.18

16 Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, p. 4. (‘Unsere modernste Zeit beherrscht ja

die Tendenz, das Kunstwerk als Objekt völlig verschwinden und gleichsam körperlos
im subjektiven Seelenleben des Beschauers aufgehen zu lassen’ (Riegl, Das hollän-
dische Gruppenporträt, p. 5).)
17 Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, p. 373, n. 41. (‘Wenn es in der modernen
Ästhetik heißt: die Dinge seien Farben, so ist damit nichts anderes gesagt, als die
Dinge seien Ebene, aber nicht die haptisch-polychrome der Alten, sondern eine
optisch-koloristische, die das Ding mitsamt seiner Umgebung als ein Ganzes versinn-
licht, ohne gleichwohl seine Individualität schlechtweg zu unterdrücken’ (Riegl, Das
holländische Gruppenporträt, p. 189, n).)
18 ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin’, trans. by Kurt
W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, in Oppositions Reader, ed. by K. Michael Hays
10 Introduction

This relatively simple explanation of natural decomposition acquires an

intriguing – and specifically haptic – complication when Riegl claims that
our optic sensory faculties afford us a better appreciation of the signs of
ageing on a built surface: ‘Age-value manifests itself less violently, though
more tellingly, in the corrosion of surfaces, in their patina, in the wear and
tear of buildings and so forth. The slow and inevitable disintegration of
nature is manifest in these ways’.19 (Though it emphasises the ‘disintegration’
of built surfaces, this translation makes no reference to the ‘mehr optisch
als haptisch’ (‘more optic than haptic’) way in which we perceive such dis-
integration, a point upon which Riegl’s original text remarks specifically.)20
Optical perception is favoured in this instance because, as we have seen
already, Riegl associates haptic perception and thinking with antique art,
not modern, post-Enlightenment artistry. As his presentations of haptically
orientated painting and building in Das holländische Gruppenporträt sug-
gest, the sensations that haptically orientated art creates within its beholders
are not compatible with physically or mentally detached observation of a
given surface, even if such sensations can be explained rationally.
These details aside, it should not escape our attention that Das
holländische Gruppenporträt and ‘Der moderne Denkmalskultus’ character-
ise Riegl’s understanding of haptic perception as being inspired by stationary
objects of artistic craftsmanship.21 Through its ability to impress itself upon
the observer’s vision, the haptic sensation inspired by an artwork imbued

(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), pp. 621–51 (p. 632). (‘An den
Spuren dieser Tätigkeit erkennt Mann nun, daß ein Denkmal nicht in jüngster
Gegenwart […] entstanden ist, und auf der deutlichen Wahrnehmbarkeit seiner
Spuren beruht somit der Alterswert eines Denkmals’ (Riegl, ‘Der moderne
Denkmalskultus’, p. 161).)
19 Riegl, ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’, p. 632. (‘[W]eit wirksamer gelangt jedoch
der Alterswert durch die minder gewaltsame und mehr optisch als haptisch sinn-
fällige Wirkung der Zersetzung der Oberfläche (Auswitterung, Patina), ferner der
abgewetzten Ecken und Kanten’ (Riegl, ‘Der moderne Denkmalskultus’, p. 161).)
20 Forster and Ghirardo explain the stylistic choices they made in translating Riegl’s
work in ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’, pp. 650–51, n.
21 On this point, it should not be forgotten that Riegl died in 1905, while filmmaking
was still very much in its infancy.
Introduction 11

with haptic characteristics can be used to date that artwork. Though he

believed the enduring influence of haptic perception upon artists of his
era to have become increasingly blurry, Riegl was certain that the evolu-
tion of art from haptic to optical perspective must also entail an element
of palpable social change, a ‘comprehensive development into a growing
emancipation of mental functions from the bodily’.22 Art’s emancipation
of psychological life from the constraints of corporeality ‘instructs the
course of art history […], then the course of religious history and
ultimately, the course of ethical developments in political and social life
in general, as well’.23
Almost a century after Riegl’s death, his certainty of a coming change
in the plastic arts and his unsurprising silence on the moving images of
early cinema would inform three markedly different understandings of
what haptic perception in fact is. Over the coming pages, I present these
new perspectives.

Laura U. Marks

As a counterpoint to Riegl’s art historical presentation of hapticity, let us

now consider the specifically cinematic understanding of haptic perception
and sensation which is to be found in Laura U. Marks’s concept of haptic
visuality. In The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and
the Senses (2000), Marks states that ‘in haptic visuality, the eyes themselves

22 My translation. (‘[G]esamte Entwicklung auf eine zunehmende Emanzipation der

geistigen Funktionen von den körperlichen’ (Riegl, ‘Über antike und moderne
Kunstfreunde’, p. 205).)
23 My translation. (‘[L]ehrt gerade der Verlauf der Kunstgeschichte […], dann der Verlauf
der Religionsgeschichte und schließlich auch der Verlauf der ethischen Entwicklung
in der Politik und im sozialen Leben überhaupt’ (Riegl, ‘Über antike und moderne
Kunstfreunde’, p. 205).)
12 Introduction

function like organs of touch’.24 In order to clarify this statement, she refers
to Riegl’s postulations of haptic and optical artistry:

Riegl […] associated the haptic image with a ‘sharpness that provoked the sense of
touch’, while the optical image invites the viewer to perceive depth. [A] film or video
(or painting or photograph) may offer haptic images, while the term haptic visuality
emphasises the viewer’s inclination to perceive them. The works I propose to call
haptic invite a look that moves on the surface plane of the screen for some time before
the viewer realises what she or he is beholding. [A] haptic work may create an image
of such detail […] that it evades a distanced view, instead pulling the viewer in close.25

Though Marks admits to ‘changing Riegl’s definitions somewhat’,26

there are clear similarities between the theorists’ approaches to haptic
perception. The idea of haptic detail as a visually perceived invitation bor-
dering on incitement to tactile interaction between an art object and its
observer is common to both theorists’ postulations. In spite of this, the
understandings of Riegl and Marks concerning the haptic differ significantly
in that Riegl only speaks of the haptic surface as being part of a static (and
solid) art object. Any movement therein is merely implied.27 Contrarily,
Marks’s understanding of haptic sensation relies upon the movement of
projected surfaces, regardless of whether such movement is actual or cre-
ated by camera trickery. This indeterminacy also links Marks’s ideas with
those of Riegl through the latter theorist’s concept of modern art as being
optic. This is because, as we have seen, some degree of conflation – and
thereby confusion – of the differing spatial planes of an optically conceived
art object is desirable, in Riegl’s view.28 Marks’s recent work on film as a

24 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the
Senses (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 162; emphasis in original.
25 Ibid., pp. 162–63; emphasis in original.
26 Ibid., p. 162.
27 Marks herself makes a similar observation (ibid.).
28 As I explained earlier in this chapter (p. 9), Riegl speaks of modern artistry as being of
the ‘optical, colouristic kind that allows the object to be depicted as a whole together
with its surroundings without completely suppressing its individuality’ (The Group
Portraiture of Holland, p. 373, n. 41).
Introduction 13

haptic phenomenon at once confirms and rebuffs Riegl’s assertions that

modern art is most interested in the visual realm:

While optical perception privileges the representational power of the image, haptic
perception privileges the material presence of the image. Drawing from other forms
of sense experience, primarily touch and kinaesthetics, haptic visuality involves the
body more than is the case with optical visuality [:] [t]ouch is a sense located on
the surface of the body […]. The difference between haptic and optical visuality is
a matter of degree. In most processes of seeing, both are involved, in a dialectical
movement from far to near.29

As we see from Marks’s explanation of the difference between her

understandings of haptic visuality and optical visuality, she – like Riegl –
maintains that visual information holds a dominant role in artistic (or in
this case, filmic) presentations of form and space. Where the two theorists
differ is that Marks finds haptic perception to be of as much relevance to
modern life and (cinematic) artistry as optical visuality. Marks’s position
on this issue is entirely contrary to the artistic evolution from exclusively
haptic to exclusively optical perspective advocated by Riegl. In fact, Marks
goes so far as to state that ‘we need both kinds of visuality: it is hard to
look closely at a lover’s skin with optical vision; it is hard to drive a car
with haptic vision’.30 As this quotation also suggests, Marks emphasises the
importance of ‘kinaesthetics’ and the ‘body’ in her formulation of haptic
visuality. Though Riegl’s explanation of hapticity makes reference to the
‘Beschauer’, his attention is focussed squarely upon the observer’s visual
perception of the art object and the mental impressions that they may
incite. There is no enquiry on Riegl’s part as to whether (kinaesthetically
perceptible) changes in the observer’s self-consciousness might affect his
or her perception of an artwork. Indeed, Riegl prefers to think of modern
artistry as one in which ‘[b]odies are stripped of their substance, their

29 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 163.

30 Ibid.
14 Introduction

tangible and physical properties; haptic forms melt into the purely visual
experience of the free space around them’.31
Contrarily, the ‘dialectical movement from far to near’, the shift from
intangible and distant imagery to tangible and proximal imagery that Marks
associates with haptic perception, is brought about by the greater corporeal
involvement in the act of looking that her formulation of haptic visuality
requires.32 Even if the difference between distant and proximal vision is only
‘a matter of degree’,33 Marks suggests that the body and all of its inherent
material needs must exert a particular influence upon the way in which
we see. Awareness of this interrelation between corporeality and vision
becomes all the more relevant when considering how we perceive filmed
surfaces haptically because ‘[h]aptic cinema does not invite identification
with a figure – a sensory-motor reaction – so much as it encourages a
bodily relationship between the viewer and the image’.34 Marks concludes
that ‘[t]he viewer is called upon to fill in the gaps in the image, to engage
with the traces the image leaves [,] to give herself up to her desire for it’.35
The perceptible immediacy or ‘reality’ of haptic images is therefore deter-
mined by the acuity of their viewers’ mental faculties and sensory organs.
So, in Marks’s view, cinematic images are presented as soliciting our
perceptual memories in order to fill in the sensory data that these moving
pictures lack. Consequently, ‘[t]he subject’s identity comes to be distributed

31 Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, p. 252. (‘Entkörperlichung durch Abstreifen

des Tastbaren und Begrenzten, dieses Überführen der haptischen Formen in den bloß
sichtbaren Luftraum’ (Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, p. 179).) As Margaret
Olin observes in Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University
Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), ‘Riegl’s strategies do not work
for us because they assume a permanent subject entrenched in the tactile body of
the individual, whose soul gazes out through the eyes. [I]t is difficult not to see an
element of the quixotic in Riegl’s […] deployment of metaphors perceptual and
gestural’ (pp. 186–87).
32 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 163.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., p. 164.
35 Ibid., p. 183.
Introduction 15

between the self and the object’ when we view these filmed images.36
Because this distributive process interferes with our sense of subjectivity,
‘the haptic image connects directly to sense perception, while bypassing the
sensory-motor schema’.37 Rather than being rational, our initial reaction
to the haptic moving image is therefore instinctive or visceral. This is not
to suggest that the psychological effects of Marks’s specifically cinematic
postulation of haptic perception will manifest themselves in every circum-
stance: ‘viewers may or may not respond’ to haptic detail while watching
films which contain such content.38
In all of this, it should not be forgotten that the visually solicited desire
to touch is experienced in a subconscious manner according to Marks.39
Even measuring a viewer’s response to haptic images with any consistency
is a challenge that Marks acknowledges.40 Following her rationale, a film
may be considered to be endowed with more or less haptic or optical prop-
erties, depending upon the social mores of the era in which it is viewed.
Its haptic allure may increase or diminish with the passage of time. Riegl’s
concepts of haptisch and optisch do not allow for any such ebb and flow:
for him, the progression of art towards pure opticality is unstoppable.41
Marks’s version of haptic perception is also gender-orientated in a way that
Riegl’s sensory theories are emphatically not:

The haptic is a form of visuality that muddies intersubjective boundaries, […] in

phenomenological terms. If we were to describe it in psychoanalytic terms, we might
argue that haptics draw on an erotic relation that is organised less by a phallic economy

36 Ibid., p. 123.
37 Ibid., p. 163.
38 Ibid., p. 170.
39 As it happens, Riegl’s model of haptic perception is also one in which little conscious
interaction between observer and haptic surface takes place.
40 See in particular Marks, The Skin of the Film, pp. 166–70, 201 for her illustrations of
this difficulty.
41 Olin summarises Riegl’s theories thus: ‘Each culture tries and fails to represent the
world in the limited way it would like to see it. […] Art finds itself untrue to itself and
forced to change its vision, thus advancing to the next stage […], leading inescapably
to acceptance of more of the world’ (Forms of Representation, p. 151).
16 Introduction

than by the relationship between mother and infant. In this relationship, the subject
(the infant) comes into being through the dynamic appearance of wholeness with
the other (the mother) and the awareness of being distinct.42

A cursory glance at these remarks might lead us to believe that Marks is

attempting to explain her sensory theories in terms of Freudian, Lacanian,
Kleinian or even Hegelian alterity.43 Marks dispels any such notion promptly
and adds that her postulation of haptic visuality is neither uniquely femi-
nine nor feminist:
I base haptic visuality on a phenomenological understanding of embodied specta-
torship, which is fundamentally distinct from the Lacanian psychoanalytic model
[…]. Though […] the use of haptic images may be a feminist strategy, there is noth-
ing essentially feminine about it. […] The engagement of haptic visuality occurs not
simply in psychic registers but in the sensorium.44

Marks’s postulation of the relationship between subject and haptic

object is obviously somewhat equivocal. The clearest explanation she offers
is that her understanding of haptic visuality necessitates ‘a respect of differ-
ence, and concomitant loss of self, in the presence of the other’.45 In spite
of their ambiguities, psychoanalytical explanations of the kind offered
by Marks are largely alien to Riegl’s more academic understanding of the
haptic as mere differentiation between visual portrayals of space and our
perception of them. Part of the reason that Riegl does not differentiate
between genders is that his theorisations of haptic and optical artistry are
generalising concepts. No matter how rigorous its selection criteria, such
an approach cannot hope to provide an unequivocal overview of what is
artistically ‘representative’ of a certain period of time.46

42 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 188.

43 Marks refutes the approaches of these thinkers specifically (see The Skin of the Film,
p. 193).
44 Ibid., p. 188.
45 Ibid., pp. 192–93.
46 Jas’ Elsner explores Riegl’s attempts to address this problem in ‘From Empirical
Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections on Riegl’s Concept of Kunstwollen’
(in Critical Inquiry, 32, 4 (2006) <doi: 10.1086/508091> [accessed 29 May 2014]).
Introduction 17

In spite of their profound differences, the theories of Marks and

Riegl posit the haptic gaze as being a ‘skin-deep’ form of vision which
glances off the surface of its object. Moreover, Marks, like Riegl, presents
the haptic experience in a manner which relates the sense of touch to a
desire to better understand an object, surface or space that is already vis-
ible. Both versions of haptic perception describe a state of being in which
sight alone is insufficient to satisfy human curiosity. Both theorisations of
haptic perception also assume that the individual who experiences such
sensations is stationary, even if – as in Marks’s postulations – the sights
which solicit haptic perception may in fact involve the physical projection
of moving surfaces. The next form of haptic perception that I shall present
incorporates movements on the part of the beholder, as well as the objects,
images or spaces that he or she observes.

Mark Paterson

The third definition of haptic perception and sensation to which I shall

refer is provided by Mark Paterson in his text The Senses of Touch: Haptics,
Affects and Technologies (2007). Though this work dwells upon artistic and
technological uses of the haptic at some length, Paterson claims that, in the
first instance, the term haptic ‘refers to the sense of touch in all its forms’.47
He groups the cutaneous, tactile, kinaesthetic and vestibular senses which
constitute the haptic under the term proprioception, which describes the
‘[p]erception of the position, state and movement of the body and limbs
in space’. Cutaneous perception, which pertains ‘to the skin itself or the

A lack of space means that I must forgo any analysis here of Riegl’s theory that a
continously evolving Kunstwollen (in simple terms, an ‘artistic volition’ or ‘will
to art’ present in every human’s conscious being) has dictated humanity’s creative
development.
47 Mark Paterson, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford/
New York: Berg, 2007), p. ix. All subsequent definitions are taken from this page.
18 Introduction

skin as a sense organ’, encompasses ‘sensation of pressure, temperature

and pain’. Paterson’s definition of tactility relies upon this understanding
of cutaneous sense, but refers more specifically to ‘the sensation of pres-
sure (from mechanoreceptors) rather than temperature (thermoceptors)
or pain (nociceptors)’. Paterson describes kinaesthesia as the ‘sensation of
movement of body and limbs. Relating to sensations originating in muscles,
tendons and joints’. He designates vestibular sensation as ‘[p]ertaining to
the perception of balance, head position, acceleration and deceleration’,
which is derived from ‘[i]nformation obtained from semi-circular canals
in the inner ear’. Such sensation amounts to the body’s means of perceiving
its physical orientation, balance and the rhythms of its motions.
In addition to the purely organic forms of haptic sensation itemised
above, Paterson refers to a specifically mechanical variant of hapticity cre-
ated by force feedback technologies. Paterson explains the term as ‘[r]elat-
ing to the mechanical production of information sensed by the human
kinaesthetic system. Devices provide cutaneous and kinaesthetic feedback
that usually correlates to [a] visual display’.48
This series of definitions underline the fact that when we speak of
haptic experience, we could now be describing a number of simultaneous
processes which involve not only our skin and our eyes, but also our ears
(and, at one point, Paterson remarks upon the proprioceptive value of the
olfactory sense).49 Paterson’s references to force feedback technologies also
demonstrate that haptic sensory data can now be created and transmitted by
machines. Through a detailed overview of the interrelation between vision
and tactility, The Senses of Touch attempts to explain the philosophical,
psychoanalytical, mathematical and scientific advances which have led us
to this point. As part of this project, Paterson analyses recent anthropologi-
cal attempts to establish a ‘“felt” phenomenology’, which seeks ‘to better
articulate the complex relationship between vision and touch, eyes and

48 The most common example of this technology at present would be the controllers
of a modern games console, which vibrate in response to events in the game.
49 Paterson, The Senses of Touch, p. 90.
Introduction 19

hands’.50 (When he explores the geometrical principles established during

antiquity, Paterson also adds feet to this list.)51 Paterson characterises The
Senses of Touch as being ‘philosophical and psychological in its approach’,52
a means of remembering and counteracting what he characterises as ‘the
forgetting of touch’.53 Though Riegl’s understanding of the haptic is referred
to, Paterson’s methodology owes appreciably more to the phenomenologi-
cal enquiries of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl.54
Given Merleau-Ponty’s discernible influence upon Paterson’s thinking
and the variety of sources of haptic sensation that Paterson identifies, it
is unsurprising that The Senses of Touch explores such sensation through a
number of specifically artistic and technological case studies. In common
with Marks’s investigations of projected, moving tactile spaces and surfaces,
the more recent creative technological applications of haptic perception that
Paterson discusses contrast with the unyielding physical presence and the
immobility of gaze upon which Riegl’s understanding of the haptic is based.
A useful example of this problematisation is provided by Paterson’s
description of the first ‘virtual handshake’ to be conducted internationally in
2002.55 As Paterson explains, the handshake required two identical Personal
Haptic Interface Mechanisms (or PHANToMs for short). One of these
desktop devices, manufactured by SensAble Corporation, was installed
in an MIT lab in Boston, MA. The other was in a UCL lab in London,
UK. The two machines communicated via a low-latency internet con-
nection. The premise of the experiment was simple: at MIT’s TouchLabs,
one operator in proximal contact with a PHANToM interface makes a
gesture akin to a handshake. The device then converts the tactile contact

50 Ibid., p. 35.
51 Paterson explains this choice in ibid., pp. 72–77.
52 Ibid., p. 5.
53 Paterson even gives a chapter of The Senses of Touch this very title (ibid., pp. 59–77).
54 Riegl is referred to on fifteen pages of The Senses of Touch, while Husserl is alluded
to on almost twice as many occasions. Merleau-Ponty receives more mentions than
the other two theorists combined, however.
55 This ‘handshake’ is discussed in detail in Paterson, The Senses of Touch, pp. 127,
132–37, 140–43.
20 Introduction

it receives into data. The information travels via the internet to a replica of
the first device which sits in a laboratory some three thousand miles away.
This replica then ‘shakes’ its operator’s hand by vibrating against his or her
finger. The second operator knows when to expect the ‘handshake’ because
live footage of the initial ‘handshake’ is streamed with the tactile data that
it creates. During the test, the two operators were also able to ‘touch’ and
manipulate other items placed within the interface’s grip.
Paterson’s use of the term ‘haptic’ to characterise the experiment
described above is significant because – like Marks’s concept of haptic
visuality – it no longer requires haptic interaction to be based upon
physical proximity. However limited its scope, the PHANToM device
is capable not only of creating a simulated synthesis of visual and haptic
proximity, but also of effacing physical distance between two biological
entities (the machine operators on either end of the two PHANToMs’
internet connection).
Notionally, the conversion of initially simultaneous tactile and visual
cues into data streams would allow these facets of sensory data to be saved
and (re-)experienced together or separately at a later date. As a result, the
machine which stores this data becomes the primary mediator and reposi-
tory of haptic sensation, rather than the interconnected brains, retinas
and cutaneous layers of the human beings who wish to experience these
sensations. Because of these possibilities, haptic perception in the early
twenty-first century loses the temporal specificity that Riegl’s art historical
theories had imbued it with previously.
In principle at least, technology such as the PHANToM ensures that
the way we feel about a given sight and our tactile memory of it need not
change with the passage of time. By replaying data stored on a hard drive,
the same haptic experience could be relived because it would have been
reduced to quantifiable visual and tactile cues through machine coding.
Under these circumstances, what might once have been an ineffable, unre-
peatable experience would also be transmissible to those with no tem-
poral or physical proximity to the events which they perceive haptically.
Haptic perception would quite literally transcend its material sources and
receptive surfaces. The binary language of this transcendence is based on
repetitious strings of noughts and ones, of nanoseconds of presence and
Introduction 21

absence which are encoded, decoded and juxtaposed in order to create a

continuous stream of haptic data.
It would be wrong to assume that the sundering of haptic perception,
its sources and its receivers is purely a product of recent advances in com-
puting. Paterson demonstrates that the decorporealisation of sensation
was already possible during the era of videotape. To illustrate this point,
he describes a piece of performance art conceived by Paul Sermon entitled
Telematic Dreaming. Staged in 1992, the month-long piece required Susan
Kozel, a trained dancer, to pose on a bed in one room before a camera. Live
images of her were projected onto a screen in the adjoining exhibition hall.
An empty bed identical to the one on which Kozel would lie was installed
beneath the screen in the hall. She would respond to the filmed gestures
of gallery goers in the other room as they moved across the empty bed.
Looking at the gallery hall’s monitor, these people could in turn see how
Kozel reacted to their gestures.56 On occasion, the spectators’ actions could
become violent. Summing up Kozel’s subsequent descriptions of her expe-
riences during the performances, Paterson remarks that Kozel

invested emotionally in her screen presence, watching her virtual interactions as an

avatar. Although purely optical, there was indubitably a play with telepresence (the
sense of presence at a distance) where the setting of the bed fostered a simultaneous
sense of intimacy and distance. The status of ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ body becomes elided,
since attacks or violations that Kozel saw on the screen caused her to feel distance, but
[…] constant reminders of the body resurfaced due to pain, cramps and stiffness. […]
What Kozel experienced in that early interactive performance was a tension between
the virtual and the visceral, a tension present within any digital performance.57

Paterson’s comments here demonstrate an appreciable evolution in the

understanding of haptic perception posited by Riegl a hundred and five years
earlier. The optical illusion of physical proximity described above – which
is created for artistic purposes – is sufficient to create physical sensation
on the part of at least one (and probably both) of its human participants.

56 Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming is described in greater detail in Paterson, The Senses of

Touch, pp. 119–20.
57 Ibid., p. 119.
22 Introduction

As Paterson’s interpretation of Kozel’s remarks makes clear, the tangible

reality of these sensations results from a wilful confusion of the ‘real’ and
‘virtual’ bodies involved in the illusion. The confusion of optical contriv-
ance and corporeally perceptible haptic stimuli that Telematic Dreaming
demands of Kozel and the members of the public involved in the instal-
lation’s enactment demonstrates the limited scope of Riegl’s presentation
of the spectator. Indeed, Riegl’s concept of a motionless (and, seemingly,
genderless) individual being satisfied by simply peering at a similarly static
painted, handcrafted or built surface appears rather quaint when compared
with either of Paterson’s examples of haptic perception being transmitted
by modern technology.
In the case of Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming, the divorce of haptic per-
ception from the optical image which incites it goes a stage further than
in the ‘virtual handshake’ discussed earlier. Paterson’s account of the 1992
art installation demonstrates how, in that instance, haptic perception from
proximal, simultaneous visual and cutaneous contact no longer concerns
even (binary) language, which could at least be related to sensory experi-
ence on a demonstrative basis. Instead, Kozel experiences haptic sensations
as the result of a purely visual stimulus which inspires her to react to the
bodily gestures of others. She allows her body to react on a simultaneously
visceral and visual level to the sights she sees projected before her. Kozel’s
reactions are a consciously mediated response to visual stimuli, however.
The sensations which result from these responsive actions cannot there-
fore be considered haptic according to Riegl’s definition of the term. (As
I have shown, the Riegl of Das holländische Gruppenporträt characterises
the haptisch as being objectivist.)
The theoretical and empirical tensions and paradoxes exposed by my
presentation of haptic perception thus far find a point of convergence in
the recent philosophical writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, the last of my chosen
quartet of haptic theorists. His work straddles an intriguing line between
critical theory and literary prose, often addressing matters of corporeity,
transcendence and artistry. Nancy’s writings also provide examples of how
the divergent forms of haptic sensation and perception detailed thus far
may find some degree of convergence in the inscriptive praxes of literature
and critical theory. For these reasons, Nancy’s understanding of haptic
Introduction 23

perception will be of the most direct relevance to my subsequent readings

of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres.

Jean-Luc Nancy

The understanding of haptic perception formulated by Jean–Luc Nancy

over the last four decades does not integrate sight and touch in the manner
of any of the haptic theories presented thus far. In fact, Nancy scarcely
uses the term ‘haptique’ in his writings. This choice is surprising because
many of his texts refer to a synergy between touch and vision which is
suggestive of the forms of haptic perception posited by Riegl and Marks.
Nancy’s portrayal of haptic perception is complex. For example, Jacques
Derrida observes that Nancy does not understand haptic perception in
terms of the objective universality implicit in Riegl’s conjunction of the
haptic and objectivism. As a result, ‘il n’y a pas “le” toucher, il n’y a pas de
toucher “originaire”’ in Nancy’s explorations of the haptic.58 Derrida adds
that Nancy’s writing of these enquiries into haptic perception is itself ‘un
acte qui n’est ni actif ni performatif de part en part, ni seulement un speech
act, ni un acte simplement discursif ’.59
As Derrida’s characterisation suggests, contradiction and confusion
are integral to Nancy’s understanding of the haptic. The traces of haptic
thinking in Nancy’s work are most clearly connected by what he terms sen-
sory zones and the manner in which he believes our perception of tactility
interlinks these sensory zones with our appreciation of art objects. I shall
therefore begin by analysing how Nancy’s understanding of touch interacts
with his theorisation of perceptual zones and how, in turn, these affect our
perception of works of art. I will then address the manner in which Nancy
relates haptic perception to these issues.

58 Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p. 252.

59 Ibid.; emphasis in original.
24 Introduction

In order to understand Nancy’s postulations concerning touch, we

must be aware that in his opinion, ‘le toucher d’abord est local, modal,
fractal’.60 The fractal nature of touch is a localised indicator of a characteris-
tic which defines all of our perceptive faculties: ‘[i]l n’y a pas de totalité du
corps, pas d’unité synthétique. Il y a des pièces, des zones, des fragments’.61
At first glance, this lack of ‘unité synthétique’ suggests that the synergy
of multiple sensory faculties implicit in the versions of haptic perception
posited by Riegl, Marks and Paterson would not be possible. Nancy’s expla-
nation of corporeal feeling (le sentir) proves otherwise:

Le sentir et le se-sentir-sentir qui fait le sentir lui-même, c’est toujours sentir à la fois
qu’il y a de l’autre (ce que l’on sent) et qu’il y a d’autres zones du sentir, ignorées par
celle qui sent en ce moment, ou bien auxquelles celle-ci touche de tous côtés, mais
seulement par la limite où elle cesse d’être la zone qu’elle est. Chaque sentir touche
au reste du sentir comme à ce qu’il ne peut pas sentir. La vue ne voit pas le son, ni ne
l’entend, bien que ce soit, en elle-même aussi, ou à même elle-même, qu’elle touche à
ce non-voir et qu’elle est touchée par lui.62

As can be seen here, Nancy postulates a form of sensory awareness which

is aware of an unquantifiable blind spot that exists in its midst. This blind
spot comes into contact with sensory zones which are fully stimulated by
the perceptible occurrences of that moment. The unquantifiability of this
nonetheless perceptible blind spot overrides the discernible feelings of
that instant and impinges perceptibly upon the sensory zones which call
these feelings to our conscious attention. This encroachment subdivides

60 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus (édition revue et complétée) (Paris: Éditions Métailié, 2006),
p. 76.
61 Ibid., p. 156. In Les Muses (édition revue et augmentée) (Paris: Galilée, 2001), pp. 32,
34–36, Nancy states that this zonal understanding of perception owes much to
Sigmund Freud’s contention that erotic, sensory stimuli (which Freud terms Reize)
are most effective when they disrupt interaction between sensory organs (see Freud,
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. by James Strachey (New York: Basic
Books, 1962)). As I noted above (pp. 7–8), Riegl writes at length about the importance
of visually attractive hints of tactility (or Reize) in stimulating integrative sensory
function (specifically, haptic perception).
62 Nancy, Les Muses, p. 36; emphasis in original.
Introduction 25

the zone which was previously fully aroused into new zones of enduring
excitation and newly created indifference to a given sensory stimulus. As a
result, ‘[l]a zone est elle-même zonée’.63 To borrow a phrase from Donald
A. Landes, ‘[r]ather than focusing on the function or object of a particular
sense, the motif of the sensuous “zone” allows Nancy to stress the quasi-
heterogeneity and discreteness of “zones” emerging from their self-touching
and touching each other’.64
Landes adds that ‘[i]n the isolation and folding of zones of sensing,
we discover a proliferation of difference that is irreducible to the continu-
ity of synaesthesia or to the unity of common sense’.65 Landes is wise to be
wary of theories of perception which imply unbroken sensory continu-
ity, not least because Nancy believes the ostensibly tactile impingements
exchanged between sensory zones to exert a simultaneous influence on a
virtual level: ‘les touchers se promettent la communication de leurs inter-
ruptions, chacun fait toucher à la différence de l’autre […] et virtuellement,
de tous, mais d’une totalité sans totalisation’.66
The implication of Nancy’s theory (and Landes’s reading of it) is that
prior to its sundering and reorganisation, a given sensory zone which is
impinged upon by more than one variety of sensory data may be fleet-
ingly responsive to vestibular, kinaesthetic or indeed haptic stimulation.
Moreover, the ‘touches’ that Nancy describes oscillate between states. In
one form, they leave physical impressions upon our sensory faculties. In
another form, these ‘touches’ cause a continual fission, fusion and reordering
of sensory zones whose sensory parameters cannot be measured and must
therefore be considered virtual, at least in empirical terms. Nancy relates
these stages of sensory differentiation to specifically haptic perception
through his explanation of what occurs when we write about anything:

63 Ibid., p. 42. Nancy offers his fullest explanation of sensory zonage in ibid., pp. 32–42.
64 Donald A. Landes, ‘Le Toucher and the Corpus of Tact: Exploring Touch and
Technicity with Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy’, L’Esprit Créateur, 47, 3
(2007), 80–92 (p. 82).
65 Ibid., p. 83.
66 Nancy, Les Muses, p. 45.
26 Introduction

[l]’excription de notre corps, voilà par où il faut d’abord passer. Son inscription-
dehors, sa mise hors-texte comme le plus propre mouvement de son texte: le texte
même abandonné, laissé sur sa limite. Ce n’est plus une ‘chute’, ça n’a plus ni haut, ni
bas, le corps n’est pas déchu, mais tout en limite, en bord externe, extrême. [I]l n’y a
plus qu’une ligne in-finie, le trait de l’écriture elle-même excrite, à suivre infiniment
brisé, partagé à travers la multitude des corps, ligne de partage avec tous ses lieux:
points de tangence, touches, intersections, dislocations.67

As Nancy explains in the quotation above, the act of writing transforms

our conscious understanding of sens into a form of virtual, self-referential
‘touche’ which in turn comes into momentary, unavoidable contact with the
empirical ‘touche’ of corporeal sensation, of le sentir. This brief, piecemeal
interaction of the virtual and the empirical through written language defines
Nancy’s concept of excription (or exscription, as it is spelt in English): it
calls our attention to the particular inability of written language to express
the sensory extremes that we have experienced through our own bodies.
Unquestionably the most radical of the sensory experiences that Nancy
associates with excription are those which offer us a palpable feeling of
alterity. The written word provides us with this feeling of alterity through
the self-referential tactility which is inherent to le se-sentir-sentir. In turn,
these tactile references mitigate the supposedly transcendental character-
istics of rational sens. The equal and opposite solicitations of corporeality
and non-corporeality which the written word places before our eyes negate
the possibility that any form of sense will arise from those words, such that

cette excription est la vérité dernière de l’inscription. Absenté en tant que discours, le
sens vient en présence au sein de cette absence, comme une concrétion, un épaississe-
ment, une ossification, une induration du sens lui-même. Comme un alourdissement,
un apesantissement, un poids soudain, déséquilibrant, de la pensée.68

Because of its characteristics, Nancy believes excription to be a matter

of perceptible chance: ‘Nous ignorons quelles “écritures” ou quelles

67 Nancy, Corpus, p. 14; emphasis in original.

68 Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Poids d’une pensée, l’approche (Strasbourg: Le Phocide, 2008),
p. 15; emphasis in original.
Introduction 27

“excriptions” se préparent à venir de ces lieux. Quels diagrammes, quels

réticules, quelles greffes topologiques, quelles géographies des multitudes’.69
Its effects cannot be predicted, nor are they guaranteed to be perceived.
For this reason, excription also designates a roving blind spot within our
perceptual faculties as much as it does the effacement of empiricist concepts
of the body or the disappearance of rationalist sens from language. The
notion of excription as an ineffable perceptual blind spot also links Nancy’s
literary presentations of haptic sensation with his empirical theorisations
of how haptic perception might function on a sensory basis. The inexpli-
cable interference wrought by this exscriptive blind spot ensures that we
can never portray the perceiving human body with absolute consistency
or accuracy. Therefore, ‘[u]n corpus n’est pas un discours, et ce n’est pas un
récit’.70 This said, it should not escape our attention that Nancy consid-
ers certain other forms of art to have inscriptive properties. Elsewhere, he
discusses photography in this very manner.71
In spite of the absence of chronological récit that Nancy postulates,
the ceaseless and random re-zoning of every living individual’s sensory
faculties creates a collectivised understanding of le sentir. This collective
experience of sensation is, simultaneously, a mark of individual unique-
ness because it is continually modified by individual memories and new
experiences. These empirical modifications form the basis of a temporal
patchwork which oscillates between the past, the present and the future
as they are sensed individually. Because these modifications stem from
the virtual aspect of the Nancyan toucher and senti, they are only ever
fleetingly perceptible:

69 Nancy, Corpus, p. 14.

70 Ibid., p. 46; emphasis in original.
71 ‘L’instant n’est pas du temps: mais topique, topographie, circonstance, circonscription
d’un agencement particulier des lieux, ouvertures, passages. Photographie, écriture
de lumière’ (Nancy, Le Poids d’une pensée, p. 87). Nancy adds that, ‘Le regard touche
car il approche. […] Ainsi la photo est-elle tactile: elle palpe toute la surface, toute la
peau, l’écorce ou la croûte du lieu’ (ibid., p. 119).
28 Introduction

La mémoire et l’anticipation, ou l’attente, n’ont lieu qu’au présent: en forment des

topiques particulières, rien de plus. […] La venue est l’espacement du temps – par
quoi le temps a lieu, toujours au présent. Mais ‘présent’ est un mauvais concept, qui
cache la venue en tant que telle, et qui étend sa prise sur le passé et sur l’avenir: alors
que ceux-ci ne désignent rien d’autre que le non-présent, et la non-venue.72

The exscriptive – and therefore, almost undetectable – synergy between

empirical and temporal that results from this situation (and which Nancy
describes above) creates a fractal continuity between space and time which
is also fleetingly haptic. This is because the virtual, arbitrary interaction of
space and time that Nancy postulates requires the constant re-zoning of
all human sensory faculties. This process is led by the self-reflexive toucher
which informs our conscious understanding of le sentir. It is attested to
by our perception of the inscriptive act in certain art objects.73 Due to the
influence of excription, however, we are never more than dimly aware of the
spatio-temporal ebb and flow of which écriture is the sole enduring remnant.
One final and extremely important aspect of Nancy’s treatment of the
haptic and the excrit is that our gender plays a role in all of the concepts
that I have just presented:
Il n’y a pas de corps unisexe […]. Le corps se rapporte au corps de l’autre sexe. Dans
ce rapport, il y va de sa corporéité en tant qu’elle touche par le sexe à sa limite: elle
jouit, c’est-à-dire que le corps est secoué au dehors de lui-même. Chacune de ses
zones, jouissant pour soi-même, émet au dehors le même éclat. […] Le fini et l’infini
se sont croisés, se sont échangés un instant. Chacun des sexes peut occuper la posi-
tion du fini ou de l’infini.74

In short, Nancy states that a perceiver may transcend or exscript his or

her body and its sensory processes momentarily, but this brief transcendence

72 Ibid., pp. 87–88.

73 ‘[C]e que l’art fait voir – c’est-à-dire ce à quoi il touche et qui est en même temps ce
qu’il met en œuvre […] –, c’est […] que l’unité et l’unicité d’un monde sont, et ne sont
pas autre chose, que la différence singulière d’une touche, et d’une zone de touche.
Il n’y aurait pas de monde, s’il n’y avait une discrétion de zones’ (Nancy, Les Muses,
p. 38; emphasis in original).
74 Nancy, Corpus, pp. 161–62; emphasis in original.
Introduction 29

is only possible because the perceiver’s body is interacting in a perceptible

manner with that of another.

Conclusion

Where does all of this leave our understanding of haptic perception? The
traces of haptic theory discernible in Jean-Luc Nancy’s understandings of
human perception are by no means easily explicable. Thanks to the signifi-
cant role that Nancy attributes to excription in his writings, these traces are
not easily demonstrable either. What is apparent from Nancy’s writings on
matters of perception is that he does not believe haptic perception to be
clearly distinguishable from optical perception in the manner that Riegl
considered them to be. In common with Paterson and Marks, Nancy does
not appear to share Riegl’s association of haptic sensation with universality.
For Riegl, universality equates with unmistakeability and, therefore, the
possibility that space may be perceived in an absolutely objective manner.
Even if Nancy discusses haptic perception in art historical and social con-
texts as Riegl did, he does not adhere to Riegl’s conviction that haptic appeal
is characteristic of the artistry of antiquity: ‘la vérité, c’est la peau. Elle est
dans la peau, elle fait peau: authentique étendue exposée, toute tournée
au dehors en même temps qu’enveloppe du dedans, du sac rempli de bor-
borygmes et de remugles. La peau touche et se fait toucher’.75 Moreover,
Nancy rejects the unbreakable chronology of artistic development inherent
to Riegl’s understanding of haptic and optical art.
At first glance, Marks’s theory of haptic visuality seems more consist-
ent with Nancy’s thinking, especially in her preoccupation with visually
indistinct yet tactilely appealing projected images and their effects upon a
flesh and blood observer. However, none of the ambiguities in our sensory
interaction with projected images that Marks identifies are explicable in

75 Ibid., p. 160.
30 Introduction

terms of one overarching concept, whereas much of the sensory ambiguity

that Nancy points out is then attributed to excription.
Where the two theorists do share some common ground is on the
issue of temporal discontinuity and the possibility that our perceptions do
not necessarily function according to the age-old chronology of sensory
stimulus leading inexorably to corporeal response. The filmed world that
Marks describes can be replayed, reversed, speeded up or slowed down and
zoomed in or out upon to such an extent that space and time can become
indistinct, even indistinguishable from each other. Nancy’s sensory world is
comparable with that of Marks in that it is made up of sensory and spatio-
temporal localities from which shared visions may be viewed. The medium
of the sensory world described by Nancy is one of inscribed language and
artistry which solicits the beholder’s mental images. Marks analyses visions
projected from a specifically optical source. Both domains are capable
nevertheless of fabulating and/or manipulating a moment in space and
time for their observers. Cinema’s optical inscriptions upon a reel of film
or a hard disc may reject rational thought just as readily as the painting or
the photograph, the written or typed word, in order to explore the world
from different sensory perspectives. Both theorists also acknowledge that
the gender of an observer might be thought to have a bearing on how he
or she perceives the world and its artistic or literary artefacts. However,
while Nancy is certain that gender plays a role in our perceptive processes,
Marks believes the question of gender to be of peripheral importance to
her formulation of haptic visuality.
In matters of gender, rationalism and spatio-temporal perception,
Paterson’s explorations of art and technology as haptic phenomena allow
for experiential possibilities comparable with those posited by Marks and
Nancy. Where his understanding of haptic sensation differs from that of
Marks or Nancy is in his insistence that haptic sensation be thought of
in proprioceptive terms, rather than as a unique synergy of optical and
tactile sensory data. Perhaps due to its phenomenological grounding,
Paterson’s understanding of haptic perception is not so fascinated by
what is imperceptible or indistinguishable as the theories of Marks,
Nancy or even Riegl appear to be. Indeed, Paterson’s presentation of the
haptic as the proprioceptive appears to suggest that some empirically
Introduction 31

useful information may be gleaned from almost any corporeal sensation.

This position is far removed from the other three haptic models analysed
here, all of which appear to begin from the standpoint that where there is
empirically valuable sense to be found, there must also be worthless
nonsense.
I now present the texts by Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and
Michel Serres that I shall be examining both in their own right and in the
context of the haptic theories just discussed.

Georges Bataille

In order to explain Georges Bataille’s theoretical stance concerning the

core sensory elements of haptic perception (sight and touch), I shall ana-
lyse his postulations of the œil pinéal, hétérologie and the informe. The
majority of my primary sources for this section of the chapter are arti-
cles first published in the journal Documents between 1929 and 1930,
though I shall also consider a selection of published and unpublished
articles that Bataille wrote for other periodicals such as Acéphale and
Verve during the late 1930s. (All of these pieces are reprinted in the first
two volumes of Bataille’s posthumous Œuvres complètes (1970).) Based
upon my appraisal of these articles, I will suggest that Bataille’s criti-
cal approach to matters of perception indicates a consistent mistrust of
haptic and uniquely tactile sensation. Furthermore, I will contend that
Bataille’s apparent favouring of optical perception is largely in keeping
with Riegl’s understanding of early twentieth-century artistic tastes,
even if Bataille does not refer to Riegl or his theories directly. Having
drawn these conclusions, I turn to Bataille’s prose works from the same
period; might his critical treatment of haptic perception be reflected in his
literary works?
The first récit by Bataille that I shall be considering in response to this
question is the original version of his debut novella, Histoire de l’œil, which
first appeared in small quantities in 1928 bearing the pen name Lord Auch.
32 Introduction

The novella describes a young couple’s violent confrontation with interwar

European ‘morality’ and its bastions, most notably the Catholic Church,
the French Gendarme and the medical profession. Aided in their frequently
sadomasochistic enterprises by a voyeuristic English aristocrat named
Sir Edmond, the first of the novella’s two male narrators and his female com-
panion Simone cut a swath of destruction across France and Spain, using
sexuality as their weapon of choice. The couple’s mutual preoccupation with
haptic sensations of carnality is a major feature of this work’s first-person
narrative. Ultimately, however, their search for absolute and simultaneous
visual and tactile satisfaction of their desires results in death and failure.
Madame Edwarda, the first edition of which appeared in 1941, is
attributed to the fictitious Pierre Angélique. Its récit is a first-person nar-
rative set in peacetime, probably pre-World War II. Bataille’s tale recounts
an unnamed man’s encounter with the titular prostitute in a brothel and
the events which unfold in its wake. The narrative of Madame Edwarda
dwells upon the sights and sensations of male and female skin coming
into proximal contact. In spite of this, there are several instances during
which intimate haptic contact gives rise to a specifically optical form of
transcendental experience.
Instances of this transcendence are even more apparent in Le Bleu du
ciel, the last of the prose works by Bataille that I shall be examining. This
work was written in 1935, but remained unpublished until 1957. Prefaced by
Bataille’s explanation of why he chose not to publish the text when first it
was written, the narrative’s main protagonist, Henri Troppmann, describes
the consequences of his attempts (and failures) to come to terms with his
repeated infidelities amidst the first stirrings of the Spanish Civil War of 1936
to 1939. Troppmann’s narrative of events is also a chronicle of his inability to
rid his troubled life of the need for simultaneously visual and tactile (haptic)
excitation of his carnal desires. In my analysis of this and the other two récits
by Bataille that I examine, I shall consider how the main characters’ sensory
preferences shift gradually from haptic interaction to optical perception,
only for the tale to conclude with both forms of sensation coexisting briefly
and unsatisfyingly in one sensory continuum. As I will show, Nancy’s sub-
sequent understanding of haptic perception as a manifestation of excription
offers us valuable perspectives upon these changes in sensory preference.
Introduction 33

Maurice Blanchot

For reasons that I shall elucidate in the chapter on Maurice Blanchot itself,
I begin my assessment of his treatment of haptic perception by present-
ing a thematic synopsis of his critical works from the period 1941 to 1969,
with some reference to his subsequent critical texts. Through analysis of
critical texts such as Faux pas (1943), La Part du feu (1949), L’Espace lit-
téraire (1955) and L’Entretien infini (1969), I intend to demonstrate that
Blanchot’s treatment of the component sensations of haptic perception is
as equivocal as his portrayals of uniquely optical perception. In order to
justify this contention, I will present Blanchot’s theorisations of image,
objet and fascination as varying forms of optical and tactile aporia. I shall
then examine how these postulates can be related to another Blanchovian
concept, le rapport du troisième genre, by haptic means. In order to com-
plete this task, I will ask what insights Marks’s subsequent postulation of
haptic visuality and Nancy’s understanding of excription as a simultaneously
literary and proprioceptive phenomenon offer us concerning the aporetic
nature of Blanchot’s perceptual theories. The paradox of Blanchot’s critical
presentations of haptic perception’s visual and tactile sensory components
is that he affords corporeity as little philosophical credence as possible. At
the same time, he cannot resist returning regularly to the subject of the
human body and exploring his belief that its sensory experiences can never
be articulated adequately through language.
My analysis of Blanchot’s literary output will demonstrate that the asso-
ciation between haptic sensation and the ineffability of corporeal sensation
which underpins his theorisations of perception is equally important in his
prose works. The first literary piece by Blanchot that I shall be examining
is his debut novel, the original version of Thomas l’obscur (1941).76 As shall
be seen, the contemporaneity of Thomas l’obscur’s initial, Occupation-era
publication and Bataille’s first version of Madame Edwarda offers many

76 A better known (though heavily abridged) second version of Thomas l’obscur was
published in 1950.
34 Introduction

rich areas of investigation. In Blanchot’s lengthy third-person account of

the dysfunctional relationships between the titular protagonist and two
females (Irène and Anne), the pre-eminence of optical distance over haptic
proximity that is favoured in Bataille’s later literary works proves fatal for
all three of Blanchot’s characters. His trio of protagonists undergo a gruel-
ling emotional and perceptual journey from haptic to optical perspectives
before transcending their perceiving bodies, only for the narrative to end
with a return of sorts to haptic sensation. I will be paying particularly close
attention to the parallels that can be drawn between selected moments of
optical interaction described in Thomas l’obscur and the manner in which
all seem to exert an appreciable haptic force upon the characters involved.
Blanchot’s critical concept of fascination will feature significantly in these
enquiries.
A récit from Blanchot’s later career, La Folie du jour (1973; first pub-
lished in 1949 under the title Un récit?), addresses sensations of chronic
physical illness and their psychological effects rather differently than
is the case in the far lengthier Thomas l’obscur. La Folie du jour’s brief,
first-person récit focuses mostly upon the unnamed narrator’s confused
thoughts and sensations whilst he convalesces from eye surgery after being
glassed. Blanchot’s text is notable for its almost total absence of direct
dialogue and a similar dearth of non-violent physical interaction. Indeed,
by the final sentence of La Folie du jour, silence and ineffability are por-
trayed as the most perceptible characteristics of the sensing human body.
As Blanchot’s narrative progresses, instances of fleeting but vivid haptic
sensation give way to increasingly indecipherable visions which remain
rooted in perceptual agony. The other sensations which accompany these
visions never transcend bodily suffering, but are so vague as to communicate
almost nothing of corporeal sensation or indeed, its transcendence. Might
these visions pre-empt the haptically perceptible limits of corporeality
at which Nancy’s postulations of excription and écriture come into
their own?
L’Instant de ma mort (first published in 1994), Blanchot’s final récit,
is a short first-person narrative of a young maquisard’s encounter with an
enemy firing squad during the Allied invasion of France in mid-1944. The
almost complete absence of reference to haptic perception in this narrative
Introduction 35

is all the more apparent because it is set during a period of intense, often
hand-to-hand combat. There is also a significant lack of female presence
in this text (as is the case in La Folie du jour). As a point of comparison
with Bataille, I consider whether the presence of female characters in either
writer’s literary works entails an increase or decrease in references to haptic
perception. I discover that the presence of female characters does indeed
correlate with an increase in allusions to hapticity in the literary works of
Blanchot and Bataille. I then examine whether it is possible that Blanchot
and Bataille presage Nancy’s assertion that there is no ‘corps unisexe’ in
matters of perception. I will also ask whether the brief, ultimately abortive
transcendence of not only haptic but also optical perception postulated
by Bataille is apparent in any of the Blanchovian critical works and prose
that I have studied.

Michel Serres

The works of Michel Serres are generally rather more difficult to categorise
than those of Bataille or Blanchot, and the texts selected for examination
here are no exception. The distinction between critical theory and literary
prose is particularly hazy in Serres’s oeuvre. His works also differ appreci-
ably from those of Bataille and Blanchot in their almost ceaseless praise and
exploration of synergies between the body’s various sensory faculties. As
we shall see, Serres believes fervently that an awareness of these synergies
is crucial to the continued evolution of social, scientific and philosophi-
cal knowledge.
As with Bataille and Blanchot, I begin my investigation of Serres’s
approach to haptic sensation by examining his critical theorisations of
perception – especially those involving touch and vision. For the purposes
of my analysis, the Serres works that I shall designate as ‘critical theory’ are
those whose content is structured by the critique of concepts or hypoth-
eses. In addition, these texts contain little or no personal anecdote and are
written from a predominantly third-person perspective.
36 Introduction

The works of ‘critical theory’ by Serres that I will consider span

most of his published career. Of those that I shall be discussing here,
Hermès II: L’Interférence (1972) and Hermès V: Le Passage du Nord-Ouest
(1980) are the nearest to being purely theoretical texts. Indeed, the ostensi-
bly empirical stance advocated in both works is firmly rooted in the guiding
philosophical principles of the mathematical and scientific practices of the
time. (For example, I illustrate that the influence of Information Theory
is particularly apparent in Hermès II. I also show that an interdisciplinary
approach to the humanities and sciences is at the heart of Serres’s arguments
in Hermès V.)
It is Serres’s continual philosophical refinements of his own brand of
modern-day empiricism that best illustrate the importance of haptic per-
ception in his thinking. I examine the role of haptic sensation in Serres’s
theorisations of the reception and transmission of information in particular
detail. I will examine how the ‘real’ physical contact involved in haptic per-
ception also becomes a form of virtual communication in Serres’s perceptual
theories. In order to explore the temporal and philosophical repercussions of
this haptic synergy between the virtual and the ‘actual’, I shall also examine
Éclaircissements (1992; co-written with Bruno Latour) and extracts from
the fourth volume of Serres’s Petites chroniques du dimanche soir (2011;
with Michel Polacco). In my analysis, I enquire as to how Serres’s empiri-
cal understanding of haptic perception alters as he reappraises his views
concerning the modifying effects of vision upon tactility and vice versa.
I shall also consider whether the evolving theoretical explanations of haptic
perception that Serres offers are reflected in his more anecdotal writings.
Let us now turn to the ‘literary’ works by Serres that I will be exam-
ining. The texts by Serres that I shall class as being ‘literary prose’ contain
anecdotes which are often written in the first person. We begin with Les
Cinq Sens, which was published in 1985. Though Serres had been including
personal anecdotes in his writings since the mid-1970s, it is only with the
publication of Les Cinq Sens that he adds haptic perception to his existing
gamut of mathematical and philosophical enquiry definitively. Over the
course of its almost five hundred pages, Les Cinq Sens addresses subjects
as diverse as canvas paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Serres’s recollection of
how speaking can dull the pain of a hornet sting and the undermining of
Introduction 37

language by modern science. Several episodes of ancient Greek and early

Christian mythology and etymology are also discussed at length. In my
analysis of Les Cinq Sens, I shall be focusing upon Serres’s depiction of the
role played by haptic perception in the growing convergence of artistry,
science, geometry and philosophy that characterises his view of the late
twentieth century.
Serres’s preoccupation with haptic experience is equally apparent in
Le Tiers-Instruit (1991). This literary work contains anecdotes illustrating
the ills of modern Western schooling and tertiary education, the myth and
dramatic personae of Arlequin (Harlequin) and the empirical knowledge
that can be gained through the haptic experience of river swimming. Serres
also presents us with tales concerning the positive physical, mental and
social effects of playing football, tennis and dancing. He then connects
these benefits with the three Laws of Planetary Rotation established by
seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler. Serres’s musings are
punctuated by his own recollections of academic elitism, globalisation and
the importance of being ambidextrous. In order to grasp Serres’s under-
standing of haptic perception as a proprioceptive phenomenon of the kind
postulated by Paterson, I will be comparing Serres’s presentation of a river
swimmer’s haptic experiences with instances of swimming in Blanchot’s
Thomas l’obscur and Bataille’s Le Bleu du ciel. My comparison will highlight
a number of significant differences in the manner that the three writers
approach the concept of proprioception, both in its own right and as the
symptom of haptic perception that Mark Paterson portrays it as being.
The last of my chosen ‘literary’ texts by Serres, La Guerre mondiale
(2008), is rather different in tone and style than either of the ‘prose’ works
discussed above in that it reads more like a personal plea than Les Cinq Sens
or Le Tiers-Instruit do. On this occasion, Serres demands that unbreakable
ethical limits be placed upon the scope of armed conflicts. He asks that
these limits be determined by philosophical examination of haptic expe-
riences and virtual realms which are, ostensibly, unable to exert a haptic
influence over us, such as events in the distant past or the numerical values
displayed by an internet website. Somewhat unexpectedly, Serres chooses
to illustrate the benefits of these proposed curbs on violence by recounting
how he filmed a drunken bar brawl between sailors. Serres then offers us
38 Introduction

his philosophical appraisal of a rugby match. Laura U. Marks’s concept of

haptic visuality is central to my reading of these examples. I will be exam-
ining why Serres appears to exhibit an increasing penchant for the optical
over the haptic in these instances.
As La Guerre mondiale draws to a close, Serres explains how he believes
one particular statistic calculated by the World Health Organisation should
determine the internet’s increasing influence upon our understanding of
reality and of virtuality. Serres’s assertions on this subject form the backbone
of his attempt to bridge the ontological distance between haptic percep-
tion as a paradigm of tangibility and optical perception as a synonym of
intangibility. Intriguingly, Serres insists that haptic interaction between
human beings must be limited and sublimated (rather than exscripted in
a Nancyan sense). Serres believes this reduction of haptic contact to be
the only means of stemming what he fears to be an otherwise inexorable
increase in violence on a global scale. In my analysis of La Guerre mondiale,
I seek to understand how Serres comes to denounce haptic perception as
being so damaging after having praised its positive influence upon modern
humanity in Les Cinq Sens and Le Tiers-Instruit.

Bataille, Blanchot and Serres: Haptic Experience

In the conclusion of this text, I will summarise my findings concerning

Bataille, Blanchot, Serres and the haptic. I demonstrate that haptic per-
ception becomes increasingly subordinated to optical perception in the
critical theories and literary prose of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres as their
careers progress. Each writer-philosopher presents and justifies this rejec-
tion in his own manner.
Though their reasonings differ considerably, the critical works of Bataille
and Blanchot are consistently scathing of any attempt to write about human
perception as a rational, socially integrative sensory phenomenon. However,
the literary narratives of Bataille and Blanchot rely upon haptic perception as
a trope to be undermined. The variety of ways in which Bataille and Blanchot
Introduction 39

achieve this subordination of haptic perception in their prose works helps

them to illustrate their critical arguments that the human body can only com-
plicate and distort our attempts to understand the world through rational
theories. Correspondingly, the prose works by Bataille and Blanchot that
I shall be studying each begin with some haptic allusions before hesitating
between a preference for haptic or optical sensation and concluding with
a pronounced endorsement of uniquely optical interaction. This pattern
holds true from the earliest literary forays of either writer.
By contrast, I observe that the ‘critical’ and ‘literary’ works by Serres
that I study in this book remain favourably disposed towards haptic per-
ception from the 1970s onwards. Serres is staunch in his insistence that
sensory interaction equates with social integration and the consolidation
of practical knowledge. His reasons for advocating this stance change sig-
nificantly between the 1970s and 2000s, but Serres’s only notable rejection
of the haptic occurs in La Guerre mondiale in 2008. Modern technolo-
gies such as the internet play a significant role in his demand that haptic
interaction be heavily limited in favour of visual contact. I note that even
instances such as this cannot divest themselves of haptic influence, however.
Though profound differences exist between the writings and phi-
losophies of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres, I conclude that for all three
writer-philosophers, the philosophical and stylistic consequences of sub-
ordinating haptic perception also exert an enduring (and paradoxically)
haptic influence upon the dominant, ostensibly optical sensibility which
has resulted from it. In short, haptic perception remains an inescapable
touchstone of the critical theories and literary prose of Bataille, Blanchot
and Serres. This remains true even when they attempt to reject the influ-
ence of the haptic and write about purely optical perception or, in Serres’s
case, to discuss forms of proprioception which involve all of the body’s
sensory faculties at once.
With the terminology and subject matter of my investigation now
established, I will begin my textual analysis in earnest. For ease of reading
and to highlight the changes in approach from one writer’s works to the
next, I shall proceed chronologically on an author-by-author basis. The
critical and literary works of Georges Bataille will therefore be the first
that I consider.
Chapter 1

Bataille and the Haptic: Fleshy Transcendence

In the introduction of this book, I presented four distinct understandings

of haptic perception. Linking Georges Bataille’s writing with these postula-
tions of haptic perception is not the easiest of tasks. Not least because the
word ‘haptique’ does not appear even once in all twelve volumes of Bataille’s
posthumous Œuvres complètes. Nor, in spite of Bataille being employed
by several libraries during his lifetime, is there any evidence that he had
read – or even heard of – Riegl, much less any of his aesthetic theories.1
With these facts acknowledged, I shall begin this chapter with two
quotations from Bataille’s critical writings. These quotations demonstrate
the complications of analysing Bataille’s literary works from a haptic stand-
point.2 If, for example, we consider the synergy between sight, touch, physi-
cal balance and spatial awareness that Paterson’s model of proprioception
as haptic phenomenon requires, quotations such as the following suggest
that Bataille’s theories do have some form of haptic sensibility:

1 See Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes, 12 vols (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1970–1988),

XII, pp. 549–621 for a list of texts Bataille is known to have borrowed from the
Bibliothèque Nationale between 1922 and 1950. All subsequent references to Bataille’s
works will be taken from his Œuvres complètes and will take the following form: name
of work, Œuvres complètes page number(s). For ease of reading, Œuvres complètes
volume numbers will only be included in the first reference to each work.
2 I wish to take issue here with Brian T. Fitch’s stance in his text, Monde à l’envers,
texte réversible: la fiction de Georges Bataille (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1982), which
specifically refuses to link Bataillean récit and critique (‘Notre propos ne concerne
que sa fiction.’ (p. 48)). I contend that Fitch’s approach is problematic, given Bataille’s
well-publicised assertion that Madame Edwarda is the ‘clé lubrique’ to the ‘Supplice’
section of his theoretical text, L’Expérience intérieure (Bataille, cited in Gilles Mayné,
Georges Bataille, l’érotisme et l’écriture (Paris: Descartes et Cie, 2003), p. 339).
42 Chapter 1

Ce qui frappe des yeux humains ne détermine pas seulement la connaissance des
relations entre les divers objets, mais aussi bien tel état d’esprit décisif et inexplicable.
C’est ainsi que la vue d’une fleur dénonce, il est vrai, la présence de cette partie définie
d’une plante; mais il est impossible de s’arrêter à ce résultat superficiel: en effet, la
vue de cette fleur provoque dans l’esprit des réactions beaucoup plus conséquentes
du fait qu’elle exprime une obscure décision de la nature végétale. Ce que révèlent
la configuration et la couleur de la corolle, ce que trahissent les salissures du pollen
ou la fraîcheur du pistil, ne peut sans doute pas être exprimé adéquatement à l’aide
du langage; toutefois, il est inutile de négliger, comme on le fait généralement, cette
inexprimable présence réelle, et de rejeter comme une absurdité puérile certaines
tentatives d’interprétation symbolique.3

‘Le Langage des fleurs’, the article from which this extract is taken, was
first printed in Documents, a relatively short-lived arts magazine of which
Bataille was a founder member and regular contributor. Particularly appar-
ent in the opening two phrases above is a postulation of vision as an incisive,
literally impressive experience of (spatial) interrelation not dissimilar to
Riegl’s explanation of haptic surfaces as those whose portrayal of proximal
images invite us ever closer to touching them.4 What role touch actually
plays in the interaction that Bataille describes above is not fully explained.
He does however insist upon the importance of ‘présence réelle’ in the
final sentence. The fact that this assertion follows a lengthy description
of the flower’s properties, most of which are simultaneously visible and
tangible (and therefore haptic), should not be ignored. Indeed, Bataille
even evokes the smell of the flower. All of this suggests a conviction on
his part that some form of conjunction between our sensory faculties is
possible, however fragmented its constitutive elements may in fact be. In
1943, Bataille even writes in his seminal text L’Expérience intérieure that
through the act of writing the book, he has discovered ‘[l]a possibilité d’unir
en un point précis deux sortes de connaissance jusqu’ici ou étrangères l’une

3 Bataille, ‘Le Langage des fleurs’, Documents, 3 (1929). Reprinted in Bataille, Œuvres
complètes, I, pp. 173–78 (p. 173; emphasis in original).
4 See Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, pp. 281–82 and p. 4, n. 7 above.
Bataille and the Haptic 43

à l’autre ou confondues grossièrement […]: tout entier le mouvement de la

pensée se perdait, mais tout entier se retrouvait, en un point où rit la foule
unanime’.5 It is clear therefore that Bataille is not averse to the idea of
fusion in itself.
Nevertheless, Paterson’s definition of the haptic as a proprioceptive
phenomenon, as the ‘[p]erception of the position, state and movement
of the body and limbs in space’,6 complicates our reading of Bataille’s
remarks above. Not least because Paterson’s definition of haptic percep-
tion postulates a sensory continuum whose constitutive faculties are con-
sciously discernible. Contrarily, Bataille states in L’Expérience intérieure
that ‘[l]’expérience atteint pour finir la fusion de l’objet et du sujet, étant
comme sujet non-savoir, comme objet l’inconnu’.7 Lest we forget, Riegl,
Marks, Paterson and even Nancy explain haptic sensation as a form of
sensorial construct, as a conceptual tool to understand the synergetic inter-
action of sight and touch in the spatial and social realms. The theorists’
(admittedly varying) postulations of haptic perception thus run contrary
to Bataille’s theoretical approach to corporeal experience because all of
their explanations rely upon rationality while Bataille’s understanding of
corporeal perception does not.
At this stage of his career, it seems that Bataille’s critical postulations
do not allow for the consciously rationalised schematisation of perceptive
processes demanded by the haptic theories of Riegl, Marks, Paterson or
Nancy. In the next subsection, I explore how Bataille’s position is rather
more nuanced than first it appears.

5 L’Expérience intérieure, in Bataille, Œuvres complètes, V, pp. 7–190 (p. 11; emphasis
in original). It should be noted that in the quotation above, Bataille is referring to a
fusion of ‘connaissance émotionnelle’ and ‘connaissance discursive’, rather than any
form of haptic/optic binary.
6 Paterson, The Senses of Touch, p. ix.
7 Bataille, L’Expérience intérieure, p. 21.
44 Chapter 1

Perspectives

One of Bataille’s earliest articles for Documents, published in its first issue
(April 1929), makes some assertions strikingly similar to those of Riegl: ‘On
trouve, liées à l’évolution humaine, des alternances de formes plastiques
analogues à celles que présente, dans certains cas, l’évolution des formes
naturelles’.8 It is equally noticeable, however, that in this early Documents
article Bataille does not attempt to differentiate between the sight and
touch of the plastic form. His choice may be explained by the fact that
this article, ‘Le Cheval académique’, discusses the images of horses found
on pre-Christian coinage in Gaul; the value of the horse’s image and the
metal upon which it appeared could be seen and touched. Nevertheless,
when Bataille does speak of vision specifically (in a Documents article enti-
tled ‘Œil’, which was published less than a year after the extremely limited
pressing of Bataille’s maiden novella Histoire de l’œil), he presents the human
eye as being a cutting edge, a tool of material seduction:

Il semble, en effet, impossible au sujet de l’œil de prononcer un autre mot que séduc-
tion, rien n’étant plus attrayant dans les corps des animaux et des hommes. Mais la
séduction extrême est probablement à la limite de l’horreur. À cet égard, l’œil pourrait
être rapproché du tranchant, dont l’aspect provoque également des réactions aiguës
et contradictoires.9

Bataille’s theoretical examinations of other parts of the body prove

similarly unable to accommodate the synergy between sensory faculties
that Riegl, Marks, Paterson or Nancy believe to be implicit in haptic per-
ception. In almost all cases, Bataille’s understanding of the body is pre-
sented in terms of a sensory disjuncture comparable with that detailed
in the extract above. Indeed, several of Bataille’s articles on parts of the

8 Bataille, ‘Le Cheval académique’, Documents, 1 (1929). Reprinted in Bataille, Œuvres

complètes, I, pp. 159–63 (p. 159).
9 Bataille, ‘Œil’, Documents, 4 (1929). Reprinted in Bataille, Œuvres complètes, I,
pp. 187–89 (p. 187; emphasis in original).
Bataille and the Haptic 45

human anatomy published in Documents during 1929 and 1930 present

the body as a discontinuous string of perceptual foci which are frequently
in no more than chaotic sensory communication with one another. In an
article entitled ‘Bouche’, for example, Bataille describes the human mouth
in the following terms:
dans les grands occasions la vie humaine se concentre encore bestialement dans la
bouche, la colère fait grincer les dents, la terreur et la souffrance atroce font de la
bouche l’organe des cris déchirants. Il est facile d’observer à ce sujet que l’individu
bouleversé relève la tête en tendant le cou frénétiquement, en sorte que sa bouche
vient se placer, autant qu’il est possible, dans le prolongement de la colonne vertébrale,
c’est-à-dire dans la position qu’elle occupe normalement dans la constitution animale.10

The human mouth is presented here not as the articulator of rational

thought but as an avatar of uncontrolled bodily affliction. It betrays an
intellectually unmediated, insidious animality of which humanity cannot
rid itself any more readily than it can the painful sensations which provoke
its actions. The ‘cris déchirants’ which emanate from the human mouth
do not only attest to sensations of pain. They also denounce a physical-
ity unable to maintain its sensorial composure in moments of physical
or mental anguish. Importantly for us, this lack of composure expresses
itself haptically through involuntary movements of the body. Of these, the
head’s movements are the most immediately noticeable, as it is this part
of the body that we treat as the centre of perception and expression. The
tendency of perceptual theories to treat the human head as the focal point
of existence is problematic in itself, according to Bataille. He goes so far
as to suggest that the most ‘human’ part of the human body is in fact the
big toe (‘Le gros orteil est la partie la plus humaine du corps humain en ce
sens qu’aucun autre élément de ce corps n’est aussi différencié de l’élément
correspondant du singe anthropoïde’).11 At the same time, however, Bataille

10 Bataille, ‘Bouche’, Documents, 5 (deuxième année) (1930). Reprinted in Bataille,

Œuvres complètes, I, pp. 237–38 (p. 237; emphasis in original).
11 Bataille, ‘Le Gros orteil’, Documents, 6 (1929). Reprinted in Bataille, Œuvres complètes,
I, pp. 200–04 (p. 200; emphasis in original).
46 Chapter 1

asserts that the mundane, repetitive realities of haptic interaction with the
world in which we live make us forget the humanity of the toe:

Aussi la fonction du pied humain consiste-t-elle à donner une assise ferme à cette
érection dont l’homme est si fier (le gros orteil, cessant de servir à la préhension
éventuelle des branches, s’applique au sol sur le même plan que les autres doigts).
Mais quel que soit le rôle joué dans l’érection par son pied, l’homme, qui a la tête
légère, c’est-à-dire élevée vers le ciel et les choses du ciel, le regard comme un crachat
sous prétexte qu’il a ce pied dans la boue.12

In the quotation above, Bataille explains our forgetting of the human-

ity apparent in our big toes in terms of a dizzying haptic confusion which
we experience between our feet and the earth upon which we see them
tread. By walking, we determine what is physically inferior to or ‘below’
us (l’abject). By looking up at the distant sky as we do so, we form ideas as
to what transcends our physical presence, what we consider to be superior
to or ‘above’ us (le sublime). Through the synchrony of sensation implicit
in the concept of proprioception, we generally see and feel the physical
presence of our feet as they come into contact with the surfaces on which
we walk. The harmonious synchrony of these sensations means that we
pay them less attention. (Lest we forget, our proprioceptive actions allow
us to perceive ‘the position, state and movement of the body and limbs in
space’.)13 Indeed, these sensations become banal, even mundane to us. As
a result, ‘l’homme, qui a la tête légère, c’est-à-dire élevée vers le ciel et les
choses du ciel, le regard [le gros orteil] comme un crachat sous prétexte
qu’il a ce pied dans la boue’.
I shall clarify this idea further. We can learn what a given surface is ‘like’
by placing our bodies into visual and dermal contact with it. Contrarily,
we can only see the sky; it cannot leave a simultaneously visual and tactile
imprint on our skin. The blueness of the sky will not rub off on our hands if
we reach skyward, for example. Even with aviation having become a routine
experience for many people, it would be difficult for us to run our fingers

12 Ibid.
13 Paterson, The Senses of Touch, p. ix.
Bataille and the Haptic 47

through a bank of cloud. Bataille implies that part of what so fascinates us

about the sky is that we can see it, but this sight can never leave an obviously
related trace of itself on our skin. The lack of tactile information that we
can glean from looking at the sky captivates us. Seeing but not touching
becomes more interesting than seeing and touching at once. This misguided
logic in turn defines modern human perception, such that the head and its
sense organs are, to a certain extent, narcotised (left with a ‘tête légère’) by
areas of space which are not at once visual and tactile. Our perception of
those spaces which are haptic, and which leave their mark upon our skin,
are looked upon with disdain because they root us too rigidly to a particular
place, time and set of social circumstances. As Bataille puts it,

[l]e pied humain est communément soumis à des supplices grotesques qui le rendent
difforme et rachitique. Il est imbécilement voué aux cors, aux durillons [,] aux oignons
[…] et […] à la saleté le plus écœurante: l’expression paysanne ‘elle a les mains plus
sales comme on a les pieds’ qui n’est plus valable aujourd’hui pour toute la collectivité
humaine l’était au XVIIe siècle.14

Those who reject the metaphorical schema of ‘high’ and ‘low’ in their physi-
cal conduct, who do not hide the baseness of their condition, must reap
the social consequences (Claire Lozier observes that, true to its Latinate
etymology, l’abject ‘désigne la nature ou l’état de ce qui a été jeté en bas ou
au loin’).15
On this evidence, the haut/sublime and bas/abject threaten to scupper
any haptic interpretation of Bataille’s work.16 To follow his argument, we

14 Bataille, ‘Le Gros orteil’, p. 201.

15 Claire Lozier, De l’abject et du sublime: Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), p. 6. Lozier adds that le sublime – another term with
Latinate etymology – ‘signifie “suspendu en l’air”, “haut, élevé, grand” au sens propre
et figuré’ (p. 12), but identifies a number of problems with the term’s usage, relative
to its etymology (pp. 12–20). For a comprehensive overview of the haut/sublime
and bas/abject in Bataille’s writing, see ibid., pp. 27–109.
16 The sacrifice of ‘sens’ (defined as a ‘sense’ which is derived from the body’s perceptive
faculties) appears consistent with Bataille’s thinking. In a posthumously published
article, he says that ‘[l]a pratique du sacrifice est aujourd’hui tombée en désuétude
48 Chapter 1

focus our sight and touch upon the sky because it is the most distant object
from our eyes and hands. Our skin cannot be soiled by the sky. Nor can
the surface of the sky be soiled by our attempts to touch it. Our percep-
tion of the sky thus becomes a paradox in which our eyes are seduced or
impressed upon by intangibility itself.17 In looking at the sky, we reach out
to touch that which we know we cannot sully by hand or sight. We touch
nothingness when we look skyward.
The eyes are a part of the sensory disjuncture which defines our bodies,
according to Bataille. However, the human body does not exist in a sensory
vacuum. As Bataille reminds us, the desire to touch the nothingness of the
sky is a physical expression of the impossible, since our necks strain when
we look above us.18 Moreover, looking too closely at the ‘wrong’ part of the
sky (its sunniest area) risks blinding us to the visual presence of the intan-
gible.19 Our attempts to look for the intangible can never be fully satisfied,
therefore. To paraphrase Gilles Mayné (and Jacques Derrida), there will
always be a blind spot (or tache aveugle) in our visions of the intangible.20
Bataille’s articles postulate an inescapable embrace of that very blind spot,
of a sullied humanity. The human eye can never tear itself away from this

et cependant elle a été, de l’avis unanime, une action humaine plus significative
qu’aucune autre’ (Bataille, ‘Le Jésuve’, Œuvres complètes, II, pp. 13–20 (p. 13)).
17 This denial also inverts the characteristics of haptic experience as they are defined
by Riegl or Marks.
18 See Bataille, ‘L’Œil pinéal (1)’, published posthumously in L’Éphémère, 3 (1967) and
reprinted in Bataille, Œuvres complètes, II, pp. 21–35. Ibid., pp. 25–27 are particularly
relevant to Bataille’s presentation of the sky as an image of impossibility.
19 Denis Hollier reminds us of this fact in La Prise de la Concorde (Paris: NRF/
Gallimard, 1974), p. 113, whilst he discusses the Nietzschean ‘joie de la cécité’ and
Bataille’s theoretical engagement with it. Compare for example Bataille’s L’Anus
solaire, a pamphlet written in 1927 and published some years later (Paris: Éditions
de la Galerie Simon, 1931; reprinted in Bataille, Œuvres complètes, I, pp. 79–86) with
‘Soleil pourri’ (Documents, 3 (deuxième année) (1930). Reprinted in Bataille, Œuvres
complètes, I, pp. 231–32).
20 See Mayné, Georges Bataille, p. 93. On the ‘tache aveugle’, see also Hollier, La Prise
de la Concorde, pp. 180–84 and Jacques Derrida’s Mémoires d’aveugle: l’autoportrait et
autres ruines (Paris: Ministère de la culture, de la communication, des grands travaux,
et du bicentenaire, 1990), pp. 120–30.
Bataille and the Haptic 49

sight, which is also a blind spot. This is because the sight/blind spot is
situated by, and refers to, the human body: ‘on est séduit bassement, sans
transposition et jusqu’à en crier, en écarquillant les yeux: les écarquillant
ainsi devant un gros orteil’.21
The sky, the sun’s retina-burning trajectory and the evolution of
Bataille’s critical engagement with these images leaves us with one certainty.
The blind spot, the simultaneously ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ place to look – and
thereby touch – upon the impossibility of haptic interaction in Bataille’s
theory is not a fixed point.22 There is no one quotation or text which proves
or disproves Bataille’s stance on perception with any authority. Instead, the
haptic blind spot in Bataille’s theories of perception invites our gaze, asks us
to follow and touch upon it, however briefly. It then leaves us lightheaded
and with burned fingers, our enquiring eyes momentarily blinded. To put
it less poetically, we can never get to grips entirely with the haptic poten-
tiality of Bataille’s theories of perception.
Having scratched the Bataillean body’s dermal surface, we shall now
turn to its inner realms. How does Bataille posit their interactions with
external stimuli?

L’Œil pinéal

What is the œil pinéal? Near the centre of the upper, outer surface of the
brain in modern humans, there exists an apparently undeveloped append-
age of the pineal gland, which was believed by Descartes to have been the
epicentre of the human soul.23 Bataille, anti-religious from the early 1920s

21 Bataille, ‘Le Gros orteil’, p. 204.

22 As demonstrated by the differing approaches adopted by Bataille in L’Anus solaire
and ‘Soleil pourri’.
23 As discussed by Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: la mort à l’œuvre (Paris: NRF/
Gallimard, 1992), p. 139. It is worthy of note that Descartes insisted upon the existence
50 Chapter 1

onward, did not share Descartes’s opinion.24 He did, however, believe

there to be a spiritual quality to this area of the brain; he considered it an
embryonic ‘œil virtuel’, a ‘vision de la voûte céleste en général’.25 Between
1927 and the mid-1930s, Bataille made five written attempts to explain the
characteristics and implications of the œil pinéal. Only one of these attempts
can be dated with any certainty: it was written in 1930.26 At any rate, none
of these works would be published during Bataille’s lifetime. (A short piece
entitled L’Anus solaire, published in 1931, refers obliquely to the œil pinéal,
but only in terms of its premise that corporeal sensations are something
to be excreted in a visible, public manner.)27 The non-publication of these
articles suggests that Bataille did not consider any of these formulations of
the œil pinéal to be definitive. The articles do, however, offer a further insight
into the variety of ways in which Bataille attempts to explain perception.
With these caveats in mind, let us begin our analysis of the Bataillean
œil pinéal with a quotation:
Chaque homme possède au sommet du crâne une glande connue sous le nom d’œil
pinéal qui présente en effet les caractères d’un œil embryonnaire. Or des considéra-
tions sur l’existence possible d’un œil d’axe vertical (ce qui revient à dire sur le carac-
tère aléatoire des corps qui auraient pu être tout autres qu’ils ne sont) permettent
de rendre sensible la portée décisive des différents parcours auxquels nous sommes
si généralement habitués que nous sommes arrivés à les nier en les qualifiant de par-
cours normaux ou naturels. Ainsi l’opposition de l’œil pinéal à la vision réelle apparaît
comme le seul moyen de déceler la situation précaire – pour ainsi dire traquée – de
l’homme au milieu des éléments universels.28

Here, Bataille qualifies the importance of the œil pinéal in terms of its ability
to improve humanity’s usual field of vision, to counter our blindness to the
celestial, intangible world. From a haptic standpoint, it is noticeable that

of a physical connection between the body and the soul, a role which the œil pinéal
postulated by Bataille could undertake.
24 As is demonstrated in ibid., pp. 139–41.
25 See Bataille, ‘L’Œil pinéal (3)’, in Œuvres complètes, II, pp. 38–40 (p. 39).
26 See Bataille, Œuvres complètes, II, p. 413.
27 See Bataille, L’Anus solaire, pp. 85–86.
28 Bataille, ‘L’Œil pinéal (2)’ in Œuvres complètes, II, pp. 36–37 (p. 37).
Bataille and the Haptic 51

within two sentences, Bataille refers to a sensory continuity (‘parcours’),

‘portée’, and ‘vision’ while discussing the œil pinéal. However, he posits
this third eye as being an organ of mental excretion, rather than corporeal
sensory ingestion: ‘[j]e me représentais l’œil au sommet du crâne comme
un horrible volcan en éruption, […] comme une envie de devenir soi-même
soleil (soleil aveuglé ou soleil aveuglant, peu importe)’.29
Bataille’s references elsewhere to modern humans’ upright posture as
being equivalent to tumescence (‘érigé comme un pénis’) makes clear that
this new eye, the first point of human contact with the sky, is instrumental
in projecting sexual desires outwards.30 The œil pinéal’s sexual potential is
based upon a sensual interconnection between the senses of sight and touch
which tallies with aspects of the haptic perception posited subsequently
by Marks, Paterson and Nancy.
Sexual potency is by no means the only characteristic of the Bataillean
œil pinéal. Bataille asserts that, since its descent from the trees, humanity
has communed with the world on a predominantly physical basis, as it must
interact with the ground in order to accomplish anything. With this daily
emphasis upon steady tactile interaction with the earth’s surface, a human
reliance upon physical, aesthetic expressions of harmony has arisen. This
reliance exists at the expense of the functional though chaotic aerial move-
ments of our primate ancestors:
les démarches de branche en branche qui ont conditionné la station semi-verticale
des singes impliquaient au contraire un mouvement de déplacement discontinu, qui
n’a jamais permis une harmonie nouvelle et a développé peu à peu une manière d’être
et en même temps un aspect monstrueux.31

At the same time, however, the newfound physical harmony of erect, ambu-
latory balance and the sacrifice of multi-axial motion and vision which it
necessitates have had an undesirable psychological effect upon us. Standing
erect (and the horizontal vision which results from it) has made the sacred

29 Bataille, ‘Le Jésuve’, p. 14; emphasis in original.

30 Ibid., p. 15.
31 Ibid., pp. 16–17.
52 Chapter 1

realm of the sun and sky tangibly more remote from us than was the case
when our primate ancestors swung through the trees.32 Worse, modern
psychology places the mind (and the head which houses it) at the centre
of human perception. The limitation of sight and touch resulting from the
human head’s inability to look (and feel) beyond the horizontal axis with
comfort has thus become our defining characteristic:
Le sommet de la tête est devenu – psychologiquement – le centre d’aboutissement
du nouvel équilibre. Tout ce qui dans l’ossature allait à l’encontre des impulsions
verticales de l’être humain comme les saillies des orbites et des mâchoires, souve-
nir du désordre et des impulsions du singe encore à demi horizontales, a presque
entièrement disparu. Mais la réduction de la saillie de l’orifice anal est, à vrai dire,
beaucoup plus significative.33

The bursting forth of the œil pinéal and its vertical view of the sky there-
fore offers humanity a badly needed integration of sight and touch. Most
importantly, this union occurs not on some distant horizon, but on the
very ground upon which we stand. In this sensorial integration, Bataille
foresees a reunion of the high/sublime and the low/abject, of the troubled,
often profane material world and the decorporealised world of the sun
and the long history of sacred mythology associated with it. Yet, as we see
from Bataille’s interest in the recession of the human anal cavity, a sullied
carnality remains critical to any sensorial reintegration of the sublime and
the abject. I shall return to this issue in a moment.
In the meantime, let us consider the deficiency that the sensory rein-
tegration provided by the speculative œil pinéal actually combats. Bataille
states that modern humanity has allowed itself to ‘se laisser polariser, dans
un certain sens, par le ciel’.34 According to Bataille’s ‘L’Œil pinéal (1)’, the
titular organ’s speculative union of sight and touch can only benefit human-
ity, as all of the science and philosophy which has developed since human-
ity’s descent from the trees is blind to the limited axis of our species’ vision:

32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., pp. 17–18.
34 Bataille, ‘L’Œil pinéal (1)’, p. 26.
Bataille and the Haptic 53

La description des axes perpendiculaires ne prend sa valeur qu’à partir du moment où

il devient possible de construire sur ces axes le jeu puéril d’une existence mythologique:
répondant non plus à l’observation ou à la déduction mais à un développement libre
des rapports entre la conscience immédiate et variée de la vie humaine et les données
prétendues inconscientes qui sont constitutionnelles de cette vie.
Ainsi l’œil pinéal, se détachant du système horizontal de la vision oculaire nor-
male, apparaît dans une sorte de nimbe de larmes, comme l’œil d’un arbre ou plutôt
comme un arbre humain. En même temps cet arbre oculaire n’est qu’un grand pénis
rose (ignoble) ivre de soleil et il suggère ou sollicite un malaise: la nausée, le désespoir
écœurant du vertige.35

Bataille makes a number of assertions here which will impact upon my

reading of his literary works. Of most importance is his refusal of scientific
observation in any attempt to understand the perceptive process. In its place,
Bataille posits a qualified return to certain aspects of mythology, enacted
through spectacles of physical sacrifice. This new sacrifice consummates the
refusal of any scientific attempt to understand the world through physical
sensation or detached observation. Only an unmediated sexual rapport and
the sun’s light, which blinds us to all else, remains. Bataille evokes
des dégagements d’énergie au sommet du crâne aussi violents et aussi crus que ceux
qui rendent si horrible à voir la protubérance anale de quelques singes [;] un organe
sexuel d’une sensibilité inouïe, qui aurait vibré en me faisant pousser des cris atroces,
les cris d’une éjaculation grandiose mais puante [;] [une] fantaisie d’œil pinéal comme
une fantaisie excrémentielle.36

By and large, Bataille posits the œil pinéal as a focal point of counter-
haptic perception which excretes inner visions and sensations, rather than
receiving sights and sensations from the body’s exterior. It is worth noting,
however, the manner in which Bataille imagines the bursting forth of this
new eye: ‘[l]e tranchant de la hache s’enfoncerait dans ce crâne imaginaire
comme les couperets des marchandes qui fendent en deux parties d’un seul
coup violemment frappé sur le billot la tête écœurante d’un lapin écorché’.37
In short, Bataille presents the arrival of this old but recuperated eye not

35 Ibid., p. 27.
36 Bataille, ‘Le Jésuve’, p. 19.
37 Ibid., pp. 19–20.
54 Chapter 1

as an inner part of the body bursting outward, but as a violent, incisively

haptic blow which is struck from outside the body. Unlike the rabbit’s skull,
however, the œil pinéal’s cranial berth remains vital and potent. In summary,
the œil pinéal’s emergence is presented as being a speculatively excretive sen-
sory phenomenon, yet Bataille’s rabbit skull simile suggests that the burst-
ing forth of the œil pinéal would in fact be an incisive sensory experience.

Hétérologie

Many of Bataille’s articles – particularly those of 1927 to 1935 – shun any

attempt to ascribe sens to haptic perception (or any other sensory phenom-
enon). We have already seen how, in several published and unpublished
articles from this period, Bataille claims that sens should instead be placed
firmly beyond the vocabulary of scientific or philosophical discourse. He
terms this refusal of scientific and philosophical vocabulary hétérologie.
Much of the apparent discontinuity between Bataille’s literary and critical
treatments of haptic perception can be attributed to the concept of hété-
rologie, so let us analyse his understanding of the term before going any
further. This ‘[s]cience de ce qui est tout autre’38 is defined most clearly
in Bataille’s unpublished journal article from 1933, ‘La Valeur d’usage de
D. A. F. de Sade (1)’: ‘[a]vant tout, l’hétérologie s’oppose à n’importe quelle
représentation homogène du monde, c’est-à-dire à n’importe quel système
philosophique’.39 Riegl’s attempts to understand previous civilisations’ use
of visual and tactile space in terms of their philosophical conception of
their world would therefore be a futile undertaking, in Bataillean terms.40

38 Bataille, ‘La Valeur d’usage de D. A. F. de Sade (1)’, reprinted in Bataille, Œuvres

complètes, II, pp. 54–69 (p. 61, n.). (Sections of this article were also published post-
humously in L’Arc, 32 (1967).)
39 Ibid., p. 62.
40 See for example the account of ancient Egyptian and Greek aesthetics offered by
Riegl in a page-for-page reprint of his 1901 text, Die Spätrömische Kunst-Industrie
Bataille and the Haptic 55

Bataille tells us that hétérologie has very specific applications:

Seuls tombent sous le coup de l’hétérologie en tant que science, le processus de

limitation d’une part, l’étude des réactions d’antagonisme (expulsion) et d’amour
(réabsorption) violemment alternées, obtenues en posant l’élément hétérogène,
d’autre part. Cet élément lui-même reste indéfinissable et ne peut être fixé que par
des négations. Le caractère spécifique des matières fécales ou du spectre comme du
temps ou de l’espace illimités ne peut être l’objet que d’une série de négations telles
qu’absence de toute commune mesure possible, irrationalité, etc …41

It is the act of excretion which holds Bataille’s attention here. Physicality and
the philosophising that it brings with it are not only rejected but forcibly,
viscerally ejected from his understanding of presence and absence. The con-
cept of what is present is no longer quantifiable by tangible measurements
or demonstrable rationale. Presence is instead defined by its immeasurable
characteristics. The problems that this concept poses for any attempt to
explain Bataille’s writing haptically are obvious. Writing of philosophy’s
urge to explain the world systematically, Bataille remarks that

[d]e telles représentations ont toujours pour but de priver autant que possible l’univers
où nous vivons de toute source d’excitation et de développer une espèce humaine
servile apte uniquement à la fabrication, à la consommation rationnelle et à la conser-
vation des produits. […] L’hétérologie […] procède au renversement complet du processus
philosophique qui d’instrument d’appropriation qu’il était passe au service de l’excrétion
et introduit la revendication des satisfactions violentes impliquées par l’existence sociale.42

The views outlined in the statement above place a potentially trouble-

some emphasis upon spatial ‘appropriation’. Might the definition of hété-
rologie given here imply that the postulations of haptic experience presented

Nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn (Vienna: Druck und Verlag der Kaiserlich-
Königlichen Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1901; repr. Paderborn: Salzwasser Verlag,
2012), pp. 63–64. (For an English translation of these passages, see Riegl, Late Roman
Art Industry, trans. by Ralf Winkes (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider Editore, 1985),
pp. 72–73.)
41 Bataille, ‘La Valeur d’usage de D. A. F. de Sade (1)’, p. 63.
42 Ibid., pp. 62–63; emphasis in original.
56 Chapter 1

by Riegl, Marks, Paterson and Nancy are simply outmoded philosophies of

spatial perception? Haptic perception as it is defined by Marks in particu-
lar does, after all, describe a form of sensory stimulation which demands
that the objects which excite it be grasped. Such grasping could surely be
interpreted as an appropriation of space. Bataille’s qualification of hété-
rologie through scatologie does little to answer this potential problem with
Paterson’s subsequent theory. This becomes especially clear when Bataille
explains the manner in which the less abstruse ‘doublet’ of hétérologie ope-
rates upon the human mind: ‘c’est surtout le terme de scatologie (science de
l’ordure) qui garde dans les circonstances actuelles (spécialisation du sacré)
une valeur expressive incontestable, comme doublet d’un terme abstrait tel
qu’hétérologie’.43 Bataille adds that

[à] partir du moment où l’effort de compréhension rationnelle aboutit à la contra-

diction, la pratique de la scatologie intellectuelle commande la déjection des éléments
inassimilables [,] ce qui revient à constater vulgairement qu’un éclat de rire est la
seule issue imaginable, définitivement terminale, et non le moyen, de la spéculation
philosophique.44

As Bataille explains, at the moment that rational thought (or percep-

tion) faces contradiction, the mind reacts physically, viscerally, to that
mental conflict through laughter. Whether this constitutes a haptic experi-
ence is debatable. Laughter – the action which turns abstract hétérologie into
scatologie’s practical rejection of philosophy as a means of understanding
perception – cannot be seen or touched. But the facial and bodily behav-
iours which give rise to that laughter – and result from it – can be. Haptic or
not, the postulation of hétérologie in relation to scatologie45 suggests as much
distaste for the purely theoretical as it does for the materialistic. It is almost
as if Bataille cannot resolve which of the two domains he dislikes more.

43 Ibid., p. 62, n.; emphasis in original.

44 Ibid., p. 64; emphasis in original.
45 See Patrick ffrench, After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community (London: Legenda,
2007), pp. 31–38 for a detailed analysis of the differences between hétérologie and
scatologie.
Bataille and the Haptic 57

L’Informe

Bataille’s hesitation appears to be longstanding. A similarly disaffected

indecision between theory and the perceptual experience of bodily sensa-
tion is apparent in his definition of the informe, which is included in a 1929
Documents article of the same name:

Un dictionnaire commencerait à partir du moment où il ne donnerait plus le sens

mais les besognes des mots. Ainsi informe n’est pas seulement un adjectif ayant tel
sens mais un terme servant à déclasser, exigeant généralement que chaque chose ait sa
forme. Ce qu’il désigne n’a ses droits dans aucun sens et se fait écraser partout comme
une araignée ou un ver de terre. Il faudrait en effet, pour que les hommes académiques
soient contents, que l’univers prenne forme. La philosophie entière n’a pas d’autre
but: il s’agit de donner une redingote à ce qui est, une redingote mathématique. Par
contre affirmer que l’univers ne ressemble à rien et n’est qu’informe revient à dire que
l’univers est quelque chose comme une araignée ou un crachat.46

This definition of the informe is instructive. Most apparent is its sundering

of rationalist links between ‘forme’ and ‘sens’. Bataille insists that philoso-
phy’s goal is to unify these concepts, which he considers irreconcilable.
Simultaneously, he points out the danger of thinking of the informe’s non-
resemblance to anything as being constitutive of a ‘thing’ in its own right.
This would amount to the very philosophical appropriation which we
see Bataille at such pains to avoid in the article on Sade analysed above.
Language’s role as bringer of sens is refuted by Bataille, who seeks to reify
the demonstrative impositions of sens from the area of space that they are
intended to designate. Moreover, the philosophical desire to ‘clothe’ the
universe in a frock coat of mathematically derived sens shrouds amorphous
form with fixed form. This means that empirical thinking provides a con-
struct which explains why we see and feel the world as we do. Unfortunately,
these constructs are also a stumbling block to the acquisition of knowledge
precisely because they render non-existent any perceptive experience which

46 Bataille, ‘Informe’, Documents, 7 (1929). Reprinted in Bataille, Œuvres complètes, I,

p. 217 (p. 217; emphasis in original).
58 Chapter 1

cannot be schematised mathematically or reconstructed using philosophi-

cal terminology.
In this context, Bataille’s choice of the term besogne or ‘task’ is also
rather odd, since to perceive a change in what is formless (or informe)
would prove difficult without imposing a formative pattern upon that
formlessness. By defining besogne as the absence of sens, however, Bataille
imposes form and order upon our understanding of the word besogne. Yet,
to borrow a phrase from Patrick ffrench’s The Cut, the Bataillean informe
‘ruins mimesis, ruins resemblance, the possibility of saying what the uni-
verse is “like”’.47 The only obvious way to reconcile these characteristics of
the informe is to treat it as a language which oscillates between sens and
besogne, unaware that it does so.48
However, as ffrench suggests, ‘[t]he operation of the informe is a
reminder of the body, of the low (‘le bas’), […] not in order to propose a
primary physicality or sexuality, but for the purposes of desublimation’.49
The characteristics of the informe make us wonder how the components
of haptic experience in Bataille’s writing can be analysed if – as is the case
with his definition of the informe – he refuses consistently to attribute any
of the sens which the haptic demands to the language that he uses. The
solution is not to be found in mathematical formulae or philosophical
schematisations of truth, according to Bataille. In a subsequent Documents
article, he states that ‘l’espace est resté voyou et il est difficile d’énumérer ce
qu’il engendre. Il est discontinu comme on est escroc, au grand désespoir
de son philosophe-papa’.50 Space is an outlaw: it rejects all philosophically
or linguistically led attempts at categorisation or homogenisation. The

47 Patrick ffrench, The Cut/Reading Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil (Oxford: British Academy/
OUP, 1996), p. 20.
48 A sentiment echoed by Roland Barthes’s assertion that the text of Bataille’s first
novella, Histoire de l’œil, exhibits a proto-structuralist ‘vibration’ between rationalist
conceptions of ‘sens’ and ‘non-sens’ (see Barthes, ‘La Métaphore de l’œil’, in Essais
critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964), pp. 238–45 (p. 244)).
49 ffrench, The Cut, p. 21; emphasis in original.
50 Bataille, ‘Espace’, in Documents, 1 (deuxième année) (1930). Reprinted in Bataille,
Œuvres complètes, I, p. 227 (p. 227).
Bataille and the Haptic 59

difficulties which this poses for haptic differentiation between tactile and
visual space are clear; Bataille appears to reject the distinction between
haptic and optical surfaces and spaces upon which the theories of Riegl,
Marks and Paterson rely. How then can we write about Bataille and haptic
perception? Nancy’s concept of excription provides us with the answer.

Reconciling Bataille and the Haptic

In spite of the difficulties in reconciling Bataille’s writing with haptic per-

ception, all is not lost. The following extract from an article written in 1938
suggests another dimension to Bataille’s thinking of physical perception
which is worthy of our attention:

L’existence n’est vraiment humaine – elle ne devient différente de l’existence des

roches ou des oiseaux – que dans la mesure où elle sait se donner un sens. Un homme
qui mènerait une vie si obscure qu’elle n’aurait de sens ni pour lui ni pour les autres
aurait même aussi peu d’existence qu’une algue: […] rien de beau, rien de grand. […]
Le sens de la vie humaine apparaît donc lié à des chances rares.51

Even here, Bataille refuses to understand human perception on any basis

other than self-determination and chance. Bataille’s distaste for any sys-
temic attempt to quantify life experience would appear to scupper any
haptic interpretation of his work more or less definitively. But it is at this
moment that the exscriptive understanding of writing put forward by
Jean-Luc Nancy comes into its own.
I stated earlier that Bataille’s postulation of the informe leaves us with
a form of language which oscillates between sens and besogne, unaware
that it does so (and thereby pre-empting Roland Barthes’s understanding

51 Bataille, ‘La Chance’, Verve, I, 4 (1938). Reprinted in Bataille, Œuvres complètes, I,

pp. 541–44 (p. 541).
60 Chapter 1

of Histoire de l’œil’s narrative as a form of ‘vibration’).52 If we add to this

postulation the hétérogène’s involuntary refusal of physicality as scientifi-
cally observable sens, we arrive at the image of the Acéphale. This headless,
muscular figure, sketched by the painter André Masson, has a death’s head
in place of its genitalia. It was the logo of a rarely-published magazine also
named Acéphale, which was founded by Bataille in 1936.53
The Acéphale’s image offers us a simplified though accurate summary
of the human body as Bataillean theory portrays it: the human head is no
longer the centre of perception. The new centre of the body’s perceptive
functions is a vision of mortality (the death’s head). In Masson’s sketches,
this image of death appears in the area where previously genitalia would
have defined the body’s geographical (though not its intellectual) centre.
Under the sign of the Acéphale, sight and sensuous touch are rendered
deathly. As ffrench reminds us, however, this morbid sexuality is neither
all-consuming nor definitive of the Bataillean human body.54 To justify
this position, let us examine a recent comment made by Nancy in Corpus:

le corps n’est pas un lieu d’écriture […]. Le corps, sans doute, c’est qu’on écrit, mais
ce n’est absolument pas où on écrit, […] toujours ce que l’écriture excrit. Il n’y a
d’excription que par écriture, mais l’excrit reste cet autre bord que l’inscription, tout
en signifiant sur un bord, ne cesse obstinément d’indiquer comme son autre-propre
bord. Ainsi, de toute écriture, un corps est l’autre-propre bord; un corps […] est
donc aussi le tracé, le tracement et la trace. […] Écrire, lire, affaire de tact […] à la
condition que le tact ne se concentre pas, ne prétende pas – comme fait le toucher
cartésien – au privilège d’une immédiateté qui mettrait en fusion tous les sens et ‘le’
sens. Le toucher aussi, le toucher d’abord est local, modal, fractal.55

This explanation of how physical perception may be expressed through

excription suits Bataille’s writing well; the excrit explores the fractured, local-
ised qualities of tactile perception and interaction which Bataille’s theory

52 See Barthes, ‘La Métaphore de l’œil’, p. 244.

53 All of the articles that Bataille contributed to Acéphale between June 1936 and June
1939 are collected in Bataille, Œuvres complètes, I, pp. 442–92, 545–58.
54 ffrench makes this assertion in more general terms in The Cut, p. 22.
55 Nancy, Corpus, p. 76; emphasis in original.
Bataille and the Haptic 61

postulates, but does not ‘know’ that it does. As we see from the quotation
above, the excrit leaves indecipherable visual traces of tactile perception’s
intermittent communication with the body’s other senses. Through the
necessarily partial and brief interaction of sense, vision and touch that it
incites, the text can therefore be said to exhibit haptic qualities. But what
about the act of reading the text? ffrench gives the following reply:
The informe […] would be a discursive operation, a move in the play of writing. This
comes down to proposing writing, and reading, as a resistance to the recovery or
sublimation of sight. In their play, that is, the forward movement of their structu-
ring/destructuring, they would operate from a point of blindness, a position of risk
as if at the edge of an abyss.56

To adapt ffrench’s stance, the haptic is at once present and absent in

Bataille’s theoretical critique and literary prose (though the quotation
above refers specifically to Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil). In ffrench’s terms,
the haptic operates as a precariously unbalanced blind spot in Bataille’s
text, oscillating from point to point with varying degrees of perceptibility.
Because of this fact, the haptic sensibilities of Bataille’s texts are to be found
in his accounts of physicality. These accounts teeter between visceral expe-
riences of attraction and the physical repulsion that follows them. These
textual remnants express the uncomfortable sight and sensation of moving
from distant visual (optical) balance to proximal (haptic) imbalance and
back again. Such movements are uncertain and ambiguous, tenuous and
fleeting. They are, nevertheless, there to be read and interpreted. I shall
now examine their various manifestations in Bataille’s literary works and
consider how strongly his critical stance on haptic perception resonates
within his prose.57

56 ffrench, The Cut, p. 175; emphasis in original.

57 Whilst undertaking such analyses, we must remember the Bataillean injunction
against the philosophical telos of the projet, which appears repeatedly in L’Expérience
intérieure: ‘dans le projet, il y avait simplement rejet du désir. Le projet est expres-
sément le fait de l’esclave, c’est le travail et le travail exécuté par qui ne jouit pas du
fruit’ (Bataille, L’Expérience intérieure, p. 71).
62 Chapter 1

Histoire de l’œil

Histoire de l’œil is Bataille’s first novella and contains many instances of

haptic experience, though none of them are ever designated as ‘haptique’.
The text was first published in 1928, in very limited numbers (fewer than 150
copies) under the pen name of Lord Auch (‘Dieu se soulageant’, according
to a passage from Le Petit, a short text first published in 1943).58 Bataille
would rewrite significant portions of Histoire de l’œil for its subsequent
printings, but its plot remained largely unaltered. Though a close read-
ing of these textual evolutions would be rewarding, constraints of time
and space dictate that I focus upon a handful of scenes from the 1928
edition of the text.59 The book is split into two distinct sections. The first
is entitled ‘Récit’ and is just that: a first-person account, narrated by an
unnamed 16-year-old male. The novel’s shorter second section is entitled
‘Coïncidences’ in the 1928 version, but was renamed ‘Réminiscences’ in
subsequent editions. These few pages, narrated by a second, unnamed male,
discuss some ‘actual’ events in the narrator’s life which explain the use of
certain imagery in the ‘Récit’.

Marcelle and the Haptic Experience

The narrator of the ‘Récit’ meets Simone, a very distant relative of approxi-
mately the same age, on the beach of an unnamed village. The couple are
engaging in mutual masturbation in nearby undergrowth when a girl of
their age named Marcelle, ‘la plus touchante de nos amies’, runs past them.
The unhappy teenager collapses in tears near the couple and they waste

58 Le Petit (1943) is reprinted in Bataille, Œuvres complètes, III, pp. 33–70 (p. 59).
59 The original 1928 draft of Histoire de l’œil is reprinted in Bataille, Œuvres complètes, I,
pp. 9–78. All subsequent references are to this version.
Bataille and the Haptic 63

little time in sexually assaulting her. Tellingly, it is Marcelle’s footsteps

which first attract the couple’s attention. The moment that she ceases to
be mobile, the duo pounce upon her:
le pas recommença […], presque une course, et je vis paraître […] une ravissante jeune
fille blonde, Marcelle, la plus pure et la plus touchante de nos amies. [N]ous étions
trop fortement contractés dans nos attitudes horribles pour bouger même d’un doigt
et ce fut soudain notre malheureuse amie qui s’effondra et se blottit dans l’herbe en
sanglotant. Alors seulement nous nous arrachâmes à notre extravagante étreinte pour
nous jeter sur un corps livré à l’abandon. Simone troussa la jupe, arracha la culotte et
me montra avec ivresse un nouveau cul aussi beau, aussi pur que le sien: je l’embrassai
avec rage tout en branlant celui de Simone dont les jambes se refermèrent sur les reins
de l’étrange Marcelle qui ne cachait déjà plus que ses sanglots.
– Marcelle, lui criai-je, je t’en supplie, ne pleure plus. Je veux que tu m’embrasses
la bouche …
Simone elle-même caressait ses beaux cheveux plats en lui donnant partout des
baisers affectueux.60

It is Marcelle’s shifting state – moving from untouchable mobility to tangi-

ble immobility – that invites the couple’s (unwanted) attention here. This
fact raises some issues concerning any haptic understanding of the passage.
As I stated earlier, Riegl explains the haptic in terms of static, three-
dimensional spaces and figures whose surface details impress themselves
upon an observer’s eyes. Marks meanwhile qualifies haptic visuality as a cin-
ematic, two-dimensional evocation of spaces and figures whose movement
incites the viewer to touch them. In the passage above, the couple only attain
sensorial satisfaction through impeding Marcelle’s movements, undressing
her as they wish to. Yet this impedance occurs in three dimensions whose
confines move when Marcelle struggles to get free of the couple’s grasp.
Marcelle’s oscillation between moving and static object of desire means that
she does not necessarily fall within either Riegl’s or Marks’s understandings
of haptic interaction. The assault begins when Marcelle becomes motion-
less and the couple are able to overcome the paralyses of their own bodies

60 Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, p. 16.

64 Chapter 1

(‘nous étions trop fortement contractés dans nos attitudes horribles pour
bouger même d’un doigt’). The renewed vigour of their sensual exertions is
such that they efface Marcelle’s kinaesthetic presence: no mention is made
of her attempting to fight off her attackers in the extract above. Moreover,
her body becomes a series of visually and tactilely stimulating locations (her
behind, her genitals, the small of her back, her tearful eyes.)
The unveiling of Marcelle’s genitals occurs during the enforced con-
tainment of her body by another female body (Simone) and that of the
male narrator. This bilateral, gendered containment or immobilisation of
(Marcelle’s) female form reveals a vision (of Marcelle’s erogenous zones)
which solicits tactile interaction from both male and female bodies. But
this sight and the tactile interaction it solicits is also narcotising because
these sensory stimuli coincide temporally, because they are haptic. The
‘ivresse’ which Simone experiences in exposing Marcelle’s most intimate
(feminine) areas to her male partner suggests a deadening of conscious
perception rather than a sharpening of its acuity.
Sight leads to a violent tactile experience in this case, but also results
in a displacement of the narrator’s physical penetration. It is Simone –
and not Marcelle – that the narrator penetrates digitally (‘Simone
troussa la jupe, arracha la culotte et me montra avec ivresse un nouveau
cul aussi joli que le sien: je l’embrassai avec rage tout en branlant celui
de Simone’). The inviting sight and touch of Marcelle’s anus invites the
narrator’s oral interaction with it. This interaction results in the pen-
etration of a different object of desire than that which incited it. It is as
if the tactile element of haptic vision is deflected or redirected by the
narrator’s oral impositions upon Marcelle. As the mouth is the seat of
language, we may infer from the above passage that the narrator’s linguistic
interaction with carnality (his kissing of Marcelle’s buttocks) leads to a
displacement of haptic experience’s constitutive elements (as he focuses
his sight and touch upon Marcelle’s anus, he is in fact penetrating Simone’s
anus with his finger). The narrator’s oral interaction with Marcelle’s skin
leads the language which articulates that contact astray (while the narra-
tor penetrates Simone, he demands to kiss Marcelle’s mouth: ‘“Marcelle,”
lui criai-je, “je t’en supplie, ne pleure plus. Je veux que tu m’embrasses la
bouche …”’).
Bataille and the Haptic 65

The passage above is a fictitious account of haptic perception being

perverted by the fleshy surfaces which define it.61 This perversion occurs
in the midst of a sexual assault – a profound moral transgression. This fact
suggests that there is a discernable moral and ethical ambivalence to haptic
experience which is as unspoken as the haptic concept is in Bataille’s writ-
ing. The visually impressive solicitations of haptic experience exert their
influence upon considerably more than just the eyes, on this occasion.
In the name of transgressing bourgeois morals, Bataille wishes to assert
that physical presence confers an automatic right to touch. However, the
violence unleashed in the passage above by desirous looking and touch-
ing seems excessive and disturbing, to say the least. The ethical and moral
ambivalence of haptic perception in this regard is not immediately appar-
ent in Riegl’s theories, even if Marks, Paterson and Nancy develop aspects
of this problem in their writings on haptic perception. In the attack on
Marcelle and the events which follow it, the sexually defined différence
that is so important to Nancy’s recent postulations of the haptic finds an
uncomfortable precedent. (‘Le corps se rapporte au corps de l’autre sexe.
Dans ce rapport, il y va de sa corporéité en tant qu’elle touche par le sexe
à sa limite: elle jouit, c’est-à-dire que le corps est secoué au dehors de lui-
même’).62 Contrarily, the ‘respect of difference’ demanded by Marks’s haptic
visuality is certainly not pre-empted by Bataille’s description of the attack,
even if a ‘concomitant loss of self, in the presence of the other’ is manifest
in the sexually aggressive behaviours of Simone and the narrator.63
The possibility that the perceptive functions of human sensory organs
may be affected by differences in gender is raised repeatedly in Bataille’s
prose works. During the attack upon Marcelle, for example, her body is
described as being ‘nouveau’ and ‘étrange’, even though her physical pres-
ence is the same as Simone’s in a narrowly defined, sexual sense. Equally,
Marcelle’s body can be said to differ little from that of the narrator on any

61 Lozier suggests that Bataillean literary prose is a form of ‘terrorisme littéraire’ based
upon a non-cathartic perversion of the processes of reading and writing (De l’abject
et du sublime, pp. 76–77, 83–86).
62 Nancy, Corpus, p. 162.
63 Marks, The Skin of the Film, pp. 192–93.
66 Chapter 1

basis other than the sexual, since both bodies belong to the same human
genus. It is not entirely clear from the narrator’s words whether it is he,
Simone or both of the characters who feel Marcelle’s form to be ‘nouveau’ or
‘étrange’. In haptic terms, we must wonder whether this newness or strange-
ness transcends gender. We shall return to this question in due course.

A Social Encounter with the Haptic

When next Marcelle sees her attackers, her blushing, which is tangible only
in terms of the heat it radiates dermally and the reddening of her facial skin,
is sufficient invitation for the couple to insist that she lunch with them.
Though unwilling, Marcelle allows herself to be talked into this, only for
the ‘lunch’ to turn into a drunken orgy. While the handful of teenage boys
and girls also present dance increasingly salaciously, Marcelle refuses to join
them. Instead, she stands blushing and motionless:

Simone seule dansant un charleston frénétique montra ses jambes à tout le monde
jusqu’au cul et les autres jeunes filles invitées à danser seules de la même façon étaient
déjà beaucoup joyeuses pour se gêner. Et sans doute elles avaient des pantalons, mais
ils bridaient lâchement le cul sans cacher grand-chose. Seule, Marcelle ivre et silen-
cieuse refusa de danser.64

Once more, Marcelle’s visible lack of movement spurs those around her
into action and things take a turn for the worse:

Tout à coup, Simone tomba à terre à la terreur des autres. Une convulsion de plus
en plus forte l’agitait, les vêtements en désordre, le cul en l’air, comme si elle avait
l’épilepsie, […] elle prononçait des mots presque inarticulés:
– Pisse-moi dessus … pisse-moi dans le cul …, répétait-elle avec une sorte de soif.
Marcelle regardait avec fixité cette spectacle: elle avait encore une fois rougi
jusqu’au sang. Mais elle me dit alors, sans même me voir, qu’elle voulait enlever sa

64 Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, p. 19.

Bataille and the Haptic 67

robe. Je la lui arrachai à moitié en effet […]; elle ne garda que ses bas et sa ceinture
et s’étant à peine laissé branler et baiser à la bouche par moi, elle traversa la chambre
comme une somnambule et gagna une grande armoire normande où elle s’enfermera
après avoir murmuré quelques mots à l’oreille de Simone.
Elle voulait se branler dans cette armoire et suppliait qu’on la laissât tranquille.65

As we see, Marcelle only moves when she sees Simone rolling on the floor,
demanding to be urinated on by the males around her. Rather than seeking
haptic interaction with her attackers or the other party attendees through
sexual relations or other skin-to-skin contact, Marcelle seeks to place an
extracorporeal boundary around her desires and her haptic sensations. By
doing so, she deprives the other party attendees of the sight and touch of
her rendering her inner desires tangible through masturbation. Aside from
blushing momentarily before entering the wardrobe, she does not allow
others to witness how her erotic visions manifest themselves upon her
skin. While the other teenagers perform a variety of sexual acts before one
another’s eyes and upon one another’s skin, Marcelle denies them either
sight or touch of her carnal pleasures.
Unfortunately for her, the wooden confines of the wardrobe that
Marcelle places between herself and her peers whilst engaging in a moment
of autoeroticism cannot contain (or conceal) perceptible indications of
her desires. The sounds made by her orgasmic body crashing against the
wooden walls that surround her draw the others’ attention. Marcelle’s
body then further denies her wish to keep her autoerotic pleasures private
when she urinates during orgasm and the urine begins to trickle under the
wardrobe door:
un étrange bruit d’eau suivi de l’apparition d’un filet puis d’un ruissellement au bas de
la porte de l’armoire: la malheureuse Marcelle pissait dans son armoire en se branlant.
[L]’éclat de rire absolument ivre qui suivit dégénéra rapidement en une débauche de
chutes de corps, de jambes et de culs en l’air, de jupes mouillées et de foutre. Les rires
se produisaient comme des hoquets idiots et involontaires, mais ne réussissaient qu’à
peine à interrompre une ruée brutale vers les culs et les verges.66

65 Ibid., p. 20.
66 Ibid., pp. 20–21.
68 Chapter 1

Nobody laughs at the carnal disorder that Simone displays because the
simultaneously tangible and visible confusion of sensory stimuli emitted
by her desirous body are ‘terrifying’ in their unexpectedness. Contrarily,
Marcelle places a haptic barrier around her carnal desires by entering the
wardrobe to masturbate. The other partygoers’ contemptuous ridiculing
of Marcelle’s orgasmic behaviour implies that, in a communal context, the
unpredictable, simultaneous interactions of sight and touch that the desir-
ing body offers are to be taken seriously. Enclosed or concealed enjoyment
of sensory stimuli are not.
In her moment of autoerotic passion, Marcelle experiences the negative
reality of Bataille’s subsequently postulated ‘possibilité d’unir en un point
précis deux sortes de connaissance jusqu’ici ou étrangères l’une à l’autre
ou confondues grossièrement […], en un point où rit la foule unanime’.67
The terror of Marcelle’s orgasmically sensual but now senseless confusion
only becomes apparent when the narrator attempts to extricate her from
the wardrobe:
dans la pissotière de fortune qui lui servait maintenant de prison […] Marcelle […]
tremblait et grelottait de fièvre [;] elle manifesta une terreur maladive [.] [ J]’étais pâle,
[…] ensanglanté, habillé de travers. Derrière moi, dans un désordre innommable, des
corps effrontément dénudés et malades gisaient presque inertes. Au cours de l’orgie,
des débris de verres avaient profondément coupé et mis en sang deux d’entre nous
[…]. Il en résultait une odeur de sang, de sperme, d’urine et de vomi qui me faisait
déjà presque reculer d’horreur, mais le cri inhumain qui se déchira dans le gosier de
Marcelle était encore beaucoup plus terrifiant.68

Marcelle feels irredeemably sullied and is unready to join the ‘unclean’

masses outside the margins of sensorial ‘propriety’ that the wardrobe’s
fixed panels offer her.69 The prospect of venturing beyond her self-imposed
sensual and sensory limits proves too much for her:

67 Bataille, L’Expérience intérieure, p. 11; emphasis in original.

68 Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, p. 21.
69 As the narrator guesses too late (see ibid., p. 43).
Bataille and the Haptic 69

Je dois dire […] que Simone […] dormait tranquillement, le ventre en l’air, la main
encore à la fourrure, le visage apaisé […]. Marcelle qui s’était jetée à travers la chambre
en trébuchant et en criant […] s’effondra en faisant entendre une kyrielle de hurle-
ments de plus en plus inhumains.70

That Marcelle’s horror is brought about through a combination of pro-

prioceptive faculties (sight, sound, smell and the threat of taste or touch)
makes it all the more difficult for the narrator to understand. Significantly,
Marcelle’s indecipherable words are referred to as a ‘kyrielle’, as a stream
(or string) of cries which are inextricably linked with physical actions. The
combination of Marcelle’s unabated movement and oracy, coupled with
the apparent impossibility of enacting physically the anguish that she is
experiencing mentally are what shock the narrator most. Neither move-
ments nor words were tolerated from Marcelle when the couple attacked her
near the beach. It is therefore unsurprising that in the following quotation,
Marcelle attacks her mother when she attempts to restrict her daughter’s
movements. Marcelle’s anguish not only transcends mental and physi-
cal mediation, it consumes them, just as Marcelle attempts to consume
portions of her mother’s face when she and other parents are alerted by
Marcelle’s screams:71

Nos camarades eux-mêmes s’étaient mis […] à produire un éclat délirant de cris en
larmes: on aurait cru qu’on venait de les mettre tous en feu comme des torches vives.
[…] Marcelle restée nue continuait tout en gesticulant à exprimer par des cris de dou-
leur déchirants une souffrance morale et une terreur impossibles à supporter; on la vit
mordre sa mère au visage, au milieu des bras qui tentaient vainement de la maîtriser.72

I asked earlier whether the haptic experience of a given event is the

same for both men and women in Bataille’s prose works. The wardrobe
incident at the party suggests that it is; the bodily horror that Marcelle

70 Ibid., p. 21.
71 Hollier refers to such inexplicable horror as a ‘terrorisme de jouissance’ in his
1992 essay, ‘La Tombe de Bataille’ (p. 84). This essay is reprinted in Denis Hollier,
Les Dépossédées (Paris, Minuit, 1992), pp. 73–99.
72 Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, p. 22.
70 Chapter 1

experiences subsequently is transmitted to all of the (male and female)

partygoers bar Simone, as if it were a virus.

A Sensory Prison

With Marcelle now incarcerated in an asylum, it is the couple’s desire to

hear her transcendent cries once more. Following a botched first attempt
to ‘free’ Marcelle from her asylum, ‘une sorte de château entouré d’un
parc muré, isolé sur une falaise dominant la mer’,73 the couple stand in
the asylum grounds, staring at what they believe to be Marcelle’s window.
Suddenly, she appears:
Quand elle nous aperçut enfin, [e]lle nous cria mais nous n’entendions rien. Nous lui
faisions signe. Elle avait rougi jusqu’aux oreilles. Simone qui pleurait presque, et dont
je caressais affectueusement le front, lui envoya des baisers auxquels elle répondit sans
sourire; Simone laissa tomber ensuite la main le long du ventre jusqu’à la fourrure.
Marcelle l’imita […]. Chose curieuse, elle avait une ceinture blanche et des bas blancs
alors que la noire Simone, dont le cul chargeait ma main, avait une ceinture noire
et des bas noirs. Cependant, les deux jeunes filles se branlaient avec un geste court
et brusque, face à face dans la nuit hurlante. Elles se tenaient presque immobiles et
tendues, le regard rendu fixe par une joie immodérée.74

As each woman masturbates to the sight of the other masturbating,

they are shown to be opposite sides of the same sensory coin by their con-
trasting undergarments. Though Marcelle is geographically and mentally
distant from Simone, she is able to partake of the same visual sensual-
ity. In this instance, sight is a (self-) touching sensory experience of the
kind that Nancy would postulate subsequently in his concept of zonage.
Indeed, the disjuncture of Simone and Marcelle’s mental states is bridged
by their visual sharing of an intimate touch at a distance, much as Marks’s

73 Ibid., p. 27.
74 Ibid., p. 31.
Bataille and the Haptic 71

understanding of haptic visuality postulates filmed surfaces tapping our

subconscious desires to see to and to touch, and to be seen and touched
ourselves.75 Neither woman in Bataille’s narrative can make her thoughts
heard above the storm by any means other than the simultaneously visual
and tactile moment of autoeroticism in which they indulge.

A Lingering Glance?

In keeping with Histoire de l’œil’s general motif of objects of desire moving

from distant vision into proximal sight and touch (the narrator and Simone;
the couple and Marcelle at the asylum), Simone’s encounters with the
human eye exhibit a growing propensity for the proximal at the expense
of the distant. When Marcelle hangs herself shortly after the couple finally
‘liberate’ her from the asylum, the thing which Simone finds most horrify-
ing about Marcelle’s corpse is that her eyes no longer respond to physical
stimuli. Even when Simone urinates on them, she is unable to make them
react. They remain open, but are simultaneously unseeing and unfeel-
ing. Where once Simone saw and felt life in Marcelle, no haptic response
remains. It is next to the corpse that Simone and the narrator first have full
intercourse; the lack of responsiveness of Marcelle’s eyes demands a tactile
interaction between the couple’s living bodies:
Simone étant encore vierge, je la baisai pour la première fois auprès du cadavre. Cela
nous fit très mal […], le cadavre étant devant elle très irritant, comme s’il lui était
insupportable que cet être semblable à elle ne la sentît plus. Les yeux ouverts surtout
étaient irritants. Étant donné que Simone lui inondait la figure, il était extraordinaire
que ces yeux ne se fermassent pas. Nous étions parfaitement calmes tous les trois […].
[I]l nous était impossible de comprendre ce qui arrivait et bien entendu cela n’est pas
plus compréhensible aujourd’hui que ce jour-là.76

75 See Marks, The Skin of the Film, pp. 183, 192–93.

76 Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, p. 46; emphasis in original.
72 Chapter 1

What results from this situation is a dry, physically painful sexual encoun-
ter between Simone and the narrator. The physical, sexualised poles of
masculinity and femininity that the two characters represent remain vital
and unchangeable while Marcelle lies dead: the lubricious fluidity of her
universal sexual appeal has died with her.77 Nevertheless, the haptic stimu-
lus of her presence, her appeal to both sexes, survives even the death of her
body and the couple feel compelled to have intercourse for the first time
next to her motionless corpse.
Marcelle’s is by no means the only corpse to appear in Histoire de
l’œil. The novella’s final scenes are dominated by the murder of a Seville
priest named Don Aminado. Having throttled the priest during forcible
intercourse while the narrator and Sir Edmond, a perverted English aris-
tocrat, held him down, Simone sees a fly settle on one of Don Aminado’s
dead eyes; it ‘agitait ses longues pattes de cauchemar sur l’étrange globe’.78
As if desiring to mimic the fly’s unpredictable actions, Simone decrees
that ‘[j]e veux jouer avec cet œil’.79 Sir Edmond grants her wish and severs
the priest’s eye. After various sexual activities involving the narrator
and the disembodied eye (including a failed anal insertion), Simone inserts
the severed eye into her vagina. The narrator looks on:

en écartant les cuisses de Simone […], je me trouvai en face de ce que, je me le figure

ainsi, j’attendais […] de la même façon qu’une guillotine attend un cou à trancher.
[M]es yeux me sortaient de la tête, comme s’ils étaient érectiles à force d’horreur;
je vis exactement, dans le vagin velu de Simone, l’œil bleu pâle de Marcelle qui me
regardait en pleurant des larmes d’urine. Des trainées de foutre dans le poil fumant
achevaient de donner à cette vision lunaire un caractère de tristesse désastreuse.80

This tangible vision is one of a desired eye which no longer works; the
tears of urine which the dismembered globe weeps not only demonstrate

77 Lozier (De l’abject et du sublime, pp. 90–91) posits Marcelle’s body as a point of sen-
sual juncture between Simone and the narrator. Mayné establishes the link between
Marcelle and liquefaction (see Georges Bataille, p. 70, n. 80).
78 Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, p. 67.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid., p. 69; emphasis in original.
Bataille and the Haptic 73

its physical displacement, but also its rejection by its new environs. This
transmogrified and moribund eye is now a refugee from all rationality. It
is a paragon of hétérologie and scatologie, existing beyond the material help
of science, philosophy or religion.
The urine tears which the transfigured eye ‘cries’ are acidic, bitter; they
attest to the relocated eye’s sad, disastrous failure to integrate into its newly
carnal and feminine environment, having been severed forever from its mas-
culine and chaste housing in the priest’s eye socket. Were this eye alive in the
body of either Marcelle or Don Aminado, it would be twitching violently
to cleanse itself of the blinding substances which, presently, it allows to pass
without action. In this sense, the eye does not ‘see’ itself; even if it were not
dead, it would be blinded by the vital waste with which it must share its new
physical space.81 Simone’s envaginated eye is dead and cannot be revived;
its unseeing nature may only be re-contextualised as an icon of the informe.
The severed eye sits lifeless in Simone’s sex, yet stimulates her senses and
those of her partner. As Gilles Mayné remarks, the couple’s understanding
of how this perceptual synergy of life and death feeds their desires is tenu-
ous, never entirely graspable either psychologically or haptically.82
No matter how grimly attracted or physically aroused the narrator
is by the scene before him, it is not illuminating. The sight that Bataille’s
narrator beholds is a bastion of hétérologie and scatologie, as well as being
exemplary of the informe. Brian T. Fitch suggests that what the narrator
sees as he looks at the contents of Simone’s sex is a vision of an impenetrable
darkness, of a reality that can be observed and touched at once, but which
can never be assimilated intellectually.83 The operational synergy between
the severed eye and any perceptual faculty that is stimulated by it makes no
sense: neither quantifiable sensory data nor rational argument can explain
their sensory interrelation coherently.84

81 Jean-Luc Steinmetz also notes this in his article ‘Bataille le mithiraque (sur Histoire
de l’œil)’, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 206 (1987), 169–86 (p. 183).
82 See Mayné, Georges Bataille, p. 82.
83 Fitch, Monde à l’envers, texte réversible, p. 46.
84 Mayné (Georges Bataille, p. 77) refers to the severed, envaginated eye as the ‘sommet
du non-sens […] du “non-savoir” culminant de l’érotisme’ in Histoire de l’œil.
74 Chapter 1

In spite of this last detail, we are a long way from witnessing the burst-
ing forth of the Bataillean œil pinéal in the closing scenes of Histoire de
l’œil, even if the simultaneously mortal, ritual and sexual characteristics of
the œil pinéal are evoked. Lest we forget, the œil pinéal looks skyward and
is specifically solar. By contrast, the severed, lunar eye of Don Aminado/
Marcelle looks nowhere: it is merely seen by others.85

Coincidences of Sight and Touch

We have seen in Histoire de l’œil’s ‘Récit’ that haptic ‘coincidences’ of sight

and touch are numerous. But the abiding feature of their perceptive simul-
taneity is that one or more of the interrelated sensory faculties fails to work
properly or in an expected manner with the other(s) involved.86 Sight is par-
ticularly vulnerable to this failing and in the ‘Coïncidences’/‘Réminiscences’
section of Histoire de l’œil, we learn why. The character who narrates this
second section of Bataille’s text is apparently the author of the ‘Récit’. He
says of his blind, crippled and syphilitic father that,
Comme il ne voyait rien sa prunelle se dirigeait très souvent en haut dans le vide,
sous la paupière, et cela arrivait en particulier dans les moments où il pissait. Il avait
d’ailleurs de très grands yeux toujours très ouverts […] et ces grands yeux étaient donc
presque entièrement blancs quand il pissait.87

Much like Marcelle in the ‘Récit’, the second narrator’s father is rooted
to the spot (in this instance, ‘cloué dans son fauteuil’)88 in an involuntary
sacrifice of his own mobility, mind and vision. The father’s unseeing eyes

85 As Fitch (Monde à l’envers, texte réversible, p. 66) may lead us to conclude. However,
as I mentioned earlier, Fitch refuses all recourse to Bataille’s theoretical works (see
ibid., p. 48).
86 Fitch too remarks upon this detail (Monde à l’envers, texte réversible, pp. 38–42).
87 Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, p. 76.
88 Ibid., p. 75.
Bataille and the Haptic 75

are the icons of this sacrifice. The sight of the father’s eventual madness also
rubs off on the second narrator’s mother. According to the second narra-
tor, she would attempt suicide on a number of subsequent occasions.89 The
powerlessness which motivates her desperate acts is in striking contrast to
the likeness between testes – icons of male potency – and the demented
father’s empty eyes. As the second narrator remarks, ‘les couilles humaines
ou animales sont de forme ovoïde et […] leur aspect est le même que celui
du globe oculaire’.90
This final realisation sheds much light on the rest of Bataille’s novella.
The instances of haptic perception contained in Histoire de l’œil are often
violent expressions of desire which are incited by a visible sexual difference.
The couple’s desire to see and touch ostensibly unrealisable aspects of their
sensual desires proves fatal for Marcelle, a young woman whose physical
and carnal presence Simone and the first narrator enjoy. As Don Aminado
finds to his cost, abstinence from carnal interaction (and, by extrapolation,
the adoption of a purely optical approach to life) is no less fatal. In fact,
both Marcelle and Don Aminado eventually die because they attempt to
shield themselves from the prying eyes and bodies of others whilst engag-
ing in haptic expressions of their own inner desires. (Marcelle loses her
mind and eventually hangs herself after attempting to hide the fact that
she is masturbating. Don Aminado also dies after trying to avoid having
penetrative sex in front of his attackers in the church.) In spite of this, the
attempts made by certain characters in Histoire de l’œil to efface sensory
barriers prove no more successful. Even the realisation of Simone’s deepest
desire to create a simultaneously visual and tactile experience of sexuality
through her placing of Don Aminado’s severed eye into her vagina leads
to her body rejecting this new ocular prosthesis by urinating it out of her
sexual orifice. Moreover, whatever sensual power the envaginated eye might
have is born of associative sensory memory, rather than current sensory
synergy between living perceptual faculties. The severed eye is simply a
piece of rotting flesh in the midst of the couple’s various bodily excretions.

89 Ibid., pp. 77–78.

90 Ibid., p. 75.
76 Chapter 1

Even the most haptically vivid of desires cannot overcome death and the
sensory numbness that it entails.
The unresolvable confusion between blindness, virility, impotence and
hapticity which concludes Histoire de l’œil resurfaces in Madame Edwarda,
the next example of Bataille’s prose that I shall be analysing.

Madame Edwarda: Attraction, Reflection and the Haptic

As with Bataille’s earlier novella, Madame Edwarda (1941) was published

under a pseudonym. Pierre Angélique was Bataille’s preferred nom de
plume on this occasion.91 The récit begins with an account of the blunted
sensations of its unnamed male narrator:
La solitude et l’obscurité achevèrent mon ivresse. La nuit était nue dans des rues
désertes et je voulus me dénuder comme elle: je retirai mon pantalon que je mis sur
mon bras […]. Je me sentais grandi. Je tenais dans la main mon sexe droit. […] Inquiet
de quelque bruit, je remis ma culotte et me dirigeai vers les Glaces: j’y retrouvai la
lumière. Au milieu d’un essaim de filles, Madame Edwarda, nue, tirait la langue. Elle
était, à mon goût, ravissante. Je la choisis: elle s’assit près de moi.92

After a curtailed moment of autoeroticism, the narrator goes in search of

someone he can be certain shares his desire to experience sexuality in an
open, easily perceptible manner. He therefore walks to a brothel named
Les Glaces, perhaps in hopes of finding a desirous mirror image of himself,
a female willing to take his sexuality (and her own) in hand.

91 The first edition of Madame Edwarda was published in 1941, but gives a false printing
date of 1937. Bataille’s introductory essay was only added to the third (1956) edition
of the text. All subsequent references will be to this third draft (reprinted in Bataille,
Œuvres complètes, III, pp. 7–31). See Bataille, Œuvres complètes, III, p. 491 for further
details of Madame Edwarda’s various printings.
92 Bataille, Madame Edwarda, p. 19.
Bataille and the Haptic 77

Upon his arrival at Les Glaces, the narrator is first confronted with a
‘swarm’ of women. What distinguishes Edwarda, the naked woman (or queen
bee?) whom the narrator ‘chooses’ from the female swarm which greets him
is not her nakedness, but the fact that she pokes her tongue out at him.
When the narrator interacts with her tactilely as well as visually, Edwarda’s
tongue comes into contact with his own for the first time. Breathlessness
becomes suffocation, their embrace, a terrified, pathogenic death grasp:93
je saisis Edwarda qui s’abandonna: nos deux bouches se mêlèrent en un baiser malade.
[ J]e sentis Madame Edwarda, dont mes mains contenaient les fesses, elle-même en
même temps déchirée: et dans ses yeux plus grands, renversés, la terreur, dans sa
gorge un long étranglement.94

The sense of illness and fright in the proximal exchange between the narra-
tor and Edwarda is communicated haptically through their mutual visual
and tactile contact. Their embrace is so intensely engaging of their sensory
faculties that Edwarda in particular is profoundly scared by the experience.
It seems that the narrator is somehow repelled by her simultaneously visible
and palpable fright because from holding her in his hands, he is described
as clenching the table just a few sentences later:
– Tu veux voir mes guenilles? disait-elle.
Les deux mains agrippées à la table, je me tournai vers elle. Assise, elle maintenait
haute une jambe écartée: pour mieux ouvrir la fente, elle achevait de tirer la peau des
deux mains. Ainsi les ‘guenilles’ d’Edwarda me regardaient, velues et roses, pleines
de vie comme une pieuvre répugnante. Je balbutiai doucement:
– Pourquoi fais-tu cela?
– Tu vois, dit-elle, je suis DIEU …
– Je suis fou …
– Mais non, tu dois regarder: regarde!
Sa voix rauque s’adoucit, elle se fit presque enfantine pour me dire avec lassitude,
avec le sourire infini de l’abandon: ‘Comme j’ai joui!’95

93 In After Bataille, pp. 167–68, ffrench makes particular allusion to the pathogenic
aspect of human contact portrayed in Madame Edwarda.
94 Bataille, Madame Edwarda, p. 20.
95 Ibid., pp. 20–21.
78 Chapter 1

In order to counter the repellent fright that both characters have

endured through their initial haptic contact, Edwarda demands that the
narrator look at the most intimate area of her body. He gazes and discov-
ers that her sexual organs appear to look back at him with a sense of sight
independent of Edwarda’s own. Her vagina is likened to an octopus in its
ability to reach out to – and thereby pacify – the narrator’s horrified eyes.
The ‘rose’ tinting of Edwarda’s genitals might also imply self-awareness,
a blushing embarrassment at their carnality not dissimilar to the blush-
ing displayed by the narrator, or Histoire de l’œil’s Marcelle.96 At the same
time, however, the ‘blushes’ of Edwarda’s sex are offset by her ‘sourire infini
d’abandon’, which suggests a saintly forgetting of the body. Though haptic
interaction has been re-established, Edwarda’s behaviour is suggestive of a
simultaneous physical presence and mental absence on her part. Though
she may claim to be God, the narrator only seeing this is not enough to
satisfy Edwarda: she wishes to incarnate herself. As a result, she will not
allow the narrator to merely gaze at her ‘rags’:
elle avait maintenu sa position provocante. Elle ordonna:
– Embrasse!
– Mais …, protestai-je, devant les autres?
– Bien sûr!
[ J]e m’agenouillai, je titubai, et je posai mes lèvres sur la plaie vive. Sa cuisse nue
caressa mon oreille: […] on entend le même bruit en appliquant l’oreille à de grandes
coquilles. Dans l’absurdité du bordel […] nous étions perdus dans une nuit de vent
devant la mer.97

It seems that even in the brothel’s permissive environs, Madame Edwarda’s

narrator feels uncomfortable sharing the sight of his moment of intimate
tactile contact with his peers, much as Marcelle is in Histoire de l’œil.98
The references to ‘nuit’, ‘vent’ and ‘la mer’ made by Madame Edwarda’s

96 Ibid., p. 21: ‘j’étais rouge, je suais’.

97 Ibid.
98 Hollier (La Prise de la Concorde, pp. 94, 104) and ffrench (After Bataille, pp. 154–57,
165–67, 190) both address the Bataillean theme of private passions experienced in
communal spaces more or less directly.
Bataille and the Haptic 79

narrator are also evocative of Marcelle; these nouns remind us of the wind-
swept night that her former attackers first attempted to ‘liberate’ her from
the cliff-top asylum which had become her sensual prison.
As Madame Edwarda’s narrator consummates his movement (or
escape?) from a purely optical perception of sexuality to one which is
haptic by kissing Edwarda’s genitals, his senses become confused by ear-
lier memories. The rushing sound that the narrator hears whilst his ear is
pressed up against Edwarda’s thigh and he is kissing her sex is the roar of
his own desiring blood. Instead of sexual desire, the sensory experience of
being pressed up against Edwarda’s naked thigh while kissing her sex makes
the narrator think of sea shells, in which one can hear the sound of one’s
own blood as it circulates. The sensory confusion which Edwarda’s naked
femininity causes the narrator spreads to all of his perceptive faculties. As
he mounts the staircase to her room ‘dans des nuées’,99 he remarks that ‘la
nudité du bordel appelle le couteau du boucher’.100 Twelve and three-quarter
lines of dots follow this observation. When the narrative begins again, mid-
sentence, the first words are: ‘les glaces’:101 ‘… les glaces qui tapissaient les
murs, et dont le plafond lui-même était fait, multipliaient l’image animale
d’un accouplement: au plus léger mouvement, nos cœurs rompus s’ouvraient
au vide où nous perdait l’infinité de nos reflets’.102 Like a ripple on an aque-
ous surface, the auditory projections which Edwarda’s skin reflects back at
the narrator while he kisses her sex become a sensual tidal wave. This tidal
wave causes a perceptual whiteout during their intercourse. The narrator
hears his own blood when first his ear is pressed against Edwarda’s most
intimate areas. It seems reasonable to suggest therefore that the even more
extensive bodily contact required for intercourse means that the narrator’s
inner sense of desolation is reflected back at him – amplified, even – through
the haptic interaction of his and Edwarda’s sexual intercourse.

99 Bataille, Madame Edwarda, p. 21.

100 Ibid., p. 22.
101 Ibid.
102 Ibid.
80 Chapter 1

During the scenes analysed thus far, Bataille’s protagonist has moved
from haptic perception alone in the street to optical perception in the
brothel. This visual bias then gives way to haptic perception once more as
the narrator and Edwarda share increasingly intimate sensations with one
another. With the break in the narrative, this oscillation reaches a crescendo
of sorts which effaces (or exscripts) not just their bodies, but all sensory
awareness and expression of it. Having heard his own sensory memories
and experienced his own sense of oblivion through contact with Edwarda,
it is surprisingly logical that Madame Edwarda’s narrator should break his
silence with the words ‘les glaces’. The corollary is that Bataille’s narrator
is projecting his desires onto Edwarda’s body, which in turn projects an
altered and amplified image of those desires back at him.

Consummation, Limits and Sense

The question of desire in Bataille’s prose is a pressing one. Histoire de l’œil

could be considered an analysis of the destruction wrought upon formerly
distant objects of desire when they are brought nearer the bodies which
desire them. By contrast, Madame Edwarda examines the possibility that
even proximal objects of desire may remain haptically distant to those
who desire them.
Having transgressed the limits of blasphemy by having intercourse
with Edwarda the prostitute Goddess (‘“je suis DIEU!”’) and having
experienced profound carnal pleasure with her, the narrator is asked to
accompany Edwarda outside. This would not normally have been possible
for prostitutes working in the ‘maisons de tolérance’:103

Le plaisir, à la fin, nous chavira. […] Le délire d’être nue la possédait: cette fois encore,
elle écarta les jambes et s’ouvrit; l’âcre nudité de nos deux corps nous jetait dans le
même épuisement du cœur. Elle passa un boléro blanc, dissimula sous un domino

103 Mayné calls this fact to our attention (see Georges Bataille, p. 129).
Bataille and the Haptic 81

sa nudité: le capuchon du domino lui couvrait la tête, un loup à barbe de dentelles

lui masqua le visage. Ainsi vêtue, elle m’échappa et dit:
– Sortons!
– Mais … Tu peux sortir? lui demandai-je.
– Vite, fifi, répliqua-t-elle gaiement, tu ne peux pas sortir nu!
Elle me tendit mes vêtements, m’aidant à m’habiller, mais, le faisant, son caprice
maintenait parfois, de sa chair à la mienne, un échange sournois. Nous descendîmes
un escalier étroit, où nous rencontrâmes une soubrette. Dans l’obscurité soudaine
de la rue, je m’étonnai de trouver Edwarda fuyante, drapée de noir. Elle se hâtait,
m’échappant: le loup qui la masquait la faisait animale. Il ne faisait pas froid, pourtant
je frissonnai. Edwarda étrangère, un ciel étoilé, vide et fou, sur nos têtes: je pensai
vaciller mais je marchai.104

Carnal pleasure eventually upsets (‘chavira’) the emotional balance of

both Edwarda and the narrator. She responds to this unbalancing with
strikingly sober behaviour. Edwarda purposefully conceals her nakedness
and then escapes the confines of the brothel, confines which demand that
her nudity be sensuous at all times in exchange for money and lodgings.
The narrator, meanwhile, is thoroughly confused not only by the pleasure
that he experiences with Edwarda, but also by the decisive actions which
she then undertakes to escape the physical, sensual impositions of this
pleasure. (This is not to imply that Edwarda’s behaviour is entirely rational
at that moment, however.)
Once back on the street – this time, with Edwarda – the narrator is
more physically and mentally confused than ever as he watches the prosti-
tute run away from him. The sight of Edwarda’s purposeful flight from the
brothel and the lycanthropy which she appears to undergo whilst fleeing
(‘le loup qui la masquait la faisait animale’) causes the narrator to shiver,
even though it is not cold. He then looks skyward, as if in hope of seeing a
divine sign that will allow him to grasp his present situation both mentally
and physically. Once again, we witness the oscillating physical uncertainties
of the sublime and the abject in haptic effect.105

104 Bataille, Madame Edwarda, pp. 22–23.

105 As implied by Lozier (De l’abject et du sublime, p. 67): ‘Bataille ne veut pas réconcilier
mais désorganiser. Si les contraires coexistent, ils sont également inversés’.
82 Chapter 1

We shall return to the motif of shaking in greater detail in the following

subsection. For the moment, let us be mindful of two things. Firstly, the
shaking experienced by the narrator suggests an oscillation or, as above, a
vacillation between two distinct states of being. Secondly, this oscillation
creates haptic illusions or hallucinations. The quotation above ends with
the narrator describing an empty sky which he then says is full of stars. At
the same time, he believes that he is stationary when in fact he is walking.
When finally he catches up with her, Edwarda attacks the narrator
before having an apparent seizure:

Comme un tronçon de ver de terre, elle s’agita, prise de spasmes respiratoires. Je me

penchai sur elle et dus tirer la dentelle du loup qu’elle avalait et déchirait dans ses
dents. Le désordre de ses mouvements l’avait dénudée jusqu’à la toison: sa nudité,
maintenant, avait l’absence de sens, en même temps l’excès de sens d’un vêtement
de morte. […] Les sauts de poisson de son corps, la rage ignoble exprimée par son
visage mauvais, calcinaient la vie en moi et la brisaient jusqu’au dégoût. [U]ne incu-
rable blessure, telle que nul n’en voulut guérir; et quel homme, blessé, accepterait de
‘mourir’ d’une blessure autre que celle-là?106

Contorting like a severed section of an earthworm, Edwarda consumes

her hood, her outer animal skin (or ‘loup’). As she does so, she exposes
her naked, trembling female body amidst metamorphic ‘sauts de poisson’.
Through a series of random gestures and the alternation of states that her
body undergoes from severed earthworm to cannibalistic she-wolf, then
from human female to gasping fish, Edwarda appears to have internalised
her earlier confusion of physical direction (‘sens’). This internalisation
not only stops Edwarda’s bid to escape the brothel in its tracks, but is so
violent that it also threatens to pull her body apart. Edwarda’s apparent
fit also allows the narrator to regain haptic contact with her (at least in a
proprioceptive sense).
It appears to be the callously chance – and partially animalistic – ele-
ment of the corporeal and sensory reshuffle that Edwarda endures during
her fit that so appals the watching narrator. Having intervened tactilely
to stop her consuming her prosthetic (animal) skin, the narrator can do

106 Bataille, Madame Edwarda, p. 26.

Bataille and the Haptic 83

nothing to calm the arhythmical disorder which now ravages Edwarda’s

body and must watch while it runs its course. The localised intensity of
Edwarda’s bodily disorder is what lends it its mortal quality; it is as if
Edwarda’s perceptive faculties and physical form are attempting to shake
themselves apart, perhaps intending to reassemble into some new, mon-
strous (proto-Nancyan) zonage of physical and perceptual presence, akin
to an Artaudian ‘corps sans organes’.107 Edwarda’s experience is a journey
to the body’s experiential limits commensurate with the Nancyan haptic’s
‘self-touching’ in that the violent re-zoning of Edwarda’s body exscripts her
awareness of the physical ravages that her brain’s excessive electrical activity
is inflicting upon the rest of her being.108 The narrator – a presence exter-
nal to the bodily changes that Edwarda is experiencing – must intervene
to stop these changes from injuring Edwarda or even killing her outright
through suffocation. For just a moment, Edwarda’s movements leave the
narrator with the impression that she is transcending the physical confines
of her body, briefly and violently radiating other, multiple forms of being
from her previously solid corporeal shell.
The sight of Edwarda’s physical anguish as she encounters and briefly
transcends the limits of her perceptual corporeity is as tactilely inviting as it
is visually repellent to the narrator (much as Edwarda’s genitals are, earlier
in the text). ‘Sa souffrance était en moi comme la vérité d’une flèche’,109 says

107 Antonin Artaud, the formulator of the ‘corps sans organes’, had been an acquaint-
ance of Bataille’s during the mid-1920s. However, according to Michel Surya, the
pair seldom met and spoke little (see Surya, La Mort à l’œuvre, pp. 97–98). On the
question of zonage, Nancy remarks that these sensory ‘“zones” […] ne sont pas du tout
seulement des localisations diverses dans un espace homogène. Elles sont en même
temps, en vertu d’un espacement qui n’est pas d’abord spatial, mais ontologique […],
les différences absolues du paraître ou de l’être-au-monde comme tel’ (Les Muses,
p. 39).
108 To justify this assertion, I refer to Nancy’s presentation of the zone as self-touch-
ing limite, a ‘se-sentir-sentir’ (see pp. 24–25 above for my analysis of his remarks on
this subject). To this, I would add that in Nancy’s view, ‘le toucher d’abord est local,
modal, fractal’ (Corpus, p. 76) and that ‘[i]l n’y a pas de totalité du corps, pas d’unité
synthétique. Il y a des pièces, des zones, des fragments’ (ibid., p. 156).
109 Bataille, Madame Edwarda, p. 27.
84 Chapter 1

the narrator: the visual and tactile data of Edwarda’s own haptic experi-
ence of sensory and bodily re-zoning impose themselves at once upon the
narrator’s sensory faculties, but do so against his wishes. The narrator is
therefore viscerally unsettled by what he sees before him: ‘son corps, la
rage ignoble exprimée par son visage mauvais, calcinaient la vie en moi et
la brisaient jusqu’au dégoût’.110
Recovering in a taxi following her episode, Edwarda punishes the nar-
rator for his attempts to recapture her momentarily divine body:

Edwarda dénoua les liens de son domino qui glissa, elle n’avait plus de loup; elle retira
son boléro et dit pour elle-même à voix basse:
– Nue comme une bête.
Elle arrêta la voiture en frappant la vitre et descendit. Elle approcha jusqu’à le
toucher le chauffeur et lui dit:
– Tu vois … je suis à poil … viens.
Le chauffeur immobile regarda la bête: s’écartant elle avait levé haut la jambe,
voulant qu’il vît la fente. Sans mot dire et sans hâte, cet homme descendit du siège. Il
était solide et grossier. Edwarda l’enlaça, lui prit la bouche et fouilla la culotte d’une
main. Elle fit tomber le pantalon le long des jambes et lui dit:
– Viens dans la voiture.111

What is most striking about the scene described above is Edwarda’s deter-
mination to first show the fertile, desiring gap in her skin (her vagina)
to the taxi driver, so that he may then probe it tactilely. It appears as if
she needs others to interact with her body tactilely, sensually, in order
to establish its perceptible limits for her, to measure its haptic depth. By
doing this, Edwarda’s partially transcendent being is also able to gauge its
otherwise unknowable material power. In this way, her body becomes a
proving ground of mortal weakness, always probing the same ‘crack’ or ‘slit’
in its haptic integrity from differing perceptual angles.112 Those differing
perceptive angles are provided by the men that Edwarda has intercourse
with. Under these circumstances, the haptic experience becomes a fault

110 Ibid., p. 26.

111 Ibid., pp. 28–29.
112 Fitch makes a similar assertion (Monde à l’envers, texte réversible, p. 27).
Bataille and the Haptic 85

line of sorts between an intellectualised transcendence of bodily experi-

ence and Edwarda’s proprioceptive awareness of the events which give rise
to that transcendence.

Tears, Trembling and Liquefied Limits

Barthes, Fitch and ffrench (among others) emphasise the importance of

trembling in Bataille’s literary works. More specifically, all of these com-
mentators suggest that the simultaneous sight and sensation of trembling
manifests a shift between two states or polarities of being.113 Citing Hollier,
Lozier suggests that in Madame Edwarda, this oscillation is replaced by a
simultaneous experience of abjection and sublimity, ‘déstabilisant radicale-
ment l’organisation paradigmatique’ which is apparent in other examples
of Bataille’s critique and prose ‘par essence distinctive’.114 This explains why
Madame Edwarda’s final lines, a footnote which elaborates upon one of
the narrator’s earlier comments, should speak of the oscillation between
sublimity and abjection in terms of trembling. Moreover, the note which
concludes the text extols the victory of haptic perception – represented
here by trembling fearfully – over a metaphysical ‘vide’:
J’ai dit: ‘Dieu, s’il “savait”, serait un porc.’ Celui qui (je suppose qu’il serait, au moment,
mal lavé, ‘décoiffé’) saisirait l’idée jusqu’au bout, mais qu’aurait-il d’humain? au-delà,
et de tout … plus loin, et plus loin … lui-même, en extase au-dessus d’un vide … Et
maintenant? je tremble.115

113 See Barthes, ‘La Métaphore de l’œil’ p. 244, Fitch, Monde à l’envers, texte réversible,
pp. 14–15, 19–26, or ffrench, The Cut, p. 105, for example.
114 Lozier, De l’abject et du sublime, pp. 66–67.
115 Bataille, Madame Edwarda, p. 31; emphasis in original. I do not share Hollier’s
conviction, stated in La Prise de la Concorde (p. 284), that this note ‘n’apporte aucune
lumière supplémentaire au texte sur lequel elle se greffe’.
86 Chapter 1

According to Fitch and Mayné, instances of trembling in Bataille’s

writing result in a liquefaction and bodily expulsion of some kind – a
little like a materialisation of the metaphysical element of the sensory
purge that Bataille claims the œil pinéal to be capable of providing. As in
the extract above, this liquefaction proclaims a mixing of the oscillatory
poles of abjection (the ‘porc’ referred to here) and sublimity (represented
above by ‘Dieu’). This fusion of the sensory faculties’ output is simultane-
ously visible and tangible without being materially fixed.116 We all know
that fluids cannot be grasped any more than fleetingly. The viscosity of
bodily fluids, their heaviness, is such that they are likely to leave only their
residues on skin which comes into contact with them. So it is that the orgy
which follows Edwarda’s seduction of the taxi driver must be consecrated
through an orgasmic baptism:
J’allumai la lampe intérieure de la voiture. Edwarda, droite, à cheval sur le travailleur,
la tête en arrière, sa chevelure pendait. Lui soutenant la nuque, je lui vis les yeux
blancs. Elle se tendit sur la main qui la portait et la tension accrut son râle. Ses yeux
se rétablirent […]. Elle me vit [;] les larmes ruisselèrent des yeux [,] une transparence
où je lisais la mort. Et tout était noué dans ce regard de rêve: les corps nus, les doigts
qui ouvraient la chair, mon angoisse et le souvenir de la bave aux lèvres, il n’était rien
qui ne contribuât à ce glissement aveugle dans la mort. La jouissance d’Edwarda [:]
[l]e corps, le visage extasiés, abandonnés au roucoulement indicible, elle eut, dans
sa douceur, un sourire brisé.117

As Edwarda has intercourse with the driver, the prostitute’s eyes become
‘blancs’ – their irises disappear behind her eyelids and she no longer sees, as
with the urinating father of Histoire de l’œil’s second section. Unlike those
of the permanently blinded father figure of Bataille’s previous work, the
irises of Edwarda’s temporarily unseeing eyes become visible once more,
only to fill with tears and become unseeing again. ‘[U]ne transparence où
je lisais la mort’ arises from this outpouring, just as tears of urine pour from
Don Aminado’s eye when it is inserted into Simone’s vagina at the close of

116 See for example Mayné, Georges Bataille, p. 64 and Fitch, Monde à l’envers, texte
réversible, pp. 15, 19.
117 Bataille, Madame Edwarda, p. 29.
Bataille and the Haptic 87

Histoire de l’œil. The unseeing vision of mortality that Madame Edwarda’s

narrator observes leads him to feel that ‘tout était noué dans ce regard de
rêve’.118 In other words, to hold the body of someone whose eyes cannot
reciprocate the gaze which accompanies that touch creates a perceptual
locus which unifies ‘les corps nus, les doigts qui ouvraient la chair, mon
angoisse et le souvenir de la bave aux lèvres’ into one experiential whole.
This supposed sensory integration is not all-consuming, however. Though
open, Edwarda’s eyes only emit tears at this stage. They do not see.
Edwarda’s failure to see – which is prompted by the consummation
of sexual difference through intercourse – permits the synchrony of her
body’s other major foci of sensual interaction (the fingers, the mouth). This
sensory contiguity is then ‘blessed’ by a ‘flot de volupté’, which ‘n’arrêtait
pas de glorifier son être, de faire sa nudité plus nue’.119 This confluence of
Edwarda’s perceptual faculties allows an experience of spatial interaction
which is initiated by the absence of sight; her penetrated (female) body
turns its gaze inward when penetrated by masculinity. Still, this inward gaze
coincides with Edwarda’s tears amd torrential outpouring of sexual liquids.
These liquids are testament to the excessive sensory experience that she
has endured. They are also an ephemerally tangible remnant of Edwarda’s
inward-looking gaze. The differences between this unseeing liquefaction
and that carried out by the urinating, blinded, sexually diseased father of
Histoire de l’œil’s second section could not be more pronounced.
The words that Edwarda’s sexual encounter prompts her to utter are
unsayable, a ‘roucoulement indicible’. However, the male narrator is able
to recount lucidly what he sees. In spite of his haptic involvement in sup-
porting Edwarda’s neck and watching her being penetrated by the driver,
the narrator is able to speak of the sexual act as it happens. Contrarily,
Edwarda is unable to speak clearly of her actions or those of others, even
when these actions impose haptically upon her body. Compared with the
narrator’s relative eloquence, Edwarda’s inability to speak clearly suggests a

118 My emphasis.
119 Bataille, Madame Edwarda, p. 29. Fitch too notes this ‘blessing’ (in Monde à l’envers,
texte réversible, pp. 38–42).
88 Chapter 1

gendered variation, a male/female divide in the ability to articulate haptic

experiences of sexual difference. This appearance is misleading, however,
precisely because at the same moment, Edwarda rejects sight: tears stream
from her eyes and she refuses to look beyond the inner recesses of her
own body while it is being penetrated. Edwarda refuses to dignify what
she does and what she perceives of these actions with the sensorial linkage
that haptic perception of the genre postulated by Riegl, Paterson or Nancy
demands. In other words, Edwarda chooses to divorce action and sensation
by refusing to see their haptic linkage – or, at least, to reject it through her
tears. Even if the taxi driver ‘se donnait de tout son corps brutalement’,120
we know that Edwarda does not. Her irises look elsewhere: they retreat into
her skull initially and are clouded by tears when they can be seen again.121
In spite of this, Edwarda’s body expresses its sacrifice outwardly, across all
proprioceptive (and, therefore, haptic) registers.
However this haptic experience is read, it comes with a warning, as all
of those involved in the orgy then fall asleep in the back of the taxi. The sen-
sory faculties of all three characters are anaesthetised by the haptic excesses
of the encounter.122 When the narrator recalls his subsequent awakening, he
finds himself alone among sleepers: ‘J’ai fini. Du sommeil qui nous laissa,
peu de temps, dans le fond du taxi, je me suis éveillé malade, le premier …
Le reste est ironie, longue attente de la mort …’123
Though it is a relatively short piece of prose, Madame Edwarda charts
a lengthy oscillation between haptic and optical forms of perception. The
nameless narrator begins on his own, walking through Paris without
trousers, holding his erect penis in his hand. The haptic dimension of this
experience is proprioceptive in nature because it is at once visual, tactile
and requires Bataille’s protagonist to be spatially aware (he puts his trou-
sers back on when he hears a noise). The narrator then visits Les Glaces,

120 Bataille, Madame Edwarda, p. 29.

121 Edwarda’s apparent refusal to acknowledge sexual difference fully in this scene poses
difficulties for a Nancyan reading of it (‘[i]l n’y a pas de corps unisexe comme on le
dit aujourd’hui de certains vêtements’ (Nancy, Corpus, p. 161)).
122 As implied by Fitch, Monde à l’envers, texte réversible, p. 87.
123 Bataille, Madame Edwarda, p. 31.
Bataille and the Haptic 89

where he ‘chooses’ the naked Edwarda after she provides him with an
optical cue by poking her tongue out at him. This incident could also be
considered exemplary of the haptic visuality postulated by Marks insofar
as the mere sight of Edwarda’s naked flesh draws the narrator closer to her.
The coital intimacy which ensues is haptic in a proprioceptive, Patersonian
sense.
When Edwarda flees the brothel and then the narrator, she becomes
a purely optical presence once more. The narrator feels compelled to give
chase and lay his hands (as well as his eyes) upon Edwarda again. Her escape
is halted by her apparent fit in front of the narrator. In haptic terms, the
incident is most evocative of the continual sensory re-zoning that Nancy’s
subsequent theories of touch and vision would demand. Edwarda’s fit is
haptically alluring for the narrator. However, due to the optical hints of
the tactile violence that Edwarda’s body endures, he is reluctant to inter-
act with her any more than he must. Following her episode, the narrator
regains his haptic contact with Edwarda and carries her to a taxi. She
then recovers, steps out of the taxi, seduces the driver with the sight of
her sex and returns to the back seat of the vehicle with him. The narrator
supports Edwarda’s body whilst she has intercourse with the driver and
thereby remains in haptic contact with her. During intercourse, Edwarda
rejects haptic sensation, refusing to look at what she is doing. All involved
then fall asleep, with the narrator waking up first and ending the narrative
with the haptic (specifically, proprioceptive) sensation of trembling
before God.
What is most apparent from this brief summary is the manner in which
oscillations between optical and haptic perception increase in regularity as
Bataille’s narrative progresses. These oscillations culminate with Edwarda
and the men in proximal contact with her falling asleep. Their senses are
deadened by their unconsciousness. While the others sleep on, the narrator
wakes and refuses to say any more about the situation, preferring to hark
back to an off-the-cuff remark he made earlier in the text which leaves him
trembling at the notion of a transcendental God. What Bataille’s protago-
nist appears to suggest is that even sublime transcendence must be thought
about in terms of what abject corporeal sensation cannot be, in terms of
the perceptual impossibilities that define the human condition.
90 Chapter 1

Interaction between haptic perception, social convention and the

fleeting transcendence of this interaction itself are central themes in
Madame Edwarda. They are also major underlying themes of Le Bleu du
ciel, the final of the three prose works by Bataille that I shall be analysing
in this chapter.

Le Bleu du ciel

Though Le Bleu du ciel was written in 1935, it remained unpublished until

1957.124 Barring a significant reworking of La Haine de la poésie which was
published in 1962 under the new title L’Impossible,125 Le Bleu du ciel proved
to be the last piece of ‘new’ literary writing by Bataille to be published
during his lifetime.
In Le Bleu du ciel, as with the other examples of Bataille’s prose studied
in this chapter, haptic experience is at once ‘there’ and ‘not there’. The word
‘haptic’ is never apparent: only descriptions of sight and touch are present.
Le Bleu du ciel’s narrative sways wilfully between revelling in the psycho-
logical impact of simultaneously visual and tactile sensation and exploring
what happens to its protagonists when one or other of these constitutive
elements of haptic perception cannot be felt. As we shall see, this situation
leaves us with the impossible – and thereby, never fully explicable – liter-
ary illustration of a perceptual theory which oscillates between embracing
and rejecting the notion of haptic perception without giving itself fully to
either philosophical position.

124 Le Bleu du ciel is reprinted in Bataille, Œuvres complètes, III, pp. 377–487. All sub-
sequent quotations will be taken from this edition.
125 L’Impossible is also reprinted in Bataille, Œuvres complètes, III, pp. 97–223.
Bataille and the Haptic 91

Hands (and Tears) in the Basement

Le Bleu du ciel’s introduction is in fact the beginning of a narrative. Within

its opening lines, we are confronted by the earthiest of human suffering.
However, we also learn that this suffering results from alcohol’s supposedly
numbing physical effects:

Dans un bouge de quartier de Londres, […] au sous-sol, Dirty était ivre. Elle l’était
au dernier degré, j’étais près d’elle (ma main avait encore un pansement, suite d’une
blessure de verre cassé). […] Elle étirait ses longues jambes, entrée dans une convul-
sion violente. […] Dirty étreignait ses cuisses nues à deux mains. Elle gémissait en
mordant un rideau sale. Elle était aussi saoule qu’elle était belle: elle roulait des yeux
ronds et furibonds.126

As we can see, the récit of Le Bleu du ciel begins with both visual and
tangible forms of physical anguish. The narrator, who we learn subsequently
is named Henri Troppmann, sees his partner’s pain but does not intervene
tactilely in it, perhaps because he has injured his hand. Dirty seeks to dimin-
ish her own agonies by tugging at her misbehaving body and expressing
her pain visually (by rolling her eyes) rather than linguistically (she chews
on a curtain as she suffers). This abject state of affairs is not pleasant for
either character, yet it is Dirty, the individual in the most pain, who initi-
ates the first truly haptic contact between the two. Having recovered from
her convulsion, she reaches out to Troppmann. As Dirty’s eyes grow wider,
so her touch grows ever closer to her male companion’s fevered brow:
‘Elle me regardait en ouvrant des yeux de plus en plus grands. De ses lon-
gues mains sales elle caressa ma tête de blessé. Mon front était humide de
fièvre. Elle pleurait comme on vomit, avec une folle supplication’.127 It is
noticeable that the widening of Dirty’s eyes precedes her reaching out for
her companion: sight comes before touch, even in a state of relative infir-
mity. Yet it is Dirty’s hand which tells the story of her male companion’s

126 Bataille, Le Bleu du ciel, p. 385.

127 Ibid.
92 Chapter 1

fever, rather than a visual description of the pallid or sweaty complexion

which we would expect to see anyone with a fever exhibit. Moreover, her
tears suggest that she rejects some element of her haptic interaction with
Troppmann (or perhaps her earlier fit). In either case, Dirty’s visual and
tactile interaction with her male partner coincides with her eyes being
clouded by tears. It should not be forgotten that Bataille’s titular character
has obscured eyes whilst having intercourse with a taxi driver at the end
of Madame Edwarda. The suggestion there, as here, is that some form of
transcendence is heralded by the interruption of haptic contact between
bodies and/or surfaces.

Hands Shaking, Bodies Moving, Minds Frozen

Just as a drunken Dirty trembles violently, moving between the extremes

of a London hovel, an opulent London hotel, the city of Paris and later,
Barcelona, Trier and Frankfurt, so Madame Edwarda oscillates between
divine transcendence and wretched carnality. Even Histoire de l’œil’s Simone
has a fit in the period following Marcelle’s death, her condition fluctuating
momentarily between the human and the bestial.128
Such oscillation between extremes also exists in the world of
sober intellectualism. At one point in Le Bleu du ciel, Troppmann pays an
unexpected visit to the home of Lazare, a political activist whose monthly
magazine he funds. There he finds not only Lazare, but also her stepfather,
M. Melou, who is a provincial philosophy teacher. The pair are discuss-
ing the ‘mouvement d’émancipation ouvrière’. After a brief introduction,
M. Melou continues their conversation:

128 Simone ‘se déchaîna par terre comme une volaille égorgée, se blessant avec un bruit
terrible contre les ferrures de la porte. [E]lle avait le visage souillé par la salive et par
le sang’ (Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, p. 49).
Bataille and the Haptic 93

Permettez-moi donc de poser ce problème … provisoirement (il me regarda sur ces

mots avec un sourire fin; il s’arrêta longuement, il donnait l’impression d’un couturier
qui, pour mieux juger de l’effet, recule un peu) … dans le vide, oui, c’est bien là ce qu’il
faut dire, (il se prit les mains l’une dans l’autre et, très doucement, les frotta) dans le
vide … Comme si nous nous trouvions devant les données d’un problème arbitraire.129

What is striking about the ensuing scene in general and the above quotation
in particular is the manner in which supposedly ‘empty’ words (or data) are
interposed with Melou’s tangible gestures. He is able to convey the impres-
sion of standing back from his words without actually doing anything other
than ceasing to move his lips while smiling. As he then speaks of ‘le vide’,
Melou joins his hands and gently rubs them together. This gesture is haptic
to him, but purely optical to the other characters present.
The obvious conclusion to be drawn from these few sentences is
that what Melou says and what he in fact does are diametrically opposed.
However, there is the additional possibility that the ideological paralysis
that he voices also expresses itself outwardly, forcing its way into his gestures
and, thereby, moving from the theoretical realm into the empirical. So it is,
for example, that as Melou muses over his ideological powerlessness to help
the workers he wishes to represent, he looks blindly at his hands: ‘“Oh …,
fit M. Melou, les yeux perdus dans la contemplation de ses maigres doigts,
je ne comprends que trop votre perplexité. Je suis perplexe moi-même,
ter-ri-ble-ment perplexe”’.130
Similarly, when Troppmann asks Melou what he thinks will become
of the workers’ movement, the ‘abstract’ problem incites bodily movements
on Melou’s part:

Après un silence gênant, il ouvrit d’interminables bras et, tristement, il les éleva:
– Les choses en arrivent là, nous ressemblons au paysan qui travaillerait sa terre
pour l’orage [.] [I]l se tient devant sa récolte et, comme je le fais maintenant moi-
même (sans transition, l’absurde, le risible personnage devint sublime, tout à coup
sa voix fluette, sa voix suave avait pris quelque chose de glaçant) il élèvera pour rien
ses bras vers le ciel … en attendant que la foudre le frappe … lui et ses bras …

129 Bataille, Le Bleu du ciel, pp. 422–23.

130 Ibid., p. 424.
94 Chapter 1

Il laissa, sur ces mots, tomber ses propres bras. Il était devenu la parfaite image
d’un désespoir affreux.
Je le compris. Si je ne m’en allais pas, je recommencerais à pleurer: moi-même,
par contagion, j’eus un geste découragé, je suis parti […]. Il pleuvait à verse […]. Je
marchai pendant presque une heure, incapable de m’arrêter, glacé par l’eau qui avait
trempé mes cheveux et mes vêtements.131

The ‘désespoir affreux’ of which Melou becomes the image is the ability
to act out words and doctrines, without putting them into useful practice.
Melou’s behaviour implies that the haptic experience has the ability to make
itself appear communal or shared when, in fact, it amounts to nothing more
than individualised mental masturbation. However, M. Melou still reaches
for the skies when faced with the physical effects of ideological problems. As
can be seen above, Troppmann’s final response to this idealised impotence
is entirely haptic and non-intellectual: he walks through freezing rain in
order to diminish his upset and agitation. It is this walk which gives him
shivers of the kind experienced earlier by Dirty.

Haptic Rhythm and Optical Repulsion

Let us now turn to three further incidents in Le Bleu du ciel which cast a
rather different light upon the notion – or in two cases, the suggestion –
that haptic perception is merely a form of mental masturbation. Shortly
before Troppmann’s impromptu visit to Lazare’s house, he finds himself
walking into a burlesque club. Having insisted on sitting right next to the
runway, the only seat remaining is unbalanced because the club’s floorboards
are bowing under the weight of clients:

J’étais rouge, il faisait très chaud […]. [M]on existence en équilibre instable sur une
chaise devenait la personnification du malheur: au contraire, les danseuses sur la piste
inondée de lumière étaient l’image d’un bonheur inaccessible.

131 Ibid., pp. 424–25.

Bataille and the Haptic 95

L’une des danseuses était plus élancée et plus belle que les autres: elle arrivait avec
un sourire de déesse, vêtue d’une robe de soirée qui la rendait majestueuse. À la fin
de la danse, elle était entièrement nue, mais, à ce moment, d’une élégance et d’une
délicatesse peu croyables [,] son long corps nacré une merveille d’une pâleur spectrale.
[…] La seconde fois que le jeu de la robe dégrafée se produisit, il me coupa le souffle
à tel point que je me retins à ma chaise, vidé. Je quittai la salle. J’errai.132

As in Madame Edwarda and Histoire de l’œil, the abundant exposure of

sexually attractive female skin causes physical and mental imbalance in the
minds of the males that behold it. Once more, blushing is also apparent as
a prelude to an outpouring of inner desires. In this instance, the sight of
women (and one woman in particular) undressing before his eyes focusses
Troppmann’s attention. When his favourite dancer completes her second
strip-tease, Troppmann is pushed back into his seat by the sight of her
naked body. The dancer is almost – but alas, not quite – close enough to
satisfy Troppmann’s expressly haptic desire to at once see and touch her skin.
As if to heighten the intensity of the irresistible tide or rhythm of haptic
attraction and repulsion that Troppmann experiences, the floorboards of
the club vibrate under his chair. The number and behaviour of other cus-
tomers in the club determines the see-sawing of Troppmann’s seat, as he
watches the women that he desires pass him by. In this sense, an element
of chance enhances the intensity of the oscillation between attractive and
potentially haptic gestures (the dancer’s movements as she undresses) and
a similarly haptic reinforcement of the impossibility of moving beyond
optical interaction with the source of these gestures (Troppmann is pushed
back into his seat by the dancer’s eventual and total nudity). Unfortunately,
sight alone is insufficient to satisfy Troppmann’s urges, here: the woman
he desires becomes a haptic image before his eyes.
Marks’s association of visible movement and tactile solicitation through
haptic visuality finds an early precedent here.133 However, rather than

132 Ibid., p. 413.

133 Marks: ‘While optical perception privileges the representational power of the image,
haptic perception privileges the material presence of the image. Drawing from other
forms of sense experience, primarily touch and kinaesthetics, haptic visuality involves
the body more than is the case with optical visuality’ (The Skin of the Film, p. 163).
96 Chapter 1

enticing him ever closer, the dancing vision of beauty that Troppmann
beholds eventually robs him of his breath. In the end, he cannot even bear
to remain in the same room as the visible yet intangible image of his carnal
desires. In this regard, the dancer’s power is optical, not tactile. Troppmann
responds to the impossibility of touching the dancer by attempting to dull
the erotic stimulation of his haptic senses. He achieves this by engaging
in another haptic experience which is within his reach and to which he
can give over his mind and body – the act of walking aimlessly. However
aimless his walk may be, it requires a repetitive series of actions from his
body. Troppmann seems to hope that these mindless repetitions will banish
the lingering physical and mental effects of the purposely titillating haptic
rhythms to which he lost his breath in the club.
Some time later, Troppmann finds his experience of another ostensibly
aimless pastime (swimming alone off a deserted Badalona beach) to be at
once numbing and erotically stimulating of his haptic faculties. The scene
in question unfolds as the first salvos of the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to
1939 are being fired in Barcelona and Troppmann’s two mistresses (Dirty
and Xénie) wend their way towards an unplanned and tragic meeting at a
hotel in the Catalan capital:
j’entrai en courant dans la mer. Je cessai de nager et je regardai le ciel bleu. […] Debout,
j’avais de l’eau jusqu’à l’estomac. Je voyais mes jambes jaunâtres dans l’eau, les deux pieds
dans le sable, le tronc, les bras et la tête au-dessus de l’eau. J’avais la curiosité ironique de
me voir, de voir ce qu’était, à la surface de la terre (ou de la mer), ce personnage à peu
près nu, attendant qu’après quelques heures l’avion sortît du fond du ciel. Je recom-
mençai à nager. Le ciel était immense, il était pur, et j’aurais voulu rire dans l’eau.134

Whilst in the sea, Troppmann is at once grounded and airborne.

Lonesome and alternating between standing in and floating on the tide,
he stares at the sky. As he does so, Troppmann’s self-awareness threat-
ens to drift beyond his bodily confines.135 In these moments, his physical

134 Bataille, Le Bleu du ciel, p. 463.

135 The tranquility of Troppmann’s experience here is in marked contrast to the bodily
violence endured by Edwarda during her moment of failed transcendence in Bataille’s
earlier work.
Bataille and the Haptic 97

presence becomes as fluid as the water which envelops his body: ‘j’eus un
instant la sensation que le corps de Dirty se confondait avec la lumière,
surtout avec la chaleur: je me raidis comme un bâton. J’avais envie de
chanter. Mais rien ne me semblait solide. Je me sentais aussi faible qu’un
vagissement’.136
Alternately standing and swimming in a space between the paradoxi-
cally earthbound weightlessness offered by the sea and the empty sky’s
vastness, Troppmann perceives that his physical presence is disintegrating.
In spite of him at once seeing and feeling the spreading dissolution of his
body and its perceptive faculties, Troppmann is still able to sense his ‘faible’
state. At this moment, the visual and tactile evidence of Troppmann’s sexu-
ality remains. Lost in a confusion of sensations which is far less apparent
in Histoire de l’œil, Troppmann imagines Dirty’s presence. His imaginings
of her are at once visual (sunlit) and tactile (warming and hardening of
his skin). In spite of this, Troppmann’s carnal reveries conflate the simul-
taneously visual and tactile indices of sexual difference between male and
female, turning them into a form of fantasy (‘j’eus un instant la sensation
que le corps de Dirty se confondait avec la lumière, surtout avec la chaleur:
je me raidis comme un bâton’). This fantasising keeps Troppmann in the
sea and makes him aware of the convergent visual and tactile sensations
of disintegration which then occur within his own body. Relying upon
his haptic sensory memories to fuel his sensual imaginings in a manner
which at once foreshadows and contradicts aspects of Laura Marks’s pos-
tulation of haptic visuality,137 Troppmann enjoys a brief moment of equi-
librium between sight and touch, as well as haptically perceptible presence
and absence.
This equilibrium does not equate with rational clarity, however: the
ebb and flow of the sea dulls Troppmann’s senses of sight and touch to
such an extent that he confuses Dirty’s imagined physical presence with
the sunlight that he sees and feels upon his skin. Simultaneously – and in

136 Bataille, Le Bleu du ciel, p. 464.

137 As I stated earlier, Marks claims that, ‘[t]he haptic is a form of visuality that muddies
intersubjective boundaries’ (The Skin of the Film, p. 188).
98 Chapter 1

spite of suffering frequently from impotence when in Dirty’s company (‘elle

me faisait même absolument perdre la tête, mais au lit, j’étais impuissant
avec elle’) – Troppmann is conscious of having an erection.138 His erection
remains the one solid point of reference for his perceptive faculties at this
moment, yet Troppmann’s erection is a product of his highly volatile emo-
tions. Troppmann is nonetheless confronted with tactile and visual evidence
of his sexuality whilst the rest of his perceptible body disintegrates. As this
paradox occurs, Troppmann also half-stands and half-floats in a physically
impossible median space between earth and sky, between a simultaneously
saintly forgetting of the body and a sinful embrace of carnality. Troppmann
moves seamlessly, fluidly and impossibly between l’abject and le sublime,
between the baseness of earthly life and the lightness of transcendental
being which is evoked by the empty blue skies above him.
Unfortunately, Troppmann’s moment of sensory equilibrium does not
last. Some weeks later, he stands alone under the canopy of a Frankfurt
theatre entrance, sheltering from a rainstorm. A band of Nazi youths per-
form nearby. Their leader directs the group with a cane, the music ‘déchi-
rant les oreilles [,] une exultation de cataclysme [,] d’une saccade de sale
petite brute’.139 Troppmann describes the group as being ‘immobiles, mais
en transe’, ‘cette marée montante du meurtre’.140 Entranced by their leader’s
gestures and using their instruments, the youths unquestioningly interpret
the sight of his actions into personalised patterns of tactile behaviour.
Oppressive waves of sound result.141 Like a shockwave, the band leader’s
violent comportment first dominates the eyes of his band members before
consuming their collective sense of touch and finally, their auditory senses.
The sounds that result from the group’s mimetic behaviour then assail and
occupy the perceptual faculties of passers-by as well.

138 Bataille, Le Bleu du ciel, p. 404.

139 Ibid., p. 486.
140 Ibid., p. 487. This suspension of perception is commented upon at length by Fitch
in Monde à l’envers, texte réversible, pp. 19–26, 30. Fitch however considers it an
‘éparpillement’, rather than an experience of convergence between the classically
defined senses of sight, touch, hearing, taste and smell.
141 As is implied by Fitch in ibid., p. 157.
Bataille and the Haptic 99

The youths in the band are caught in the same tide of simultaneously
tactile and visual interaction which envelops and threatens to disinte-
grate Troppmann’s self-awareness during his swim at Badalona. The indi-
vidual identities of the Nazi band members who play in the rainsoaked
Frankfurt square have, however, been overpowered entirely. These future
soldiers, who will lay waste to so much life during World War II, are intel-
lectually and uniformly suspended in, sacrificed to and swept along by the
rhythmic tide of almost simultaneous sight and tactility which oscillates
between themselves and their leader.142 The impossibly absolute suspen-
sion of individual thought and sensation to which their behaviour attests
is immediately apparent to Troppmann, as is its destructive potentiality.
His simultaneously aural and visual experience of the band’s unquestion-
ingly and barely sublimated violence is at once prophetic and revelatory.
Troppmann responds to this tragic moment of sensory clarity by leaving
Frankfurt immediately.143

Conclusion

At the beginning of this chapter, I demonstrated how Bataille’s critical

writings expose a number of significant barriers to any haptic reading of
his prose works.
Initially, I showed that Bataille’s theoretical writings on the body
published prior to 1945 tend towards a dismantling of corporeal and sen-
sory contiguity. Documents articles such as ‘Bouche’, ‘Œil’ and ‘Le Gros
orteil’ all demonstrate this tendency. Other theoretical articles of that era
such as ‘Espace’ and ‘Informe’ disavow any notion of spatial continuity or

142 As Fitch remarks, ‘L’être “suspendu” n’est […] pas tout à fait entré dans l’autre monde.
Il se trouve plutôt sur le seuil de ce dernier, de passage en quelque sorte, entre les deux
dimensions de l’être qu’il pressent mais ne connaît pas encore’ (ibid., p. 14; emphasis
in original. See also ibid., pp. 19–26).
143 Bataille, Le Bleu du ciel, p. 487.
100 Chapter 1

solidity. Bataille’s unpublished essays of the time, on topics as diverse as

the speculative œil pinéal and the excretive anti-perception of hétérologie,
insist upon a violent rejection of the concept of proprioception if it is to be
treated as a bastion of haptic perception or rationalist sens. Though it was
published almost fifteen years after many of the articles just mentioned,
I demonstrated that L’Expérience intérieure exhibits a similar distrust of
philosophies of perception on Bataille’s part, instead embracing the physi-
cal exploration of ‘non-savoir’.
Taken together, these works suggest an understanding of physical expe-
rience which would nullify any interpretation of the events which occur
in Histoire de l’œil, Madame Edwarda and Le Bleu du ciel as being haptic.
This is a strange situation, since there are numerous instances of synergy
between tactile and visual perception in all three of these works, even if
Bataille never alludes to haptic perception by name in any of his writings.
Through close readings of the unpublished œil pinéal dossier, Bataille’s
1938 article ‘La Chance’ and excerpts from L’Expérience intérieure, I illus-
trated how Bataille’s intellectual position on corporeal perception was far
from unequivocal or definitive. These texts all suggest an (albeit grudg-
ing and partial) acceptance that some form of sense must be derivable
from corporeal sensation, however limited it may be. I also showed that in
L’Expérience intérieure, Bataille refers directly to a point of conscious con-
vergence between the bodily senses which is to be found outside the body.
Though this floating point in space invites synergy between our perceptual
faculties, it guarantees that little if any rationalist ‘sense’ may be derived
from any such interaction. It promises only a raw perceptive experience.
Whether this solicitous (and intermittently haptic) point in space involves
the presence of another object, person or anything else is of only partial
significance: it is external to, yet demanding of, the momentarily unified
attentions of our senses.
I suggested that this point of perceptual convergence, if it is consid-
ered in conjunction with the Nancyan notion of exscriptive logic, may be
understood as haptic. According to Nancy, the exscriptive experience is a
visceral rejection of rationalist sense which bases itself upon the body’s per-
ceptive faculties. It is a self-effacing literary and artistic remnant of bodily
sensation. Nancyan excription attempts to reject all sensorial evidence of
Bataille and the Haptic 101

the bodily trace, but never fully succeeds in doing so, precisely because it
is never entirely aware of its physically, perceptively and rationally excre-
tive characteristics.
In this context, I posited ffrench’s understanding of the act of reading
as an informe praxis; the reader excretes his or her prior haptic experiences
onto the pages that he or she reads, often unaware that he or she does so.
This readerly action occurs in a perceptual blind spot. As his critical works
show, Bataille consistently rejects the idea that sens is a concept which may
be perceived at (or through) the limits of bodily sensation. However, he
alters the emphasis of this rejection every so often. These changing perspec-
tives call to mind an evolving shadow that the sun might cast over a fixed
object during the course of a day. In less metaphorical terms, this moving
shadow or blind spot in Bataille’s critical and literary explorations of the
perceiving human body relates to haptic perception. From article to article
and from book to book, this haptic blind spot shifts from one aspect of
Bataille’s writing to another, threatening to blind our senses to that which
is patently before us. Our attempts to grasp at haptic meaning in Bataille’s
literary works unbalance us intellectually. When we read Bataille’s texts,
our own memories of haptic perception lead us to believe that the experi-
ences he writes about should be tenuously familiar to us, even if we are
only reading of them for the first time. The inevitable hesitation between
(rational) intellect and (haptic) instinct which results from this attempt
to grasp perceptible reality from textual evocations of sensation creates a
mental impression of teetering on the reader’s part. Crucially, both elements
in this hesitation subsist upon sens – in all meanings of the word’s English
equivalent, and that of physical ‘direction’, which the French word offers
us additionally – whether as a presence, an absence or a hybrid of the two.
My subsequent close readings of Histoire de l’œil, Madame Edwarda
and Le Bleu du ciel demonstrate that Bataille’s literary writing is conceptu-
ally haptic. The principles of haptic theory are present in these texts, even
if they are not expressed in a consistent manner. This is not to suggest that
Bataille’s prose is conceptually orientated: it is far more preoccupied with
combatting the philosophical and experiential impossibilities that are
imposed upon us by the physical limits of our bodies. Every sentence of
Bataille’s prose oscillates between the physically possible (the potentially
102 Chapter 1

haptic) and the impossible (the simultaneously optical and haptic). No

rapprochement between the haptically possible and impossible will ever
be complete in Bataille’s literary writing because neither of these elements
is permitted to recognise the opposing force with which it is met.144 There
is merely an ebb and flow between them.
Thus it is that the three prose works by Bataille that I have analysed in
this chapter exhibit vestiges of the fixed, incisive, proximal hapticity posited
by Riegl and the mobile, ghostly, yet tactilely inviting haptic experience that
Marks advocates. The heightened haptic sensitivities of Simone, Marcelle,
Edwarda and Dirty appear to validate the distinctly feminine quality that
Marks seeks to dissociate from the haptic invitation to touch and in the
process, be touched. Nevertheless, Marks’s insistence that haptic visuality is
not specifically feminine is vindicated in part by the fact that instances of
haptic interaction in Bataille’s prose works occur most frequently between
men and women. In fact, when women are seen to interact haptically with
women (particularly in the case of Simone and Marcelle), the results of
such interaction prove mortally damaging to at least one party (Marcelle),
while they are not for the other (Simone). Sustained haptic interaction
between males is rare in any of the three prose works studied. Such contact
does prove destructive in Histoire de l’œil. The narrator of that text’s récit
and Sir Edmond beat and then hold down Don Aminado while Simone
throttles him to death.145 Le Bleu du ciel makes fleeting reference to ‘deux
vieillards pédérastes qui tournoyaient en dansant, réellement, et non dans
un rêve’,146 but says no more on the subject.

144 In L’Expérience intérieure, Bataille makes the following observation: ‘Ce que tu es
tient à l’activité qui lie les éléments sans nombre qui te composent, à l’intense com-
munication de ces éléments entre eux. Ce sont des contagions d’énergie, de mouve-
ment, de chaleur ou des transferts d’éléments, qui constituent intérieurement la vie
de ton être organique. La vie n’est jamais située en un point particulier: elle passe
rapidement d’un point à l’autre (ou de multiples points à d’autres points), comme
un courant ou comme une sorte de ruissellement électrique’ (Bataille, L’Expérience
intérieure, p. 111).
145 In Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, pp. 64–67.
146 Bataille, Le Bleu du ciel, p. 395.
Bataille and the Haptic 103

Where does all of this leave our haptic reading of Bataille’s works?
Quite simply, Nancy’s understanding of haptic perception as being some-
what involved in all forms of human sensation is the most closely related
to Bataille’s critical theories.147 The synergy between sensory faculties that
is integral to Paterson’s proprioceptive understanding of the haptic expe-
rience is also apparent in all three of the works of prose by Bataille that
I have analysed. This synergy between sensory faculties which extends into
aspects of all five of the classically defined senses (sight, touch, hearing, taste
and smell), is equally evocative of the eternally re-zoning sensory faculties
that Nancy’s understanding of haptic sensation requires.
With these observations in mind, let us move on. The next chapter
of my investigation concerns Maurice Blanchot, a critic, philosopher and
literary writer whose works address proprioceptive experiences directly only
occasionally. Blanchot first met Bataille in 1940, the year before his debut
novel Thomas l’obscur was printed.148 The pair would remain friends and
intellectual sparring partners until Bataille’s death. In the coming chapter,
I shall be examining how their intellectual closeness manifests itself in
Blanchot’s critical and literary approaches to interactions between sight
and touch, the primary sensory elements of haptic perception. As with
this chapter, the texts by Blanchot that I shall study span the beginning,
middle and end of the writer’s career.
In common with Bataille, neither Blanchot’s critical writings nor his
literary works refer to haptic perception specifically. In spite of this, I shall
demonstrate that Blanchot’s prose works manifest a particular interest in
descriptions of physical experience. Intriguingly, however, these same works
do not revel in the overt carnality apparent in Bataille’s prose works. Indeed,
Blanchot’s critical accounts of physical perception are more reminiscent of
the senseless opacity that Bataille denounces in ‘La Chance’.

147 Nancy acknowledges this thematic debt. La Pensée dérobée (Paris: Galilée, 2000), a
compilation of articles by Nancy, begins with Bataille’s quip that ‘[j]e pense comme
une fille enlève sa robe’ (p. 9).
148 This meeting is discussed in Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: partenaire
invisible (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2008), p. 166.
104 Chapter 1

In light of these facts, I intend to discover whether, in common with

Bataille’s literary writing, there is an identifiable (if equivocal) haptic sen-
sibility discernable in Blanchot’s prose works. As part of this task, I shall
also assess how, if at all, the haptic theories of Riegl, Marks, Paterson and
Nancy might interact with Blanchot’s critical writings.
Though he seldom wrote about the human body directly, Blanchot
did write at considerable length on the issue of how shared experiences
can create or dissolve communities. These writings led him into textual
exchanges with Nancy on more than one occasion. Might this mean that,
like Bataille, Blanchot’s critiques and prose display a greater disposition
towards Nancy’s understanding of hapticity than the haptic models posited
by Riegl, Marks or Paterson?
Chapter 2

Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence

In the previous chapter, I demonstrated that Georges Bataille’s writings

on perception exhibit a particular interest in sensory interactions between
sight and touch. I also showed that Bataille’s interest in these constitutive
elements of haptic perception is apparent in his works of critical theory
and literary prose. However, my analysis proved that there is an appreciable
difference between the critical and literary approaches that Bataille adopts
when he explores the issues of sight, touch and how these two senses may
or may not interact.
Like his friend Georges Bataille, Blanchot does not use the word ‘hap-
tique’ in any of his works. If we are to establish Blanchot’s attitude to haptic
perception, we must therefore analyse his literary and critical treatment of
tactile perception and his treatment of visual perception simultaneously.
I contend that Blanchot’s critical theories and works of literary prose explore
the constitutive elements of haptic perception with specific (though often
tacit) reference to Bataille’s critical and literary treatments of these topics.
In Lautréamont et Sade (1963), Blanchot tells us that ‘[l]a littérature reste
bien l’objet de la critique, mais la critique ne manifeste pas la littérature’.1
I will contradict this stance by showing how Blanchot’s portrayals of haptic
perception suggest there to be at least some reciprocity between critique
and prose in his writing.
There are however pronounced differences between the manner
in which the frequently silent engagement with haptic perception just
mentioned manifests itself in Blanchot and Bataille’s writings. In par-
ticular, Blanchot engages far more with Husserlian, Heideggerian and

1 Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamont et Sade (Paris: Minuit, 1963; repr. UGÉ/10/18,

1967), p. 7.
106 Chapter 2

Merleau-Pontyan phenomenology than Bataille ever does. This is unsurpris-

ing when we recall that Merleau-Ponty was an acquaintance of Blanchot.2
In spite of these facts, phenomenology’s interest in examining the
psychological relationship between a perceiver and the object of his or
her perception is given relatively short shrift in Blanchot’s works of criti-
cal theory and literary prose. Even the ontological perspectives upon this
relation proffered by Emmanuel Levinas, another of Blanchot’s friends, are
rarely exposed in the latter’s oeuvre.3 Instead, Blanchot casts the interaction
between the perceiver and the perceived as being one in which the perceiver
knows something to be absent from his or her perception of a given object
or situation, but cannot express this absence linguistically. This paradox
presents itself in nearly every work of theory or literary prose produced by
Blanchot and is postulated and repostulated in many different ways over
his lengthy career.
In the next subsection, I shall be analysing a selection of Blanchot’s
critical writings. The works to be analysed cover the majority of Blanchot’s
active years between 1943 (Faux pas) and 1969 (L’Entretien infini). This
is not to suggest that Blanchot’s critical thinking ceases with the dawn
of the 1970s. I have chosen not to address Blanchot’s subsequent critical
works (such as Le Pas au-delà (1973), L’Écriture du désastre (1980) and La
Communauté inavouable (1983)) in any great depth for several reasons.
Firstly, Blanchot’s critical works of 1943 to 1969 establish many key
parameters of his approach to corporeal perception, even if his subsequent
critical works expand upon some of these ideas.
My second reason for not addressing Blanchot’s critical theories
beyond 1969 to any great extent is much simpler: many of his critical works
from the early 1970s onwards analyse the expressly political connotations
of the term ‘communauté’. In Blanchovian texts such as Le Pas au-delà and
La Communauté inavouable, these analyses generally treat the concept
of community as more of a function of language and of speech than as a

2 See Bident, Maurice Blanchot: partenaire invisible, p. 504.

3 Patrick ffrench’s After Bataille offers a concise overview of the points of confluence
between Bataille and Blanchot’s theoretical approaches and their friendship (see in
particular pp. 107–16).
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 107

phenomenon that might be perceptible through shared bodily sensations.

There is not sufficient space here to address these more politically orientated
analyses in the critical depth that they merit.
My final reason for not dwelling on Blanchot’s critical writings from
1970 onwards is that two of the three works of prose by Blanchot that I
shall be analysing were first published between 1941 (the original version of
Thomas l’obscur) and 1949. (La Folie du jour, which was first printed under
that title in 1973, is otherwise identical to an earlier work by Blanchot enti-
tled Un récit?, which appeared in a short-lived literary periodical, Empédocle,
in 1949.) L’Instant de ma mort (1994) is the final piece of prose by Blanchot
that I shall be considering in this chapter.
In my analyses of Blanchot’s critical writings and literary works, I
shall explore his evolving portrayals of coincidences of touch and vision
in potentially haptic situations. How do these portrayals interact with the
perceptible yet ineffable absence which all of Blanchot’s writings attempt
to describe?
In the coming chapter, I shall demonstrate that, as with his critical
works, each example of Blanchot’s narrative prose that I analyse follows
a thematic trajectory from haptic perception to solely optical perception,
before concluding with the impossibility of unifying these two modes of
perception into one. I shall also suggest that, as Blanchot’s critical works
reject rationalist notions of cause and effect with increasing vehemence,
so his literary works concentrate less and less on a conflict between haptic
and optical modes of perception. Simultaneously, however, these pieces of
prose place an ever greater emphasis upon the impossibility of reconciling
haptic and optical perception within one experiential whole.
Why is this emphasis so significant? In the previous chapter, I showed
that Georges Bataille’s works of literary prose proceed from the physi-
cal damage that haptic proximity can wreak in sexually violent situations
(Histoire de l’œil). The arc of Bataille’s prose then travels into an experiential
realm which is simultaneously haptic and optical (Madame Edwarda). The
impossibility of these two forms of perception cohabiting within the same
experiential realm is underlined by the conclusion of Madame Edwarda’s
narrative and by several incidents in Le Bleu du ciel. In both of these texts,
oblivion can present itself on haptic and optical sensory registers. However,
108 Chapter 2

the ways in which this oblivion might affect its perceiver cannot be pre-
dicted purely on the basis of which sensory register it is perceived through.
For example, the death and destruction which takes place in Histoire de l’œil
occurs on a mostly haptic level, whereas the enduring sense of desolation
in Le Bleu du ciel relies far more upon visions of apocalypse than expressly
haptic (visual and cutaneous) interactions with such visions. In what
follows, I intend to discover whether a similarly destructive arc from haptic
to optical perception can be traced across Blanchot’s critical writings and
literary prose.

Blanchot, Haptic Theories and Some Initial Difficulties

In this subsection, I shall show that as Blanchot’s critical works engage

increasingly with issues of temporality and cause and effect, his references
to sight and touch diminish appreciably.
As I stated above, Blanchot’s critical works and literary prose span
more than half a century. What follows is a necessarily truncated account
of the changing roles played by sight and touch in some of Blanchot’s most
often used textual motifs relating to perception. As we shall see, one con-
stant in Blanchot’s theorisations is the impossibility of writing about sight
and touch in a constructive or informative manner. Each of the concepts
itemised during the following subsections describes different facets of this
underlying (and unnamed) problem.
Let us begin by assessing the first theoretical stumbling blocks that
might prevent us from analysing Blanchot’s theories in haptic terms. In Faux
pas, a collection of articles written for newspapers and journals between
1941 and 1943, Blanchot writes that ‘[i]l faut que le langage renonce à
être en même temps expression de la certitude sensible et expression de
l’universel; il n’y a pas de continuité entre la sensation et les mots’.4 Why

4 Maurice Blanchot, Faux pas (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1943; repr. 2009), p. 106.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 109

might Blanchot make this statement? Part of his reasoning stems from what
Blanchot understands the very notion of ‘communication’ between beings
and objects to be. As the following quotation demonstrates, Blanchot’s
stance on the issue of communication is a highly nuanced mixture of criti-
cal theorisation and poetic sensibility:
La communication ne commence […] à être authentique que lorsque l’expérience
a dénudé l’existence, lui a retiré ce qui la liait au discours et à l’action […]. Elle n’est
pas plus participation d’un sujet à un objet qu’union par le langage. [L]orsque le
sujet et l’objet ont été dessaisis, l’abandon pur et simple devient perte nue dans la
nuit […] par hasard. [I]l faudrait imaginer une équation qui, tandis qu’on la formu-
lerait, modifierait le flux et le reflux, la fonction dans le temps et la nature de l’organe
qu’elle voudrait déterminer.5

Blanchot demands here that there be a disconnection between perceived

experience and the physical actions which form part of it. This reductive
experience eradicates the difference between its subject and object: these
distinctions are ‘let go of ’ (‘dessaisis’). The erstwhile subject and object of
experience coalesce into a form expressible only in linguistic terms. This
change of circumstance creates a wilful wastage of any instructive sens which
might otherwise have been derived from a perceived experience. As Gerald
L. Bruns puts it, Blanchot’s ‘[l]iterature is language turning into something
that is no longer language, that is, no longer a productive system’.6 Blanchot’s
use of the term nuit designates a consciously unfathomable perception of
otherness or difference, an experience of opacity so dense that our senses
cannot penetrate it; they are only able to discern its presence. As in Bataille’s
works, this discernment, which is ostensibly arrived at through corporeal
sensation, is in fact no more than a matter of ‘hasard’.
The quotation above also shows that the ebb and flow of perception
that I linked with Bataille’s writing whilst concluding the previous chap-
ter is present in Blanchot’s critical works. In Blanchot’s case, however, this
sensory flow is one of temporal and experiential otherness. The fleeting

5 Ibid., pp. 51–52.

6 Gerald L. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins, 2005), p. 54.
110 Chapter 2

sensory interaction between subject and object is an ‘equation’, a working

out or likening. As Blanchot remarks, however, this resolution or liken-
ing of subject and object has a decisive effect upon the manner in which
the sensory organs whose discerning sensations enable this resolution or
likening actually function. Attempting to clarify this proposition, Bruns
suggests that for Blanchot, it is ‘[a]s if language were outside our concepts,
inaccessible to subjectivity as an instrument of meditations, but not outside
our passive, porous corporeality’.7
In Faux pas, Blanchot tells us that the ability of the body’s sensory
organs to discern the passage of time is altered by ‘une équation qui,
tandis qu’on la formulerait, modifierait le flux et le reflux, la fonction
dans le temps et la nature de l’organe qu’elle voudrait déterminer’.8 He also
states that the very ‘nature’ of these sensory organs – their parameters of
discernment – can also be altered by the equation of subject and object.
Yet until this temporal distortion and/or functional metamorphosis of
the sense organs occurs or is allowed to occur, Blanchot states that no
‘authentique’, revealing, (‘dénudé[e]’) communication concerning an
object can take place between two subjects. Therefore, even if temporal
distortion and/or functional metamorphosis come to pass, bodily sensa-
tion loses any instructive value that might be attributable to it. Equally,
if the same temporal distortion and/or functional metamorphosis do not
occur, then the perceptual experience which is constituted and described
by the body’s sensory data cannot, according to Blanchot, be considered
‘authentique’.
This impasse brings us back to Blanchot’s insistence that ‘[i]l faut que
le langage renonce à être en même temps expression de la certitude sensible
et expression de l’universel; il n’y a pas de continuité entre la sensation et les
mots’.9 Language (Blanchot is referring to both written and spoken language
here) must give up any claim to be an expression of discernible certainty.
Language must also be purged of any pretence that it is simultaneously

7 Ibid., p. 37.
8 Blanchot, Faux pas, p. 52.
9 Ibid., p. 106.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 111

able to make absolutely comprehensible – and evoke with unerring

accuracy – any instance of sensory information gleaned by corporeal means.
These demands appear to break any possible linkage between bodily sen-
sation and the language used to describe or otherwise designate such
perception.
A haptic interpretation of Blanchot’s prose therefore seems problem-
atic. The rejection of subjectivity and objectivity that Blanchot postulates
above renders Riegl’s schematisation of haptic perception impossible to
apply. This is because although Riegl understands the haptic surface or plane
to be objective, this objectivity requires the enquiring gaze of a subjective
individual in order to manifest itself. In fact, Riegl associates the haptic
with objectivism because haptic detail should, in his opinion, provide the
same perceptible information to all of its subjective observers.10 The differ-
ence between subject and object is what attracts the viewer’s glance. This
attraction in turn creates a conscious desire within the subject’s mind to
touch the object that he or she beholds.
The same can be said of Laura U. Marks’s theorisation of haptic
visuality. In the case of Marks’s theories, however, it could be argued that the
subject’s desire to touch the object or projected image’s surface, whether this
desire is realised or not, amounts to a sensory interaction which borders on
a fusion of sorts between subject and object. Nevertheless, Marks’s theories
imply that there is no absolute guarantee that looking at and touching an
object’s surface simultaneously will grant the viewer a better understand-
ing of what they are looking at: such comprehension is a matter of chance,
or ‘hasard’.
The model of haptic perception put forward by Mark Paterson
allows for chance interactions between the facets of the various forms
of bodily sensation that he deems to be haptic (such as proprioception,
kinaesthesia and cutaneous perception, for example). However, the reli-
ance of this sensory framework upon cause and effect (that is, sensory
stimulus being followed inevitably by sensory reaction) is a problem

10 See Riegl, ‘Über antike und moderne Kunstfreunde’, p. 202 and p. 5, n. 8 above for
my transcription and English translation of the relevant passage.
112 Chapter 2

shared by the theorisations of haptic interaction postulated by Riegl

and Marks.
We therefore find ourselves turning once more towards Jean-Luc
Nancy’s postulation of haptic interaction in order to understand Blanchot’s
theorisation of communication from a haptic perspective. As I stated ear-
lier, Nancy’s understanding of perception is one of chance interactions
between sensory zones which all contain a variable quantity of visual and
tactile data (which are the requisite sensory components of haptic percep-
tion). The clearest example of this understanding is provided by Nancy’s
reference to a speculative
‘sur-voir’ […] qui est une prise et pour finir un toucher: l’absolu même du toucher,
le toucher-l’autre comme se-toucher, l’un dans l’autre absorbé, dévoré. [L]a vue elle
même s’y distend, s’y espace, elle n’embrasse pas la totalité des aspects […] qui ins-
crivent et qui excrivent un corps [,] voyant aussi par touches d’autres sens, odeurs,
goûts, timbres, et même, avec les sons, les sens des mots.11

While Nancy – unlike Blanchot – seems to advocate a form of continuity

between sensations and words, this continuity occurs through the apparent
absence of rational ‘sense’ in the words which refer to these sensations. Nor
does Nancy believe the potentially haptic striations of a surface (in this case,
those of human skin) to be capable of revealing anything to their beholder
by tactile or visual means. In addition to these observations, we must be
mindful that the ultimate lack of incisive power that Nancy attributes to
vision in the quotation above contradicts the caressing and self-consuming
potentiality with which he endows the human gaze only a sentence before.
All of the paradoxical characteristics of vision just itemised are apparent
in Blanchot’s conceptions of image and fascination.

11 Nancy, Corpus, pp. 41–42; emphasis in original.

Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 113

L’Image or Getting to Grips with the Intangible

Blanchot states in L’Espace littéraire (1955) that, ‘Écrire, c’est briser le lien
qui unit la parole à moi-même, […] l’action et le temps’.12 One of his theo-
retical means to this literary end is his conception of the literary image.
This formulation trades on language’s ability to conjure up in vivid sensory
detail the very world that it seeks to destroy through abstraction:

L’image, dans le poème, n’est pas la désignation d’une chose, mais la manière dont
s’accomplit la possession de cette chose ou sa destruction, […] pour venir à son
contact substantiel et matériel et la toucher dans une unité de sympathie ou une unité
de dégoût. [E]lle est l’absence de ce qu’elle nous donne et elle nous le fait atteindre
comme la présence d’une absence, appelant, par là en nous, le mouvement le plus vif
pour le posséder […]. Mais, en même temps, l’image poétique, dans cette absence
même de la chose, prétend nous restituer le fond de sa présence, non pas sa forme
qui est ce qu’on voit, mais le dessous qui est ce qu’on pénètre, sa réalité de terre, sa
‘matière-émotion’.13

Blanchot’s speculative poetic and literary image exhibits the character-

istic schisms between reality, perceptibility and absence that he attributes
to language more generally (as I explained in the previous subsection).
However, Blanchot posits his notion of image in noticeably more haptic
terms than he does his general understandings of language (‘pour venir
à son contact substantiel et matériel et la toucher […] dans une unité de
sympathie’).14 The Blanchovian image is a lexically constructed edifice
with an unambiguously visible outer veneer. The words which form the
linguistic image’s visible outer veneer suggest (misleadingly) that there is
an earthy, empirical basis upon which they and the textual edifice which
they construct might rest. We are presented with the notion of a series

12 Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Folio/Gallimard, 1955; repr. 2009), pp. 20–21.
13 Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1949; repr. 2009), p. 112.
14 It is interesting to note the haptic characteristics of these descriptions of the
Blanchovian image, given that the first recorded uses of the term ‘haptique’ in French
date from 1950, a year after La Part du feu was published (see above, p. 1).
114 Chapter 2

of indices necessarily derived from corporeal perception (the image as

Blanchot explains it). These sensory indices invite us to gaze at them, much
as the striations of a haptic object’s surface impose themselves upon our
vision, according to the theorisations of Riegl or Marks. Yet it is distance
rather than proximity that is at the heart of the Blanchovian image’s visu-
ally impressive yet tactilely absent nature:
L’image, d’après l’analyse commune, est auprès l’objet: elle en est la suite; nous voyons,
puis nous imaginons. […] L’éloignement est ici au cœur de la chose. La chose était
là, que nous saisissions dans le mouvement vivant d’une action compréhensive, – et,
devenue image, instantanément la voilà devenue l’insaisissable, l’inactuelle, l’impos-
sible, non pas la même chose éloignée, mais cette chose comme éloignement, la
présente dans son absence, la saisissable parce qu’insaisissable, apparaissant en tant
que disparue, le retour de ce qui ne revient pas, le cœur étrange du lointain comme
vie et cœur unique de la chose.15

Of particular significance in the extract above is the linkage between

cause and effect that Blanchot establishes between objet and image: when
the object is perceived (seen, in this case) as being present or absent, this
perception gives rise to the image’s literary construct. The image’s destruc-
tion of that which it designates functions on abstractive and temporal bases.
When translated into words, the formerly present (and corporeally percep-
tible) object becomes ‘l’insaisissable, l’inactuelle, l’impossible, non pas la
même chose éloignée, mais cette chose comme éloignement’. Through its
translation into words, the perceptible object’s potentially haptic proxim-
ity becomes an indistinguishable distance. (As Joseph Libertson remarks
of Blanchot’s theories, ‘[p]roximity, in the region of manifestation, is the
impossible’.)16 The impossible element of the distance to which I have just
referred is not optical but rather temporal. The beholder’s memories of
the object that they perceive presently rush in to fill the sensory gap or lag
discerned by his or her body’s perceptive faculties. When memory ‘fills
in’ sensory gaps apparent in the present moment, the formerly proximal

15 Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, p. 343.

16 Joseph Libertson, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (The
Hague/Boston/London: Nijhoff, 1982), p. 211.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 115

object becomes image. This temporal distance, inherent to the Blanchovian

formulations of image, distorts the proximal object-become-image’s dis-
cernible characteristics.
To explain this in another way, the image’s temporal distortion is a
function of the sensory memory that must recall perceptions in order to
designate them linguistically. Our reliance upon memories of comparable
sensations in order to comprehend the textual image perverts our present
perceptions of the object-become-image to such an extent that the suppos-
edly proximal object from which the image proceeds becomes a sensory
impossibility. Our earlier awareness of the object’s presence endures in one
regard, yet at the same time, it is no longer present to us. This is to say that,
according to Blanchot, an object perceived in the present moment cannot
contain simultaneously the abstractive tendencies of the spatially or objec-
tively differentiating word and indices of corporeal sensation informed by
memory. By committing our perceptions of an object or a space to language’s
abstractive processes, we necessitate the destruction of those perceptive
indices by designatory language. This destructive process also has temporal
implications. As one unidentified voice remarks in Le Pas au-delà, ‘[s]oit un
passé, soit un avenir, sans rien qui permettrait de l’un à l’autre le passage […].
Seule, alors, du temps resterait cette ligne à franchir, toujours déjà franchie,
cependant infranchissable, et, par rapport à “moi”, non situable’.17
Without points of material reference such as the concepts of pres-
ence or absence, of visibility or invisibility, of tangibility or intangibility,
language’s evocative power is lost. Language no longer serves any expres-
sive purpose for us. Thus, even as language attempts to ‘overwrite’ and
overdetermine corporeal sensory indices with its own inscriptive pres-
ence, it relies upon bodily sensations of presence or absence so to do. As
Emmanuelle Ravel reminds us, however, the literary image’s constitutive
words are not a form of perception in themselves or even a faithful relation
of sensory indices (‘l’expérience de l’œuvre pour Blanchot révèle la contra-
diction. L’image impose sa duplicité, apparence et apparition, éphémère

17 Blanchot, Le Pas au-delà (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1973; repr. 2008), p. 22.

116 Chapter 2

et immuable, simulacre mais présence réelle de l’absence’).18 These words

are perverted by their reliance upon memory and materially descriptive
allusion: they cannot hope to evoke any more than the material absence
of that which they seek to evoke.
Through the memories solicited by the supposedly abstractive word,
time therefore intervenes in and further distorts language’s already destruc-
tive attempts to articulate experiences of bodily sensation with any form of
fidelity to reality. At this moment, the laws of cause and effect, of sensory
stimulus and perceptive reaction, disintegrate because the chronologies
which sustain these laws are themselves suspended.19 At the same moment,
haptic or optical vision as they are postulated by Riegl, Marks or Paterson
are also suspended because all rely upon a chronology of sensory stimulus
being inexorably followed by perceptive reaction.20 As the following quota-
tion implies, we would therefore struggle to consider Blanchot’s accounts
of corporeal sensation and its textual relation to be haptic in the sense that
Riegl, Marks or Paterson might suggest:

L’image n’a rien à voir avec la signification, le sens, tel que l’impliquent l’existence du
monde, l’effort de la vérité, la loi et la clarté du jour. L’image d’un objet non seulement
n’est pas le sens de cet objet et n’aide pas à sa compréhension, mais tend à l’y soustraire
en le maintenant dans l’immobilité d’une ressemblance qui n’a rien à quoi ressembler.21

18 Emmanuelle Ravel, Maurice Blanchot et l’art au vingtième siècle: une esthétique du

désœuvrement (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 56–57.
19 An observation made by Jean-Luc Nancy in his text Les Muses seems apposite here:
‘ni l’art n’est imitatif, ni la vie lui fournit de modèle. Pour dépasser cette antinomie,
on peut seulement viser […] une autre intégration sensible, […] un sixième sens, […]
un sens outrepassant les sens (suprasensible), un tel sens est forcément un sens de
l’assomption des sens – c’est-à-dire de leur dissolution ou de leur sublimation’
(pp. 29–30; emphasis in original).
20 In making this statement, I refer to Ravel’s comment that ‘[p]arce qu’elle nous offre
l’immédiat, la vision, elle oublie de nous dire […] qu’elle est médiatrice. […] La vision
donne bien immédiatement le monde, mais c’est qu’elle n’en donne que le reflet,
point le vécu, le sensible, qui serait de l’ordre du toucher’ (Maurice Blanchot et l’art
au vingtième siècle, p. 54).
21 Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, p. 350; emphasis in original.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 117

However, on the evidence of the following quotation from Blanchot’s

L’Entretien infini, Nancy’s vision of haptic interaction (and the excription
which attests to it) owes much to Blanchot’s conception of the literary
image:

L’image est la duplicité de la révélation. Ce qui voile en révélant, le voile qui révèle
en revoilant dans l’indécision ambiguë du mot révéler, c’est l’image. [N]on pas le
double de l’objet, mais le dédoublement initial qui permet ensuite à la chose d’être
figurée [,] cette ‘version’ toujours en train de s’invertir et portant en elle le de-ci de-là
d’une divergence. […] Rien n’est expliqué, ni déployé.22

Noting the material ‘dédoublement’ and ‘indécision’ which Blanchot

attributes to the literary image in the quotation above, I shall now address
his understanding of the textual effects of the image’s temporal distortions
and neutralisations of sensory indices.

A Fascinating (Haptic?) Time

The Blanchovian term fascination describes the interruption of temporal

continuity wrought by the literary image. As I have just stated, Blanchot’s
postulation of the image and the characteristics which he attributes to it
do not permit a straightforward haptic interpretation of his theories of
perception – at least in terms of the variants of haptic perception posited by
Riegl, Marks or Paterson. If we refer to one of Blanchot’s earliest accounts of
fascination in L’Espace littéraire, however, a rather different picture emerges:

22 Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1969), p. 42. Compare Blanchot’s

words above with the following remark from Nancy concerning excription, in which
he describes ‘[l]’excription de notre corps, […] sa mise hors-texte comme le plus propre
mouvement de son texte: le texte même abandonné, laissé sur sa limite. [I]l n’y a plus
qu’une ligne in-finie, le trait de l’écriture elle-même excrite, […] brisé, partagé à travers
la multitude des corps’ (Corpus, p. 14; emphasis in original).
118 Chapter 2

Mais qu’arrive-t-il quand ce qu’on voit, quoique à distance, semble vous toucher par
un contact saisissant, quand la manière de voir est une sorte de touche, quand voir
est un contact à distance? Quand ce qui est vu s’impose au regard, comme si le regard
était saisi, touché, mis en contact avec l’apparence? Non pas un contact actif, ce qu’il y
a encore d’initiative et d’action dans un toucher véritable, mais le regard est entraîné,
absorbé dans un mouvement immobile et un fond sans profondeur. Ce qui nous est
donné par un contact à distance est l’image, et la fascination est la passion de l’image.23

It is clear from this quotation that Blanchot believes a form of sight imbued
with characteristics reminiscent of the tactilely attractive and imposing
haptic visions posited by Riegl or Marks to be possible. Indeed, Blanchot
asks what occurs when ‘ce qui est vu s’impose au regard, comme si le regard
était saisi, touché, mis en contact avec l’apparence’ in the extract above.
Yet this form of visual perception is not truly comparable with that of the
haptic: it is merely a form of vision evocative of the haptic’s constitutive
sensory elements. As is the case with the Nancyan variant of haptic inte-
raction, ‘le regard est extraîné, absorbé dans un mouvement immobile et
un fond sans profondeur’. In short, this vision does not enable a decisive
differentiation of spaces and objects in the manner that the forms of haptic
perception posited by Riegl, Marks or Paterson do. Instead, the ‘fascinated’
form of vision postulated by Blanchot in the quotation above is one which
is allusive of interactions between the senses of sight and touch. This allu-
sion is, however, static: it has none of the volatile, dynamic exchange and
interchange of sensory data implied by the models of haptic perception
put forward by Riegl, Marks, Paterson (or even Nancy, whose understand-
ing of haptic perception requires that while ‘le corps est secoué au dehors
de lui-même’, ‘[c]hacune de ses zones, jouissant pour soi-même, émet au
dehors le même éclat’).24
In the textually mediated confusion of perceptible proximity and dis-
tance that Blanchovian fascination designates, the sensory indices which
the text communicates (in spite of itself ) to its reader are petrified, ossified:

23 Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, pp. 28–29.

24 Nancy, Corpus, p. 162.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 119

Ce qui nous fascine, nous enlève notre pouvoir de donner un sens, abandonne sa
nature ‘sensible’, abandonne le monde, se retire en deçà du monde et nous y attire,
ne se révèle plus à nous et cependant s’affirme dans une présence étrangère au pré-
sent du temps et à la présence dans l’espace. La scission, de possibilité de voir qu’elle
était, se fige, au sein même du regard, en impossibilité. Le regard trouve ainsi dans
ce qui le rend possible la puissance qui le neutralise, qui ne le suspend ni ne l’arrête,
mais au contraire l’empêche d’en jamais finir, le coupe de tout commencement, fait
de lui une lueur neutre égarée qui ne s’éteint pas, qui n’éclaire pas, le cercle, refermé
sur soi, du regard.25

As can be seen from the quotation above, fascination channels but also
neutralises the tactilely enquiring gaze required by the forms of haptic
perception posited by Riegl and Marks. This neutralisation of vision as a
valuable source of sensory information occurs through the use of spoken
or inscribed language.26 With fascination no longer permitting us to learn
anything of the people, objects or spaces that we behold or imagine, the
resultant simultaneity of proximity and distance, of presence and absence
is also neutralised. In this situation, a further, more generalised remoteness
between sensory relation and the interrelation of subject and object arises.
From all of this comes a model of sensory interaction the description of
which exhibits a number of characteristics that I identified with Nancy’s
subsequent understanding of haptic interaction earlier in this chapter.
Writing cannot refer to the body without effacing rationalist explanations
of the act of writing and the body to which that action refers. According
to Blanchot, however, the neutralisation of instructive vision which results
from the fascination which is in turn inspired by the interaction of lan-
guage and image, also provides an allusive link with tactile perception, a
‘profondeur non vivante, non maniable, présente absolument’.27 In spite
of this, the ‘mesmerising’ text (dis)places temporality into a never-ending
loop and neutralises the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity,
perceptible proximity and distance. These indistinguishable characteristics

25 Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, p. 29.

26 This assertion comes with the proviso that Blanchot does not differentiate readily
between these two forms of language here.
27 Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, p. 30.
120 Chapter 2

become the perceptible (visible) symptoms of a vision that is no longer

treated as the pre-eminent medium of sensory instruction by the language
which speaks of it. Blanchot adds that

[q]uiconque est fasciné, ce qu’il voit, il ne le voit pas à proprement parler, mais cela le
touche dans une proximité immédiate, cela le saisit et l’accapare, bien que cela le laisse
absolument à distance. La fascination est fondamentalement liée à la présence neutre,
impersonnelle […]. Elle est la relation que le regard entretient, relation elle-même
neutre et impersonnelle, avec la profondeur sans regard et sans contour, l’absence
qu’on voit parce qu’aveuglante.28

These qualities of linguistic fascination prove longstanding in Blanchot’s

critical theories. In L’Entretien infini, a further compilation of critical
articles published fourteen years after L’Espace littéraire, Blanchot writes
that ‘[d]ans la vue, non seulement nous touchons la chose grâce à un inter-
valle qui nous en désencombre, mais nous la touchons sans être encombrés
de cet intervalle. Dans la fascination, nous sommes peut-être déjà hors du
visible-invisible’.29 As may be discerned from this quotation, the realm of
fascination is one fraught with equivocation, but equation is also possible.
Through visual references, we touch upon objects whose nature has been
fundamentally altered by language to such an extent that the very acts of
looking and touching are also perverted by language. These acts are them-
selves mediated by an ‘intervalle’, an element which is at once temporal
and spatial, simultaneously present and not present (and which cannot
therefore be designated haptic).30 This non-haptic equivalence of time and
space, of presence and absence neuters the sensory indices through which
designatory language establishes and demonstrates its material usefulness.

28 Ibid., pp. 30–31.

29 Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, pp. 41–42.
30 This non-haptic potentiality is made obliquely apparent by Martin Crowley’s con-
ference paper ‘Touche-là’ (in Blanchot dans son siècle, ed. by Monique Antelme and
others (Lyon: Paragon/Vs, 2009), pp. 166–76). In Crowley’s opinion, Blanchot’s
perceptual theorisations serve one purpose: ‘n’inscrivant le toucher que comme
fracturé, interrompu par un espacement, un intervalle irréductibles; interrompant
cet espacement par le surgissement d’un immédiat excessif ’ (p. 167).
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 121

The neutering of language as an informative means of expressing sen-

sation occurs precisely because the sensory allusions upon which language
relies are drawn from human memory. Human memory functions on the
basis of temporal, spatial and experiential differentiation. In thrall to the
text, we do not sense the perceptive, spatial and temporal alterations that
its words impose upon us. The laws of causality and empiricism as we
know them are affected without our conscious knowledge, ‘comme si
l’impossibilité, cela en quoi nous ne pouvons plus pouvoir, nous attendait
derrière tout ce que nous vivons, pensons et disons […]. L’expérience n’est
pas l’issue’.31 Inescapable in all of this is an increasingly negative correlation
between corporeal sensations and the language that we employ to articu-
late them. As is the case with language, ‘dans l’objet usuel, […] la matière
elle-même n’est pas l’objet d’intérêt [.] [À] la limite, tout objet est devenu
immatériel […] dans le circuit rapide de l’échange’.32

A Third Dimension

The confusion of space, time and perceptible experience outlined above

is at the centre of what Blanchot terms le rapport du troisième genre. He
characterises this rapport as ‘le pur intervalle entre l’homme et l’homme, ce
rapport du troisième genre, […] ce qui […] ne me rapporte cependant en
rien à moi-même’.33 This rapport ‘ne s’énonce pas en termes de pouvoir’, yet
allows a ‘rapport avec ce qui est radicalement hors de ma portée, et cette
relation mesure l’événement même du Dehors [,] affirmant une relation
sans unité, sans égalité [,] une relation qui ne serait pas de sujet à sujet, ni
de sujet à objet’.34

31 Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, p. 308.

32 Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, p. 296.
33 Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, p. 98.
34 Ibid., pp. 98–99.
122 Chapter 2

The manner in which Blanchot explains this third ‘relation’ merits

our attention because it renders explicit an approach to the components
of haptic perception (the senses of sight and touch, in particular) which,
as we shall see later, he had already been employing in his prose works for
more than two decades.
For Blanchot, the perceptible experience of the rapport du troisième
genre is an
[e]xpérience […] où les démêlés du médiat et de l’immédiat, du sujet et de l’objet, de
la connaissance intuitive et de la connaissance discursive, de la relation cognitive et
de la relation amoureuse, sont, non pas dépassés, mais laissés de côté. La question la
plus profonde est cette expérience du détournement sur le mode d’un questionne-
ment antérieur ou étranger ou postérieur à toute question.35

In other words, any potentially instructive content obtainable from a given

experience and discernible through corporeal sensory data is to be acknowl-
edged and then put aside. The list of considerations which should be put
aside in order to attain the rapport du troisième genre – itemised in the above
quotation – renders that experience an impossibility because the sensory
data which would enable us to discern this rapport are invalidated by it.
The rapport du troisième genre leaves the perceiver in a netherworld
of sensory information which cannot be schematised by language or even
science. This is because science relies upon the observation and articula-
tion of praxes and their results. Blanchot suggests that, under the aegis
of the rapport du troisième genre, all that the perceiver can sense with any
certainty is the fractured nature of his or her perceptions and the absence
of rationalist sense which results from that fracture: ‘L’homme veut l’unité,
il constate la séparation’.36 In this regard, there is a clear rapprochement
between Blanchot’s theorisations of literature and perceptible experience

35 Ibid., p. 32.
36 Ibid., p. 94. Martin Crowley adds that any piece of writing that presents itself ‘comme
lieu d’un contact fusionnel […], d’un accès corporel à l’être des choses, d’une piste
linguistique’ is inherently misleading because ‘[i]l n’en est rien’ (‘Touche-là’, p. 169).
As shall become apparent, my position differs somewhat from Crowley’s presenta-
tion of corporeity in Blanchot’s writing.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 123

and those of Georges Bataille in his articles of 1929 to 1939. Both writers
explore the idea that corporeal perception can create an illusory impression
that our senses are functionally interconnected.

Sight, Writing and a Recurrent Haptic Limit

As we have seen, one key property of Blanchot’s postulation of literary

fascination (with which the rapport du troisième genre shares many char-
acteristics) is its almost infinite ability to neutralise or otherwise suspend
chronology: ‘Écrire, c’est se livrer à la fascination de l’absence de temps.
[…] C’est le temps où rien ne commence’.37 This literary turn leaves us in
a linguistically indescribable no-man’s-land. Its characteristics are simul-
taneously evocative of a tactile ‘tremblement’ and a form of vision which
denies itself without acknowledging the possibility that this state equates
with blindness: ‘Les mots sont suspendus; ce suspens est une oscillation très
délicate, un tremblement qui ne les laisse jamais en place. [C]’est comme si
nous avions franchi la ligne [,] comme si nous étions détournés du visible,
sans être retournés vers l’invisible’.38 This implies that the lexical expressions
of tactile perception (and the distinctly Bataillean ‘oscillation’ inherent to
words which is mentioned in the quotation above) constitute an inverted
form of sight in the realm of Blanchot’s rapport du troisième genre. However,
the very abstraction towards which Blanchot’s descriptions of this rapport
tend also recalls his earlier postulations of image, of literary constructs
that evoke the corporeal sensations that they claim to efface. Blanchot is
therefore able to write in Le Livre à venir (1959) that
[l]e récit commence où le roman ne va pas [,] récit d’un événement exceptionnel qui
échappe aux formes du temps quotidien et au monde de la vérité habituelle, peut-être
de toute vérité. [L]e roman, au contraire, qui ne dit rien que de croyable et de familier,

37 Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, p. 25.

38 Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, p. 38.
124 Chapter 2

tient beaucoup à passer pour fictif. […] Le récit n’est pas la relation de l’événement,
mais cet événement même, l’approche de cet événement, le lieu où celui-ci est appelé
à se produire, événement encore à venir et par la puissance attirante duquel le récit
peut espérer, lui, aussi, se réaliser.39

In this context, Blanchot’s earlier remark that ‘[l]ire, ce n’est donc pas
obtenir communication de l’œuvre, c’est “faire” que l’œuvre se communique’
makes more sense: the perceptible chronology of events to which the text
gives voice must be assembled by its reader.40 Blanchot’s insistence that
this process should not be taken to imply an ‘antagonisme […] de pôles
fixes […] appelés lire et écrire’ also reminds us that whether critical text or
prose, his writings should not be construed as inscriptive enactments of an
opposition between (pre-) defined and opposing theoretical viewpoints.41
This remains the case whether the opposing viewpoints in question are
temporal disruption and chronological order or concepts such as haptic
and optical perception.
Blanchot’s committed rejection of binary oppositions remains appar-
ent in L’Entretien infini; visible distance is portrayed as being capable of
delivering proximal contact precisely because such vision evokes perceptible
sensations of absence:

Voir ne suppose qu’une séparation mesurée et mesurable: voir, c’est certes toujours
voir à distance, mais en laissant la distance nous rendre ce qu’elle nous enlève. La
vie s’exerce invisiblement dans une pause où tout se retient. Nous ne voyons que ce
qui d’abord nous échappe, en vertu d’une privation initiale, ne voyant pas les choses
trop présentes ni si notre présence aux choses est pressante. […] Il y a une privation,
il y a une absence, grâce à laquelle précisément s’accomplit le contact. L’intervalle

39 Blanchot, Le Livre à venir (Paris: Folio/Gallimard, 1959; repr. 2008), pp. 13–14.
40 Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, p. 264.
41 Ibid. As Michel Foucault says of Blanchot’s writings, ‘en ce pouvoir de dissimulation
qui efface toute signification déterminée et l’existence même de celui qui parle, […]
l’espace de l’image, le langage n’est ni la vérité ni le temps, ni l’éternité ni l’homme,
mais la forme toujours défaite du dehors; il faut communiquer, ou plutôt laisser voir
dans l’éclair de leur oscillation indéfinie, […] leur contact maintenu dans un espace
démesuré’ (Foucault, ‘La Pensée du dehors’, Critique, 229 (1966), 523–46 (p. 545).
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 125

n’empêche pas ici et, au contraire, permet le rapport direct. Toute relation de lumière
est relation immédiate.42

A further quotation from L’Entretien infini clarifies Blanchot’s critical

interest in the abolition of experiential distance implied above. This clari-
fication also presages many of the themes relating to political notions of
community and social dialogue that his critical writings of the 1970s and
thereafter address more directly (often in dialogue with Jean-Luc Nancy’s
writings on these subjects):43
Nous ne voyons plus des hommes, nous ne manions plus des choses, nous ne parlons
pas par mots particuliers ou par figures singulières: là où nous voyons des hommes,
c’est la question d’ensemble qui nous dévisage; c’est elle que nous manions et qui
nous manie; c’est elle qui nous atteint dans chaque parole, nous faisant parler pour
mettre en question tout le langage et ne nous laissant rien dire que pour tout dire
et tout ensemble.44

Even here, allusions to tactility are apparent in Blanchot’s writing. A presen-

tation of the expressly intellectual aspects of communal interaction coaxes
two references to the primary sensory components of haptic perception
from Blanchot within the space of one sentence. (Specifically, questions of
collectivity ‘nous dévisage; c’est elle que nous manions et qui nous manie’.)
By rejecting the distinction between subject and object integral to the ver-
sions of haptic interaction postulated by Riegl, Marks or Paterson, these
vestiges of haptic perception reveal their simultaneously visual and tactile
fragments in the collective (that is, the impersonal) experience of the rapport
du troisième genre. It is no accident that this rapport affirms ‘une relation
sans unité, sans égalité [;] une relation qui ne serait pas de sujet à sujet,
ni de sujet à objet’.45 Thus, according to Blanchot, the haptic experience

42 Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, p. 39; emphasis in original.

43 For example, Blanchot’s La Communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983; repr. 2009)
was written in response to La Communauté désœuvrée, a journal article by Jean-Luc
Nancy that was published earlier the same year (and was subsequently reprinted as
a standalone text (Paris: Bourgois, 1986)).
44 Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, p. 19.
45 Ibid., pp. 98–99.
126 Chapter 2

is not a personal experience but a collective one in which the distinction

between subject and object is hazy. At the same time, Blanchot displays
an increasingly evident preference for structuring his critical works as if
they were dialogues between nameless and innumerable speakers rather
than as pieces of continuous prose (especially in texts such as L’Entretien
infini and Le Pas au-delà). This proclivity suggests that for Blanchot,
(haptic) experience is rooted in perceptions of language, rather than any
attempt to explore perceptive experience by means of language. Later in
this chapter, I shall consider whether the same philosophy is apparent in
Blanchot’s prose.
I shall pause at this juncture to remark that over the course of Blanchot’s
critical writings, there is an appreciable arc from haptic to optical. A lan-
guage increasingly detached from material perception is embraced at the
particular expense of haptic sensation. Because language so often refers to
material perceptions, this new version of language postulated by Blanchot
is divorced from haptically perceptible experience and defines itself through
the silence or absence of such perceptive experience as subject-to-object or
subject-to-subject rapport. This silence in turn becomes a language unable
to express anything other than its inability to articulate the absence of
haptically discernible referents.46 As the quotation from L’Entretien infini
cited above demonstrates, though flawed, the optical realm continues to
play a significant role in establishing language’s detachment from percep-
tible experience because, for Blanchot, sight allows us to perceive material
distance (‘là où nous voyons des hommes, c’est la question d’ensemble qui
nous dévisage; c’est elle que nous manions et qui nous manie; c’est elle
qui nous atteint dans chaque parole, nous faisant parler pour mettre en

46 Blanchot explores such silence in Le Pas au-delà (see pp. 101–16, 182–87, for example).
More often than not, he portrays it in terms of le neutre. On one occasion, Blanchot
goes further and explains the link between silence, the neutre and bodily sensation
as follows: ‘Le Neutre, la douce interdiction du mourir, là où, de seuil en seuil, œil
sans regard, le silence nous porte dans la proximité du lointain. Parole encore à dire
au-delà des vivants et des morts, témoignant pour l’absence d’attestation’ (p. 107;
emphasis in original).
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 127

question tout le langage’).47 By contrast, Blanchot treats the cutaneously

gleaned element of haptic sensation with increasing distrust.
As we digest this summary, let us remember that in the previous
chapter, I showed how, prior to World War II, Bataille’s critical works do
not suggest an arc of thought comparable with that of Blanchot. Indeed,
from his earliest articles in the late 1920s until 1939, Bataille avows his
unswerving mistrust of all forms of perception – especially those which
are nonvisual.
This is not to imply that Blanchot’s critical approach to corporeal per-
ception is dynamic, however: it is clear that Blanchovian constructs such
as la nuit, l’image, la fascination, le rapport du troisième genre and le neutre
all express different facets of a belief that perception is a flawed, indecisive
process. To paraphrase Bruns, Blanchot’s critical stance concerning sensory
perception can be summarised – albeit reductively – as follows: language
which purports to be capable of articulating faithfully one person’s expe-
riences of bodily sensation to those of another is inherently corrupt.48 As
Françoise Collin reminds us in her text Maurice Blanchot et la question
de l’écriture, this corruption arises from language’s seemingly omniscient
power to mediate (and discriminate) when it is used to express sensory
memories. With appreciable irony, Collin states that ‘[l]e Verbe n’est pas ici
ce qui met en relation et qui unit, mais ce qui désassemble’.49 Unavoidably,
these linguistic qualities skew any human attempt at objective description.
However, this summary ignores the fact that la nuit, l’image, la fascination,
le rapport du troisième genre and le neutre are all elaborations of the same
silent presence which is perceptible only as absence.50 Perception that grants

47 Blanchot, L’Entretien infini, p. 19.

48 ‘Blanchot supplements his texts […] by emphasising how speech – for example, the
everyday speech of conversation – exposes experience to what it cannot locate or
grasp’ (Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, p. 141).
49 Françoise Collin, Maurice Blanchot et la question de l’écriture (Paris: Gallimard, 1986),
p. 74.
50 There is an empirical aspect to this underlying, unknowable element, but one which
appears almost exscriptive in nature. As Collin puts it in her initial summary of
Blanchot’s theoretical stance on perception, ‘[l]’expérience n’est pas l’expérience
128 Chapter 2

haptic and optical sensations simultaneous and equal standing is impossi-

ble. Libertson adds that it is similarly impossible for language to embrace
any form of expressive totality.51
As with the theorisations of corporeally centred perception put for-
ward by Blanchot or Bataille, the formulations of language advocated
by both writers are localised. Neither of their theoretical constructs is
capable of providing universally comprehensible explanation under any
circumstance, yet they continue to solicit our attention. As Patrick ffrench
observes,

Blanchot proposes that the response to Bataille must leave the experience aside,
withdraw from the convention of commentary and impose a discretion or a silence
with regard to it. The ‘authentic’ response is not to respond, not directly, in any case.
[…] In Blanchot’s meditations on Bataille’s expérience, the constant emphasis is that
contestation, being experienced as a question without answer or arrest, demands
communication.52

I would add to this summary that where Blanchot’s critical works remain
favourably disposed towards the visual, Bataille’s critiques never move
beyond an initial, profound mistrust of all forms of perception. Moreover,
while Blanchot’s theories assert that our perception of the world is distorted
or even neutralised by our intellectual relationship with language, Bataille
claims that perception is inherently irrational and adds that linguistic
attempts to articulate sensory experience merely reflect this lack of reason.

d’une certaine chose et certes pas de la littérature comme chose, elle n’est donc pas
une expérience, mais la pure épreuve qui ouvre et véhicule en elle-même son propre
champ’ (ibid., pp. 29–30).
51 I refer here to Libertson’s summary of Blanchot’s treatment of language in relation to
perception: ‘In the world but not of the world, literature will point to the insistence
of an arrière-monde, “behind” the accomplishments which are brought to existence
by power in the dimension of action. This “world behind the world” is the economy
of proximity, in which totalisation gives way to impossibility, and in which action
is replaced by the contamination of […] exigency’ (Proximity, p. 112; emphasis in
original).
52 ffrench, After Bataille, pp. 130–31; emphasis in original.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 129

Having acknowledged these similarities and differences between Bataille

and Blanchot’s critical works – which I will return to in my conclusion –,
I now turn my attention to three literary works penned by Blanchot. Are the
conflicts and confluences between the senses of sight and touch identified
in his critical works as apparent in Blanchot’s romans and récits?

Thomas l’obscur (première version)

Though he had been writing newspaper and magazine articles since the early
1930s, Blanchot’s first full-length piece of prose, Thomas l’obscur (which is
designated as a roman in its first edition), was only published in 1941. The
text’s sheer size hints at its nine years of gestation. Blanchot apparently
considered even this period of work insufficient: a second, heavily abridged
version of Thomas l’obscur would be published in 1950. With the arrival
of this new version, Blanchot withdrew the previous edition of Thomas
l’obscur from publication. It only came back into print – against Blanchot’s
wishes – in 2005, two years after his death.53 In deference to Blanchot’s
injunctions against ‘une vue subrepticement corrigée, hypocritiquement
étendue, mensongère’, I shall focus upon the original, 1941 version of Thomas
l’obscur.54 This choice also enables me to establish a baseline of sorts by
which to consider Blanchot’s subsequent prose works.
Thomas l’obscur begins with a description of a lone male swimming
at sea which is comparable with the scenes which occur on the Badalona
shoreline near the finale of Bataille’s Le Bleu du ciel. This similarity of
circumstance offers us the perfect opportunity to begin to assess the ways
in which the writers’ descriptions of these scenes converge and diverge in
relation to each other. In turn, we can begin to consider how – if at all – the

53 All subsequent allusions to the 1941 version of Thomas l’obscur will refer to the pagi-
nation of the 2005 reprint (Paris: NRF/Gallimard), which differs from that of the
original 1941 edition.
54 Blanchot, L’Entretien Infini, p. 40.
130 Chapter 2

similarities and differences apparent in these literary texts by Blanchot and

Bataille manifest themselves in the writers’ critical works.

A Swimming Sensation

During Le Bleu du ciel’s beach scene, Troppmann’s floating body becomes

numb. The only features it can perceive of itself below the waterline are
visible and sexual. As he fantasises about his mistresses’ imminent arriv-
als in Barcelona, Troppmann’s limbs appear to him as scattered, rippling
shards of colour. Floating alone on the tides, his only nonvisual perceptions
of his body are simultaneously tactile and gender-specific. He is aware of
maintaining an erection whilst the rest of his body becomes increasingly
indistinguishable from the azure waters and blue skies which surround him.
In Bataille’s text, the sea’s currents dismantle and dissociate interactions
between sight and cutaneously gleaned sensation, the two key perceptive
faculties which, according to Riegl and Marks, haptic interaction requires.
Even the models of haptic perception postulated by Paterson and Nancy
require some input from these two sensory faculties.
Mindful of these details, we should not forget that, while it is dis-
integrative of any simultaneous sensory interaction between sight and
cutaneously gleaned sensation, the corporeally perceptible experience of
swimming described by Bataille is immersive. That is to say that when
Troppmann’s skin and eyes come into contact with the sea in which he
swims, this interaction consumes those sense organs to such an extent that
his body becomes almost indistinguishable from the waters which engulf it.
It is only the tangible sensation of sexuality provided by Troppmann’s erec-
tion that stops his body’s sensory disintegration becoming all-consuming.
Though Thomas’s experience of swimming in the sea shares some of the
confusion between body and water experienced by Bataille’s protagonist,
it is more forceful and markedly less sexual in nature.
Thomas’s first encounter with the sea begins Blanchot’s debut roman.
As we see from the text’s opening lines (quoted below), the mere sight
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 131

of swimmers is insufficient to lure Thomas into the water. He remains

rooted on dry land, fascinated by their image (‘immobile comme s’il était
venu là pour suivre les mouvements des autres nageurs’). It is only when
Thomas at once sees and feels the waves touch his skin that he begins to
move towards them:
Thomas s’assit et regarda la mer. Pendant quelque temps, il resta immobile comme
s’il était venu là pour suivre les mouvements des autres nageurs [,] les yeux fixés sur
les corps qui avançaient difficilement dans l’eau. Puis, une vague plus forte que les
autres l’ayant touché, il descendit à son tour sur la pente de sable et il glissa au milieu
des remous qui le submergèrent rapidement.55

The primary form of haptic perception at play in the above quotation

is most reminiscent of the Marksian model (with the obvious caveats
that this variant of haptic perception was not theorised by Marks until
circa 2000 and is cinematically orientated). Nevertheless, the parallels
between Marks’s haptic visuality and what occurs in the extract above are
noteworthy. Before Thomas’s eyes, the swimmers form a series of visible,
peripatetic details on the sea’s mobile but tactilely distant backdrop. This
image focuses Thomas’s attention upon the sea, breaking the sensory
fascination which had kept him rooted to dry land. The fluidity – and
breadth of sensation – that the sea offers Thomas is so intense that he
cannot resist its tides when they come into momentary contact with his
skin. It is only when the sea touches him that Thomas is enticed into a more
fully engaged sensory interaction with it. Though these waves have already
made contact with his visual faculties, Thomas’s skin is almost entirely
submerged within the fluidity of sensation that the ocean tides bring him.
Having chosen to envelop himself in the waves’ visually and tactilely invit-
ing characteristics, it is Thomas’s sense of hearing (in conjunction with that
of his sight) which is the next to be engaged directly:

Non loin de lui, […] il aperçut un nageur dont les mouvements le surprirent par leur
rapidité et leur aisance. [I]l aurait voulu avoir assez de force pour crier et obtenir un autre
cri en réponse. [L]e cri distinct et vibrant […] jaillit parmi les sifflements du vent […].

55 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 23.

132 Chapter 2

Néanmoins le nageur négligea l’appel […] comme s’il avait été rayé de la réalité.
Nager devint alors pour Thomas une activité dont l’importance ne cessa de grandir.56

Thus far, three of Thomas’s five senses (sight, touch and hearing) have
been engaged. In spite of this, the simultaneous interaction of these sensory
faculties does not provide Thomas with any form of perceptual satisfac-
tion. The object of Thomas’s desire to communicate with others will not
respond with anything other than an indecipherable silence. This silence
allows itself to be penetrated by Thomas’s sensory faculties, but will not
yield any intellectually useful information to them. Not even the swim-
mer’s gender or age are apparent to Thomas. The entire situation seems
unreal to him, yet it takes place amidst the ebbing and flowing reality of
the tide’s perceptible fluidity.
Perhaps attempting to mimic the other swimmer’s apparent sensory
isolation from other people, Thomas turns away from the auditory realm
and rededicates himself to the act of swimming and the expressly cutane-
ous interaction that such activity demands. Once again, Thomas’s sensory
investiture in his immediate environment is diminished and the sea’s cur-
rents begin to overpower his body, as well as his ability to discern what is
happening to it with any certainty:
Des remous très violents secouèrent le corps de Thomas, attirant ses bras et ses jambes
dans des directions différentes, sans pourtant lui donner le sentiment d’être au milieu
des vagues et de rouler dans des éléments qu’il connaissait. La certitude que l’eau
manquait imposait même à son effort pour nager le caractère d’un exercice tragique.57

It is unsurprising that Thomas’s perceptive experience should be described

as an ‘exercice tragique’. The act of swimming is an ostensibly empirical
undertaking which relies upon the laws of physics in order to proceed.
Unfortunately, these positivist requirements are defeated by Thomas’s
inability to be certain of the existence of the water in which he swims. The
empirical, positivist act of perception as rational discernment is thereby

56 Ibid., p. 24.
57 Ibid.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 133

rendered a ‘tragique’ – and, hence, distinctly Nietzschean – exercise in

impossibility.58
With his cutaneous and auditory faculties becoming increasingly
redundant in the tidal swirl, Thomas returns to the visual realm which first
solicited his potentially haptic interaction with the sea. On solid ground,
Thomas’s sense of sight allowed him to discern the potential pleasures and
difficulties of the ocean tides’ sensory ebb and flow: the struggling swim-
mers were the indicator of these material difficulties. As can be seen from
the above quotation, however, when Thomas is enveloped by the tides, his
vision proves just as unreliable and intellectually unsatisfying as his senses
of touch or hearing did shortly before (‘l’eau manquait’). This lack of sat-
isfaction prompts Thomas to consciously disregard (or become selectively
deaf to) the senses that he no longer considers rewarding of his attention.
Realising that his primary sensory (and haptic) faculties (sight and
touch) are equally useless to him at this juncture, Thomas chooses to sus-
pend his intellectual interaction with bodily sensation and the laws of
physics to which these interactions must submit in order to be rational.
This wilful neutralisation of sensory logos is illusory, and in fact gives rise
to the experience of an even more perceptible and violent law of cause and
effect. This new law is simple: treating the realm of bodily sensation as
being entirely distinct from the realm of rationalism is a recipe for physi-
cal oblivion because it breeds indifference to both domains. This indif-
ference renders everything the same: subject and object become dead to
one another. Only silence fills the experiential void left behind by the
obliteration of these constructs. Rapidly, Thomas falls foul of this new
law’s brutal application:

58 As Nietzsche says, ‘science, spurred on by its powerful delusions, is hurrying unstop-

pably to its limits, where the optimism hidden in the essence of logic will founder and
break up. [T]hen a new form of knowledge breaks through, tragic knowledge, […]
turning suddenly into tragic resignation’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy,
in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. and trans. by Raymond Geuss and
Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 13–116 (p. 75;
emphasis in original)).
134 Chapter 2

Thomas chercha à avancer en se dégageant du flot fade qui l’envahissait de tous côtés.
Un froid très vif […] paralysa ses bras qui lui semblèrent lourds et étrangers. L’eau
tourna autour de lui en tourbillons. […] Tantôt l’écume voltigeait devant ses yeux
comme des flocons blanchâtres, tantôt c’était l’absence de l’eau qui prenait son corps
et ses jambes et les entraînait violemment.59

At this moment, Thomas’s very life is menaced by his body’s sudden

inability to decipher its surroundings haptically. The water which threat-
ens to drown him acts upon his body with such violence that it bludgeons
his conscious perceptive faculties into numbness. The pleasurable sensory
suspension that Troppmann experiences on the Badalona coast is nowhere
to be found in Thomas’s ordeal. Blanchot’s protagonist is so battered by
the waves that his arms are reduced to heavy and indistinct masses at his
sides that will not comply with his wishes. While Thomas apparently per-
ceives the waves’ sensory effects cutaneously, his sight is so impeded that he
cannot be certain that they are even there. The sea’s foam looks to Thomas
as if it were snow while the waves themselves vanish from his perception,
threatening to take not only his conscious sensations but his very existence
with them. It is the absence of reliable sensory indices which creates the
haptic sensations within Thomas’s mind that his body is being engulfed
by the sea. Yet Blanchot’s protagonist finds the most perplexing element
of his sensory obliteration to be the fact that its trickery, the mechanisms
of the enticing illusion from which this perceptible oblivion derives, will
not reveal themselves:
Il eut donc rapidement l’impression désagréable d’être enchaîné à une illusion dont
le caractère lui échappait. Il respira plus lentement et garda quelques instants dans la
bouche le liquide que les rafales poussaient contre sa tête; mais ce n’était […] qu’une
douceur tiède, le breuvage étrange d’un homme privé de goût. Puis il s’aperçut que
ses membres, soit à cause de la fatigue, soit pour une raison inconnue, lui donnaient
la même sensation d’étrangeté que l’eau dans laquelle ils roulaient.60

59 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 25.

60 Ibid., p. 26.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 135

Even the engagement of the senses of taste and smell in Thomas’s mortal
battle with the ebbing tides proves insufficient to counter their overpow-
ering of his senses of sight, touch and hearing. Though all five areas of
Thomas’s sensory faculties have now been fully engaged (and partially
immersed) by the sea, he remains powerless to act against the water. The
mighty ocean’s force extends beyond the grasp of Thomas’s sensory regis-
ters. Though he remains ‘un homme’ in the quotation above, Thomas has
no sexual stimulation with which to identify. Unlike Bataille’s Troppmann
during his swim at Badalona, Blanchot’s protagonist is increasingly unable
to preserve even the merest hint of individual identity from the environ-
ment which threatens to engulf and extinguish his being entirely.
Nature’s ability to overpower Thomas’s sensory faculties derives from
the same sense of abandonment that reinforces Troppmann’s perceptive
singularity in Bataille’s Le Bleu du ciel. The sensation of his own erection
is enough to stop Bataille’s protagonist from becoming one with the sea,
which he perceives haptically whilst swimming. At the same time, the auto-
erotic sensations of his erection also prove sufficient to stop Troppmann’s
body dissolving into the sky’s purely optical space. By contrast, even as the
waves batter Thomas’s head to and fro, he is so estranged from his perceiv-
ing body and its corporeally discernible environs that he cannot deter-
mine which of the two elements is integral to his physical being. What he
perceives – the sea – becomes an equally useless part of the dysfunctional
sensory apparatus that his body now is.
In this respect, Thomas attains a state which Blanchot would subse-
quently term a rapport du troisième genre in L’Entretien infini. Amidst the
waves, Thomas achieves a synergy between his sensory faculties which
cannot be described by the rationalist categorisations of subject-to-subject
or subject-to-object.61 But as Thomas arrives at this state, his body is neu-
tralised by his paradoxical (haptic) perception of the sea as being simul-
taneously present and absent. This misconception – which is impossible

61 In making this observation, I acknowledge its debt to Jean Starobinski, who describes
the sea as a ‘matière aveugle et hostile du monde’ (‘Thomas l’obscur, chapitre premier’,
Critique, 229 (1966), 498–513 (p. 503)).
136 Chapter 2

in purely rational terms due to the physical effects it has upon Thomas’s
body – creates a fascination of sorts within Blanchot’s protagonist. This
enchantment or fascination and the consuming engagement of the senses
that it demands in turn creates what Blanchot would term an image in La
Part du feu. Unable to grasp the mechanics of these illusions either physi-
cally or mentally, Thomas is left to ponder the vision of his body acting
against its presently hostile environment from an experiential distance; it
is as if he were watching a filmed chronicle of another person’s actions:62
il réfléchissait sur la manière dont ses mains disparaissaient puis reparaissaient dans
un état d’indifférence totale à l’égard de l’avenir, avec une sorte d’irréalité dont il
n’avait pas le droit de prendre conscience, il était tout prêt à croire qu’il éprouverait
bien des difficultés impossibles à prévoir pour se tirer de l’affaire.63

At this moment, Thomas finds himself transported beyond the physical

confines of his own perceiving body. As he swims, he watches his own
hands enter and exit the water without remarking on any of the haptic sen-
sations which may be derivable from these actions. The tides drive haptic
sensation out of Thomas’s perceiving body. The enforced absence of these
sensations also entails the neutralisation of the rationalist laws of cause and
effect. The actions of Thomas’s hands, which he can still perceive visually,
have no overpowering relation with the chronologies of past, present and
future. Instead, his hand actions occur ‘dans un état d’indifférence totale à
l’égard de l’avenir’. In other words, Thomas’s visual perceptions of his bodily
comportment overrule the cutaneous sensations that his gestures generate.
As vision triumphs over all other bodily sensation, so the chronology of
physical stimulus leading to physical response is neutralised. Only Thomas’s
visual faculties are able to perceive this neutralisation because his skin is
now numb to all sensation. Moreover, whilst Thomas perceives the mortal

62 In a further filmic parallel, Thomas’s involvement with Irène, a female character

edited out of the 1950 version of Blanchot’s text, is consummated when she takes
his hand whilst they watch a film in a darkened cinema auditorium (see Blanchot,
Thomas l’obscur (première version), pp. 175–79). This scene will be analysed in detail
shortly.
63 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 26.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 137

situation in which he finds himself as ‘une sorte d’irréalité dont il n’avait

pas le droit de prendre conscience’, he is still intellectualising his visual
perceptions of the event. Sensory detail can be derived from the mortal
struggle with nature in which Thomas finds himself, but this information
does not permeate his skin.64 It is instead provided by his vision. Thomas’s
visual faculties remain able to attest to his body’s powerlessness against
the tides at a stage when his faculties of cutaneous perception have been
so brutalised that they can no longer even be certain of the forces which
overpower them.
As I stated above, Thomas’s vision of his hands fighting against the
ocean tide attests to the neutralisation of the rationalised chronology which
dictates that physical cause must lead to physical effect. But this neutralisa-
tion of perceptible chronology proves to be of limited value to Thomas: his
visions of it only leave him with the impression that ‘il éprouverait bien des
difficultés impossibles à prévoir pour se tirer de l’affaire’. In other words, the
reified vision of his hands moving into and out of cutaneous interaction
with the waves only demonstrates to Thomas the impossibility of predict-
ing the physical actions that might save him from being drowned by those
waves. The vision of his hands entering and exiting the water, momentar-
ily entering into and then exiting the physically enchanting rapport du
troisième genre and the unsatisfying image brought forth by this rapport,
gives Thomas no comprehensible indication of what physical actions he
should undertake next. There is therefore no sense of inevitability in what
sensations or actions (if any) should follow Thomas’s disembodied visions of
his own body’s actions. As the inevitability of visual and cutaneous modes
of perception fusing into one experiential whole or even interacting recedes,
so Thomas’s conscious perception of the events befalling him becomes ‘une
sorte de rêverie’ in which ‘l’ivresse de […] glisser dans le vide [,] la pensée

64 In this regard, my opinion diverges somewhat from that of Starobinski. He claims

that though Thomas is ‘sortant de lui-même’, this occurs because the protagonist’s
body is ‘tout entier pénétré par la puissance extérieure de la mer’ (Starobinski, ‘Thomas
l’obscur, chapitre premier’, p. 504).
138 Chapter 2

de l’eau lui faisait oublier l’impression pénible contre laquelle il luttait et

qui avait pris possession de lui comme une nausée’.65
Thomas now finds himself experiencing a sensory paradox: he is at
once imperceptibly yet physically linked with the waves that threaten to
end his life. The imperceptibility of this bond creates an emptiness which
is discernible only by the absence of corporeally perceptible sensations that
it inspires in Thomas’s mind as he experiences it. In this regard, Thomas
endures a physical experience of the literary image which would be formal-
ised by Blanchot over the following years in critical works such as Faux pas
and La Part du feu. Through being overpowered by its own perceptions
of physical alterity, Thomas’s body threatens to sacrifice itself to the waves
and thereby efface its abilities to perceive or even live.
In spite of this, Thomas eventually manages to swim back to dry land
with surprisingly few difficulties (‘le rivage était tout proche, contrairement
à ce qu’il pensait […]. Il prit pied sans peine à […] une sorte de falaise’),66
yet ‘il garda encore l’impression d’un bourdonnement dans les oreilles et
des brûlures dans les yeux’.67 Thomas struggles to understand these lingering
sensory imprints in a haptic manner. Looking back at the sun’s reflections
upon the sea, ‘il était tout prêt à distinguer n’importe quoi dans ce vide
trouble que ses regards cherchaient fiévreusement à percer’.68
During his swim, Thomas’s perceptive engagement with the sea makes
use of all of his sensory faculties at some stage. The resultant sensations
rarely interact with each other in any manner that proves materially useful
to him, however. In making this observation, we should not forget that
in a comparable situation in Bataille’s Le Bleu du ciel, Troppmann never
experiences a total sensory disintegration into air and water (or sublime and
abject) because his sexuality (in the form of an erection) halts the process.
While Thomas’s encounter with the sea’s image of a ‘matière même au-delà
de la matière’ is brief, he manages to ‘s’y engager totalement’.69 This means

65 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), pp. 26–27.

66 Ibid., p. 28.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., p. 29.
69 Ibid., p. 28.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 139

that, however short-lived and illusory it eventually proves to be, Thomas –

unlike Troppmann – does appear to undergo a complete sensory disintegra-
tion whilst in the sea. In the next subsection, I shall address what influence
this moment of sensory oblivion exerts upon Thomas’s perceptive faculties
subsequently.

Caving in to Haptic Perception

After Thomas’s watery ordeal, night begins to close in and he moves inland
to shelter in dense woodland. With the light fading rapidly, he stumbles
into a dark, cave-like space. Having appeared to reject haptic methods of
perception consistently whilst in the sea, the darkness and apparent solidity
of the cave force Thomas to perceive in a different manner:

Il descendit dans une sorte de cave où l’obscurité était complète. […] Dans cette
incertitude il chercha à tâtons les limites de la fosse voûtée et, étendant les bras, il
plaça son corps tout contre le mur, son corps qui n’existait pas comme corps et qui
dans ce lieu n’offrait pas plus de traits observables que son esprit même.70

When his visual faculties cease to function, Thomas must adopt an overtly
tactile method of discerning his surroundings. In the absence of sight, his
first instinct is to counteract the perceptive uncertainty which this absence
creates by establishing the tactile boundaries of his unfamiliar environs
(‘Dans cette incertitude il chercha à tâtons les limites de la fosse voûtée’).
To this end, Thomas places as much of his cutaneous surface as possible
into proximal contact with the cave walls. Stretching out his arms as he
does so, Thomas begins to establish not only his physical dimensions within
this unfamiliar space, but also the ability of its stone walls to imprison him
perceptually. It is worthy of note that no reference is made to any sensation

70 Ibid., pp. 30–31.

140 Chapter 2

of coldness or warmth upon Thomas’s skin as he attempts to imbed himself

in the cave’s wall.
In the midst of the cave’s dermally perceptible environment, however,
Thomas’s body ‘n’existait pas comme corps’ precisely because it ‘n’offrait
pas plus de traits observables que son esprit même’. This suggests that when
Thomas’s sight is disrupted, the rest of his sensory faculties are also impinged
upon to such an extent that they cease to operate in an obviously human
fashion, reverting to prehensile methods of perception.71 This should not
be taken to mean that Blanchot is implying that visual perception should
dominate all other perceptive faculties without question. Thomas’s virtual
blindness following his first swim and the complete absence of light in the
cave subsequently demonstrates this point.
By extension, the generalised sensory interruption which is first
detected by Thomas’s eyes and then interferes with the rest of his sensory
faculties whilst he is in the cave suggests a proprioceptively derived form of
haptic perception similar to that which Paterson postulates. (In Paterson’s
version of haptic sensation, the aggregated sensory interactions implied
by kinaesthetic, vestibular and cutaneous perception form the building
blocks of proprioception, which Paterson in turn classifies as a substratum
of haptic perception.)72
While – or rather, because – only the comportment of his mind (rather
than his bodily comportment) is observable in the cave’s total darkness,
Thomas’s sensory organs engage in a form of phantom perception. The
primordial nature of this phantasm is emphasised by the cave’s womb-like
characteristics. Thomas’s sensations do not yield to rationalist penchants

71 Thomas suddenly imagines that he is being attacked by ‘un rat gigantesque’ while
reading in his hotel room some time later (ibid., p. 48).
72 As I showed in the introduction, Paterson defines and subdivides haptic perception
as follows:
‘Haptic: Relating to the sense of touch in all its forms, including those below.
Proprioception: Perception of the position, state and movement of the body and
limbs in space. Includes cutaneous, kinaesthetic and vestibular sensation’ (Paterson,
The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies, p. ix; emphasis in original).
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 141

for observation or to the assumption that perceptible stimulus must give

rise to perceptible reaction:
ce n’était pas qu’il vît quelque chose, mais ce qu’il regardait dédaignait ses regards sans
lui permettre de les détourner. Cela suffit à la longue pour le faire entrer en rapport
avec une masse nocturne qu’il percevait vaguement comme étant lui-même […].
Comme il n’avait aucun moyen pour mesurer le temps, il se passa probablement des
heures avant qu’il acceptât cette façon de voir […].73

Thomas has employed an essentially haptic form of perception in order

to define the perimeters of the sensory prison in which he now finds him-
self. He cannot however resist his dermal sensations becoming intertwined
with his eyes’ functionality (or lack thereof, in this instance). A similar
pathology is apparent in several of Bataille’s key protagonists. In Histoire de
l’œil, for example, though insane, Marcelle is able to look from her barred
asylum window and establish the physical and emotional distance which
exists between her, Simone and the text’s first narrator by masturbating
to the sight of Simone pleasuring herself.74 The insanity that Blanchot’s
Thomas experiences is based on a lack of rationalist points of reference. In
the cave, nothing corporeal or chronological can be observed by uniquely
visual means. The illusory objectivity that sight claims to bring with it as
a tool of (scientific or temporal) observation should thus be absent. But
this cave is haunted, possessed (‘voûtée’)75 by Thomas’s perceptions of his
previous out-of-body experience. He cannot exorcise that experience’s pro-
prioceptive (and following Paterson’s rationale, therefore, haptic) imprint
from his mind. Because Thomas’s mind is the only observable element of
his presence within the darkened cave, the cave becomes populated by
the sensory image that he experienced fleetingly whilst at the mercy of
the ocean’s potentially fatal currents. The image’s imprint upon Thomas’s
senses is indelible precisely because it results from the sea’s overwhelming

73 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 32.

74 In Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, p. 31.
75 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 31.
142 Chapter 2

of both Thomas’s body and his sensory faculties. As Marie-Laure Hurault

says of the image’s manifestations in Blanchot’s literary works,
l’image […] est indispensable pour engager une acceptation de la fiction entendue
non plus dans son rapport au réel mais à l’inverse comme la réalité de tout rapport.
[C]ette réalité est essentiellement paradoxale. […] Elle manifeste le retour à un temps
archaïque où n’existe pas encore la distinction entre moi et mon image […] et met
en doute la recherche d’une synthèse fusionnelle.76

Still, faced with the indelibility of the image’s haptic trace, the cave’s
surface – with which Thomas has been in proximal cutaneous contact –
continues to impose itself upon his visual faculties, much as the haptic
surface postulated by Riegl might (‘ce qu’il regardait dédaignait ses regards
sans lui permettre de les détourner’).77
It is significant that whether he is surrounded by stone or immersed in
oceanic currents, Thomas is confronted with the effects of sensory failure.
On both occasions, he must endure the emotional rigours of a perceptible
gap between what his senses tell him is happening to him and what in fact
is happening to him. In their clamour to seal this breach, which is physi-
cally and mentally painful to endure, Thomas’s afflicted perceptive faculties
(in this case, his eyes) project phantom images, which only in fact exist
within his conscious mind, into the perceptible world beyond it. Because
that which Thomas cannot see sets this process in motion, his eyes create
an image of being penetrated by this invisibility in an essentially (Riegl-
esque) haptic manner: ‘il eut […] le sentiment que quelque chose de réel
l’avait heurté et cherchait à se glisser en lui. C’était une sensation absurde
qu’il aurait pu interpréter d’une manière moins fantastique’.78
The result of this wilful sensory trickery, however irrational it seems to
him, is to calm Thomas’s anxieties and furnish him with an illusory, visu-
ally led understanding of his environment. In the cave, this illusion stills
Thomas’s troubled mind – albeit briefly – by neutralising his awareness

76 Marie-Laure Hurault, Maurice Blanchot: le principe de la fiction (St. Denis: PUV,

1999), pp. 196–97.
77 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 32.
78 Ibid., p. 33.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 143

that his senses have failed him. Thomas wants to understand where he
is and what is happening to him, so his perceptive faculties do all they
can to provide him with any form of meaning to attribute to the events
which befall him. These events occur in the realms of the image and of
fascination. These events therefore have no perceptible rationality or
chronology to them. In order to counter the frightening and painful
perceptual gaps that the rational constructs of image and fascination unin-
tentionally revive whilst trying to efface themselves, Thomas’s perceptive
faculties create sensory constructs on a grandiose scale. Thus, the cave’s
darkened, stony walls are replaced for a short time by ‘villes réelles faites
de vide et de milliers de pierres entassées’.79 Thomas’s desire to understand
his environment causes him to project his mental world outwards through
his sensory organs, to adopt the pathologies of chronic psychiatric condi-
tions such as schizophrenia. This projection creates a stream of perceptive
consciousness that inverts Riegl’s haptic chronology of proximal tactile
details being seen and then touched. However, the impossible image before
Thomas’s eyes cannot endure. The dearth of tactile sensory data available
to corroborate it ensures that the image dissipates eventually.
When this ‘constructive’ sensory fabulation disperses and its empty
urban architecture vanishes, they leave the fearful, destructive elements of
Thomas’s consciousness to play with the perceptual building blocks just
relinquished. The results are terrifying for Blanchot’s protagonist. When
considering the following quotation, it should not escape our attention that
Thomas’s fears are mostly expressed in terms of violent contact between his
skin and other potentially tactile surfaces. Crucially, none of these other
surfaces is seen or can be identified by sight alone: all are described with
some reference to (Thomas’s own) contact with his skin. His whole body is
ravaged by these phantom images, which are in reality intermittently per-
ceptible and localised facets of the same illusory projection of sensation:80

79 Ibid., p. 34.
80 Hurault’s explanation of how the image manifests itself in Blanchot’s literary works
offers us a valuable critical perspective upon this scene: ‘Les images tiennent par
leur capacité à se laisser submerger et à disparaître au moment où elles s’exposent’
(Maurice Blanchot: le principe de fiction, p. 193). The corollary of this is that when
144 Chapter 2

La peur s’empara de lui […]. Le désir était [un] cadavre qui ouvrait les yeux […]. Les
sentiments l’habitèrent puis le dévorèrent. Il était pressé dans chaque partie de sa
chair par mille mains qui n’étaient que sa main. […] Il savait qu’autour de son corps sa
pensée, confondue avec la nuit, veillait. [L]e corps de Thomas subsista privé de sens.81

Thomas’s now nonsensical reliance upon perception of spaces exter-

nal to his body stems from the fact that all of his sensory experiences are
perceived with reference to the presence or absence of sight as a materially
informative medium at the given moment. This use of vision as a temporal
referent is unwise precisely because of its temporal qualification. In the
midst of the temporal and chronological disruption caused to his senses
by Thomas’s perceptible experiences of the literary image and its attendant
fascination, the ‘given moment’ mentioned above may be of an infinite
duration or may never even begin.82 Thus, the presence or absence of sight
as a functional or materially informative medium may be eternal or may
never commence. Due to this temporal disruption of his senses, Thomas
can never be certain as to which of the possibilities just itemised is near-
est to actuality (or the ‘authentique’, as Blanchot terms it in Faux pas).83
What does all of this mean for the manifestations of haptic perception
that occur whilst Thomas is on the beach, in the sea or in the cave? The first
thing to notice is that however fleetingly, instances of haptic perception
are apparent in each section of Thomas’s initial exploits. Whether these
haptic occurrences take place on dry land, in the sea or somewhere between
these two extremes (that is, on the beach), each incident occurs in rela-
tion to sight being a present or absent perceptive faculty at that moment.

Thomas’s sensory faculties allow him to localise one of their phantom images, they
create another elsewhere upon his body. This distracts Thomas from consciously
analysing any image that he perceives in any depth, meaning that he remains unaware
of his sensory faculties’ devious trickery and continues to believe that all he perceives
is real.
81 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 35.
82 Bruns: ‘For Blanchot, temporality does not coincide with history but exceeds it,
interminably, as if at the end of history’ (Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy,
p. 139).
83 Blanchot, Faux pas, pp. 51–52.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 145

When Thomas does resort to uniquely cutaneous methods of perception

(as when he is in the cave), he only appears willing to resort to these per-
ceptual measures if all other sensory possibilities have escaped him. This
reticence seems odd when we realise that haptic forms of perception prove
no more reliable or unreliable for Thomas than any other during Thomas
l’obscur’s opening chapters.
Be this as it may, Thomas is first depicted standing immobile on a
beach, staring at swimmers moving around amidst the waves. It is only
when Thomas sees and feels these waves touch his skin that he moves,
diving into the space that stimulates his visual and cutaneous sensory facul-
ties simultaneously. Though there is much oscillation between haptic and
optical perception during the incidents which befall Thomas subsequently,
all such oscillation occurs in relation to the functioning or inoperability
of Thomas’s visual perception. Indeed, visual perception appears to be the
faulty yardstick against which all of Thomas’s other sensory faculties are
measured. We can go further and state that the ever more consuming sen-
sory malfunctions that Thomas experiences subsequently all result from
this initial fallibility. This is because these shortcomings are betrayed by
Thomas’s awareness of perceptible gaps in the information provided to him
by his visual faculties. What he does not discern is the manner in which
his senses attempt to manipulate his awareness of their flawed nature by
creating perceptual hallucinations of the kind he experiences whilst alone
in the cave.

The Feminine Touch

Aside from Thomas, Anne and Irène are the only other major characters in
the 1941 version of Blanchot’s text. The latter of these female protagonists is
removed entirely from the heavily abridged 1950 version of Thomas l’obscur.
Anne and Irène are both attracted to Thomas to some extent and both
women die partly as a result of the indifferent manner in which he responds
to them. Though they scarcely interact with each other at all during the
146 Chapter 2

text, the two women’s experiences are the keystones of Thomas l’obscur’s
sensory ‘arc’. As I stated above, Blanchot’s literary prose, like his critical
works, begins by exploring facets of haptic perception before interrogat-
ing certain characteristics of optical perception. This literary and inquisi-
tive ‘arc’ invariably terminates with an investigation of the impossibility
of incorporating haptic and optical perception into one all-encompassing
form of perception and the impotence of language when attempting to
describe or quantify this impossibility.
As we have seen, Thomas l’obscur begins with Thomas’s masculine per-
ceptions of corporeality; the prose ends with his obliteration of these per-
ceptions. The roles played by Anne and Irène in bridging this gap merit our
attention. Are these women the mediators of sensation that their appear-
ances in the middle of Blanchot’s text imply? This question becomes impor-
tant when we realise that by dying, Anne and Irène succeed in effacing their
perceptions permanently and rapidly, while Thomas struggles to.

Anne

Anne is the character with whom Thomas shares the most physical contact.
As I noted above, however, this contact does not equate with intimacy in
Thomas’s thinking. Anne first expresses her attraction to Thomas as they
walk through a wood. As he looks at Anne, Thomas becomes ‘aveugle
de ses mains, de ses lèvres, tant qu’il restait sourd de tout son corps’:84 no
spatial discernment can be arrived at in Anne’s presence, whether or not
it is cutaneously derived. As with Paterson’s proprioceptively orientated
version of haptic interaction, the sharing of sensory data between discrete
sensory faculties is possible, but as he faces Anne, the sensation transmit-
ted between Thomas’s proprioceptive faculties does not resonate with his
living environs.

84 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 84.

Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 147

As we shall see, questions remain as to how much of the spatial una-

wareness that Thomas (somewhat paradoxically) discerns whilst looking
at Anne is attributable to Thomas’s misfiring haptic senses. One reason for
these questions is the manner in which Anne’s perceptible presence seems
to exist outside the laws of chronology. As he looks at her closely, Thomas
‘cherchait à rendre d’actualité pour chacun de ses sens le mot sensuel’.85
In other words, Thomas struggles to actualise (to make physically and
temporally present to his perceptive faculties) the concept of the sensual
by purely visual means. This difficulty could be a lingering effect of the
‘véritable brouillard devant les yeux’ that he experiences after returning to
the beach from his troubled swim.86
As Thomas touches Anne – apparently without sensing any more than
her visible presence – she shivers (‘elle frissonnait en devinant le contact de la
main’).87 During the previous chapter, I demonstrated that when characters
in Georges Bataille’s works of prose begin shivering, this indicates that they
are experiencing a change of physical state. In most cases – for example the
titular Madame Edwarda and Le Bleu du ciel’s Troppmann or Dirty – this
shaking is an outward manifestation of a character’s oscillation between
abjection and sublimity. This is not the case in Blanchot’s text. Instead,
Anne’s shaking is a prelude to her body and her consciousness rigidifying
under Thomas’s simultaneous glare and touch, as if she were experiencing
the effects of a paradoxically masculine yet Medusa-like stare. Though
none of Thomas’s perceptive organs appear to function around Anne –
only his near-fatal immersion in the sea or the sensory deprivation of the
cave have managed to create a similar situation up until this moment –
Anne’s visual proximity is sufficient to make him blush:

Une vive rougeur montra à ses joues […]. Ses yeux perçants pour lesquels il n’y avait plus
d’horizon devinrent des yeux de myope: c’était pour Anne comme s’ils allaient pleu-
rer. Elle regarda avec stupeur cette figure […] ruisselante et en fusion […]. Elle n’osait
plus bouger. Elle était saisie d’effroi [,] statue craintive enfoncée dans la verdure [.]

85 Ibid.
86 Ibid., p. 29.
87 Ibid., p. 85.
148 Chapter 2

Elle le voyait posant sur elle une main morte [:] plus de mots préférés comme lilas,
crépuscule ou Anne.88

The appearance of a blush (another physical motif recurrent in Bataille’s

prose) is particularly intriguing given the frequent sexual subtext that it
betrays in Bataille’s récits. For example, following their initial attack upon
her, Marcelle develops a habit of blushing deeply when in the presence of
Simone and Histoire de l’œil’s first narrator. In addition to these Bataillean
parallels, as Anne looks into Thomas’s newly myopic eyes, she senses that
he is about to cry. As I underlined in the previous chapter, tears are also
a recurrent motif in Bataille’s prose; they equate with the crying party’s
unspoken desire to reject physically a mental image which troubles them
(as is the case with Marcelle in Histoire de l’œil or Troppmann in Le Bleu
du ciel). In this context, Anne’s shudder when touched, Thomas’s blush
and her perception that he is about to cry suggest that his very proxim-
ity to her causes him to project his rejection of corporeal sensation onto
her, thereby attaining the pathogenic and physically petrifying ‘fusion’
described in the quotation above. Caught in the reflected, empty visions
that Thomas’s body radiates, Anne becomes just another feature of his
proximal world that he has difficulty perceiving, let alone designating.
Even Anne’s visually discernible qualities begin to vanish before Thomas’s
withering stare and touch. She becomes a ‘statue craintive enfoncée dans
la verdure’, pushed back into the wood’s fertile surroundings by the touch
of a hand which has not yet realised that it is dead: ‘Elle le voyait posant
sur elle une main morte et étouffant tout ce qui lui restait de tendresse [:]
plus de mots préférés comme lilas, crépuscule ou Anne’.89
As is apparent from this scene, petrifying sensations not only take
hold of Anne’s senses, but also deprive her of her linguistic preferences.
The suffocating cutaneous contact which so frightens Anne that it stops
her from moving (and exhibiting any physical traits that might distinguish
her from the surrounding greenery) is also sufficient to neutralise her lin-
guistic faculties. More precisely, Anne’s linguistic preferences – her most

88 Ibid.
89 Ibid.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 149

intimate relationships with language – are neutralised by the same hand

gesture that deprives her of her motor functions. After just a moment of
cutaneous interaction with Anne, Thomas succeeds in transmitting to her
the captivating impossibility of living and perceiving the literary image and
the fascination which heralds it. Because Thomas experiences different forms
of this impossibility whilst in proximal visual and cutaneous contact with
absolutely fluid environments (the sea), semi-fluid environments (the beach)
and the cave’s solid rock, its influence when communicated to another
human being is so absolute that it too is impossible. The communication
of this impossibility occurs only when Anne’s individualised relationship
with language dissipates and her favourite words cease to be her favourite
words.90 Therefore, the impossibility of living the literary image – as it is
experienced by Anne – occurs in spite of language and not because of it.
Whilst these changes take place within Anne’s mind and body, she
closes her eyes. Only the blinding sun, a most Bataillean textual motif, can
force Anne to open her eyes again. When she does so, Anne immediately
seeks haptic (and proprioceptive) interaction with Thomas by running to
him, embracing him and holding his hand:
Alors un rayon de soleil la frappa au visage, […] la fit frémir. Elle ouvrit les yeux sur le
soleil. Puis se tournant, elle aperçut Thomas immobile […]. Elle courut à lui, lui prit
la main […]. Et jouissant de son abandon qu’il ne savait attribuer à l’anéantissement
ou à l’indifférence, il garda Anne contre lui.91

As I explained in the previous chapter, Bataille’s Madame Edwarda offers

her body to a taxi driver at one stage. When she has intercourse with the
driver, Edwarda’s eyes roll back in her head, such that her irises are no longer
visible. When they become visible again, they are shrouded by her tears. In
Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil, the male character Don Aminado first loses his
life and then an eye in a ritualistic act of violence. In addition, the second
narrator’s father, blinded and crippled by syphilis, betrays the fact that he

90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., p. 88.
150 Chapter 2

is urinating by allowing his eyes to roll back in his head to such a degree
that his irises are no longer visible.
By contrast, when Blanchot’s Anne offers her body to Thomas through
their physical proximity, there is little outward evidence of any of the obvi-
ous, self-explanatory (and often physically violent) corporeal behaviour so
apparent in the literary works by Bataille analysed earlier:

Il l’attirait, et elle s’enfonçait dans le visage dont elle pensait encore caresser les
contours […]. Ses regards s’attachèrent à lui, [s]es paroles s’humectèrent. Ses mou-
vements même imperceptibles étaient destinés à la coller contre lui. […] Elle n’était
à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur que plaies cherchant à se cicatriser, que chair en voie de
greffe. [M]algré un tel changement […], elle continuait […] à jouer et à rire.92

As Anne begins to share in the same solar-induced blindness experienced

by Thomas since his swim, she feels their skins begin to mesh. In spite of
this, Thomas’s paradoxical sensations of proximal distance persist. Anne
meanwhile draws herself ever closer to Thomas, lured in by her visions of
him. Her skin becomes no more than a series of open wounds, masked by
her proximal physical contact with Thomas. It is noticeable that the ‘graft-
ing’ of Thomas’s skin onto Anne’s own also ‘moistens’ her use of language
in his presence (‘Ses paroles s’humectèrent’). It is as if proximal visual and
cutaneous contact between the male and female protagonists imbues the
language used by Anne with haptically discernible characteristics.
The error of this impression soon becomes evident. As Anne’s skin
comes into proximal contact with Thomas’s, so she begins to perceive the
spatio-temporal distortions that affect him. Some time later, she finds her-
self seeking the same haptically derived solace that Thomas had sought pre-
viously whilst sheltering in the cave. As she repeats this formerly masculine
quest, Anne metamorphoses from being a ‘dryade’ (wood nymph)93 into a
‘sorte de néant sans sexe’ with no haptically functional organs or physiology:

soudée à son mur dans une immobilité insupportable, elle mélangeait son corps avec
le vide pur, les cuisses et le ventre unis à une sorte de néant sans sexe et sans organe,

92 Ibid., pp. 91–92.

93 Ibid., p. 86.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 151

les mains serrant convulsivement une absence de main, la figure buvant ce qui n’était
ni souffle, ni bouche. […] Son véritable être devenait […] la totalité de ce qu’elle ne
pouvait devenir.94

The parallels between Anne’s situation and Thomas’s alternately

haptic, optical and proprioceptive experiences in the ocean, on the beach
and then in the cave are clear to see. Even Anne’s perceptions of the sen-
sory ‘totalité de ce qu’elle ne pouvait devenir’ are reminiscent of Thomas’s
earlier ordeals (and Bataille’s musings on the impossibility of attaining an
all-encompassing perception of ourselves and our environs in L’Expérience
intérieure).95 Moreover, Anne has evolved from being the wood nymph who
was previously indiscernible from the foliage she enchanted;96 she is now
an entity which cannot even be designated through observable or tangi-
ble sexual difference. As she spends more time in proximal contact with
Thomas, Anne’s existence becomes one which is pathologically incapable
of recognising itself or the space in which it functions by haptic means. In
this, she mimics Thomas, whose body betrays no visible haptic detail, yet
is haptically perceptible (‘[s]ur le front’, Thomas exhibits ‘pas une ride pour
faire voir ses pensées’ and his face is ‘lisse, sans une de ces empreintes que
laissent le malheur et l’histoire’).97 This circumstance is, however, derived
from a sensory paradox that has been passed on to Anne through human
contact (specifically, her tactile interaction with Thomas). This violent
paradox is the haptically perceived indifference to (gendered) corporeal
presence that Anne now experiences when she beholds her body: ‘elle
était corps sans tête, tête sans corps, corps hideux s’unissant dans un effort

94 Ibid., pp. 131–32.

95 See also Bruns’s discussion of the similarities and differences apparent between
Bataille and Blanchot’s understandings of the impossible in Bruns, Maurice Blanchot:
The Refusal of Philosophy, pp. 66–70 and 125–31. ffrench too discusses the influences
of L’Expérience intérieure and the 1941 version of Thomas l’obscur upon each other
in detail in After Bataille, pp. 115–20.
96 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 86.
97 Ibid., p. 100.
152 Chapter 2

insensé à une figure corporelle toute de représentation et d’idée. Rien n’était

évidemment changé dans l’apparence ou la profondeur de sa personne’.98
Anne’s perception of her plight, her sensation of being headless when
faced with the prospect of being unable to discern either herself or her
environment from one another by optical or haptic means, is remarkably
similar to Bataille’s descriptions of the Acéphale (which I detailed earlier).99
In any event, the sensory disjuncture that Anne begins to experience proves
fatal for her. Her inability to distinguish space from time and life from
death infects all of her perceptual faculties and she grows physically frailer.
Within a short time, she is bedridden and dying of an unspecified illness.
No longer haptically or even linguistically responsive to corporeally per-
ceptible reality, Anne rejects the mortal plane and dies uttering a final,
silent word to herself: ‘“Dormons”’.100 After infecting Anne with the same
spatio-temporal confusions with which he suffers through proximal contact
with her, Thomas then outlives her.

Irène and the Cinema

Thomas also survives the second female with whom he comes into proximal
dermal contact. His involvement with Irène begins when Anne invites her
to join them both to watch a film in a cinema. Haptic perception plays a
major rule in what follows. These events pre-figure several key characteristics
of the haptic visuality formulated much later by Laura U. Marks. (Indeed,
I contend that Blanchot’s writings on perception establish a number of the
haptic postulates subsequently formalised in Marks’s theories.)

98 Ibid., p. 132.
99 See above, p. 60.
100 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 288.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 153

At first glance, Irène seems far from approachable (‘Nulle femme ne

paraissait aussi distante, aussi intouchable’).101 Yet in the darkened audi-
torium, it is Irène who initiates skin-to-skin contact with Thomas in thor-
oughly nonchalant fashion:
Dès qu’elle fut près de Thomas, elle lui prit machinalement la main. L’obscurité lui
cachait entièrement l’être avec lequel elle était […]. Elle croyait reconnaître la pres-
sion rude et inégale des doigts dont l’un porte l’alliance, la peau dont la douceur s’est
évaporée avec le temps et qui reste pourtant la plus douce: il était sans doute qu’elle
avait épousé ce bras depuis des années.102

In this instance, casual haptic (or at least, tactile) perception affords Irène
the misleading impression of being in her husband’s presence. Just like her
friend Anne and the man whose hand she now holds, Irène perceives a dis-
tortion in the laws of sensory stimulus and response when she comes into
dermal contact with another. This realisation coincides with the moment
when Irène projects something of her own life (the sensation of holding
her spouse’s hand) onto the unfamiliar tactile surface with which she now
interacts (Thomas’s hand). In turn, Irène is left with the impression that
touch might be capable of creating some form of spatio-temporal short
circuit through psychic projection. That is to say that for Irène, touching
Thomas whilst remembering something of her past allows her to mould
those memories to fit her present-day perceptions and sensual needs:
Elle le sentait souple, malléable […]. Toutes les coches qui servent à marquer les sou-
venirs d’une vie commune, elle les retrouvait sur elle et sur lui, sur elle comme une
peau plus tendre et sur lui comme un durillon. […] C’est une absence de corps qu’elle
s’appropriait comme son propre corps délicieux et dont la douceur, bouleversante et
déchirante, la grisait. Elle demeurait confondue auprès de ce silence.103

The communication of Irène’s desires occurs in silence, beyond the

aegis of language. In an act which mimics their cinematic surroundings,

101 Ibid., p. 175.

102 Ibid., p. 176.
103 Ibid.
154 Chapter 2

she projects her carnal desires onto the skin of the man whose hand she
holds. The marks of her projected desires are manifested haptically both
on Thomas’s skin and her own. Yet these marks are described differently.
Irène’s skin softens as she projects (or filters?) her desires through it in
order to appropriate Thomas’s body, much as Anne’s words ‘s’humectèrent’
in Thomas’s presence.104 Simultaneously, Thomas’s dermal layer hardens
itself to Irène’s projected desires, resists their haptic imprint and thereby
repels her attempts to impose her consciousness and its symptoms upon
his own being.
Crucially, this oscillation between haptic attraction and repulsion,
an oscillation that is also discernible in Bataille’s prose works,105 occurs
simultaneously with the expressly optical experience of Irène, Thomas and
Anne watching a film in a darkened cinema. Irène’s initial – and ‘machi-
nal’ (unthinking) – desire to grasp Thomas’s hand appears to be the result
of her finding the celluloid images she beholds on the cinema screen to
be materially or emotionally unsatisfying. With this possibility comes
the likelihood that a visual detail which she notices on the screen incites
a conscious desire within her to touch that object. As I pointed out in
the introduction, a situation of this nature characterises what Laura U.
Marks and before her, Aloïs Riegl, would term haptic vision. Of these
two models of haptic perception, however, it is Marks’s theories which
are most applicable to this moment of Blanchot’s roman. Realising that
she will only touch a canvas screen and thin air if she reaches out to the
cinematic image before her, Irène engages Thomas in expressly cutaneous
interaction as a form of sensual surrogacy, as compensation for the lack of
sensual satisfaction offered by the cinematic medium. It is at this juncture
that we must pause to consider in greater detail how this scene relates to
the concept of haptic visuality posited by Marks. As she says, ‘[t]he viewer
is called upon to fill in the gaps in the image, to engage with the traces the

104 Ibid., p. 91.

105 Bruns also suggests that Blanchot and Bataille’s writings share an oscillatory qual-
ity. Bruns however borrows a line from Bataille’s L’Expérience intérieure (p. 111) and
postulates this oscillation in terms of a pathogenic ‘électricité’ that flickers between
two points (see Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, p. 53).
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 155

image leaves [,] to give herself up to her desire for it’.106 As a result, ‘[t]he
subject’s identity comes to be distributed between the self and the object’
when we watch these filmed images.107
If we apply Marks’s postulation here, then what occurs in the cinema
between Irène and Thomas is haptic, in certain respects. However, Irène
only attains a sense of completeness through her subjectively affecting
interaction with Thomas when the filmed images that she watches fail to
satisfy her desires. Moreover, Irène sublimates the visual element of her
interaction with Thomas (which occurs in a darkened cinema salon) into
a mental vision rather than an ocular one.
In other words, Irène’s haptic experience of part of Thomas’s body
(his hand) turns the physically impossible literary image that has infected
his being into a physically impossible cinematic image within her own mind
and body, ‘une absence de corps qu’elle s’appropriait comme son propre
corps délicieux’.108 But this hallucinatory state of perception ‘dont la dou-
ceur, bouleversante et déchirante, la grisait’ only offers Irène the sensation
of being physically and emotionally complete by obliterating her physical
individuality and its corporeally perceptible presence.109 Later in Blanchot’s
roman, Anne chooses a similar oblivion in order to achieve what she deems
to be perceptible completeness. This mortal fate is something she desires.
Irène’s time in the cinema with Thomas is also marked by her desires.
But these desires are initially haptic in nature (if by ‘haptic’ we mean the
model of haptic perception recently postulated by Marks). Indeed, a semi-
conscious desire to at once see and touch is a key ingredient of the Marksian
haptic experience (just as it is for Riegl).110 When Irène takes Thomas’s hand
in the cinema, what she initially believes to be a casual gesture gradually
reveals differences in cutaneous pressure and dermal striations. Within a

106 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 183.

107 Ibid., p. 123.
108 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 176.
109 Ibid. This is a far more violent experience than the haptic visuality posited by Marks,
which merely encourages us to ‘give […] up’ to our ‘desire’ (see Marks, The Skin of
the Film, p. 183).
110 See pp. 3–17 above for my discussion of the haptic theories of Riegl and Marks.
156 Chapter 2

short time, she has projected all of her inner desires onto the male hand
she grasps and this cutaneous contact has begun to erode every aspect
of her haptic perceptions of her own body. All of this occurs under the
glare of the artificial light that is generated by the cinema projector and
is then reflected off the screen. Significantly for any reading of the scene
using Riegl’s haptic theorisations, these visible reflections exert a subjective
influence rather than an objective influence. These reflections are also two-
dimensional, whereas the filmed movements which create them occurred
in three dimensions originally:
Pendant la première partie du spectacle, comme si la fantasmagorie des images l’eût
projetée en dehors d’elle-même, [e]lle n’arrivait pas à savoir […] qu’il y avait en elle
des organes [,] ombres d’une tragique dureté. Ce n’est qu’après un écoulement très
long du temps qu’elle commença de sentir une différence de température et de tension
entre les deux corps, jusque-là parfaitement identiques, qu’elle avait.111

It appears as if Irène projects her perceptions of selfhood outwards during

the early stages of her haptic interaction with Thomas, inspired by the
optical trickery taking place on the screen before her. We have no way of
specifying the inspirational role played by cinema in this passage because
what appears on the screen is never described. It is nevertheless clear that
the shift in perception that Irène experiences during the film’s running time
disseminates from the illusory three dimensions which are projected onto
and reflected off the cinema screen that she beholds.
I suggested above that Irène grasps Thomas’s hand in order to com-
pensate for the inability of filmed images to satisfy her desire for proximal
cutaneous interaction. This haptic gesture, an interaction of the individuals’
dermal layers, leaves Irène with the erroneous (and fleeting) impression of
being at once physically and mentally complete. As we see in the quotation
above, however, her haptic perception of Thomas’s physically discernible
presence tells her nothing about him and therefore offers her no solace.
Irène learns only that there is a schism developing between her physical
body and the mental image she has of it. As this realisation dawns on her,

111 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 177.

Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 157

her perceptions of her surroundings and the chronology that informs them
also begin to disintegrate. Irène has entered the realm of fascination.112
The neutralisation of Irène’s senses is an affliction transmitted to her
haptically by Thomas. What makes Thomas ‘infectious’ in this situation –
and in his earlier contact with Anne – is a desire seemingly unique to his
female companions to project and thereby perceive physical (and possibly,
emotional) closeness in a manner that is haptic, rather than optical. The
pathogenic sensory transmission that Irène receives in the cinema salon
is aided and abetted by the peripatetic images that she sees on the screen
before her while she is in physical contact with Thomas (‘On eût dit que
les rayons inconnus, la vie inassimilable qui convenait aux figures déjà
à moitié consumées de l’écran réussissaient à le toucher et l’embrasaient
silencieusement’).113 However, while Irène wishes to assimilate something
of Thomas’s being into her own by haptic means and her skin therefore
becomes softer, Thomas’s skin hardens to the point of feeling blistered
to her and will not permit such assimilation. His body has become as
inassimilable as the cinematic images that the two protagonists behold.
Moreover, it is only in this haptically inassimilable state – comparable with
the projected images that they watch on the cinema screen – that Thomas
appears haptically complete to Irène:
Tout de Thomas était visible. Il rayonnait parfaitement une dernière fois [,] d’être
pour Irène, après dix ans de mariage, après une heure de cinéma, un corps glorieux.
Il se séparait d’elle, il devenait un corps étranger, un corps ami, il mourait. Le film
était fini. Les lumières éclairèrent la salle.114

The consequences of the cutaneous contact that occurs between Irène

and Thomas and the mental images of this haptic interaction that she
subsequently endures reach far beyond the scope of the haptic visuality

112 Collin tells us that ‘[v]oir, dans l’œuvre de Blanchot, c’est toujours entrer dans l’espace
de la fascination’ (Maurice Blanchot et la question de l’écriture, p. 109). While I ques-
tion the rather sweeping nature of this generalisation, it is certainly true of this scene.
113 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 177.
114 Ibid., pp. 179–80.
158 Chapter 2

postulated by Marks.115 This is not only because Irène’s haptic visions con-
tain an optical dimension of the kind postulated by Riegl.116 These visions
are also influenced by the cinematic image that Irène has internalised as
well as a fourth perceptual dimension: time. As I demonstrated earlier in
this chapter, the temporal disruption wrought by fascination goes hand
in hand with the image in its literary guise. In the previous and following
quotations, Irène’s visions act not only upon her outer dermal layers, but
also within her body. The oscillation between haptic and optical modes of
perception that she endures – an indecision between remembrance and
forgetting of the perceiving body which is mirrored by the impossible
alternation between abjection and sublimity in Bataille’s critical and prose
works – begins to pull apart Irène’s sense of being:

dans une apothéose pathétique [l]es doigts, contact tour à tour froid et brûlant,
lui apportaient l’impression nouvelle […]. Irène se sentait malade, délicieusement
malade, se sentait sensible dans les organes même réputés insensibles. […] La peau
était inerte, mais la moelle vibrait doucement […]. Déjà un par un les organes que la
maladie avait éclairés s’éteignaient. Un rêve les remplaçait.117

Though the potential liberation from corporeity that the cinematic

image offers Irène appears to be a pleasant dream to her initially, the percep-
tual flux between corporeity and disembodiment that she endures proves
highly erosive of her ability to reason. Within a short time, she becomes
so mentally unstable that she is no longer able to function in the world
of rationality or empiricism and rejects the continued influence of either

115 For evidence of this, compare any of the quotations given above relating to Irène’s
experience in the cinema with Marks’s contention that ‘haptic perception privileges
the material presence of the image. Drawing from other forms of sense experience,
primarily touch and kinaesthetics, haptic visuality involves the body more than is the
case with optical visuality. Touch is a sense located on the surface of the body […].
The difference between haptic and optical visuality is a matter of degree. In most
processes of seeing, both are involved, in a dialectical movement from far to near’
(The Skin of the Film, p. 163).
116 As is evidenced by Riegl, ‘Über antike und moderne Kunstfreunde’, pp. 202–03. See
p. 7, n. 12 above for my transcription and translation of this extract.
117 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), pp. 177–79.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 159

concept upon her perceptive faculties by committing suicide: ‘Des images

la pétrissaient, l’enfantaient, la produisaient. Il lui vint un corps, un […]
cadavre, […] sa gorge traversée d’un stylet, son sang noir, Irène qui existait
encore et qui n’existait plus’.118
Irène’s perceptions of the literary image (and of Thomas as its avatar)
lead her to slit her throat with a dagger. She inscribes (or ‘writes’) her desire
to die into her skin with such force that it kills her. In this regard, Irène’s
corporeal existence and its self-destruction foreshadow the exscriptive expe-
rience of writing about our perceptive experiences described decades later
by Jean-Luc Nancy.119 Blanchot’s Irène actively seeks the sensory concentra-
tion of her haptic faculties. She mistakenly believes the literary/cinematic
image and the various hallucinations it provokes to have revealed every
facet of her physical being and the world that she perceives through her
sensory organs. She is unable to cope with the lack of rationality in what
she is able to perceive of herself and her environs under the image’s distort-
ing linguistic and designatory influence. When indeed Irène does commit
suicide, however, she slits her throat, thereby also severing her body from
any possibility of being governed by rational thought or of expressing such
thoughts again. She is thus left in a netherworld in which rationality and
irrationality become one and the same thing because neither concept is
able to express itself corporeally or, by extension, linguistically.120

118 Ibid., pp. 262–63.

119 As Nancy remarks of excription, ‘[l]e sens a besoin d’une épaisseur, d’une densité,
d’une masse, et donc d’une opacité, d’une obscurité par lesquelles il donne prise, il
se laisse toucher comme sens précisément là où il s’absente comme discours. Or ce là
est un point matériel, un point pesant: la chair d’une lèvre, la pointe d’une plume ou
d’un style, toute écriture en tant qu’elle trace le bord et le débord du langage. C’est le
point où toute écriture s’excrit, se dépose hors du sens qu’elle inscrit, dans les choses
dont ce sens est censé former l’inscription’ (Le Poids d’une pensée, p. 15; emphasis in
original).
120 In making this observation, I also wish to acknowledge Bruns’s comment concerning
Blanchot’s theorisations of a ‘mad’ language in which ‘writing begins with the gaze of
Orpheus […] because this gaze no longer reveals what it sees; it is outside the realm
of the visible-invisible [,] in a region of existence without being’ (Bruns, Maurice
160 Chapter 2

Another Tide

Following the deaths of the two women, Thomas’s haptic perception of

the world around him disintegrates to such a degree that he finds himself
living in a uniquely optical space, devoid of any tangible corporeity and
bereft of all female presence. The text concludes with Thomas and a group
of seemingly spectral male comrades succumbing to sensory temptation.
Seduced by images of the sense organs that once defined their perceptive
experiences of themselves and of their environs, the group throw themselves
into a sea of illusory, sensory tides. Thomas follows them reluctantly, unable
to finally divorce his sense of being from his visual faculties. He returns
to the waves which overpowered all of his perceptive faculties (to such an
extent that they endangered his very life) at the start of the text:
ils se groupèrent sur le rivage, cherchant à modeler dans le sable […] une main, […] un
œil [,] une bouche […]. Ils redevinrent pour un instant des hommes et, voyant dans
l’infini une image dont ils jouissaient, ils se laissèrent aller à une affreuse tentation et
se dénudèrent voluptueusement pour entrer dans l’eau. Thomas regarda […] ce flot
d’images grossières, puis il s’y précipita tristement, désespérément.121

Thomas finally surrenders his sensory faculties to the sea’s image-led

fascination of his perceptual faculties. His choice is socially motivated in
that he watches his male comrades undress in preparation to swim before
he runs reluctantly to the sea himself. The social aspect of this surrender is
in marked contrast to the actions and fates of Thomas’s female associates.
Anne and Irène willingly and unilaterally sacrifice their sensory faculties
in order to be rid of the anguished physical and mental (haptic) sensations
that they experience. In both instances, the female characters make their
own choices as to what they wish to perceive or not, and act accordingly.

Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, p. 73). Bruns’s words offer us a tidy summation
of Irène’s fate.
121 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 323.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 161

By contrast, Thomas allows himself to be swept along by the visual

fetishes of his male comrades. This fetish leads to them – and to him –
succumbing to the illusory pleasures of corporeal sensation. This double
(and appreciably haptic) seduction is followed by an inevitable effacement
of all of the group’s sensory faculties. Haptic perception as it is postulated
by Riegl, Marks or Paterson lures Thomas into the illusory world of a lan-
guage which deems itself capable of describing his sensations but which
promptly eradicates itself and drowns his individual consciousness.
In spite of all he has perceived, Thomas cannot resist being swept away
by his haptic sensations of the image as a construct of language and the
perceptual constructs which result from it. This wilful confusion of literary
cause with perceptible haptic effect (and affect) consumes Thomas’s sen-
sory faculties through fascination. The rest of his comrades suffer a similar
fate. Contrarily, in all three of the works of literary prose by Bataille that
I analysed in the previous chapter, the male characters remain unswerv-
ingly lucid in their descriptions of what they see and how they feel in their
skin, even if they are unable to make any rational sense of these pieces of
perceptual data.
At any rate, while the literary image and its attendant fascination appear
to outlive the physical existences of all three of Thomas l’obscur’s main pro-
tagonists whether they are female or male, the females seem more able to
transcend their bodies than Thomas is.
The pronounced difference in sensory experiences between the gen-
ders described in Thomas l’obscur is markedly less apparent in La Folie du
jour. This brief work, first published in 1949 under the title Un récit? in
a short-lived literary journal entitled Empédocle, was reprinted as a stan-
dalone text identical to its predecessor in all but name in 1973.122 What
differences exist between the portrayals of haptic perception in this récit
(that Blanchot decided against referring to as such when it was reprinted)
and the first, roman-length version of Thomas l’obscur?

122 I shall be referring to a reprint of La Folie du jour (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1980).
162 Chapter 2

La Folie du jour: Haptic Feelings of Madness

The first version of Thomas l’obscur is preoccupied with the concept of

proximal sensory interaction and the psychological damage that it can do.
Blanchot’s text illustrates how such interaction may only serve to amplify
the differing sensations experienced by two people engaged in a supposedly
shared situation. In Thomas l’obscur, this perceptible difference develops
into a form of violence which expresses itself mentally and physically. The
accounts of ostensibly ‘shared’ incidences in which Thomas and Anne or
Thomas and Irène are involved are exemplary of this characteristic.
La Folie du jour is a rather different prospect: it is a lone male narra-
tor’s brief account of a chronologically discontinuous series of events. If
other people are involved in any of these events, none are given names or
described in any more than cursory detail. Yet the text is vivid in its descrip-
tions of the narrator’s troubling bodily sensations:

Puis-je décrire mes épreuves? Je ne pouvais ni marcher, ni respirer, ni me nourrir.

Mon souffle était de la pierre, mon corps de l’eau, et pourtant je mourais de soif.
Un jour, on m’enfonça dans le sol, les médecins me couvrirent de boue. Quel travail
au fond de cette terre. Qui la dit froide? C’est du feu, c’est un buisson de ronces. Je
me relevai tout à fait insensible. Mon tact errait à deux mètres: si l’on entrait dans
ma chambre, je criais, mais le couteau me découpait tranquillement. Oui, je devins
un squelette. Ma maigreur, la nuit, se dressait devant moi pour m’épouvanter. Elle
m’injuriait, me fatiguait à aller et venir; ah, j’étais bien fatigué.123

In the previous chapter, I demonstrated the significant differences

discerned by Bataille between earth and sky – particularly in terms of his
understandings of abjection and sublimity, of corporeality and transcend-
ence. The ailments from which Blanchot’s nameless narrator suffers in the
quotation above all have earthly, elemental symptoms. These symptoms
cause him to suffer because they are inversions of the similes that we would
normally associate with the sensory faculties to which they relate. Instead

123 Ibid., pp. 13–14.

Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 163

of being light or intangible, the narrator’s breath ‘était de la pierre’ – one of

the most solid objects on earth. Far from feeling solid (as stone), his body
was ‘de l’eau’, yet still he felt an extreme thirst.124 When doctors attempt to
cure Blanchot’s narrator of his elemental ailments by burying him in earth
or soil – which we might consider a ‘middle ground’ between the tactile
solidity of stone and the fluidity of water – he experiences an intense burn-
ing sensation (‘C’est du feu’). The immersion of almost all of the narrator’s
dermal layer in earth sharpens his cutaneous perception to such an extent
that it becomes agonising for him. Nevertheless, the very intensity of this
sensation confuses his visual and cutaneous receptors. Indeed, the narrator’s
physical pain distorts his spatial discernment such that proximal and even
dermally incisive stimuli (such as a surgeon’s knife) feel physically distant
to him. Conversely, people entering the narrator’s hospital room – who,
unlike him, are capable of seeing the narrator and all of the room around
him – exert an agonising pressure upon the phantom skin that his sensory
faculties project around him.
There is a precedent for such phantasms in Blanchot’s prose. In the
midst of the tactile interactions that occur in the darkened cinema salon
between Thomas and Irène in the first version of Thomas l’obscur, it is noted
in the narrative that ‘[o]n eût dit que les rayons inconnus, la vie inassimilable
qui convenait aux figures déjà à moitié consumées de l’écran réussissaient
à le toucher et l’embrasaient silencieusement’.125 In both this scene and La
Folie du jour’s first passages concerning a hospital room, there is a possibil-
ity that another, somehow inassimilable vision of alterity may impose itself
upon human skin without actually coming into tactile contact with it.
But there is a further dimension to the suffering endured by La Folie du
jour’s narrator. His sensory and spatial confusion begins when he is briefly

124 Starobinski detects a similar inversion of concrete and abstractive similes in the
opening chapter of Thomas l’obscur (see ‘Thomas l’obscur, chapitre premier’, p. 504).
Ironically, the sensation of liquidity endured by Blanchot’s narrator is scientifically
accurate: we have known the human body to be composed almost entirely of liquids
for a long time. See François Dagognet, Le Corps (Paris: PUF, 2008) pp. 26–27, 32–33
for further discussion of the history surrounding this discovery.
125 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 177.
164 Chapter 2

rooted in soil. While partially buried in this earth, he becomes part of it.
The doctors appear to hope that by immersing the narrator in a space which
seems rigidly solid when it is in fact formed of a vast number of movable
soil particles, the sensory inversions that afflict him will be neutralised.
Following his immersion in the soil, the narrator’s sensory faculties
oscillate. At one moment, he is subject to the acute responsiveness to atmos-
phere exhibited by water through phenomena such as erosion and evapora-
tion. On other occasions, he is as indifferent and perceptually unresponsive
to his environment as a stone might be (‘Elle m’injuriait, me fatiguait à aller
et venir; ah, j’étais bien fatigué’).126
In his subsequent litany of sensory contradictions, the narrator
describes walking down the street one day and witnessing a man holding
a door open for a woman who then wheels a pram through it. Intrigued,
the narrator cannot resist crossing the road to inspect the now vacant space
more closely:

J’allai à cette maison, mais sans y entrer. Par l’orifice, je voyais le commencement
noir d’une cour. Je m’appuyai au mur du dehors, j’avais certes très froid; le froid
m’enveloppant des pieds à la tête, je sentais lentement mon énorme stature prendre
les dimensions de ce froid immense, elle s’élevait tranquillement selon les droits de
sa nature véritable et je demeurais dans la joie et la perfection de ce bonheur, un
instant la tête aussi haut que la pierre du ciel et les pieds sur le macadam. Tout cela
était réel, notez-le.127

As the narrator comes into contact with the house wall, he perceives cuta-
neously the chilling lack of haptic contact exchanged between the man and
the young mother; until this moment, he had only been able to observe
it from a distance. Moreover, by moving from distant optical space into
proximal haptic space (and thereby conforming with the haptic models
postulated by Riegl or Marks), Blanchot’s narrator is able to discern what
he believes to be the ‘nature véritable’ of the chill he feels running through
his skin and bones. He is able to gauge not only his emotions but also his
body’s relationship with its physical environs by means of this cutaneously

126 Blanchot, La Folie du jour, p. 14.

127 Ibid., p. 20.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 165

gleaned information (‘la perfection de ce bonheur, un instant la tête aussi

haut que la pierre du ciel et les pieds sur le macadam. Tout cela était réel’).
Such gleaning of knowledge by cutaneous means runs contrary to the
‘non-savoir’ that Blanchot’s theoretical works associate with corporeal
perception (as in the passages from Faux pas or L’Entretien infini analysed
earlier in this chapter).
Just as significantly, the narrator’s ability to discern ‘perfection’ in the
quotation from La Folie du jour given above directly contradicts Bataille’s
stance on human perception in texts such as L’Expérience intérieure (‘Ne
plus se vouloir tout est tout mettre en cause’;128 ‘[l]’expérience atteint pour
finir la fusion de l’objet et du sujet, étant comme sujet non-savoir, comme
objet l’inconnu’).129
The experience of La Folie du jour’s narrator when he presses him-
self against the house’s external wall proves to be more enjoyable for him
than the ordeal that Thomas endures while in contact with a cave wall
in Blanchot’s earlier work. Following his paradoxical moment of haptic
interaction with an area of space which actively numbs haptic perception
through its chilliness (another motif shared with Thomas l’obscur), the
sensations experienced subsequently by the narrator of La Folie du jour
appear sharper, even though he loses his sight for a time:

Quelquefois dans ma tête se créait une vaste solitude où le monde disparaissait tout
entier, mais il sortait de là intact, sans une égratignure, rien n’y manquait. Je faillis
perdre la vue, quelqu’un ayant écrasé du verre sur mes yeux. Ce coup m’ébranla, je le
reconnais. J’eus l’impression de rentrer dans le mur, de divaguer dans un buisson de
silex. Le pire, c’était la brusque, l’affreuse cruauté du jour; je ne pouvais ni regarder
ni ne pas regarder; voir c’était l’épouvante, et cesser de voir me déchirait du front à la
gorge. En outre, j’entendais des cris d’hyène qui me mettaient sous la menace d’une
bête sauvage (ces cris, je crois, étaient les miens).130

In spite of the acuity of his skin in detecting his inwardly and outwardly
discernible sensations of physical pain, the narrator’s spatial perception is

128 Bataille, L’Expérience intérieure, p. 10.

129 Ibid., p. 21.
130 Blanchot, La Folie du jour, p. 21.
166 Chapter 2

scrambled. At the epicentre of this scrambling are his neither seeing nor
unseeing eyes and the haptic properties of the sun’s rays, their ability to
penetrate his bandaged irises. (Once more, the sun appears as an avatar of
the absence of rationalist sense.) The narrator’s bandaged eyes and the sun’s
burning rays incite an overcompensation in his cutaneous sensory faculties.
He is no longer able to distinguish his body’s outer limits from the percep-
tible space that surrounds him. On this evidence, the narrator’s sense of
touch proves far from able to discern space in its own right. Without visual
reference, his sense of touch in fact becomes so confused that it creates a
disjuncture between his other senses. This disjuncture proves sufficient to
leave him uncertain as to whether or not he is screaming. As the narrator’s
treatment continues, this confusion spreads from anguished cries into
the realm of coherent, nuanced language, but does so only as a result of
the painful tactile sensations that he must suffer in as much silence as
possible to ensure his recovery:

Le verre ôté, on glissa sous les paupières une pellicule et sur les paupières des murailles
d’ouate. Je ne devais pas parler, car la parole tirait sur les clous du pansement. […] À la
longue, je fus convaincu que je voyais face à face la folie du jour; telle était la vérité: la
lumière devenait folle, la clarté avait perdu tout bon sens; elle m’assaillait déraisonna-
blement, sans règle, sans but. Cette découverte fut un coup de dent à travers ma vie.131

In the depths of his sensory confusion, Blanchot’s narrator finds him-

self assailed haptically. He perceives a ‘coup de dent’ caused by his sensory
faculties being unable to penetrate the sensations that they perceive. Not
only are his eyes burned by the sun, but even expressing the anguish that
he experiences as this occurs in language of any kind could well impede
the recovery of his sight. Deprived of his vision and of his ability to speak
of this anguished loss, the narrator’s skin is capable only of adding further
senseless hurt to his already acute pain (thereby falling in line with Bataille’s
stance on physical perception’s correlations with angoisse).132 Yet following

131 Ibid., pp. 22–23.

132 This link is evidenced by Bataille’s Madame Edwarda (pp. 29–30) and is theorised
in Bataille’s L’Expérience intérieure (especially the chapter entitled ‘Le Supplice’
(pp. 43–76)).
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 167

his discharge from hospital and the healing of his ocular injuries, Blanchot’s
narrator remains unable to function without being in proximal contact
with his immediate surroundings:

Bien que la vue à peine diminuée, je marchais dans la rue comme un crabe, me tenant
fermement aux murs et, dès que je les avais lâchés, le vertige autour de mes pas. Sur
ces murs, je voyais souvent la même affiche […] avec des lettres assez grandes: Toi
aussi, tu le veux. Certainement, je le voulais, et chaque fois que je rencontrais ces
mots considérables, je le voulais.133

The situation that Blanchot’s narrator describes above offers us a rather dif-
ferent perspective on Marks’s postulation of haptic visuality. As I stated in
the introductory chapter, the Marksian variant of haptic perception is par-
ticularly driven by the subject’s barely conscious desire to touch particular
tactile details of an otherwise unidentifiable surface. These details are made
apparent by the moving (cinematic) images that he or she beholds. In La
Folie du jour, however, it is the narrator’s very desire to move that provokes
his need to interact haptically with his proximal environment. Taking
hold of his immediate surroundings allows him to ground – and thereby
guard – his perceptive faculties against ‘vertige’. It could therefore be
argued that by rooting himself in the earthly (and the haptic), Blanchot’s
narrator consciously avoids oscillation between this state and the out-
of-body sublimity solicited by the behaviour of a number of Bataille’s
protagonists.
Unfortunately, by conducting himself as he does, Blanchot’s narrator
finds that ‘recueillant une part excessive du délabrement anonyme, j’attirais
ensuite d’autant plus les regards qu’elle n’était pas faite pour moi et qu’elle
faisait de moi quelque chose d’un peu vague et informe; aussi paraissait-elle
affectée, ostensible’.134 By avoiding one characteristic exhibited by many of
Bataille’s literary characters (the oscillation between the sublime and the
abject), La Folie du jour’s narrator falls prey to one of Bataille’s theoretical
postulates: the informe.

133 Blanchot, La Folie du jour, pp. 24–25; emphasis in original.

134 Ibid., p. 26.
168 Chapter 2

In order to explain the inescapable move towards decorporealisation

that he perceives, the narrator harks back to his convalescence in hospital
following the operation that saved his sight. It is then that we learn that
the reduction of the narrator’s body to the linguistic and numeric record-
ing of its most basic and intangible inner components – blood cells –
diminishes his haptically discernible presence to such an extent that doctors
no longer seem able to conceive of him as being haptically present:

J’aimais assez les médecins […]. L’ennui, c’est que leur autorité grandissait […]. En
hâte, je me dépouillais de moi-même. Je leur distribuais mon sang […]. Sous leurs
yeux en rien étonnés, je devenais une goutte d’eau, une tache d’encre. [ J]e passais
tout entier sous leur vue, et quand enfin, n’ayant plus présente que ma parfait nullité
et n’ayant plus rien à voir, ils cessaient aussi de me voir.135

At the same time that the body of Blanchot’s narrator has become informe,
it has also undergone an experience which Jean-Luc Nancy would qualify
as exscriptive some years later (‘la vision ne pénètre pas, elle glisse le long
des écarts […]. Elle est toucher qui n’absorbe pas, qui se déplace le long
des traits et des retraits qui inscrivent et qui excrivent un corps’).136 Much
as with Nancy’s subsequent postulation of excription, the effacement of
haptic presence that Blanchot’s narrator suffers in La Folie du jour is one
which purges not only his spatial understandings but also his linguistic
relationship with them.

In Shadow: Le rapport du troisième genre

While convalescing in hospital after his operation, the narrator makes a

new acquaintance: ‘j’apercevais la silhouette de la loi. Non pas la loi que
l’on connaît, qui est rigoureuse et peu agréable: celle-ci était autre. […]

135 Ibid., pp. 28–29.

136 Nancy, Corpus, p. 42.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 169

À la croire, mon regard était la foudre et mes mains des occasions de périr’.137
This law’s motives are knowable: ‘Je savais qu’un de ses buts, c’était de me
faire “rendre justice”. Elle me disait: “Maintenant, tu es un être à part; […]
tes actes demeurent sans conséquence”’.138 Whether this is a hallucina-
tion or not, the image of the law and the ‘justesse’ that it demands of the
narrator play out in the perceptible though scrambled haptic space of his
hospital room:139
Voici un de ses jeux. Elle me montrait une portion de l’espace, entre le haut de la
fenêtre et le plafond: ‘Vous êtes là’, disait-elle. Je regardais ce point avec intensité.
‘Y êtes-vous?’ […] Je sentais bondir les cicatrices de mon regard, ma vue devenait
une plaie, ma tête un trou, un taureau éventré. Soudain, elle s’écriait: ‘Ah, je vois le
jour, ah, Dieu’, etc. Je protestais que ce jeu me fatiguait énormément, mais elle était
insatiable de ma gloire.140

The scene quoted above and that which precedes it (in which the nar-
rator claims that a feminised, shadowy vision of the ‘other’ law ‘m’avait une
fois fait toucher son genou: une bizarre impression’)141 are based upon a
momentary, almost ghostly haptic interaction between the sexes (because
the narrator only ever sees and touches a small part of the silhouette’s entire
form).142 Most significant in the ‘game’ described above is the manner in
which ‘justesse’ may be derived from the narrator’s skewed perception of
the (haptic) space around him. This new, somewhat crazed logic of spatial

137 Blanchot, La Folie du jour, p. 29.

138 Ibid., p. 30.
139 This is not without precedent. As I demonstrated earlier in this chapter, Thomas’s
brutally numbing encounter with the ‘new’ law that obliterates subject and object
occurs in the midst of a similar haptic confusion (which on that occasion is created
by his initial swim in the sea).
140 Blanchot, La Folie du jour, p. 34.
141 Ibid.
142 Hurault considers this ghostliness to be a defining characteristic of Blanchot’s literary
works: ‘figure d’exil, détachée, […] abstraite comme l’est l’être où il est privé de sa
dépouille, ni être ni non-être, quelque chose qui serait hors de tout rapport à l’être.
[…] Le vide de la figure […] préoccupe Blanchot’ (Maurice Blanchot: le principe de
la fiction, pp. 31–32).
170 Chapter 2

perception and the words uttered by the silhouette to validate it form the
basis of a new (troisième) rapport between the narrator and that space as he
now perceives it (rather than fostering a subject-to-subject or subject-to-
object interrelation between the two). The new, irrational rules of ‘justesse’
imparted to Blanchot’s narrator by the hallucination or image which is in
turn born of the daylight that so taunts his sanity insist that he is percep-
tibly present in an area of space in which he cannot be (‘entre le haut de
la fenêtre et le plafond’).143 Crucially, this space – which is impossible for
the narrator to inhabit and almost as impossible for him to see or touch
in his convalescent state – is essentially haptic (by the standards of Riegl,
Marks or Paterson). That is to say that the space is relatively proximal and
could be seen and touched at once with the aid of a ladder. Additionally,
this space imposes itself upon the narrator’s vision and forms a small, tac-
tilely detailed section of a much larger, imperceptible whole (the hospital
room in its entirety).144
So, what in fact attests to the narrator’s new rapport du troisième genre
with physical space, abstractive reason and his own perceptive consciousness
is the designation of space that has the potential to be haptic. This haptic
potentiality cannot be realised at present, however, given the beholding
narrator’s infirmity (which is itself a form of fascination).145
The impossibly haptic space with which the narrator is confronted is
designated by the image of a previously unknown ‘silhouette de la loi’. This
silhouette – which would be a non-haptic presence, according to Riegl’s

143 Blanchot, La Folie du jour, p. 34.

144 Blanchot himself says in L’Entretien infini that ‘l’impossible […] faut entendre que
la possibilité n’est pas la seule dimension de notre existence’ (p. 307; emphasis in
original). To this, Ravel adds that ‘[l]a littérature blanchotienne se destitue en per-
manence d’un objet potentiel. De ce qui pourrait laisser trace’ (Maurice Blanchot
et l’art au vingtième siècle, p. 40). I therefore think it justifiable to insist upon this
notion of potentially haptic space.
145 As Crowley observes, ‘les rapprochements effectués par Blanchot entre le toucher et
ce qui demeure par nature inaccessible – disons, ici, la vision, l’écriture, la lecture – se
font invariablement sous le signe du paradoxe […]; au milieu de tout contact s’ouvre
une distance irréductible. […] Le toucher devient le propre du voir, l’éloignement
l’essence de la proximité’ (‘Touche-là’, pp. 169–70).
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 171

definitions –146 invests the narrator’s haptic faculties with the power to
insinuate themselves perhaps fatally beneath the surfaces with which they
interact (‘À la croire, mon regard était la foudre et mes mains des occasions
de périr’).147 This situation inverts the rationale of haptic interaction, which
demands vital contact between a beholder and a potentially tactile surface
first and foremost. Haptic interaction therefore becomes impossible not
only spatially, but also on a metaphysical level: the deathly senses of sight
and in particular, touch with which La Folie du jour’s narrator is imbued
will be unable to detect anything other than the deadness that they already
are themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, the referent of this dual impossibility is
space that could be designated as being haptic and which has the potential
to be perceived haptically under different physical circumstances.

Récit vs. Hapticity?

La Folie du jour concludes with another impossibility that relates to

identification. The identity of the individual or individuals who smashed
the glass into the narrator’s eyes is never revealed. This does not prevent
his carers from asking him repeatedly about the events leading up to the
attack:

146 To justify this contention, I refer to Riegl’s qualification of the precociously optical
sensibilities exhibited by Thomas de Keyser’s paintings as ‘[d]iese Entkörperlichung
durch Abstreifen des Tastbaren und Begrenzten, dieses Überführen der haptischen
Formen in den bloß sichtbaren Luftraum und das Auflösen der das Haptische stets
begleitenden Lokalfarben in unmerklich ineinander überfließende Lichter und
Schatten’ (Das holländische Gruppenporträt, p. 179). (‘Bodies are stripped of their
substance, their tangible and physical properties; haptic forms melt into the purely
visual experience of the free space around them. The local colour that always clings
to the haptic is broken up by highlights and shadows into imperceptible modulation
of varying shades’ (The Group Portraiture of Holland, p. 252).)
147 Blanchot, La Folie du jour, p. 29.
172 Chapter 2

l’un était un technicien de la vue, l’autre un spécialiste des maladies mentales […].
Ni l’un ni l’autre, certes, n’était le commissaire de police. Mais, étant deux, à cause de
cela ils étaient trois, et ce troisième restait fermement convaincu, j’en suis sûr, qu’un
écrivain, un homme qui parle et qui raisonne avec distinction, est toujours capable
de raconter des faits dont il se souvient.
Un récit? Non, pas de récit, plus jamais.148

The narrator’s récit, his literary enunciation of that period of time as he

perceives it, comes to an end with the promise that no more shall follow
it. His refusal to give explanations about this decision or his injury in the
quotation above could just as easily be genuine ignorance about what hap-
pened to him or the state of mind that he was in subsequently. Neither those
characters who question the narrator nor we who read his narrative can be
certain whether the narrator is telling the truth or withholding it, however.
This uncertainty is integral to Blanchot’s approach to haptic interaction
in La Folie du jour. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, Blanchot writes
in L’Espace littéraire that ‘[é]crire, c’est briser le lien qui unit la parole à
moi-même, […] l’action et le temps’.149 La Folie du jour makes liberal use
of this philosophy.
As with the majority of Bataille’s récits that I analysed in the previous
chapter and Thomas l’obscur, La Folie du jour’s narrative also makes frequent
reference to moments of potentially haptic interaction, only to undermine
this haptic potentiality within the same paragraph. It is in many respects a
text which is more exscriptive of haptic perception than directly allusive of it.
In spite of the frequent journeys made by Blanchot’s narrator to the
experiential limits of his body and mind, however, his vocabulary remains
firmly rooted within corporeal terms of reference. There is only one narra-
tive voice apparent in La Folie du jour and that narrative concludes with a
refusal to create a coherent account of the events which led to the narra-
tor’s seemingly hallucinatory experiences whilst in hospital. This refusal
directly contradicts the desires of two characters that specialise in visual
and mental perception. These individuals’ specialisms combine to create a

148 Ibid., pp. 37–38.

149 Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, pp. 20–21.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 173

discernibly absent third presence which the narrator believes to be juridi-

cal (‘Ni l’un ni l’autre, certes, n’était le commissaire de police. Mais, étant
deux, à cause de cela ils étaient trois’).150 This assertion recalls the narrator’s
earlier encounter with the alternately haptic and non-haptic ‘silhouette
de la loi’, which had already established the existence of an intermittently
perceptible juridical force.
The space designated by the shadowy presence of the ‘silhouette de la
loi’ is, as I suggested above, potentially haptic in nature. However, Blanchot’s
narrator cannot realise this haptic potentiality at the moment that the
space is shown to him because of the poor state of his eyesight and general
health. The haptic potential of that space therefore appears to be at once
present and absent, simultaneously possible and impossible to the narrator.
The avatar of ‘justesse’ that points this space out to the narrator exhibits
haptic characteristics comparable with the very space designated by that
avatar.
I therefore suggest that the impossibly discernible absence that is nev-
ertheless perceived by La Folie du jour’s narrator is not juridical in nature
but is instead haptic. As should be obvious from the textual analysis above,
this is a proto-exscriptive form of haptic perception, a mode of sensation
which – in common with instances of haptic interaction in Bataille’s prose –
does not recognise itself or its literary trace.151 Thus, the discernible literary
traces of these haptic interactions must also be effaced, meaning that there

150 Blanchot, La Folie du jour, p. 38.

151 This self-effacing form of inscription is perhaps the most apparent evidence of
Stéphane Mallarmé’s influence on Blanchot’s thinking. It also, however, highlights
the extent to which Blanchot’s thinking differs from that of Mallarmé. Bruns opines of
Mallarmé’s writing that ‘[l]’écriture is not an inscription of something other than itself;
what is inscribed disappears’ (Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy,
p. 9; emphasis in original). As is evident from my textual analyses, I do not believe
that what Bruns says of Mallarmé’s writing is applicable to Blanchot’s literary and
critical writings. To support this assertion, I refer to Georges Préli’s observation that
‘[l]’expérience de l’écriture chez Blanchot correspond à une coexistence du corps et
de l’espace, qui est l’extrême et secrète transparence de ses récits, par où le langage se
voit comme régi par les mouvements du corps et son séjour dans l’espace, et où corps
et espace sont intimement inscrits dans le langage’ (La Force du dehors: extériorité,
174 Chapter 2

will be ‘pas de récit, plus jamais’.152 This exscriptive form of haptic percep-
tion is carried to its logical conclusion in Blanchot’s final piece of literary
prose, L’Instant de ma mort.

L’Instant de ma mort: Erasing the Haptic’s Foothold

L’Instant de ma mort is the last non-theoretical text of Blanchot’s career.

First published in 1994,153 this very brief work bears final testament to the
increasing absence of descriptions of haptic experience from Blanchot’s
prose. There has been much discussion as to whether L’Instant de ma mort is
autobiographical or not; the text describes how – as Blanchot in fact did – a
young member of the French resistance narrowly avoids a Nazi firing squad
during the Allied invasion of France in June 1944.154
When L’Instant de ma mort begins, we are treated to a haptic allusion
within fewer than two paragraphs: ‘Les Alliés avaient réussi à prendre pied
sur le sol français. Les Allemands, déjà vaincus, luttaient en vain avec une
inutilité féroce’.155 Though obviously idiomatic, the phrase above suggests
that some form of material possession can be associated with perceived

limite et non-pouvoir à partir de Maurice Blanchot ([Fontenay-sous-Bois]: Recherches,

1977), p. 217).
152 Blanchot, La Folie du jour, p. 38.
153 I shall be referring to the 2006 reprint of Blanchot’s L’Instant de ma mort (Paris:
NRF/Gallimard).
154 Jacques Derrida – among others – has discussed the autobiographical potential of
L’Instant de ma mort. In Demeure (Paris: Galilée, 1998), Derrida suggests that, though
there are documented parallels between the events which befall L’Instant de mort’s
protagonist and situations in which Blanchot found himself during World War II,
Blanchot’s text cannot be considered entirely autobiographical (Derrida, Demeure,
pp. 25, 33–36, 132). A lack of space means that the question of autobiography cannot
be dwelt upon here, however.
155 Blanchot, L’Instant de ma mort, p. 9.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 175

haptic presence: by setting foot on French soil, the Allies had already initi-
ated the defeat of their Nazi enemies.
As these battles rage, there is a seemingly innocuous knock at the door
of a large house known locally as the ‘château’. The house’s sole male occu-
pant goes to see who is there: ‘on frappa à la porte plutôt timidement. Je
sais que le jeune homme vint ouvrir à des hôtes qui sans doute demandaient
secours. Cette fois, hurlement: “Tous dehors.”’.156 In the wake of responding
to what he hears, the young master of the ‘château’ finds himself and the
rest of his family being ordered out of their own house at gunpoint. The
ensuing walk removes the whole family from the house but threatens to end
with the young man’s death because he is then placed before a firing squad:

Le nazi mit en rang ses hommes pour atteindre, selon les règles, la cible humaine.
Le jeune homme dit: ‘Faites au moins rentrer ma famille.’ Soit: la tante (94 ans), sa
mère plus jeune, sa sœur et sa belle-sœur, un long et lent cortège, silencieux, comme
si tout était déjà accompli.
Je sais – le sais-je – que celui que visaient déjà les Allemands, n’attendant plus
que l’ordre final, éprouva alors un sentiment de légèreté extraordinaire, une sorte de
béatitude (rien d’heureux cependant) […]. À sa place, je ne chercherai pas à analyser
ce sentiment de légèreté.157

As the young man’s four female relatives (rather than any religiously sym-
bolic Trinity) retire to their ‘château’ in a ‘long et lent cortège’, he stands
motionless, fascinated by his seemingly mortal fate. In this frozen moment,
he ‘éprouva alors un sentiment de légèreté extraordinaire, une sorte de
béatitude (rien d’heureux cependant)’; cutaneous and kinaesthetic sensa-
tions appear to desert the young protagonist in pre-emption of the death of
their corporeal receptors. Moreover, the young man perceives his increasing
absence of sensation (‘Je sais – le sais-je’). Nevertheless, the young man’s
visual faculties remain functional: he is still able to tell where he is, that
a Nazi firing squad stands before him and that his relatives are no longer
present.

156 Ibid.
157 Ibid., pp. 10–11.
176 Chapter 2

What is it that so diminishes the bodily sensations (and any haptic

potentiality) of this moment? Could the young man’s sensation of being
light of body and in a state of ‘béatitude’ – characteristics which correlate
closely with Bataille’s fictionalised descriptions of sublimity – result from
the physical absence of his female relatives’ unwilling eyes at the moment
of his probable death? Equally, are the young man’s sensations of haptic
absence incited by his wait to experience visually – rather than visually and
cutaneously, as would be the case in haptic perception – a concretisation
of the abstract military ‘règles’ that govern the firing squad’s actions?158
Though no answer is immediately apparent, it is clear that L’Instant de ma
mort’s narrative expressly refuses to engage or identify with its protagonist
on the basis of sensory (and especially, haptic) empathy: ‘À sa place, je ne
chercherai pas à analyser ce sentiment de légèreté’.159

From Haptic Perception to Sensory Neutralisation

Just when it seems that the young maquisard’s removal from the world
of haptic perception will also prove to be his final conscious moment on
earth, his life – if not all of his perceptive faculties – are saved by the noisy
intervention of his guerrilla comrades:

158 This wait for a concretisation of juridical force is foreshadowed by the alternately
haptic and non-haptic sensory experiences of the narrator of La Folie du jour when
he encounters ‘la silhouette de la loi’ in his hospital room. In that instance, the ‘loi’
seemed distinctly feminine to the narrator. By contrast, the narrator of L’Instant de
ma mort prepares himself to experience the rules of war in the absence of his female
relatives.
159 L’Instant de ma mort, p. 11. Derrida remarks upon this refusal to judge, but emphasises
the use of the future tense in the wording of it. Moreover, the haptic implications of
this refusal are not discussed by Derrida in any other terms than the ‘légèreté’ that
Blanchot’s young protagonist experiences (see Derrida, Demeure, pp. 81–83).
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 177

À cet instant, brusque retour au monde, éclata le bruit considérable d’une proche
bataille. Les camarades du maquis voulaient porter secours à celui qu’ils savaient en
danger. Le lieutenant s’éloigna pour se rendre compte. Les Allemands restaient en
ordre […] dans une immobilité qui arrêtait le temps.
Mais voici que l’un d’eux s’approcha et dit d’une voix ferme: ‘Nous, pas allemands,
russes’, et, dans une sorte de rire: ‘armée Vlassov’ et il lui fit signe de disparaître.160

The noise created by the resistance’s attack proves sufficient to distract the
Nazi lieutenant’s attention from ordering the firing squad to carry out their
task. While the lieutenant moves away from his firing squad, his prisoner
continues to watch it intently. The prisoner becomes increasingly aware that
his gaze is being stripped of other corporeal sensation, yet as he becomes
fully conscious of this fact, time stops (‘Les Allemands restaient en ordre
[…] dans une immobilité qui arrêtait le temps’).161
By reading this description of the moment before the young man’s
anticipated death, we too enter the realm of literary fascination. Just to
remind us of this fact, the reason that chronology is restored in the quota-
tion above is vocal, a product of language. Blanchot’s nameless protagonist
is told by one of his similarly nameless would-be executioners that they are
not members of the regular German Army. These words are accompanied by
a potentially haptic gesture (an action which is at once visible and tangible).
However, the soldier’s signal, his ‘signe de disparaître’162 exscripts any haptic
potential from itself because of its content; the verb ‘disparaître’ means
both ‘to disappear’ and ‘to die’, so even as the soldier enacts this gesture, it
effaces itself. He is asking the young maquisard to become invisible to him
and by extension, not to see him make such a gesture again.

160 Blanchot, L’Instant de ma mort, pp. 11–12.

161 Ibid., p. 12. Ravel offers an interesting perspective upon this situation through a
comment that she makes about Blanchot’s writing in general. Ravel states that in all
of Blanchot’s writing, ‘[l]’œil se pose sur la scintillation – le permanent, l’apparence,
donc –, et s’aveugle de ce qu’il advient de visible – l’apparition – et qui se perd,
disparaît. L’actuel donc’ (Maurice Blanchot et l’art au vingtième siècle, pp. 37–38).
Ravel’s observation is as applicable to Thomas l’obscur and La Folie du jour as it is to
L’Instant de ma mort.
162 Blanchot, L’Instant de ma mort, p. 12.
178 Chapter 2

Far from relying upon the vital, gendered différence that underpins
sensory interaction (according to philosophers such as Nancy),163 the
young maquisard’s physical liberation from imminent death and bodily
sensation – whether unhappy or not – can only be brought about by the
collusion of another male, the Vlassovite soldier who lets him go. The
males’ respective roles of victim and persecutor are transcended by this
complicity. The traditional archetypes of gender roles are not, however:
the women featured in L’Instant de ma mort have nothing to offer the
young man in his struggle for life apart from their discernible silence and
their perceptible absence.
Having fled the firing squad, Blanchot’s young protagonist hides
himself in a distant wood:

Je crois qu’il s’éloigna, toujours dans le sentiment de légèreté, au point qu’il se retrouva
dans un bois éloigné, nommé ‘Bois des bruyères’, où il demeura abrité par les arbres
qu’il connaissait bien. C’est dans le bois épais que tout à coup, et après combien de
temps, il retrouva le sens du réel. Partout, des incendies, une suite de feu continu,
toutes les fermes brûlaient. […] En réalité, combien de temps s’était-il écoulé?164

Following his brush with death, the young protagonist finds himself almost
floating into the woods which shelter him, shorn of nearly all of his sen-
sory awareness. Even the narrative which expresses this perceptual vague-
ness is uncertain of itself (‘Je crois qu’il s’éloigna’). Once inside the wood,
however, in this isolated space ‘où il demeura abrité par les arbres qu’il
connaissait bien’, the maquisard rediscovers ‘le sens du réel’. Let us begin
by commenting upon the name of this wood, the ‘Bois des bruyères’. This
name would translate roughly as ‘Briar Wood’ (though bruyère can also
mean ‘heath(land)’ or ‘heather’). Given the sensory dislocation described
in the passage above, it seems far from accidental that the name given to
the wood (bruyères) could designate either a sharp, prickly plant (briar
bushes) or a plant which is relatively soft to the touch (heather).

163 See Nancy, Corpus, pp. 161–62 and my analysis of Bataille’s Madame Edwarda in the
previous chapter (pp. 76–90, above).
164 Blanchot, L’Instant de ma mort, pp. 12–13.
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 179

Part of the young man’s return to reality is provided by his growing

awareness of the violence which continues to occur in the area around
him (‘[p]artout, des incendies, une suite de feu continu, toutes les fermes
brûlaient’).165 The primary senses through which this awareness derives
are those of vision, hearing and possibly smell, in the case of the fires and
burning farms. The young man’s sensory awareness begins to return after
an unknown period of time but the gunfire in the area and the death that
it brings with it are discernibly ‘continu’.
In spite of this temporal disjuncture being so apparent to him,
Blanchot’s protagonist recovers his ‘sens du réel’ through his perceptive
faculties, even if references to touch are limited to a ‘sentiment de légèreté’.166
This fact implies that tactile interaction is not necessary in order to create
a perception of the ‘réel’. To summarise, the ‘sens du réel’ that the young
man experiences is atemporal and is perceptible from a densely covered
space that is obscure to others but is readily visible to him. At the same
time, this space is only faintly perceptible by cutaneous means, in spite of
the visible density of trees which fill it.
However, before becoming unduly distracted by the mostly visual
qualities of the ‘sens du réel’ that the young man rediscovers in the car-
nage that unfolds around him, we must remember that this ‘réel’ is one
of mortality: ‘Même les chevaux gonflés, sur la route, dans les champs,
attestaient une guerre qui avait duré’.167 Though these visions are such that
interacting with them cutaneously could prove physically harmful, the
young maquisard experiences them at one remove because he is sheltered
by the simultaneously tactile and visible familiarity of the wood. Traces of
the Bataillean sublime (especially those in Le Bleu du ciel) are also discern-
ible in this scene from L’Instant de ma mort. Blanchot’s young maquisard
alternates between being almost entirely numb to cutaneous sensation
and being all too aware of the gunfire, noxious smoke and bloated animal
corpses which surround him.

165 Ibid.
166 Ibid., p. 12.
167 Ibid., p. 13.
180 Chapter 2

Though Blanchot’s young protagonist survives his return to reality

from the carnage that he witnesses, his haptic faculties appear to have been
permanently diminished by what he has seen:

Plus tard, revenu à Paris, il rencontra Malraux. Celui-ci lui raconta qu’il avait été
fait prisonnier (sans être reconnu), qu’il avait réussi à s’échapper, tout en perdant
un manuscrit. […] Avec Paulhan, il fit faire des recherches qui ne pouvaient que
rester vaines.
Qu’importe. Seul demeure le sentiment de légèreté qui est la mort même ou, pour
le dire plus précisément, l’instant de ma mort désormais toujours en instance.168

The overwhelming légèreté that impresses itself upon the young maquisard’s
sensory faculties means that the art or the textual remnants that it inspires
cannot, for the young man at least, proffer any substantive expression of
his haptic perceptions of warfare. Nor can his sensory faculties perceive the
diminishment of their haptic acuity. Blanchot’s protagonist has become
possessed and obsessed by an indefinable lightness which he cannot know as
anything other than his lifelong haptic perceptions of an always recurrent,
ever-deferring moment of death. This unrelenting, deathly sensation unites
the young man’s experiences of war as a civilian who aided the maquis with
the elder voice that narrates those perceptions of conflict subsequently (the
pronoun ‘il’ and the possessive ‘ma’ in the quotation above both appear
to refer to the same individual). Perhaps the simple act of recollection is
what seals the overwhelming feeling of ‘légèreté’ that the young maquisard
continues to endure.
Inspired by the deferred haptic experience of death that is imprinted
upon his perceptive faculties by the firing squad’s image and the sensation
of ‘légèreté’ that this moment brings, the young protagonist’s perceptible
conflict between life and an eternally recurrent death becomes a fixed form
of fascination. The mortal haptic potential of the primed firing squad’s image
and the attendant fascination that it generates refuse to dissipate. This mul-
tisensory image is unable to know or resolve itself. To this extent, L’Instant
de ma mort is thus only able to examine what makes life perceptible to us

168 Ibid., p. 17.

Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 181

by referring every facet of itself to the absolute effacement and exscription

of bodily (and in particular, haptic) sensation and perception.

Conclusion

In 1975, Emmanuel Levinas made an observation concerning Blanchot’s

writing which is applicable to all three of the literary works studied in this
chapter. Levinas says that
[s]i la vision et la connaissance consistent à pouvoir sur les objets, à les donner à
distance, le retournement exceptionnel que produit l’écriture revient à être touché
par ce que l’on voit – à être touché à la distance. Le regard est saisi par l’œuvre, les
mots regardent celui qui écrit. (C’est ainsi que Blanchot définit la fascination). Le
langage poétique qui a écarté le monde laisse réapparaître le murmure incessant de
cet éloignement.169

Levinas describes here the essence of the potentially haptic space that
I believe to be a constant in Blanchot’s theoretical and literary writings, a
visible space which touches (and can be touched), but only at a distance
and only intermittently. Blanchot explores this speculative space from
both haptic and optical standpoints in all of the texts I have referred to in
this chapter. However, I have shown that there is an appreciable shift from
the predominantly haptic interests of Thomas l’obscur to the mostly visual
preoccupations of La Folie du jour. This arc concludes in L’Instant de ma
mort with the ultimate impossibility of reconciling either form of percep-
tion with empirically instructive knowledge. All three of these works of
prose begin with some element of haptic interaction before moving into
the optical realm and concluding with the impossibility of either form of
perception being of materially instructive value.

169 Emmanuel Levinas, Sur Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1975), p. 16; emphasis
in original.
182 Chapter 2

Blanchot is not alone in his broad rejection of corporeal sensation

being capable of providing an instructive experience, however. As is appar-
ent from my analyses thus far, Bataille and Blanchot both reject the idea that
the spatial differentiations or discernments which result from corporeal sen-
sation could amount to a consistently schematised form of knowledge. Both
writers’ critical and literary treatments of sensation exhibit an oscillation
between potentially haptic (simultaneously visual and tactile) and purely
visual perception. However, Blanchot’s bias towards visual perception –
insofar as he expresses any such bias – is more apparent from an earlier
stage in his career (as is evidenced by the critical and non-critical works
analysed in this chapter).170 Blanchot’s literary works also tend increasingly
towards decorporealisation; what is perceived haptically or otherwise by
the human body becomes of less and less relevance to Blanchot’s literary
explorations of the mortal human condition.
In Bataille’s case, some remnant of perceiving corporeity remains neces-
sary in order that his theoretical and literary works may continue to oscillate
between sublimity and abjection. The fact remains however that according
to Blanchot and Bataille, our sensory organs (and haptic perception’s core
sensory faculties in particular) can neither glean nor enhance the acuity
of any empirical knowledge that we may be able to perceive. This truth
applies equally to Blanchot’s male and female characters. In the previous
chapter, however, I showed that the majority of Bataille’s male characters
display significantly more perceptual awareness of themselves and of others
than his female protagonists do. (Histoire de l’œil’s Simone is the notable
exception to this rule.)
As a counterpoint to the literary and critical approaches of Bataille
and Blanchot in matters of haptic perception, Michel Serres, the writer
whose works I shall be analysing in the next chapter, bases much of his
writing between the 1970s and 2010s on the premise that empirical knowl-
edge is indeed shaped by specifically haptic perception. Moreover, it can

170 Though our analyses differ considerably, Ravel for example claims that ‘[l]e regard
a chez Blanchot un statut ordonnancier et légiférant’ (Maurice Blanchot et l’art au
vingtième siècle, p. 37).
Blanchot, Haptic Sensation and a Visible Absence 183

be argued that Serres’s work blurs the boundaries between literary prose,
poetry, autobiography and critical commentary in ways that the writings of
Bataille and Blanchot do not. What parallels and differences of theoretical
approach and literary execution exist between Serres’s works and those of
Blanchot and Bataille where haptic perception is concerned?
Chapter 3

Serres: Haptic Perception, Touching Knowledge

The descriptions of haptic experience that appear in the theoretical and lit-
erary works of Blanchot and Bataille examined thus far exhibit a number of
common features. Both writers posit some form of disconnection between
the manner in which we perceive physical space and the manner in which
we perceive our physical interactions with this space. The critical and lit-
erary means through which both writers expose this disjuncture are vari-
able and no one approach to the issue is privileged by either Bataille or
Blanchot for any length of time. Equivocation and a refusal to judge are
the two most discernible traits of the writers’ critical and literary accounts
of human spatial perception.
In their explorations of how the human body interacts with spaces
that it may or may not perceive, Blanchot and Bataille also suggest that
these interactions between sensory organs and (im)perceptible space do
not necessarily occur within the confines of temporal continuity. Just as
material cause need not determine material effect, so sensory stimulus does
not always give rise to bodily reaction, or vice versa.
For this reason, the critical and literary works of Bataille and Blanchot
also problematise the extent to which bodily perception of space or time
may be analysed in terms of the haptic theorisations put forward by Aloïs
Riegl, Laura U. Marks or Mark Paterson. This is especially troublesome
when we recall that all three of the theorists just mentioned claim that
some form of intellectually instructive data may be gleaned from haptic
perception. As I have demonstrated, however, the works of Bataille and
Blanchot do lend themselves to the discontinuous, exscriptive vision of
haptic perception posited by Jean-Luc Nancy.
In addition, I have shown that Bataille and Blanchot’s critical and
literary approaches to haptic experience demonstrate an increasing
186 Chapter 3

proclivity towards abstracting bodily sensation from any form of rational

schematisation. In this sense, it can be said that these writers advocate
an increasingly virtual approach to the body’s perceptive relationship
with haptic space and time. If we adhere to the arguments of Bataille or
Blanchot, the less physically centred (or the more virtual) that our bodily
relations with our perceptible environment become, the less we seek to
rationalise our sensory interactions with the haptic space and temporal-
ity that we inhabit. With this increasing absence of rationalisation comes
a paradoxically heightened sense of understanding: sensory experience
is less mediated by empirically suspect philosophies of perception. In
fact, what this ‘liberation’ leads us to is a perceptible though inexplica-
ble silence in Blanchot’s case. Bataille’s writings appear to suggest that
this sensory migration towards the virtual will, at best, lead us to a quasi-
Nietzschean embrace of sensuality and tragedy that defies all other rationale
stubbornly.
It is at this point that I turn to Michel Serres’s critical theories and
literary writings, which offer a piquant rebuff to many of the positions
just itemised. Unlike Bataille or Blanchot, Serres claims more or less
explicitly – though not without caveat – that haptic perception is rich
in intellectually instructive potential. I shall be considering the extent to
which Serres’s portrayals of haptic perception differ from those of Bataille
and Blanchot.
In all of the following, it should not be forgotten that Serres’s first
major publication (Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques)1
only appeared in 1968, some six years after Bataille’s death and relatively
late in Blanchot’s active career. Moreover, Serres has not yet had the last
word on any of the subjects under discussion in this chapter; at the time
of writing, he continues to publish a new book every twelve to eighteen
months. It is also extremely rare that any of the more than fifty books that
Serres has published as of May 2014 addresses just one issue. In the last
fifteen years alone, his writing has tackled matters as diverse as music, ecol-
ogy, theatre, sport, education and art history – often within the same text.

1 Michel Serres, Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques (Paris: PUF, 1968).
Serres 187

In interviews with Bruno Latour, Serres admits that the interdisciplinary

nature of his tertiary education played a major role in his decision to write
in a style which, over the decades, has become increasingly at odds with
typical genre distinctions between ‘critical theory’ and ‘literary prose’.2 As
Maria Assad says, ‘Serres’s texts present […] topics in discursive nuggets,
fragments, and sometimes allusive parables whose thematic and conceptual
cohesion is not always easily recognisable’.3
Serres’s frequently challenging refusal to adhere to categorisations
is equally apparent in his treatment of the perceiving human body, a
subject to which he returns on many occasions. In this chapter, I shall be
considering Serres’s postulation of a form of time which is not only con-
tinuous and dynamic in nature, but which is also integral to the manner
in which we perceive haptic space. What links Serres’s vision of time with
his portrayal of haptic perception is his approach to the question of how
we acquire knowledge. His answers to this question derive from broadly
empirical principles. More specifically, Serres’s postulation of time as a
form of dynamic continuity is rooted in his belief that history is driven
by empirical revelation. Rather than overarching and generalising the-
ories or abstractive scientific laws, Serres claims heavily localised and
individualised moments of empirical discovery to be at the root of humani-
ty’s continually evolving pool or réseau of knowledge. Through this temporal
patchwork of localised, haptically discernible experiments and experi-
ences, a flow of information develops. As we shall see, however, knowl-
edge and information are not always interchangeable concepts in Serres’s
thinking.

2 Serres discusses his multidisciplinary graduate and postgraduate studies in Michel

Serres and Bruno Latour, Éclaircissements (Paris: François Bourin, 1992), pp. 16–17,
20–32 and 46–47.
3 Maria L. Assad, Reading with Michel Serres: An Encounter with Time (Albany, NY:
SUNY, 1999), p. 5.
188 Chapter 3

Information, Matters

Before considering how Serres’s early works approach the issue of human
perception, we must first understand how he conceives of the perceptive
information received and transmitted by the body’s sensory faculties. Before
we can even do that, we must be aware of how Serres believes information
to travel. In the second text of his Hermès cycle, L’Interférence (1972),
Serres tells us that

chaque région est un échangeur: j’interviens dans le monde objectif et contrôle

l’information qui circule confusément entre les choses, et tout objet est, aussi, un
échangeur; et voici qu’au moment où je sais en construire, je me perçois moi-même
comme tel, et les objets culturels que j’engendre à mon image. J’interviens, et ne
pense que si j’intercepte.4

It is clear from this passage that Serres believes the transmission of infor-
mation and the knowledge that it conveys to be materially impactful:
he describes thought as a process of intercepting, of confused bundles
of data which emanate from and are receivable (or more accurately, are
intercepted) by both inanimate objects and living beings. This process
of sending and interception is constructive: it demands that the thinker/
interceptor construct a mental image of the cultural objects which enable
this information transfer.
This relation dictated by image has a material basis, however. The
process of interception to which Serres alludes in the quotation above
proceeds from an individual being struck by how he or she perceives an
object (much as Riegl suggests that the vision of a haptic surface imposes
itself upon the beholder’s retina).5 The Serresian image thus appears to have
little in common with the Blanchovian notion of image as ghostly petrifi-
cation. The indifferent, indeterminate aspect of Blanchot’s literary image

4 Michel Serres, Hermès II: L’Interférence (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 16.

5 See p. 7, n. 12 above for a transcription and translation of the passage in question,
which appears in Riegl, ‘Über antike und moderne Kunstfreunde’, pp. 202–03.
Serres 189

does however resonate with Serres’s explanation of thought inasmuch as

the latter of these concepts is an interceptive process which also interferes
with the flow of (perceptual) information. As Serres tells us, ‘[l]’interférence
est, proprement, la réduction de la différence’.6
Unlike the Blanchovian image, there is a sense of rationality underli-
ning this Serresian philosophy of indifference: ‘il est indispensable d’élaborer
une philosophie du transport, de la circulation, et de l’absence de référence’.7
What Serres in fact postulates is a form of free-floating information that
exists and transmits itself independently of all indices sensory or otherwise.
Serres asserts that ‘[l]’espace est une forme a priori de la sensibilité’.8 As a
result, (sensory) information that traverses perceptible space cannot be
bound by material or linguistic constraints.
In the midst of this newfound expressive freedom, perceptible differ-
ence becomes a means of communication: ‘En tout cas, le différent, c’est
le déformé […], c’est l’informé. Voici le code. Le langage objectif. Dont on
cherche, partout, la grammaire et la combinatoire. Non l’unité d’une loi,
mais la cohérence d’une langue’.9 Conscious communication is thus imbued
with an appeal to our corporeal senses: how else would we determine the
constitutive deformation or incompletion of the difference to which Serres
alludes? Speaking of the manner in which we perceive, Serres is thus able
to state that ‘[i]l existe bien une intersubjectivité, un consensus transcend-
antal’ without appearing paradoxical.10
Now that we have established how information flows according to
Serres’s system, how does that information interact with emitters and receiv-
ers? Differentiation plays an integral part in the process once more, but
not perhaps in the expected manner. Serres explains that

6 Serres, Hermès II, p. 40.

7 Ibid., p. 41.
8 Ibid., p. 42.
9 Ibid., p. 101.
10 Ibid., p. 16. Mark Paterson also observes the seeming paradox of Serres’s juxtaposition
of transcendence and subjectivity (Paterson, The Senses of Touch, p. 68). Similarities
with Bataille’s formulation of the informe are apparent in this paradox, but a word
limit prevents me from exploring these parallels here.
190 Chapter 3

il existe quelque chose et moi qui partage la même détermination qui la fait exister
comme chose expérimentable. La chose est expérimentable, parce qu’elle existe comme
conservateur et émetteur d’information et parce que j’existe comme lecteur, récepteur
et conservateur d’une même ou analogue information. Elle est expérimentable et je
suis expérimentateur dans un réseau communicant où nous échangeons des fonctions
très simples, si simples qu’elles peuvent mettre en communication les objets entre
eux, sans que j’intervienne sauf pour contrôler. Ainsi, tel objet est émetteur, tel autre
récepteur, tel autre vecteur, tel, enfin, conservateur d’information.11

As is clear from this quotation, Serres’s positing of sensory data as informa-

tion is reliant upon a discernible homogeneity already existing between
a perceiver and the object that he or she perceives, in order for the two
elements to be apparent to each other.
Of particular import to any haptic interpretation of Serres’s informa-
tion theory is the manner in which transmitting and receiving surfaces
act as selective repositories of sensory indices. The transfer of informa-
tion between perceiver and object is able to occur because the two ele-
ments possess ‘une même ou analogue information’. Sensory experience
can never therefore be considered truly revelatory. At its most unexpected
or surprising, a beholder’s perceptive experience of a given object will only
reveal forgotten or less immediately apparent dimensions or aspects of the
information gleaned. The scientific basis of Serres’s thinking is appreciable
in notions such as this; he hails Léon Brillouin’s 1959 treatise La Science et
la théorie de l’information as a major influence.12 As the following extract
underlines, Serres’s understanding of the manner in which information
flows is far more reliant upon objectivising scientific observation than it
is upon phenomenological interrogations of the experiencing subject: ‘Ici,
la relation objet-objet est fondamentale, et le sujet est hors circuit […]. Ici,
je ne me mets en circuit qu’en m’intégrant au réseau fondamental de com-
munication […] objet–objet’.13

11 Serres, Hermès II, p. 98.

12 See Serres and Latour, Éclaircissements, p. 25 and Léon Brillouin, La Science et la
théorie de l’information (Paris: Masson, 1959).
13 Serres, Hermès II, p. 98. Later in his career, Serres admits that ‘[l]a phénoménologie
ne m’intéressait pas […]. Pourquoi une si haute technicité, pour si peu?’ (Serres and
Serres 191

At first glance, Serres’s insistance upon the centrality of the ‘relation

objet-objet’ appears to rule out any haptic interpretation of his theories;
it does not allow for the conscious interaction between discerning subject
and perceived object that is demanded by any of the haptic models that
I presented in the introduction of this book. Indeed, the way in which
Serres’s speculative information network functions is such that it does
not seem to permit the material or temporal fixity necessary to differen-
tiate haptically perceived information from optically gleaned data: ‘par
le flux que je reçois et celui que j’émets, je suis indéfiniment ici et ailleurs;
je ne suis pas un point fixé ici et maintenant, j’habite une multiplicité
d’espaces, je vis une multiplicité de temps, toujours autre et toujours
le même’.14 Simultaneously extant in a number of spatial and temporal
dimensions, each node of Serres’s oscillating information network ‘reçoit et
redistribue, […] trie sans mélanger, […] simule localement, sur une station
ponctuelle, la totalité du réseau efférent et afférent’.15
This last detail is of particular importance. In a pre-emption of Nancy’s
sensory zones,16 every constitutive nodule of the Serresian information
network is capable of creating a temporally immediate reproduction of
some or all of the network to which it belongs, including therein the data
which traverses it. The virtual quality of this concept is underscored by
Serres’s decision to dub each such nodule ‘un quasi-point’.17 The information

Latour, Éclaircissements, p. 20). Speaking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomeno-

logical writings, Serres remarks that they contain ‘[b]eaucoup de phénoménologie,
pas de sensation: tout dans la langue’ (ibid., p. 193).
14 Serres, Hermès II, p. 150.
15 Ibid., p. 131.
16 ‘Le sentir et le se-sentir-sentir qui fait le sentir lui-même, c’est toujours sentir à la fois
qu’il y a de l’autre (ce que l’on sent) et qu’il y a d’autres zones du sentir, ignorées par
celle qui sent en ce moment, ou bien auxquelles celle-ci touche de tous côtés, mais
seulement par la limite où elle cesse d’être la zone qu’elle est. Chaque sentir touche au
reste du sentir comme à ce qu’il ne peut pas sentir’ (Nancy, Les Muses, p. 36; emphasis
in original).
17 Serres, Hermès II, p. 131. Before going any further, I would like to clarify my usage of
the term ‘virtual’ in this instance and throughout the remainder of this chapter. Ian
Tucker’s article ‘Sense and the Limits of Knowledge: Bodily Connections in the Work
192 Chapter 3

network can hence be said to be transcendental, even if it remains rooted

in physicality and empiricism. In addition, none of the data transmitted
across the network are merged or otherwise conflated. This suggests that
the confluence of tactile and visual sensation that is integral to the modes
of haptic perception put forward by Riegl, Marks, Paterson or even Nancy
remains possible, but difficult to attain. As with Blanchot’s theories of per-
ception, however, we encounter a temporal multiplicity in Serres’s under-
standing of sensory integration that further problematises any speculative
synergy between visual and tactile data.18 More precisely, this polyvalent
time threatens to disrupt the inexorable order of visual stimulus leading to

of Serres’ (Theory, Culture & Society, 28 (2011) <doi: 10.1177/0263276410372240>

[accessed 31 August 2012]) links Serres’s concept of the virtual with that postulated
by Gilles Deleuze in Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1968; repr. 2011). Alluding
to Serres’s writing in Les Cinq Sens and the later 1980s, Tucker claims that ‘bodies are
seen as possessing the ability to sense, to feel in ways that escape common cultural
patterns. Such a framing imbues bodies with the potential to escape the social, to
enter a space that is new, a place where invention can exist. The inventive place is what
Deleuze […] would refer to as “virtual”, a realm that is ever present, although never
directly accessible. This is not to suggest the virtual is a “space”, a place of invention,
rather that Deleuze proffers it as a concept to think creation’ (‘Sense and the Limits
of Knowledge’, 153–54). My reading of the Serresian virtual differs somewhat from
that of Tucker (and his interpretation of Deleuze). Following Serres’s words in the
critical and literary works studied in this chapter, I suggest that the dermal ‘échange’
which remains integral to Serres’s thinking of the body retains an inherently social
and extracorporeal element of interaction. In addition, I shall demonstrate that the
Serresian body’s sensory faculties are able to gain fleeting, transcendent access to the
‘virtual’ realm through simulations of haptic sensation. I do however concur with
Tucker’s view that the virtual is not a consistently definable ‘space’. I say this because
Serres portrays the virtual as a spatially allusive domain which nevertheless resists
quantitative or qualitative analysis.
18 In Reading with Michel Serres (p. 75), Assad inadvertently justifies this contention
when she remarks that for Serres, ‘[t]he skin is the common border where the world
and the body touch, where the one who feels mixes with the felt or sensately expe-
rienced. It is always variated and contingent, it is a “fuzzy set” which means that it
is not a middle or focal point, not a geometric center or point of order, but a pure
variability or mélange’ (emphasis in original).
Serres 193

tactile interaction that is demanded by the haptic theorisations of Riegl,

Marks or even Paterson:
J’habite, archaïquement, l’espace d’un corps organique plein, continu, connexe, élas-
tique, […] où les échanges s’opèrent selon une totalité sourde et continue […]. Il est
structuré comme un espace topologique. [C]es structures sont telles et invariantes,
que je les vive, […] ou que je les pense. [ J]e suis le siège d’une pluralité d’échanges
ou d’interceptions.19

In spite of the significant caveats that I have just outlined, however, the
quotation above reveals that Serres tends towards an integrative schemati-
sation of human perception (‘je suis le siège d’une pluralité d’échanges ou
d’interceptions’). It is also apparent that he considers the human body to
be inherently topological or manifestly constructed of multiple physical
and sensory strata. Nevertheless, the element of chance that is integral in
establishing the body’s physical and perceptive presence and its sensory
interrelations with the world mean that ‘ma seule certitude est d’être situé
irréductiblement, plongé latéralement dans l’espace transcendantal de la
communication, d’être indéfiniment traversé par un flux continu dont je ne
suis qu’un écho de hasard, c’est-à-dire une pure possibilité d’interruption’.20
In other words, no absolute differentiation between haptic and optic space
is possible. As with Blanchot and Bataille, Serres believes the outcome of
this indecision between haptic and optic space, between body and the
eschewing of tangible sensation in particular, to be capable of unifying
society, rather than being socially divisive:

Qui suis-je encore? Une virtualité discontinue de tri, de sélection dans la pensée
intersubjective […] qui sépare les modulations du bruit mondial, un échangeur pour
messagers. Je suis l’intercepteur du nous. La con-science est le savoir qui a pour sujet
la communauté du nous. La communication crée l’homme; il peut la réduire, non la
supprimer sans se supprimer lui-même.21

19 Serres, Hermès II, pp. 151–52; emphasis in original.

20 Ibid., p. 155.
21 Ibid.
194 Chapter 3

With the subject substituted and replaced with transcendental inter-

subjectivity comes a new form of interdisciplinary science (and, implicitly,
a new notion of what constitutes observation to complement it): ‘Il faut
lire interférence, comme inter-référence. [I]l n’y a pas de science-reine, […]
de science-référence’.22

The Material Traces of Time

The new, unreferenced model of perception advocated by Serres in

Hermès II at once unifies and problematises linear conceptions of time and
space. As Serres illustrates in Hermès V: Le Passage du Nord-Ouest (1980), he
distrusts the theoretical recasting of observations made in the real world as a
valid means of solving entirely abstractive geometrical problems. According
to Serres, we cannot even be certain what the categorisations of ‘time’ and
‘space’ actually mean in either abstract or empirical terms:
le réel n’est pas découpé en créneaux, il est sporadique, espaces et temps, à détroits et
cols. La classification des sciences les ordonne dans un espace et l’histoire des sciences
les arrange dans un temps, comme si nous savions, avant les sciences même, ce qu’il
en est de l’espace et du temps. […] Au moins avons-nous à douter de cet espace de
classes, de ce temps de spectacle.23

Serres implies here that space and time cannot be classified or dissected using
visual cues or references because the realities evoked by these cues or refer-
ences are neither uniform nor perceptually contiguous in nature. Moreover,
those same visual cues or references are incapable of distinguishing time
and space from a broader notion of illustrative, demonstrative spectacle
with any certainty. This indecision stems from the collapse of the subject/

22 Ibid., p. 157.
23 Michel Serres, Hermès V: Le Passage du Nord-Ouest (Paris: Minuit, 1980), p. 23.
Serres 195

object binary explained above, in which the genre distinctions ‘sujet’ and
‘objet’ become as hard to discern as those of space or time.
It is at this moment of indecision that Serres’s presentation of writing
as a form of information comes to the fore: ‘Espace des modèles, espace
des images, espace du spectacle, l’espace des similitudes est bien celui de
la représentation. […] Le récit, porte écu, offre les icônes au regard […].
J’espère écrire sans détruire ni murs ni plans’.24 The summary of empirical
observations conveyed by the récit is capable of representing the sensory
experiences of which it speaks, but can only do so by means of reference
or allusion (‘images’ or ‘similitudes’, in Serres’s vocabulary). In the words of
Paul A. Harris, ‘Serres’s method […] turns literary analysis into an exercise
in projective geometry – in the sense that it maps the surface of fictional
discourse onto topological surfaces’.25
As we have seen already, Serres disallows any notion of universal ref-
erence at this stage of his thinking. Because of this, the récit must act as
a localised suspension of time, a protective shield or value (‘écu’) which
evokes nothing other than its writer’s visions at that frozen moment. The
inscribed récit as Serres posits it thus attests to an infinitely selective sus-
pension of modern science’s laws of cause and effect: ‘L’ordre n’est pas que
de l’espace ou du voir de l’observateur. Il est aussi un ordre des rasions, par
chaîne de rapports, ou par conséquence. La loi d’une série par cause et par
effet demeure une relation d’ordre, non-réflexive, asymétrique et transitive’.26
Rather than prompting a fall into the stasis of reflective – though often
communally experienced – silence favoured by Blanchot’s critique, however,
the demise of absolute truth and absolute falsity posited by Serres heralds
a new model of social interaction. This model is based upon subjective
perceptive experiences. The sum of these individually experienced percep-
tions creates a global topology that has no common language because it is

24 Ibid., p. 34.
25 Paul A. Harris, ‘The Smooth Operator’, in Mapping Michel Serres, ed. by Niran Abbas
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 113–34 (p. 116).
26 Serres, Hermès V, p. 35.
196 Chapter 3

composed entirely of subjectively gleaned information.27 My analyses thus

far have shown that Serres believes (spatial) perception to be inherently
bound by semiotics or, more precisely, an individual’s mental experiences of
how his or her perceptions and the language that designates those percep-
tions interrelate. Yet for Serres, it is the very polyphony of any speculative
global topology of shared sensation that induces its silence:
L’espace est condition du sens et des valeurs, topologie sous sémiotique, l’espace
local découpé en région. Pour l’espace global, on ne peut rien en dire, il n’a ni sens
ni valeur de vrai, il est silencieux. Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.
Si vous parlez, hors le silence, dans le sens et dans les valeurs, il faut une topologie
locale […]: comment recoller ces morceaux?28

Here, Serres asks how the ‘silence’ of globally shared perceptive experiences
and its manifold, localised ‘topologie sous sémiotique’ can be reconciled. He
turns to both the material and the temporal in order to explain his position:

L’objet de la philosophie, de la science classique, est le cristal, et en général, le solide

stable, à bords distincts. Le système est fermé, il est en équilibre. Le deuxième objet-
modèle est à bords fluents, c’est la gerbe ou le banc de nuages. Et le système est oscil-
lant. Il oscille entre des bords larges, il a aussi des bords.29

As we see from the extract above, Serres does not base his under-
standing of perception and the expression of it upon materialist principles
(embodied here by the crystal’s hardened outer surfaces and unchanging
inner structure). Instead, he evokes a system of perceptive and linguistic

27 See David Webb’s article ‘Penser le multiple sans le concept: vers un intellect démo-
cratique’ (in Michel Serres, ed. by François L’Yvonnet and Christiane Frémont (Paris:
L’Herne, 2010), pp. 87–94): ‘dans l’œuvre de Serres [l]es mots sont des choses et leur
signification est elle aussi intrinsèquement variable. La réticence de Serres à quitter le
terrain de l’expérience est donc aussi une réticence à abandonner le langage et reflète
l’intuition que les choses ne se présentent pas dans le langage, comme si on pouvait
espérer remonter à leurs origines (pour Serres, cela est une ineptie)’ (p. 93; emphasis
in original).
28 Serres, Hermès V, p. 50.
29 Ibid., p. 51.
Serres 197

interrelation that is akin to malleable, semi-solid composites such as sheaves

(of corn, for example) and banks of cloud. This second variety of ‘objet-
modèle’ exhibits a physically discernible presence but the visible surfaces
of such objects appear to vary at will. They can seem to go from being in a
nearly solid state to complete dissolution – so from one material extreme
to another – with little rhyme or reason. Clearly, the changes of state per-
ceptible in this second group of objects are driven by a discernible progress
of time.
Time remains similarly integral to the third form of material presence
that Serres identifies: ‘Il existe une approche, une échelle, un temps, par
rapport à quoi un objet quelconque du monde n’apparaît pas entre les
bords que je viens de noter, uniformes ou oscillants. [I]l paraît fluctuer
au hasard’.30 I suggest that the random fluctuations that characterise this
‘troisième objet’,31 as Serres names it, are an alternation between hapti-
cally and optically discernible characteristics.32 This postulation seems less
outlandish when we recall that Serres does not believe time to exist as a
coherent, unified whole.33 He claims instead that every surface that we per-
ceive (including those which constitute our body) exists within a temporal
stream of its own. Every such stream is unique to the surface upon which
it acts. Each stream also functions independently of those around it: ‘Les
objets sont des flammes gelées par des temps différents. Mon corps est une
flamme un peu plus lente que ce rideau cramoisi qui consume les bûches.

30 Ibid., pp. 51–52.

31 Ibid., p. 51.
32 This remark is inspired by a comment made by Steven Connor concerning one of
Serres’s subsequent publications: ‘The senses are the body forming and reforming
itself. As such the body is a miraculous node in the flux, a negentropic eddy or swirl in
the current that traverses it yet which it delays’ (from ‘Michel Serres’s Les Cinq Sens’,
in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Cultural Reader, ed. by David Howes (Oxford:
Berg, 2005), pp. 318–34 (p. 332).
33 Connor observes (ibid., p. 332) that for Serres, ‘self-touching, […] faces outwards
and inwards, backwards and forwards, at the same time. In doing so, it disobeys the
fundamental law of time, the law of entropy or going out’.
198 Chapter 3

D’autres choses sont plus lentes encore, pierres, d’autres plus foudroyantes,
soleils. Mille temps font battre leurs bords’.34
Serres states that in order to perceive our own presence or that of
our environment, our sensory organs distinguish more or less consciously
between an infinite variety of temporalities. No less significant is his cor-
relative assertion that perceptible surfaces act as a form of temporal enclo-
sure, as a regionalisation of time which is enforced by physically discernible
boundaries. To this extent, it can be said that for Serres, time is an optically
discernible phenomenon which is housed by haptically discernible shells.
This assertion comes with the obvious caveat that, due to the fluidity that
Serres believes to be inherent to the concept of time itself, the physical
boundaries that encompass temporal solidity are themselves subject to
gradual, perceptible variation.
Thus, according to Serres, when we are aware that we see and/or touch
a given surface, our sense organs are gluing together a fixed moment of our
perception of time. For just a split second, we petrify our conscious sense
of time. We then integrate our temporal consciousness with our perception
of the temporality enclosed by the surface that we are interacting with.35
Clearly, this sensory processing occurs on the basis of how apparent
the passage of time is to us. That is to say, on the basis of how we perceive
temporal difference. (As Serres explains, ‘[l]a vie est identiquement la syn-
chronie de plusieurs temps. […] Il y a contingence lorsque deux temps se
touchent’.)36 The process that Serres describes is reminiscent of attempting
to piece together a jigsaw composed of ostensibly identical parts by first
looking for its corner pieces. Given the importance of discernible tempo-
ral difference to Serres’s perceptually integrative explanations of space and
time, the notion of a universally applicable spatial or temporal continuum
becomes nonsensical:

34 Serres, Hermès V, p. 53.

35 Geneviève James states that ‘[p]our Serres, l’individuation se fait par la conscience
du temps’ (‘Le Philosophe récitant’, in Michel Serres, ed. by L’Yvonnet and Frémont,
pp. 266–72 (p. 267)).
36 Serres, Hermès V, pp. 80, 83.
Serres 199

L’espace comme tel, unique et global, est, je le crains, un artefact philosophique. […]
Le temps, comme tel, unique et universel, est lui aussi, un artefact. Quand nous par-
lons de ce couple célèbre, béni, monogamique, par la philosophie, ou parfois divorcé,
nous ne faisons pas même une synthèse entre des temps divers ou des espaces séparés,
nous émettons un son privé de sens.37

As Serres elucidates in the quotation above, the realms of space and

time and their discontinuous interactions cannot be navigated by means of
abstractive theory or philosophy alone. Instead, we must rely upon empiri-
cism to guide us through these tessellated regions. Serres evokes the tactile
experience of those who engage in needlework in order to illustrate how
empiricism might lead us through the alternately congruent and incongru-
ent zones of space and time:

tel espace topologique est justement celui du tact. […] Les espaces qualitatifs […]
sont à la fois a priori et sensoriels. [N]ous vivons dans une multiplicité d’espaces de
ce genre, et […] nous travaillons, parfois, tels le tisserand ou la tricoteuse qui fait
marcher ses doigts sans les voir, en eux et par eux, et non dans ce cube euclidien.38

Aside from obvious haptic/optic binaries, the plurality of coexisting spaces

to which Serres alludes here could also be thought of in terms of pro-
prioception (that is, the synergy of kinaesthetic, vestibular and cutaneous
sensations itemised by Paterson). In order for this empiricism to be truly
haptic in nature, however, sight must play some role in it (if we follow the
definitions of haptic perception put forward by Riegl, Marks or Nancy).
Unfortunately, Serres’s speculative tactile topography integrates visual sen-
sation with discontinuity. This integration is arrived at in such a way that
he appears to refute any notion of haptic perception:
déjà, l’acte de voir suppose un ou plusieurs espaces. L’objet comme tel change dans sa
structure et sa définition selon qu’il est extrait ou plongé, serti ou desserti, ce change-
ment ne dépend plus du site de l’observateur ni de la représentation, puisque celle-ci,
justement, suppose un espace global de définition telle et telle.39

37 Ibid., p. 68.
38 Ibid., p. 69.
39 Ibid., p. 71.
200 Chapter 3

The crux of the problem is Serres’s insistence that the position of the observer
does not matter because there is no unified space or time to measure his or
her proximity to the object being surveyed. As I explained in the introduc-
tory chapter, the position of the observer is critical to the definitions of
haptisch and optisch perspectives formulated by Riegl. The same is true of
Marks’s filmic definition of haptic perception. Even Paterson’s propriocep-
tively orientated explanations of haptic sensation and interaction assume
that the haptic perceiver is able to situate himself or herself spatially.
Perhaps most damning for any haptic interpretation of Serres’s think-
ing is his remark that ‘[n]ul n’a jamais pu intégrer le local au global [;]
ce qui se fait passer pour un universel global n’est qu’une variété enflée
démesurément’.40 According to Riegl, Marks or Paterson, haptic sensation is
contingent upon the human body’s ability to perceive a fraction of a surface
by tactile and visual means on occasions when using our sight alone will
not suffice. (We use our understanding of the surfaces that we can at once
see and grasp to decipher the characteristics of other parts of that surface
which do not make sense to us on a visual basis and are too distant from
us to be touched or are simply too large to be perceived in one glance.)
Temporal discontinuity is also integral to Serres’s concept of space.
This is similarly incompatible with the simultaneous physical and mental
presence demanded by the haptic theories of Riegl, Marks or Paterson:
‘[n]ous sommes archaïques dans les trois quarts de nos actions; peu de gens,
moins de pensées encore, sont, de part en part, présents à la date de leur
temps’.41 Yet in spite of these caveats, Serres explains human perception’s
inevitable flaws in overtly haptic terms:

Nous chassons le détail, et nous ne gardons que les peaux. Nous percevons un peu
les superficies, des points singuliers dans un continu. [D]ans l’espace de communi-
cation, volent les muses. Nous vivons perceptiblement au milieu des simulacres, des
simulations du monde. Nos sens simulent les objets, au meilleur sens technique.42

40 Ibid., p. 75.
41 Serres and Latour, Éclaircissements, p. 95.
42 Serres, Hermès V, pp. 107–08.
Serres 201

Though he is paraphrasing a claim by Lucretius that only the per-

ceptible details of the simulacrum’s outermost surface impose themselves
upon our senses, it is abundantly clear from the comments above that
Serres remains preoccupied with the idea of tactile perception because it
is a sensory experience that all humans are able to share in. As the follow-
ing extract shows, Serres believes this skin-deep, surface-defined sharing
of simulacra to be linked with stirrings of linguistic and cultural exchange
which in turn seek to disembody language:
Nous tous percevons le monde par les terminaux sensoriels et la peau, nous le dessinons
de nos gestes, nous l’endurons et nous en jouissons, le transformons par le travail,
le signifions par le langage, au moins le désignons par là, le rêvons et le fantasmons,
par le mythe et le pathétique.43

Serres nevertheless wishes to retain some interaction, however hazy,

between the perceiving body, inscribed language and cultural artefacts
that are ‘accessible’ (or at once tangible and visible, if we extrapolate from
his definition of the ‘inaccessible’ in Hermès II):44
Les lettres ne sont pas seulement, comme en alphabet Morse, des points, des traits.
Elles sont aussi des ouverts, des fermés, des tracés intermédiaires, des nœuds, des
bords, des graphes en général. Voici la topologie. Le tisserand, je le savais, est un
artisan pré-géométrique. Mais aussi le scribe de cursive.45

In three short phrases, Serres manages to equate topology, sewing and hand-
writing. He suggests that the geometrical study of how objects and spaces
interact, stitching by hand and handwriting as an artefact of (spatial) per-
ception are products of manual praxes which differentiate one space from
another. Nor should it escape our attention that the flowing, continuous

43 Ibid., p. 161.
44 ‘[L]’inaccessible est ce que je ne puis toucher, ce vers quoi je ne puis transporter la
règle, ce sur quoi l’unité ne peut être appliquée. […] La vue est un tact sans contact.
[…] L’inaccessible est, parfois, accessible à la vue’ (Serres, Hermès II, p. 165).
45 Serres, Hermès V, p. 184.
202 Chapter 3

perception of space integral to topology, weaving and handwriting can be

perceived haptically.
How can Serres draw such seemingly tenuous parallels as these with-
out venturing into poeticism or wilful obfuscation? Ironically enough, the
answer to this conundrum is provided by Serres’s concept of the virtual and
the manner in which it interacts with haptic perception.

A Virtually Haptic Turn

As I have shown, Serres’s early critical texts (exemplified by Hermès II

and Hermès V) display a regard for tactile perception that is far more pro-
nounced than in the critical works of either Bataille or Blanchot. This regard
for tactile perception is even more apparent in Serres’s texts after 1980. At
that moment, his writing style changes appreciably: Serres becomes even
more interested in modern science’s relationship with literature than he
was previously and begins to present his prose in an overtly literary style.
Theory and dry terminology give way to erudition and etymological analy-
ses. By so doing, Serres makes explicit his conviction that ‘[l]a philosophie
n’est pas un savoir, ni une discipline parmi les sciences usuelles, car elle tient
à ce balancement entre tout et rien’.46 The corollary of this stance is that
‘[i]l y a seulement des corpus de textes, des situations, des lieux, des objets.
De moins en moins de textes, d’ailleurs, et de plus en plus d’objets. […] La
science n’est pas un contenu, mais un mode de circulation’.47
Serres remains true to his word; henceforth, neither philosophy nor
science dominates his critical writings, though both categories of knowl-
edge continue to contribute richly to his works. Éclaircissements (1992),
Serres’s collaborative interview-cum-manifesto with Bruno Latour, is a
prime example of this even-handed approach. Indeed, Serres’s commitment

46 Serres and Latour, Éclaircissements, p. 135.

47 Ibid., p. 154.
Serres 203

to intellectualism at its most fluid is mirrored by his continued conviction

that even the most solid regions of space known to modern science in fact
exist without either materially or temporally fixed borders:
les solides les plus durs ne sont que des fluides un peu plus visqueux que d’autres.
Et […] les bords ou les frontières sont flous. Fluides flous. Alors l’intelligence entre
dans le temps, dans les erres et les fluctuations, les plus rapides, les plus vives, les plus
subtiles […] de la turbulence […]. Les relations engendrent des objets, des êtres et
des actes, non l’inverse.48

There are a number of comments to be made concerning Serres’s words

here. Firstly, he postulates an explicit connection between solidity (which
may present itself in many unexpected forms) and knowledge. Under
certain circumstances, it is therefore possible that for Serres, touching (or
even seeing) a surface can provide valuable information to its perceiver.
Moreover, this knowing interaction between perceiver and surface is not
uniform in nature: it is prone to fluctuation. Such fluctuations are tempo-
rally specific phenomena: they do not operate outside the scheme of chro-
nology in the manner that Blanchot claims fascination does, for example.
Thus, contrary to the stances taken by either Bataille or Blanchot, touching
or seeing a surface over a period of time – observing its material character-
istics either manually or visually – is, in Serres’s opinion, a valid exercise.
The final and most crucial aspect of Serres’s argument arises from
this last point. Any sensory interaction or exchange that occurs between
two surfaces, defines both surfaces. So, until we are able to perceive, we do
not exist. Our surroundings are similarly nonexistent until they somehow
stimulate our perceptive organs, whether haptically or not. In short, we
must interact sensorially in order to be.49 We are evidently far removed
here from the increasingly disembodied silences towards which Blanchot
and even Bataille lean in their critical and literary works.

48 Ibid., p. 159.
49 See Tucker, ‘Sense and the Limits of Knowledge’, 154: ‘Individualism becomes non-
reducible to individual bodies, but will occur as a set of relations (or event) at a particu-
lar moment, part of which is the constitution of a specific mode of human experience’.
204 Chapter 3

As Serres explains, mutually definitive interactions between surfaces

may also be haptic in a proprioceptive sense: ‘Allons, debout, courez, sautez,
remuez-vous, dansez; comme le corps, l’intelligence requiert le mouvement,
surtout des mouvements subtils et composés. [I]l y a beaucoup plus de
rapports, de relations, que de sujets ou d’objets’.50 Yet just as Serres appears
to imply that we might be right to think of the world (and ourselves) in
haptic terms, he takes a detour into the virtual realm, stating that ‘objets
fabriqués […] depuis la revolution industrielle […] inventent des entrelacs
serrés de relations nouvelles: ce sont tous des quasi-objets [,] ces objets qui
conditionnent la totalité de nos relations’.51
Serres’s preoccupation with the virtual object is longstanding; it makes
repeated appearances in the Hermès series but is only fully addressed in
Serres’s subsequent writings. To clarify, the Serresian quasi-objet is a physi-
cal object that can be observed as it passes between perceiving bodies. The
quasi-object’s virtual component is its peripatetic travel from one tangi-
ble surface to another, which is viewed from a distance by a third party.52
As I shall demonstrate in the second half of this chapter, a common Serresian
example of the quasi-objet is a rugby ball being thrown from one player to
another in front of a stadium crowd.53

50 Serres and Latour, Éclaircissements, p. 159.

51 Ibid., pp. 290–91.
52 Steven D. Brown explains this idea well in ‘Michel Serres: Science, Translation
and the Logic of the Parasite’, Theory, Culture & Society, 19 (2002) <doi:
10.1177/0263276402019003001> [accessed 31 August 2012] (p. 21): ‘Consider a
game of rugby. The players are oriented around the ball, the token. They act in rela-
tion to the token, which is like a little sun around which the players orbit. [T]he
relationships between the players are defined by how they position themselves with
regard to the token. It is the movement of the token that defines their relations […]
meaning that it [the token or quasi-objet] can become embedded within a concrete,
highly deterministic social practice’. To this I would add that the crowd’s relationship
to the token and to the players who pass it around is equally important to Serres. My
analysis of La Guerre mondiale later in this chapter will explain why.
53 In Le Parasite (Paris: Grasset, 1980; repr. Hachette/Pluriel, 1997), Serres describes a
ball as a ‘quasi-objet’ being passed amongst team members and alludes to American
Football in this context (pp. 404–05). In the first, pictorial edition of Variations sur
Serres 205

In spite of his repeated allusions to the quasi-objet, Serres is adamant

that humanity’s quest to understand itself and its perceptible environment
will always rely upon empirical principles and praxes (‘Quand nous parle-
rions toutes les langues et pourrions déchiffrer tous les codes, quand nous
serions instruits du savoir absolu, nous ne saurions rien sans l’expérience’).54
Under these circumstances, perceptive experience, philosophy, science,
technology and sociology become increasingly interwoven:

Les problèmes moraux qui nous pressent aujourd’hui naissent, sans doute, d’un temps
où les objets pilotent les relations, alors que nous sortons d’une ère archaïque où les
relations pilotaient les objets. […] Nous n’avons pas encore une idée suffisante de ce
que le déluge d’objets fabriqués, depuis la révolution industrielle, par les sciences, les
techniques, les laboratoires et les usines implique pour nos relations, et maintenant
de celles, universelles, que nos performances globales installent.55

The extent to which Serres’s thinking differs from the non-referential mode
of perception that he champions in his earlier works is manifest in the quo-
tation above. Gone is the insistence that we remove our subjective selves
from any schematisation of our sensory modus operandi. In its place, Serres
demands that we consider our subjective interrelations based upon how
manufactured objects influence our daily behaviour. He also insists that
we must consider this question on an international and even a universal
scale. At first glance, it is somewhat surprising that the Michel Serres who
wrote the Hermès series would be making such demands of us less than a
dozen years on from its final instalment.
In any case, it is the ability of modern society’s manufactured objects
to create new perceptual interactions between themselves and us without
our knowledge that so intrigues Serres. As I explained above, such objects
are, in Serres’s view, quasi-objets because they can mould and manifest social
bonds, which then inspires and influences the manufacture of further

le corps (Paris: Le Pommier, 1999), Serres praises the benefits of teamwork and alludes
to rugby specifically (pp. 44, 47). He later refers to a ball being passed around for
sport as a ‘quasi-objet’ (p. 114).
54 Serres and Latour, Éclaircissements, p. 263.
55 Ibid., p. 290.
206 Chapter 3

(quasi-) objects and social interrelations: ‘[b]alle, ballon, furet… le quasi-

objet précède et construit l’objet parce qu’il trace la relation entre les gens
qui jouent’.56 Over the next two subsections, I shall examine two of Serres’s
written accounts of the perceptible traces that are left by an objet and a
quasi-objet. In doing so, I shall assess how the two concepts are entwined
with Serres’s explanation of the virtual. What bearing does this rapproche-
ment have upon his haptic postulations?

The Serresian Objet: Defining the Partial, the Quasi

and the Virtual

Though it is apparent that tactile perception has been of interest to him

for most if not all of his published career, Serres rarely discusses the topic
either directly or in great detail for much of the two decades that follow
Éclaircissements in 1992. His most recent works suggest something of a
return to this area of enquiry, however. This change is demonstrated by
the following extract from the fourth instalment of Petites chroniques du
dimanche soir, a series of transcriptions of radio segments co-hosted by
Serres and Michel Polacco. These shows were first broadcast on the French
station France Info. In a segment that was first aired in April 2010, Serres
tells us that
le toucher, […] le tact [,] [c]’est un sens global. La peau enveloppant tout le corps,
il concerne la peau, les mains, les pieds, le dos, la bouche, le sexe, etc. Le corps total.
[L]e mot ‘adapté’ – ‘apté’, ‘haptonomie’ – veut justement dire ‘toucher’. La personne
la mieux adaptée, c’est celle qui arrive à toucher, à caresser.57

56 Serres, Variations sur le corps, p. 114.

57 Michel Serres and Michel Polacco, Petites chroniques du dimanche soir, 5 vols, IV
(Paris: Le Pommier/France Info, 2011), pp. 208–09. This idea echoes Jean-Luc Nancy’s
assertion in 2006 that ‘[l]’unité d’un corps, sa singularité, c’est l’unité d’une touche,
Serres 207

Responding to Serres’s observation, Michel Polacco remarks that ‘on fait

corps avec l’objet’.58 This brief exchange is of significance to any haptic
interpretation of Serres’s recent work. It shows that the writer’s attitude
to tactile perception has altered appreciably over the last thirty-five years.
Earlier in this chapter, I showed that in 1980, Serres claims ‘[l]’espace
comme tel, unique et global, est, je le crains, un artéfact philosophique’.59
Yet in 2010, ‘le toucher, […] le tact [,] [c]’est un sens global [,] [l]a peau
enveloppant tout le corps, [l]e corps total’.60 Space has not only become
integrated, but also is centred upon the tactilely aware human body. Serres
makes clear that the integration of our bodies’ localised perceptive faculties
is arrived at and maintained by tactile means (‘le mot “adapté” – “apté”,
“haptonomie” – veut justement dire “toucher”. La personne la mieux
adaptée, c’est celle qui arrive à toucher, à caresser’).61 He even goes so far
as to argue that because of their common etymology, the material quali-
ties that are designated by the word ‘adapté’ (meaning adapted, fitted or
accommodating) and the French verb and noun to touch (‘toucher’) are
synonymous to a certain extent. The corollary of this logic is that an indi-
vidual’s adeptness to a given environment can be expressed through tactile
interaction between the perceiver and his or her perceptible surroundings.
Having established the possibility that tactile experience can be expres-
sive and adaptive, Serres then evokes the concepts of subject and object.
He uses the ostensibly binary opposition of these terms – and in doing so,
embraces a methodology that he eschews in his earlier theoretical works
– to illustrate his current understanding of how tactile sensation relates to
our perception of distance:
Le sujet, c’est ce corps qui, la peau en éveil, le toucher en éveil, a le bon tact pour
s’adapter aux choses. Du coup, puisque je prends le mot ‘adapter’, je vous donne le

de toutes les touches (de tous les touchers) de ce corps. Et c’est cette unité qui peut
faire un moi, une identité’ (Nancy, Corpus, p. 122).
58 Serres and Polacco, Petites chroniques du dimanche soir, IV, p. 209.
59 Serres, Hermès V, p. 68.
60 Serres and Polacco, Petites chroniques du dimanche soir, IV, p. 208.
61 Ibid., p. 209.
208 Chapter 3

mot ‘objet’. À ce moment-là, le corps n’a d’objet. Pourquoi? ‘Objet’: ‘ob’, ça veut dire
‘devant’, et ‘jet’, ça veut dire ‘jeter’. Comme si l’objet était jeté devant vous, à distance.
Un objet suppose donc l’objectivité, c’est-à-dire cette distance-là.62

What Serres disallows in this instance is the projective, hallucinatory sensa-

tion that is often apparent in the critical appraisals of perception offered by
Bataille or Blanchot. Serres implies that because all of the biomechanical
processes involved in perception are corporeally centred, the notion of
objectivity – of perceiving a surface at distance, in a physically detached
manner – is impossible. As Serres says, ‘l’adaptation, par la peau, par ce
toucher-là, réduit ou annule même la distance et fait de vous un homme
qui est tout le temps en train de caresser ce qui n’est plus un objet, ce qui
est absolument voisin’.63
Thus, by reaching out to touch the space that surrounds us, our body
and its sensory faculties in fact overwrite the space or object that we grasp
for, replacing it with a subjectivity which, consciously or not, stands
momentarily in objectivity’s stead. The Serresian object cannot hence be
perceptibly distant because it is constructed of sensory extrapolations drawn
from our existing proximal sensations. Even the virtual dimension of the
quasi-objet is defined by individual perceptive experiences of communal
tactile interaction. Steven D. Brown’s summary of the Serresian quasi-objet
is particularly succinct in explaining how this ‘overwriting’ occurs through
communally shared tactile activity (in this case, a game of rugby or football):
The token that circulates is a […] ‘quasi-object’. The name is misleading, however.
Serres has in mind a token which does more than simply keep a game going. This is
more than a simple object. It is ‘quasi’ object since it is undetermined, its particular

62 Ibid., p. 210. Again, a parallel with Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories presents itself here.
Nancy remarks in 2006 that ‘“Je” n’est rien d’autre que la singularité d’une touche,
d’une touche en tant qu’une touche est toujours à la fois active et passive et qu’une
touche évoque quelque chose de ponctuel – une touche au sens d’une touche de
couleur’ (Corpus, p. 122).
63 Serres and Polacco, Petites chroniques du dimanche soir, IV, p. 210.
Serres 209

qualities are unimportant. Its standing comes from the way it moves as a token. And
it is the movement that holds together the players.64

In the example above, individuals come into bodily contact with the quasi-
objet (a rugby ball or football, on this occasion). Their individual haptic
experiences of that interaction are subordinated by their need to pass the
ball around to their teammates, whilst not allowing it to fall into the pos-
session of their opponents. In order to achieve either task, the individual
who is in possession of the quasi-objet must juxtapose his or her simultane-
ously optical and tactile sensations of the quasi-objet with the purely optical
perceptions of it which the rest of the players share at that moment. This is
a projective process that requires the player to extrapolate simultaneously
visual and tactile data onto areas of space (the remainder of the pitch) which
are visible but intangible to the player at that moment. These proximal,
haptic sensory assessments will allow the player to navigate the quasi-objet
through intangible (optical) space with some degree of success, or, in the
words of Maria Assad, ‘seeing circumstantially with all sensate parts of the
body, […] patiently circumnavigating every locality encountered, and in
this manner sewing together the strewn circumstances of reality’.65
If we offset Serres’s indifference to the quasi-objet’s surface detail against
his interest in the proprioceptively discernible manner in which it moves,
his postulations concerning the quasi-objet remain in accordance with
the extrapolative forms of haptic perception described by Riegl, Marks
or Paterson. In each of these models of haptic experience, visual stimulus
solicits localised, tactile interaction with a larger object or surface area. As
it does not require conscious interpretation, haptic detail will be inevitably
perceptible in the same manner by all people, according to Riegl. Marks
and Paterson associate haptic sensation with more individualistic, fallible
perceptions of space and material. The inspiration for Serres’s haptic formu-
lations owe as much to recent medical science as they do to studies of art
history, however: ‘les nouveautés du corps […] viennent […] d’une réalité

64 Brown, ‘Michel Serres: Science, Translation and the Logic of the Parasite’, p. 21.
65 Assad, Reading with Michel Serres, p. 94.
210 Chapter 3

bien concrète, celle de la recherche scientifique – une réalité médicale. […]

Le nouveau corps arrive lorsque la douleur est supprimée’.66
Needless to say, Serres’s insistence that the ‘new’ body he speaks of can
only exist in a realm devoid of pain runs largely contrary to the understand-
ings of the perceiving human body advocated by Bataille or Blanchot. In
spite of this, the human body as it is explained by Serres does have some-
thing of the Bataillean informe about it:
Le corps, c’est, je crois, un jaillissement extraordinaire qui passe par trois étapes.
L’inerte – l’eau, le carbone, l’azote, etc. –; le vivant – de l’ADN aux battements du
cœur –; enfin, le langage, le sens, l’âme, le souffle, etc. [C]e jaillissement-là permet
qu’on ne définisse pas le corps. Je ne sais pas ce que c’est que le corps, mais je sais ce
que ‘peut’ le corps. Le corps, c’est une pure possibilité. […] Ainsi le corps et l’esprit
sont-ils deux possibilités du même genre.67

The multifaceted body that Serres describes is characterised rather than

defined by science and the chemical reactions which occur within it. Serres’s
concept of the modern body is also marked by the guiding double helix of
DNA structures, the heartbeat and the act of breathing. By contrast, the
final isolatable – though unquantifiable – characteristics of the Serresian
body are at once abstractive and subjective. Serres mentions the importance
of language and sense to his concept of the modern body – two paradigms
that do require at least some interaction with the perceptible world – whilst
equating them with the notion of the soul (and the Cartesian legacy of this
term). Serres makes no hard and fast distinctions, however, between mind
and body, and has no interest in defining the human body in the manner
of the Cartesian categorisations of corps or âme (in the quotation above,
Serres tells us that ‘[j]e ne sais pas ce que c’est que le corps’). Moreover,
Serres believes that empirical assessment of the modern body’s oscillation
between inert chemical, empirical, and abstractive phenomenon points
to an as yet unrealised virtual potential (‘je sais ce que “peut” le corps. Le
corps, c’est une pure possibilité’). This possibility remains virtual for the

66 Serres and Polacco, Petites chroniques du dimanche soir, IV, pp. 102–03.
67 Ibid., pp. 104–05.
Serres 211

moment because it is foreshadowed but has not yet been tapped into. So
while the Serresian body is rooted in empirical (and potentially haptic)
praxis, it also retains a simultaneously transcendent, virtual element because
the Serresian body is an ‘intersubjective’ exchanger (rather than purely a
receiver or transmitter) of information.68
How then might we formulate this virtual potential? Given Serres’s
noticeable preference for material praxis, it seems unlikely that his con-
cept of the virtual would be uniquely transcendent. In fact, it appears that
Serres is thinking in cybernetic terms. He notes that the rise of informa-
tion technology over robotics implies that ‘il était plus facile de mimer les
opérations de l’esprit que les opérations du corps. Comme si le corps était
plus complexe encore que les opérations intellectuelles’.69 What makes the
human body so much more complicated than the human mind, in Serres’s
opinion, is that the body relies upon the mind in order to function, whereas
the mind may function more or less independently of the body.
Intriguingly, Serres posits the body’s reliance upon the mind in terms
highly reminiscent of Bataille, even if Serres’s use of metaphor serves rather
different ends. According to Serres, ‘le rythme du pas entraîne la pensée.
[…] Je crois que le pas et le pied sont le propre de l’Homme. Les animaux
ne marchent pas, ou très peu. Les singes ne marchent pas comme nous: ce
sont des quadrumanes. La formation du pied a formé l’homme’.70 In other

68 Serres: ‘Qui suis-je encore? Une virtualité discontinue de tri, de sélection dans la
pensée intersubjective […] qui sépare les modulations du bruit mondial, un échan-
geur pour messagers’ (Hermès II, p. 155). On this point, see Ian Tucker’s elaborations
of Serresian virtuality: ‘Individualism becomes non-reducible to individual bodies,
but will occur as a set of relations (or event) at a particular moment, part of which
is the constitution of a specific mode of human experience. […] Virtuality is con-
ceptualized as a driving force of such processes, never immediately accessible, but
a veiled presence, masked by the “actualised” forms that spin off and form from it.
Serres is attempting similar achievements with sense, arguing it is a concept that is
necessary if we are to see beyond current formations of knowledge. As such it exists
to point us towards a space outside of the present’ (Tucker, ‘Sense and the Limits of
Knowledge’, 154).
69 Serres and Polacco, Petites chroniques du dimanche soir, IV, p. 105.
70 Ibid., pp. 97–98.
212 Chapter 3

words, the haptic, proprioceptive cadence of placing one foot in front of

the other (though not the metric possibilities of such actions) leads us
to think. In Serres’s view, this thought derived from haptically perceived
rhythm is what differentiates humans from other beings and has instructed
our knowledge and our behaviour.71
In stark contrast to this, Bataille describes the speculative œil pinéal’s
emergence as being an instinctive, sexual connection between tree-dwelling
primates and the next stage of modern humanity’s evolution. As I dem-
onstrated in my earlier analysis, rather than aiding our evolution, Bataille
claims that modern humanity’s rootedness to the ground is burdensome.
Instead of swinging freely amidst the branches and being in closer contact
with the sun, earthbound modern humans must crane their heads awk-
wardly in order to perceive the transcendence of consciousness and reason
symbolised by the sun and sky.
In spite of these marked divergences of approach, Bataille’s claim in ‘Le
Gros orteil’ that the big toe is the single most human part of the body does
resonate with Serres’s thinking. The big toe is after all a significant source
of physical balance for the rest of the body and is therefore an integral
biomechanical component of the ‘le pas et le pied’ that Serres considers
so crucial to human evolution.
Another area of difference between Bataillean and Serresian approaches
to sensation concerns the question of distance and how it is perceived.
Whereas the Bataillean notion of walking is more evocative of a painful
trudge that reminds us of our physical and spiritual distance from the
heavens, Serres considers the tactile interaction between foot and ground
to be materially instructive and therefore, mentally liberating: ‘Le toucher,
c’est d’abord l’abolition de la distance. Et quand vous parlez de “tactile”, il

71 In making this observation, we should not forget that Paterson makes a similar
argument in his postulation of haptic sensation as a proprioceptive phenomenon.
He even entitles one subsection of his text ‘Geometry with Eyes, Hands and Feet’
(in Paterson, The Senses of Touch, pp. 72–74). We must also be mindful that Jacques
Derrida disagrees with the suggestion that self-conscious thought and perception
is a uniquely human characteristic (see Derrida, Séminaire: la bête et le souverain,
2 vols, I (Paris: Galilée, 2008), pp. 408–10, 414–15, 428–30).
Serres 213

s’agit de l’accès à l’information, et même à la connaissance, par – et seule-

ment par – le tact’.72
Bataille would disagree with this assertion. His critical and literary
writings suggest that we can best shorten distance between ourselves and
our perceptible environment by looking. (The sun and sky are the nearest
perceptible things to the corporeal transcendence that Bataille advocates;
neither can be interacted with habitually on any other basis than the visual.)
Serres tacitly counters this position by claiming that tactile interac-
tion is the best means of reducing distance. Like Bataille, Serres posits
a clear interrelation between the manner in which tactile interaction is
used (as a weapon of violence or as a tool of knowledge) and purposeful
(im)morality. As we shall see shortly, this communion between the indi-
vidual body that perceives and the wider society that surrounds it forms
the basis of much of Serres’s thought in Les Cinq Sens. Serres is adamant,
however, that the integrity of perception and sociability implied by the
word ‘tact’ result from humanity’s collective experiences of tactile sensa-
tion. These experiences are born of and mediated by our skin: ‘les autres
sens sont liés à un ou deux organes qui sont situés en des points singuliers
du corps, […] alors que le tact court sur la totalité du corps. C’est la tota-
lité de la peau qui est concernée. Le tact devrait donc être beaucoup plus
important que les autres sens’.73
Whereas neither Bataille nor Blanchot schematise the concepts of
individual or societal experiences of skin in a coherently scientific manner,
Serres does exactly that. He remarks, for example, upon how the traditional
categorisations of subject and object may be short-circuited by physical
haptic contact between two surfaces. Serres turns to the discipline of tribol-
ogy to explain how this physical interaction between two surfaces creates
a third presence or object which is at once a mixture of those surfaces and
a distinct haptic surface in its own right:

72 Serres and Polacco, Petites chroniques du dimanche soir, IV, p. 135.

73 Ibid., p. 136. Again, the similarity between Serres’s positing of perception as fun-
damentally ‘tactile’ resonates strongly with Nancy’s assertion that all perception is
defined by ‘touchers’.
214 Chapter 3

la ‘tribologie’ […] étudie les effets des frottements et des frictions: une science du
tact, une science du toucher. [E]lle a découvert que deux corps qui sont en contact,
en con-tact, développent entre eux, lorsqu’ils se frottent, un troisième petit feuillet,
comme s’ils produisaient ou qu’ils créaient, au moment du frottement, une sorte de
tiers corps, de corps troisième.74

What is most striking about this extract is that the Serresian corps troisième
is arrived at by skins being rubbed together. The act of rubbing requires
active movement of at least one of the two surfaces coming into tactile
contact. In this regard, the ‘third body’ to which Serres alludes is created
by a haptic proprioception of the kind postulated by Paterson, in that it
requires kinaesthetic as well as tactile action and reaction from the body
or bodies involved.
‘Haptonomie’ (haptonomy) is similar; Serres characterises this tactile
discipline as being akin to a form of ‘caresse’ used on pregnant women and
new mothers to help them prepare for – or recover from – the physical
demands of giving birth.75 By alluding to simultaneously functional and
scientific applications of tactility such as haptonomy, Serres draws out the
metaphorical ability of tactile interaction to manipulate and optimise as yet
unrealised (or in this case, unborn or newborn) potential. Moreover, hap-
tonomy illustrates the capacity of tactility to reach into areas of life about
which we have much objectively observed information, but no conscious,
subjective sensory memory.
It would be erroneous to suggest that Serres privileges touch over
all other perceptive means, however: in his opinion, all of our sensory
faculties are capable of being instructive. To underline this point, Serres
alludes to the multiple sensory experiences evoked by the French verb
entendre:

Avez-vous remarqué que la plupart des gens, et même la plupart des philosophes – les
ignorants et les savants –, croient que la vision est le modèle de l’accès à la connaissance?

74 Serres and Polacco, Petites chroniques du dimanche soir, IV, pp. 136–37; emphasis in
original.
75 Ibid., p. 137.
Serres 215

Eh bien, c’est une erreur: l’ouïe est un accès aussi important et il en va de même pour
l’odorat. La preuve: ‘entendre’ signifie ‘comprendre’, et ‘sentir’ …
– … signifie ‘percevoir’.76

This appeal to language in order to justify his conception of how the human
body perceives typifies much of Serres’s writing since 1980. Whereas Bataille
and, in particular, Blanchot differentiate not only between the act of seeing
and that of touching but also between the body’s other sensory faculties,
Serres seeks to establish sight and tactility as perceptual functions that are
interlinked by specifically proprioceptive processes.

The Interdisciplinary, the Virtual and the Haptic

As I stated above, there is a pronounced change in Serres’s literary style fol-

lowing the publication in 1980 of the last of his quintet of texts dedicated
to the ancient Greek god of communication, Hermes.
Over the subsequent decades, an appreciable amount of Serres’s more
critically orientated work has taken the form of interviews. Though Serres
complains bitterly about the unconstructive nature of critical texts in his
interviews with Latour,77 I have demonstrated that even after 1980, the
works by Serres that address matters of perception retain a clear interest in
critical theory and schematisation. Nevertheless, it should not escape our
attention that these interests serve an interdisciplinary agendum.
As Serres explains in Hermès V, his project is to negotiate and reconcile
what he perceives to be a continually shifting gap in knowledge between the
natural sciences and the humanities. Significantly, Serres posits this quest for
interdisciplinary congruence in topological (physically perceptible) terms:

76 Ibid., pp. 137–38; emphasis in original.

77 Serres: ‘La critique se trouve […] sans cesse bloquée entre le trivial et le fortement
inaccessible. […] Mieux vaut créer que critiquer’ (Serres and Latour, Éclaircissements,
pp. 197–98).
216 Chapter 3

Je cherche le passage entre la science exacte et les sciences humaines. Ou, à la langue
près, ou, au contrôle près, entre nous et le monde. Le chemin n’est pas aussi simple
que la laisse prévoir la classification du savoir. Je le crois aussi malaisé que le fameux
passage du Nord-Ouest […]. Des optiques de fantasme trompent, dans un milieu
blanc, cristallin, diaphane, brumeux. La terre, l’air et l’eau se confondent, solides et
liquides, flocons flous et brouillards se mélangent, ou, au contraire, chacun d’eux se
découpe, fractal.78

From these remarks we can establish that Serres treats the interaction
between the natural sciences and the humanities as being capable of impact-
ing materially upon the manner in which we perceive. Serres’s rationale
here relies upon transcendental empiricism in the sense that though it is
fluid in form, the interdisciplinary space that he describes is based upon
perceptual indices. The writer’s interdisciplinary praxis instead seeks to
create an avant-la-lettre virtual reality for his readers. This virtual reality is
one based upon defeating the mental boundaries imposed by rigidly mate-
rialist thinking (‘La terre, l’air et l’eau se confondent, solides et liquides,
flocons flous et brouillards se mélangent, ou, au contraire, chacun d’eux
se découpe’). Assad emphasises the tactile basis of this virtuality: ‘[f ]or
Serres, the sense of touch is the fractal boundary that opens up a creative
process, where objective reality and subjective intellect invent together’.79
This simulacral zone subsists upon allusion to the reader’s existing percep-
tive experiences of solidity, of liquidity, and of the vaporous in order to
express its wilful confusion of these haptically discernible characteristics.80
Serres’s justification for making sensory confusion integral to his theory is
simple: ‘Le mimétique est un échec’.81
More recently, Serres has opined that

78 Serres, Hermès V, p. 15.

79 Assad, Reading with Michel Serres, p. 76; emphasis in original.
80 The parallels between Serres’s presentation of perception here and Nancy’s thinking
on this subject are very strong indeed. Consider for example Nancy’s remark that
‘[l]e sentir et le se-sentir-sentir qui fait le sentir lui-même, c’est toujours sentir à la
fois qu’il y a de l’autre (ce que l’on sent) et qu’il y a d’autres zones du sentir, ignorées
par celle qui sent en ce moment’ (Les Muses, p. 36; emphasis in original).
81 Serres, Hermès V, p. 160.
Serres 217

[j]’estime […] Lucrèce, qui dit que la vision nous met directement en contact avec
des membranes que chaque chose que nous voyons émet et disperse dans l’espace. Et
ces membranes – qu’il appelle des ‘simulacres’ – circulent à toute vitesse dans l’espace
entre nous, telles des peaux mobiles. Elles se posent sur nos yeux.82

These virtualised visual impressions of the surfaces that we perceive impose

themselves upon our eyes in a manner similar to Riegl or Marks’s versions
of the haptic image. Such sensory impressions as those postulated by Serres
are however indicative of perceptive reality rather than constitutive of per-
ceptive reality itself. Tellingly, Serres believes that only this haptic synergy
between visual and tactile sensation is capable of bridging the experiential
gap between a perceiver and the object that he or she perceives. The writer
expresses his conviction in a fashion highly evocative of Riegl or Marks:
Vous voyez là que ce modèle tactile abolit toute distance. La vue crée la distance. On a
du recul quand on voit, tandis que quand on touche, on a l’impression – la pression? –
que la distance s’abolit. Et si Lucrèce a raison, nous nous caressons sans arrêt les uns
les autres, et nous caressons le monde qui nous caresse. Et du coup, l’espace du tact,
c’est l’espace de la caresse, c’est-à-dire la fin des distances, le bonheur et la paix.83

According to Serres, then, the haptic synergy between tactile and

visual perception abolishes the concept of distance. As Serres makes this
remark, however, he cites Lucretius. I showed earlier in this chapter that
the simulacrum of Lucretian philosophy is described as being covered in
skin, much like a human body. Just before his invocation of Lucretius,
Serres claims that ‘on a l’impression – la pression? – que la distance s’abolit’.
So, Serres claims that tactile interaction leaves us with the (mental and
physical) impression that such interaction can abolish our perception of
distance, but this impression has as much to do with the simulacral realm
as it does our bodies or minds. The fact that Serres’s statement appeals to
tactile sensations that we have experienced consciously makes no differ-
ence here. In spite of invoking the real, Serres’s understanding of tactility
cannot rid itself of the virtual, the simulated, the simulacral.

82 Serres and Polacco, Petites chroniques du dimanche soir, IV, p. 138.

83 Ibid.
218 Chapter 3

As we have seen thus far, it is language’s oxymoronic potential in mat-

ters of sensory description that so enthrals Serres. In his earlier works, this
potential is explained in terms of oscillation. Serres tells us that the manner
in which we perceive ourselves and the world around us alternates between
our sensory faculties – notably those of sight, touch and hearing – and
our recourse to language. Evoking Aristotle’s concept of hylomorphism
(in which ‘matter’ and ‘form’ meld physically in myriad ways yet remain
distinct, linguistic categories), Serres claims that ‘[l]e monde comme réseau
communicant est un réseau de pôles ou de sommets hylémorphiques’.84
As I established earlier in this chapter, perceptible topology and
inscriptive language go hand in hand in Serresian thinking: they are
intimately associated with the concept of tactility. This proximity renders
the sensory oscillation that Serres describes in the quotation above a three-
dimensional terrain of sorts, just as ‘[u]n objet quelconque est un modèle
hylémorphique’.85 When a three-dimensional object is defined in the same
‘hylémorphique’ terms as the sensory oscillations which differentiate that
object from the rest of its surroundings, object and sensation can no longer
be distinguished reliably.86
To put it simply, the sensory faculties through which an object is sensed
or the subjective presence that differentiates itself from the object cease to
be distinct or discrete spaces. Instead, the subject, the object and the haptic
sensations that differentiate experientially between the concepts of subject
and object become regions of a larger experiential whole. This situation
requires us to change the manner in which we write about the perceptive
experience: ‘La description, ici, n’est plus globale, comme la précédente où
le phénomène apparaît figure sans fond, mais elle est simplement locale.
Elle ne requiert plus comme condition un espace de plongement ou de
prolongement’.87

84 Serres, Hermès II, p. 110.

85 Ibid., p. 113.
86 Assad: ‘For Serres, […] the sensate brings together, at incredibly complex boundaries,
the subject and the object, our being as an intellect and the reality of the world we
are part of ’ (Reading with Michel Serres, p. 74).
87 Serres, Hermès V, p. 40.
Serres 219

The three-dimensional interconnectivity between topology, inscrip-

tive language and tactile perception that Serres posits above does have a
drawback for any haptic interpretation of his theories, however. The prob-
lem stems from Serres’s rapprochement of these three domains: he treats
topology, inscriptive language and tactile perception as knowledge-giving
concepts which are simultaneously praxes reliant upon (specifically) bodily
sensation. Through this interdisciplinary approach to matters of perception,
science, geography, written culture and philosophy, Serres seeks to foster a
haptically discernible impression of physical and mental liberty amongst
his readers. This impression is, however, simulacral. To clarify: the liberat-
ing juxtaposition of tactile sensation with physical science, geography and
inscriptive language is simulacral because it becomes representational the
moment that it is expressed on a solely linguistic basis. Once Serres’s juxta-
position of disciplines becomes representational, it becomes unavoidably
mired in references to what we readers have or have not perceived before
(Serres tells us so in Hermès V).88 This situation is problematic because once
knowledge moves into the representational realm, it ceases to be current
and therefore unmediated by sensory memory.89 These circumstances harm
the ability of literature to inform us reliably about things that we have not
seen, touched or otherwise sensed first-hand: ‘L’écrit est prédit. Le roman
s’enchaîne de cause à effet, des conditions initiales à leur développement, il
est le développement des enveloppes précitées. Il est à séquences et consé-
quences. Ainsi du calcul astronomique’.90

88 See ibid., pp. 14–19.

89 Assad makes this point when she describes Serres’s writing in Les Cinq Sens: ‘The
word itself becomes a literal object whose implications form the passages between
the senses and the various Serresean notions expressing the union of subject and
object in the topological space of ahistorical time. Circumstance is a bouquet of
intersecting sensations constantly in turbulent motion which cannot be qualified
or analysed’ (Assad, Reading with Michel Serres, p. 87). Can the objectification of
language that Assad describes truly relay the plurality of sensation and temporality
that she believes to be so important to Serres’s understanding of this process?
90 Serres, Hermès V, p. 35.
220 Chapter 3

Due to the reliance of inscribed language upon memorial reference,

the chronology which defines memory begins to interfere with linguistic
freedom; it shackles literary description of perceptive experience to the laws
of sensory stimulus and perceptual reaction. Surprisingly, such shackling
also unleashes the haptic potential of literary description: it allows the
principle of visual cause and tactile response inherent to the haptic theo-
ries of Riegl, Marks, Paterson and Nancy to re-establish itself. As Maria
Assad summarises,

By juxtaposing language, the tactile, and the fine line that separates and weds the
two, Serres reveals the process of fuzzy logic with which he will try, not to explain,
but to imply what happens […] when the senses convert the concrete into abstract
forms that our intellect then shapes into knowledge.91

So, what are the specifics of Serres’s theoretical stance on haptic percep-
tion and what Assad dubs its ‘fuzzy logic’? From the evidence analysed thus
far, it seems fair to say that there are overtly haptic sensibilities discernible
in Serres’s treatment of bodily perception. It is also reasonable to state that
there remains an as yet untapped and therefore virtual potential inherent
to the perceiving body as he presents it. Serres’s writings suggest that at
least some of this virtual potential is capable of being unleashed through
haptic interaction. In Serres’s opinion, the haptic loosing of the modern
human body’s hitherto virtual potentiality provides us with valuable empiri-
cal insights to which modern science is otherwise wilfully blind and deaf.
The corollary of Serres’s works of ostensible ‘critical theory’ is decep-
tively simple. Simultaneously haptic and instructive unleashing of the
human body’s potential may be expressed and/or perceived through par-
taking in or witnessing physical actions. The haptic component of this
realisation (and its instructive potential) may also be conveyed virtually.
This conveyance occurs through the simulacrum of inscriptive language.
What I mean by ‘the simulacrum of inscriptive language’ is an inscribed
language which purports to include all of the temporal and sensory allusions
necessary to evoke haptic sensations within us. This language is inherently

91 Assad, Reading with Michel Serres, p. 74.

Serres 221

partial or incomplete due to the impossibility of transporting perceptual

data from materiality into abstraction or vice versa with any degree of
exactitude or completeness. The sensations that this language evokes are
therefore unavoidably simulative rather than faithfully reproductive of
their experiential source. However, Serres considers this lack of sensory
fidelity to be positive. As Ian Tucker explains,

For Serres, […] there is something unique to sense, something that cannot be entirely
captured by the words and meaning attached to it. Language can affect sense, but
not feel it. Sense can be seen as produced through different kinds of processes than
language – virtual processes that are open and outfacing rather than meaning-imbued
and narrowing.92

The instructive value of inscriptive language as virtual simulacrum is not,

therefore, universal. Indeed, this value is strictly localised to the individual
who, on an a priori basis, interprets the simulacra borne by inscriptive lan-
guage into (potentially) haptic experience and vice versa.
As my analyses thus far have shown, there is a clear tension between
Serres’s positing of haptic perception in the Hermès cycle and the posi-
tions he adopts subsequently in Éclaircissements or the fourth volume of
the Petites chroniques du dimanche soir series. Much of this tension appears
linked with Serres’s changing opinions as to whether the question of
haptic perception could – or indeed, should – be thought about in rela-
tion to the perceiving human body or its environment. In the second half
of this chapter, I shall examine how Serres’s more anecdotally orientated
writings exploit and convey the haptic potential of the ‘corps nouveau’
in order to address this quandary. I also consider whether Serres’s literary
prose, in common with the literary works of Bataille and Blanchot, has
grown increasingly preoccupied with the virtual realm as his career has
progressed.

92 Tucker, ‘Sense and the Limits of Knowledge’, 157; emphasis in original.

222 Chapter 3

Skin to Begin: Les Cinq Sens

I begin my literary analysis with an exploration of Michel Serres’s Les Cinq

Sens, which was first published in 1985. I have selected this text because it
is among the first of Serres’s works to address directly the thorny issue of
how our perceptive faculties influence our way of thinking and what role art
objects and religious iconography may play in determining this influence.
Les Cinq Sens is a sizeable and thematically rich tome which has yet
to be analysed comprehensively. This is partly explicable by the fact that,
true to Serres’s interdisciplinary agenda, Les Cinq Sens contains many pas-
sages which could fall within the rubric of ‘critique’ just as readily as they
might be considered ‘littérature’. For the sake of brevity, I have opted to
focus primarily upon passages from Les Cinq Sens which contain an overtly
anecdotal element or which make repeated and direct allusion to sensation
using the first person. These extracts are arguably the most unambiguously
‘literary’ in Serres’s oeuvre.
Firstly, I will explore how and why Serres links individual perceptive
experience with abstractive sensory theory. I begin with the following
quotation, which appears within the opening ten pages of Les Cinq Sens:

Du majeur, je me touche une lèvre. En ce contact gît la conscience. J’en commence

l’examen. Elle se tapit souvent dans un repli, lèvre posée sur lèvre, palais collé à la
langue, dents sur dents, paupières baissées, sphincters serrés, main fermée en poing,
doigts pressés les uns contre les autres, face postérieure de cuisse croisée sur la face
antérieure de l’autre, ou pied posé sur l’autre pied. […] Sans repli, sans contact de soi-
même sur soi, il n’y aurait pas vraiment de sens interne, pas de corps propre, moins de
cénesthésie, pas vraiment de schéma corporel, nous vivrions sans conscience; lisses,
prêts à nous évanouir.93

This handful of sentences illustrates the important role that self-awareness

plays in Serres’s understanding of the body’s perceptive faculties in the period
after 1980. Though the issue of self-awareness was present in theoretical

93 Michel Serres, Les Cinq Sens (Paris: Grasset, 1985; repr. Hachette/Pluriel, 2008),
p. 20.
Serres 223

works such as Hermès II, it is only with the publication of Les Cinq Sens
that the topic is explored in specifically haptic (and literary) terms. Serres’s
examination of perceptual consciousness begins with a male narrator – quite
possibly Serres himself – pressing a finger against his lips. The discernment
of distinct perceptive surfaces is underway. The fingertip distinguishes fine
surfaces and intricate detail from rough or plain material. Its ability to touch
a visible object is among our most basic sensory tools for discriminating
proximity from distance. In contact with his lips, that fingertip forces Les
Cinq Sens’s narrator into a subjective analysis of how his body must first
look inward before it can look outward.94
As we see from Serres’s words above, the formative, conscious influ-
ence of the inward looking that Serres evokes encompasses all areas of the
body. The writer goes so far as to state that without this form of predomi-
nantly tactile self-awareness, we would be no more than blank surfaces
devoid of consciousness (‘nous vivrions sans conscience; lisses, prêts à nous
évanouir’). Serres acknowledges that the gesture of putting a finger to one’s
lips is demonstrative and therefore social (‘[d]ans le geste de faire taire, le
corps, localement, joue’).95 It implies a desire to silence another person
without actually laying hands upon them. Yet this gesture still requires a
simultaneously tactile and visible action from the person who seeks silence.
As we read the following quotation, we should not forget that it is a spe-
cifically individualistic, haptic experience that allows Serres to make this
leap into theory:
Les organes de sens font des nœuds, des lieux de singularité à haut relief dans ce
multiple dessin plat, des spécialisations denses, montagne ou vallée ou puits sur la

94 Nancy’s recent portrayals of the entire perceptive process as being a series of interre-
lated sensory touche(r)s finds a notable precursor, here, yet he never mentions Serres’s
name. For example, Nancy remarks in Corpus (p. 160) that, ‘la vérité, c’est la peau.
Elle est dans la peau, elle fait peau: authentique étendue exposée, toute tournée au
dehors en même temps qu’enveloppe du dedans, du sac rempli de borborygmes et
de remugles. La peau touche et se fait toucher’.
95 Serres, Les Cinq Sens, p. 20.
224 Chapter 3

plaine. Ils irriguent toute la peau de désir, d’écoute, de vue ou d’odorat, elle coule
comme l’eau, confluence variable des qualités sensibles.96

As I highlighted earlier in this chapter, Serres has suggested on several

occasions that time flows akin to a liquid of variable viscosity, as temporal
streams contained within physical boundaries. In the extract above, he
leaves us with the impression that our perceptive faculties irrigate our very
skin, making it fluid in much the same manner as the writer claims time
to be. In addition, the dermal fluidity that Serres describes is a ‘confluence
variable des qualités sensibles’. Might this sensory confluence be haptic in
nature? Though tactile sensation is not referred to directly in the quotation
above, visual and olfactory sensations are. Moreover, Serres speaks of the
sensory irrigation that liquefies or at least lubricates our skin as providing
us with a ‘haut relief dans ce multiple dessin plat’. Riegl uses precisely this
analogy to differentiate the haptic surface from the optical.97 However, the
corollary of the extract from Les Cinq Sens given above is that all sensation
flows outwards from the perceiver’s body.
The sensing skin that Serres postulates here is far from neutral in its
integrative perceptive functions. In spite of this, the melding that Serres
alludes to retains a distinctly haptic quality. By stating subsequently that
‘[l]a peau intervient entre plusieurs choses du monde et les fait se mêler’,98
he evokes the visually and tactilely imposing characteristics of the haptic
surfaces that Riegl or Marks describe. What is more, if ‘[t]out se rencontre
à la contingence, comme si tout portait peau’,99 then the haptic charac-
teristics of perception that Serres itemises are actually simulacra, chance
sensory constructs.
As I remarked earlier, Serres states in Hermès V that Lucretius believed
all simulacra to be covered in skin comparable with our own. Yet that obser-
vation begs a question: where does the simulacral end and the real begin?
In the next subsection, I shall examine how Serres believes two relatively

96 Ibid., p. 60.
97 See Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, pp. 281–82 and p. 4, n. 7 above.
98 Serres, Les Cinq Sens, p. 97.
99 Ibid., p. 98.
Serres 225

recent artistic portrayals of human skin can begin to answer this question.
I also consider how Serres’s literary portrayals of skin clarify his often com-
plex theorisations concerning sensation. Additionally, I will ask whether
Serres believes gender to have an effect upon the perceptual process in the
manner that Bataille and Blanchot appear to.

Painted Ladies: Skin as a Virtually Haptic Surface

In Les Cinq Sens, Serres devotes a dozen pages to a series of paintings

by Pierre Bonnard. I will not provide an exhaustive analysis of these
thematically rich, often highly associative commentaries, nor of Serres’s
subsequent discussion of the Dame à la licorne tapestry, which hangs at the
Musée Cluny in Paris. Nevertheless, in this subsection, I shall explore how
Serres presents painted (female) skin as a simultaneously haptic and virtual
surface. This portrayal of skin painted on canvas as a haptically perceptible
oxymoron is valuable because it offers us a means of understanding certain
evolutions in Serres’s literary and critical writings. Moreover, it provides
numerous points of comparison between the Serresian stance on percep-
tion and those taken by Bataille and Blanchot.
Let us begin with Serres’s description of a canvas that Bonnard painted
in 1931:

Bonnard donne un Nu au miroir, dit encore La Toilette. Une femme nue, en sou-
liers à talons, vue de trois quarts arrière, se regarde à la glace. Nous ne voyons pas
son image, de face.
Les deux miroirs et la nudité, la face cachée ou l’image volée, la deuxième glace
aussi vide que la première, tout nous pousse à ressentir les prestiges de l’optique, à
discourir d’érotisme et de représentation, encore. Non.100

100 Ibid., p. 32.

226 Chapter 3

Serres imbues even the manifestly simulacral skin of Bonnard’s painted lady
with the same self-reflexive awareness that he associates with the gesture
of placing a finger over one’s own lips. We cannot say whether Bonnard’s
figure is able to see herself, but we are certainly unable to see what she sees:
there is no reflection in either of the painted mirrors around her. It is for
this reason that Serres disallows any talk of Bonnard’s canvas as a work of
mere representation or eroticism. Serres’s refusal to consider this painting
in either manner immediately places him at odds with Bataille, who is
often preoccupied with the eroticism of female skin, and Blanchot, whose
works frequently address the impossibility of explaining or representing
what happens to our minds when our skin comes into contact with that
of another human being.
Additionally, we see from the quotation above that Serres refuses the
desire ‘à ressentir les prestiges de l’optique’. He appears to reject the sole
sensory faculty towards which Bataille and Blanchot are even vaguely
charitably disposed with any regularity. To judge by the quotation above,
it also seems that Serres refuses to accept any haptic confluence between
tactility (ressentir) and vision (l’optique).
That is, until we read the description below. Here, Serres compares
the female figure of Nu au miroir with a painting by Bonnard that dates
from 1890 and is entitled Peignoir. In this earlier canvas, a woman wears
a dressing gown covered in leopard-like spots. Bonnard paints the gown’s
hues and spots in such a way that they appear indistinguishable from the
woman’s skin. Serres suggests that the woman painted by Bonnard in 1931
still bears the marks of this dressing gown on her naked flesh:
Elle est nue, voyez sa peau: couverte de tatouages, chinée, tigrée, granitée, ocellée,
piquetée, niellée, tiquetée, constellée plus encore que le vieux peignoir, ensemencée
de taches moins monotones, moirée. Son épiderme est peint de manière bien sin-
gulière. Elle a ôté sa robe de chambre, on dirait que les imprimés du tissu sont restés
sur sa peau.101

101 Ibid.
Serres 227

What Serres describes above would be a haptic surface, according to Riegl’s

theories: the visible indentations and striations of a proximal tactile sur-
face impose themselves upon the beholder’s eyes (or in this case, upon the
writer’s words). Though they are static, the small imperfections on the
surface of the woman’s skin that Serres mentions also call to mind Marks’s
cinematic version of haptic solicitation. In Bonnard’s canvas, our visual
faculties are focussed upon often indistinct, highly localised regions of
a larger and more easily discerned whole, akin to the zooming cinematic
camera that Marks describes.102
Perhaps more striking is Serres’s suggestion that the skin of Nu au
miroir’s female figure has been imprinted with the patterns of the dressing
gown visible in Peignoir four decades earlier. As I have demonstrated, the
concepts of perceiving skin advocated by Bataille tend towards an oscillation
between sublimity and abjection, between transcendental forgetfulness of
the skin and an utter subjugation and degradation through carnality that
our skin binds us to. Blanchot continually alludes to a skin that forgets
itself in favour of an indistinct vision or a clearer narrative voice. The skin
that Serres describes here is simulacral yet capable of remembering and
of inciting us, its viewer, to remember the perceptual realities inherent to
our own, non-virtual dermal layers. As Serres inadvertently points out,
however, the devil is in the haptic detail. Writing of the female figure in
Nu au miroir, he says that
les demi-lunes du peignoir se distribuaient sur lui de façon régulière, mécanique,
reproductible; sur la robe cutanée, vivantes, les impressions s’ensemencent au hasard,
de manière inimitable. On pourrait reconnaître le modèle. La dernière pelure, celle
qu’on peigne, ne s’imprime pas lisse, homogène ni monotone, elle s’étale et brille
comme un chaos de couleurs, de formes et de tons. Nulle autre n’a la peau de cette
femme, spécifique. Vous l’avez reconnue.103

102 ‘The works I propose to call haptic invite a look that moves on the surface plane of
the screen for some time before the viewer realises what she or he is beholding. [A]
haptic work may create an image of such detail […] that it evades a distanced view,
instead pulling the viewer in close’ (Marks, The Skin of the Film, pp. 162–63; emphasis
in original).
103 Serres, Les Cinq Sens, p. 32.
228 Chapter 3

The painted evidence of perceiving skin’s irreproducibility in art ‘ne

s’imprime pas lisse, homogène ni monotone, elle s’étale et brille comme
un chaos de couleurs, de formes et de tons’. In other words, the failure
of (painted) art to reproduce the sensation of perceiving skin with any
accuracy is expressed in a myriad of simulacral forms and tones of colour,
‘comme un chaos’. These forms can nevertheless be discerned haptically by
those who touch and/or view them. This haptic specificity comes with a
surprising twist. The female figure that Serres claims we recognise by haptic
means in Bonnard’s painting is in fact a literary character:

Au mélange des nuances, au chaos des marques et touches, vous avez reconnu la Belle
Noiseuse que Balzac disait inimaginable: de fait, elle n’a pas d’image, aux miroirs
et ne se représente pas. Là se lève le corps au-dessus du désordre […]. Non, le vieux
peintre du Chef-d’œuvre inconnu ne sombrait pas dans la folie, mais anticipait plus
d’un siècle de peinture. Balzac rêvait de Bonnard, la vue projetait le tact, la raison et
l’ordre méditaient le chaos de la singularité.104

There are a number of comments to be made here. Most importantly, the

haptically recognisable female figure of Bonnard’s Nu au miroir casts no
optical reflection upon the painted environment that she inhabits (‘Les
deux miroirs et la nudité, la face cachée ou l’image volée, la deuxième glace
aussi vide que la première’).105 Her simulacral skin does not register within
her equally simulacral dressing room because her skin is not tactilely self-
reflexive, meaning that it is not self-aware (‘elle […] ne se représente pas’).106
Nevertheless, the figure radiates simultaneously tactile and visual stimuli
to viewers who are able to distance themselves proprioceptively from the
painted locale contained within Bonnard’s canvas.107 In this sense, for Serres,

104 Ibid.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid.
107 Connor also detects a certain synergy between tactility and vision in Les Cinq Sens,
but casts it in a distinctly negative light, observing that ‘[w]here the other senses give
us the mingled body, vision appears on the side of detachment, separation. Vision is
a kind of dead zone, as the petrifying sense, of non-sense, which it is the role of the
other senses to make good or redeem’ (‘Michel Serres’s Les Cinq Sens’, p. 328).
Serres 229

the absence of optical ‘image’ in Bonnard’s painting actually clarifies our

perceptual relationship with it. This is in stark contrast to the presence of
the Blanchovian image, which serves only to confuse and obscure the haptic
faculties of those literary characters who fall under its petrifying influence.
In spite of this, the temporal anomaly associated with the Blanchovian
image remains: Serres claims that ‘Balzac rêvait de Bonnard’, when Balzac
actually died decades before Bonnard even began to paint. In addition, the
absence in presence of the Blanchovian image hovers over Serres’s account
of Bonnard’s Nu au miroir. The female figure’s absence of optical presence
and tactile self-awareness leaves a void that we could perceive both tactilely
and optically, were we able to touch the canvas ourselves. According to
Serres, this void forms a curtain of sorts between the figure’s skin and her
painted environment, which should be perceptible to her. This curtain is
adorned with reflections of the simultaneously flecked, bone-like and silk-
ily undulating surfaces of the painted room itself:

Or le reflet dans le miroir, en face, miroir qu’on ne voit qu’à demi, or l’image de la
femme dans la glace sont réduits à une sorte de rideau, une tenture de la salle de
bains, elle-même ocellée, moirée, chinée, constellée, ensemencée de couleurs et de
tons, tatouée. Mélange pour mélange et chaos pour chaos, la peau a pour image le
rideau, a pour reflet une toile, pour fantôme un drap.108

As we read in the quotation above, Bonnard’s female figure is unable either

to see herself or to be tactilely self-aware. This non-perception of selfhood
forms a haptically constituted mesh of sorts which renders her skin – the
painted skin that we would perceive haptically upon Bonnard’s canvas, were
we allowed to touch it – a ghostly curtain between the figure’s perceptually
discernible world and our own.
Let us recap briefly. A haptic interaction between our visual and tactile
faculties allows us to discern the lack of haptic self-awareness of the female
figure painted in Bonnard’s painting, Nu au miroir. She does not appear
to herself either visually or haptically, yet we are able to perceive this of
her by both sensory means. Our haptic recognition of her lack of haptic

108 Serres, Les Cinq Sens, pp. 32–33.

230 Chapter 3

self-recognition leads us – in Serres’s opinion – to an inevitable compari-

son between Bonnard’s female figure and the infamous Belle Noiseuse of
Honoré de Balzac’s novella, Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu.109
Important as all of this may be, the most crucial aspect of Serres’s pres-
entation of Bonnard’s painting is the manner in which Serres uses the haptic
imagery that the paintings evoke (‘la vue projetait le tact’)110 as a means of
orientating interdisciplinary communication in the humanities. Serres says
of Bonnard’s canvases that ‘[l]’image se forme sur une variété déployée, la
carte se dessine sur une page, s’imprime sur elle’.111 The simultaneously visual
and potentially tactile characteristics of Bonnard’s painted female simulacra
are not materially different in nature from Serres’s interpretation of the act
of reading. This is because reading as Serres presents it is a solicitation of
the reader’s senses to fabulate visual and tactile information based upon
their prior perceptual experiences. To repeat a phrase from Paul Harris’s
article, ‘Serres’s method of moving by “analytic prolongement” turns literary
analysis into an exercise in projective geometry – in the sense that it maps
the surface of fictional discourse onto topological surfaces’.112
The sight of Bonnard’s canvases makes us want to touch them. The
sensory projections stirred by our interpretation of words on a page are what
make us want to touch the living or inanimate surfaces that those words
describe or fabulate. Serres nevertheless postulates a haptically informed
yet individually experienced equivalence between the simulacrum as it is
painted and the simulacrum as it is written:
La toile se recouvre de toiles, les voiles s’entassent et ne voilent que des voiles, les
feuilles se chevauchent dans le feuillage. Feuilles qui gisent sous les pages. Sans doute

109 The question of recognition and non-recognition of the human body in paintings
is an integral element of Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, a novela of which several drafts
were published between 1831 and 1846. Balzac’s tale concludes with an elderly master
painter (Frenhofer) being criticised by two young artists who cannot decipher any-
thing more than a particularly lifelike foot from La Belle Noiseuse, a canvas that the
older man believes to be his masterpiece.
110 Serres, Les Cinq Sens, p. 32.
111 Ibid., p. 37.
112 Harris, ‘The Smooth Operator’, p. 116; emphasis in original.
Serres 231

lisez-vous du regard ces pages où j’écris au sujet de Bonnard, ôtez les feuilles, tournez
les pages, […] l’œil enfin ne trouvera plus rien. Reste à toucher la feuille imprimée,
pellicule fine, support de sens, la feuille, la page, tissu-étoffe, peau, la toile même de
la femme de Bonnard. Je feuillette le peignoir.113

According to Serres, the instructive potential of haptic perception and its

sensory indices exist in the projective fabulations that literature demands of
us, just as readily as they do in painting’s evocations of the physical world.
In both instances, Serres claims that tactility incites memory and empirical
knowledge in a way that visual perception alone never can. In this respect,
Les Cinq Sens’s version of Serresian tactility exhibits an instructive auton-
omy and inherent ‘sens’ (or ‘raison’) that is not apparent in the perceptive
experiences written about by either Bataille or Blanchot.
This is not to say that the Serresian model of tactility or its correlate
hapticity is guaranteed to provide intellectual clarity in all circumstances:
‘La sensation se tient dans une boîte noire et fonctionne comme elle. L’une
et l’autre précèdent la connaissance, mais la suivent aussi, et l’entourent ou
la trouent, l’une et l’autre méconnues’.114 What Serres tells us here is clear:
even tactile perception has blind spots, but only our individual sensory
experiences of this fact will make rational sense of it.115 The reason for this
is the infinitely fractal, enveloping effect of our skin upon our sensory fac-
ulties. These ‘voiles’ separate us from our perceived environment because
that environment is contingent upon our self-awareness, which is itself
born of our skin’s auto-defined sense of tactility. In spite of their simulacral
nature, Serres claims that Bonnard’s canvases are capable of articulating
this very fact to us:

113 Serres, Les Cinq Sens, p. 31.

114 Ibid., p. 186.
115 Assad takes this argument a stage further. In Reading with Michel Serres (p. 74), she
claims that ‘skins function in Serres’s reading as frontiers of such extreme complex-
ity that precisely defined and quantified descriptions of their composition becomes
impossible; they are black boxes. He resorts therefore to fuzzy logic to imply their
“multivalued” functions’.
232 Chapter 3

Les anciens épicuriens appelaient simulacres des membranes fragiles qui volent par
l’air, émises partout, reçues par tous, chargées de faire signe et sens. Les toiles de
Bonnard, et d’autres peut-être, remplissent la fonction de simulacres. Certes, elles
font semblant. Mais surtout: partant de la peau du peintre et de la fine enveloppe
des choses, le voile de l’un rencontre les voiles des autres, la toile saisit la jonction
instantanée des mues. Simulacre simultané.116

Whilst we digest the repercussions of this haptic journey from theory

to subjectivity and back again, let us return to Serres’s writings on Pierre
Bonnard and a third of the latter’s canvases, Nu à la baignoire, which, Serres
claims, Bonnard painted in 1936.117 In this painting composed of bright
patinas, a naked female figure – viewed from a slightly elevated angle –
perches on the edge of a partially filled bathtub, her face slightly obscured.
The dimensions of the bathroom appear somewhat occluded, almost as if
we were looking at it through a high-focus telescope. The only shading that
differentiates the female figure from the background that surrounds her is
provided by the sleeve of a densely patterned dressing gown that she has
not yet removed fully. The remainder of the dressing gown forms a textured
shadow beneath the woman’s right hip and upper leg:

le Nu à la baignoire paraît. Plongement. Je ne peux pas dire avoir vu ce nu, je ne puis

prétendre le connaître, j’essaie d’écrire que je sais, que je vis ce que Bonnard a voulu
faire. Le plongement révèle, au voisinage de la peau, sensitive, au voisinage des appa-
ritions ou impressions qui l’enveloppent ou la baignent, une sorte de membrane, une
pellicule fine qui se glisse ou naît entre le milieu ou le mélange et le baigneur ou la
baigneuse, une variété commune au sentant et au senti, un tissu arachnéen qui leur
sert de bord commun, de frontière, d’interface, un film de transition qui sépare et

116 Serres, Les Cinq Sens, p. 41.

117 Serres could in fact be alluding to any one of several canvases painted by Bonnard
between 1925 and 1936, all of which have a similar title and subject matter. For exam-
ple, there is another canvas by Bonnard that dates from 1936 and includes a female
figure – this time entirely naked and lying in a filled bathtub. This work is entitled
Nu dans la baignoire.
Serres 233

qui unit l’impressionnant et l’impressionné, l’imprimant et l’imprimé, mince étoffe

à impressions, le bain révèle ce voile.118

Let us begin our appraisal of this quotation by stating the obvious. Serres
claims not to have seen the painting that he describes. The haptic charac-
teristics that Serres exposes – perhaps unwittingly – in three of Bonnard’s
other paintings (Serres also alludes to Bonnard’s 1936 canvas, Le Jardin)
are intuitive. Irrespective of their simulacral state, the haptic (female)
skins painted by Bonnard provide Serres with the intuitions necessary
to decode the underlying rationale of a fourth canvas (Nu à la baignoire)
that the writer has only heard others speak of (‘Je ne peux pas dire avoir vu
ce nu’). What are these intuitions?
Serres tells us that ‘[l]e plongement révèle, au voisinage de la peau,
sensitive, au voisinage des apparitions ou impressions qui l’enveloppent
ou la baignent, une sorte de membrane, une pellicule fine qui se glisse ou
naît entre le milieu ou le mélange et le baigneur ou la baigneuse’. What he
means by this is that our perceptions of our surroundings and the manner
in which they impress themselves haptically upon our perceiving skin are
not the only ingredients of the sensations that our bodies emit or receive.
Rather, we perceive the sensation of being immersed in space, a sensation
which results from visible semblance and cutaneous impression being chan-
nelled through an intermediary simulacrum. Whether the intermediary
simulacrum is written, painted, filmic (as it is in the quotation above) or
otherwise projected, this third element in the perceptive equation is inte-
grative rather than divisive of the other two; it does not separate perceiver
from perceived.
Instead, the simulacrum’s infinitely variable form and opacity alter-
nates between drawing the perceiver and the perceived together and push-
ing them apart. As Jennifer Lea’s likening of this process to the ‘kneading’
action of therapeutic massage reminds us, the oscillation between haptic
intermeshing and haptic enveloping that Serres postulates is arrived at by

118 Serres, Les Cinq Sens, p. 38.

234 Chapter 3

chance. Such oscillation is nevertheless integral to Serres’s understanding

of corporeal and extracorporeal space: ‘[t]he mixing of body and body,
or body and world brings unpredictability into what has generally been
understood to be a relatively predictable and stable system, and underlines
the tension that exists between thinking about the mixed body and the
body as contained by the skin’.119 The fact remains that the ‘mixed body’ of
which Lea speaks is one based upon the fusion of our body with our physical
environment or upon social contact with another body. I believe that the
Serresian corps mêlé of Les Cinq Sens is as much a product of integration
between the tangible and the intangible, between the empirical and the
virtually empirical (the simulacral). Under such circumstances, environ-
mental, societal and individual contexts determine the extent to which a
simulacrum will mitigate how apparent (and how accurately discernible)
the perceiver is to the perceived, and vice versa.120
The simulacrum’s almost Bataillean ‘variété commune au sentant et au
senti’ constitutes the dynamically haptic frontier of Serresian perception
in Les Cinq Sens, ‘frontière […] d’interface, un film de transition qui sépare
et qui unit l’impressionnant et l’impressionné, l’imprimant et l’imprimé’.
The potentially haptic aspect of this otherwise intangibly fluid and virtual
frontier is provided by the works of creative industry that Serres discusses

119 Jennifer Lea, ‘Negotiating Therapeutic Touch: Encountering Massage Through the
“Mixed Bodies” of Michel Serres’, in Touching Space, Placing Touch, ed. by Mark
Paterson and Martin Dodge (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 29–45 (p. 33).
Concerning the interrelation of therapeutic massage as kneading and Serres’s writ-
ings on perception, see ibid., p. 32.
120 As Marcel Hénaff explains in ‘Des pierres, des anges et des hommes: Michel
Serres et la question de la ville globale’, Horizons philosophiques, 8, 1 (1997) <doi:
10.7202/801061ar> [accessed 1 April 2014], ‘[l]e langage, l’imagination, l’œuvre de
fiction sont des modes de traitement du virtuel. Mais si l’on s’en tient à la question de
l’espace dit virtuel, l’expérience nous en est donnée de manière constante. Ainsi entre
deux personnes qui échangent par lettres ou par téléphone se dessine un lieu invisible,
insituable, qui n’est ni celui de l’une ni celui de l’autre (on pourrait même le dire d’une
simple conversation): plus qu’un entre-deux c’est un mi-lieu ou même un non-lieu,
un ailleurs par rapport à chaque site, cet espace où se croisent nos messages’ (89).
Serres 235

and likens.121 It is Serres’s interdisciplinary approach to these compari-

sons that reconciles much of the misguided but nonetheless troublesome
schism between conceptualism and empiricism against which he writes. In
the following subsection, I shall consider how the Serres of Les Cinq Sens
addresses haptic perception in aspects of our lives that are not so obviously
connected with art.

Speech, Haptic Perception and Remembering a

Sting in the Tale

Though Serres insists that ‘[j]e ne puis dire ni écrire du toucher, ni d’aucun
sens’,122 he is more than happy in Les Cinq Sens to describe in considerable
detail the ways in which tactility grounds our understanding of sens as both
sensation and as reason or rationale:

Notre peau varie comme une queue de paon, même si nous ne portons pas de plumes,
à croire qu’elle voit. Elle aperçoit confusément sur toute la surface de sa plage, voit,
clair et distinct, par la singularité suraiguë des yeux. Partout ailleurs, elle porte des
sortes d’ocelles vagues. La peau fait des poches et des plis.123

Serres’s integrative approach to corporeal perception is highly apparent in

this instance (and in many others I have cited thus far); human skin links

121 Serres: ‘On cite de façon distraite Montaigne qui disait: “ce moi ondoyant et divers”.
On le cite comme une phrase poétique sans vraiment réfléchir à ce que Montaigne
disait. En disant: ondoyant, ce qui veut dire: fluctuant comme l’onde, de l’ordre du
liquide et non pas du solide; ce qui signifie: de l’ordre du changeant et non pas du
stable. Quand il disait: divers, il disait quelque chose qui voulait dire: mêlé, strié,
nué, comme je le dis dans Les Cinq Sens’ (Geneviève James and Michel Serres,
‘Entretien avec Michel Serres’, The French Review, 60, 6 (1987) <http://www.jstor.
org/stable/393765> [accessed 31 August 2012], 792. Emphasis in original.).
122 Serres, Les Cinq Sens, p. 67.
123 Ibid., p. 59.
236 Chapter 3

our perceptual faculties together physically and functionally, integrating and

distinguishing between them as the need arises. Serres sums up the skin’s
multivalent character with the pithy observation that ‘[l]e toucher voit
un peu, il a ouï’.124 All of this leaves us wondering, however, what happens
when the world as we perceive it interrupts or even penetrates our skin’s
haptic (or otherwise sensory) envelope. Serres’s response to this question
is pointedly non-theoretical. In fact, he turns to personal reminiscence:
Je parlais un jour devant quelque auditoire, attentifs, lui et moi, sous la tente d’une
conférence. Soudain, un gros frelon me piqua l’intérieur de la cuisse, la surprise s’ajou-
tant à la douleur exquise. Rien dans la voix ni dans l’intonation ne trahit l’accident
et le discours s’acheva. Que ce souvenir exact ne vante pas un courage spartiate, mais
indique seulement que le corps parlant, la chair pleine de langue a peu de peine à
demeurer dans la parole quoi qu’il arrive. Le verbe emplit la chair et l’anesthésie, on
a dit même, on a écrit qu’il se faisait chair.125

By retelling this anecdote, Serres states clearly that language as a par-

ticipatory, first-person sensory experience is capable of overriding bodily
responses to perceptual stimuli. In one respect, then, he implies that speech
is capable of disrupting our cognition of our haptic faculties. Nonetheless,
the anaesthetic influence of language does not extend into our sensory
memory: Serres is able to recall his unflinching vocal response to the hor-
net’s physically disturbing sting. What is more, Serres is aware that he did
not react outwardly to the sudden, unexpected pain that he felt after the
sting because he was concentrating on speaking to his audience, who were
listening just as intently. The fact that Serres’s narrator mentions ‘un gros
frelon’ implies that he saw the insect circling him at some point before,
during or after being stung by it. Since neither Serres’s voice nor its intona-
tion alter following the hornet sting, it seems reasonable to assume that
he did not look down to see where he had been stung. Even under the
self-reflexive influence of the spoken word, then, Serres’s skin proves itself
capable of informing him where he has been stung and does not require
his conscious visual verification in order to do so. Because ‘le verbe emplit

124 Ibid., p. 58.

125 Ibid., p. 68.
Serres 237

la chair’, the writer’s skin, filled or bloated with language, does not react
to being penetrated by the hornet. Under the aegis of language as a par-
ticipatory (that is, as an intently listened) sensation, Serres’s body does not
twitch a muscle even involuntarily.
Yet under the influence of his words as he speaks them, the haptic
(visual and cutaneous) sensations that Serres is aware of when he is stung
linger in his memory, such that he is able to articulate and analyse these
sensations subsequently. Serres appears convinced that spoken language
as a subjectively experienced sensation is uniquely capable of suppressing
our physical (and specifically haptic) responses:
Rien ne rend insensible comme la parole. Si j’avais regardé quelque image, écouté le
son issu du positif, senti une couronne de fleurs, goûté une dragée, tenu à poing serré
une hampe, l’aiguillon du frelon m’eût arraché des cris. Mais je parlais, en équilibre
dans un sillon ou une clôture, au sein de la cuirasse discursive. […] Nous parlons pour
nous droguer, militants comme égotistes.126

Serres claims here that if one or more of his senses (vision, hearing, smell,
taste or touch) had been in concentrated use at the time that he was stung,
he would have felt the hornet’s attack and would have yelped involuntar-
ily. However, because Serres’s mouth is colonised by language when he is
stung, his skin is also ‘filled’ by language (‘le verbe emplit la chair’) and in
that state of sensorial plenitude, is content not to react.
The corollary of Serres’s recounting of the hornet sting is that words
are somehow more haptically arresting than a combination of tactile and
visual sensory data because the thought or attention required to make use
of or to interpret language can dull our perceptual awareness. Contrarily,
sensory stimulus alone cannot diminish our recourse to language.127 (For
example, someone who inadvertently hammers a nail into his or her hand
will almost certainly express their physical anguish verbally.) Serres thus
suggests that our conscious participation in the act of enunciation can

126 Ibid.
127 As Tucker says, ‘Serres’ sense fits in nicely here, as a way of recalibrating theory and
analysis towards a space before rather than post language’ (‘Sense and the Limits of
Knowledge’, 157; emphasis in original).
238 Chapter 3

satisfy our perceptive faculties in a manner that sensory data cannot. We

might then ask how language – which is allusive of sensation and is, in this
regard, a tool for abstracting or virtualising perception – could be more
‘filling’, more materially nourishing of our sensory consciousness and organs
than our own, corporeally gleaned sensations are. Let us reread Serres’s
encounter with the hornet.
A state of equilibrium is induced in Serres’s skin by his concerted ges-
ture of speaking at length to a visibly engrossed audience. This sustained
engagement with his oral faculties and the visible comportment of his
audience softens the ability of his skin to respond instinctively, unthink-
ingly, to external stimuli. When Serres is assailed by the sharp and fleet-
ing intensity of the hornet’s sting, his skin registers the intrusion and he
becomes conscious of it, but does not react physically. His account of the
incident describes his skin’s selective refusal to react to momentary, intensely
localised and therefore acute sensation. In place of that sensation, there is
an extended period of diminished reactivity to sensory stimulus which
stifles almost all unconscious bodily expression. The implication is that to
engage fully and actively in dialogue with others is to react less viscerally to
them, to be less haptically expressive to and impressive upon others. Serres
even goes so far as to say that sensation and designatory language cannot
function together: ‘Il faut sentir ou se nommer, choisissez. Le langage ou
la peau, esthésie ou anesthésie. La langue indure les sens. […] Combien
d’impressions et de temps manqué-je en marquant sur la peau de papier
tant d’écriture codifiée […]?’.128
Above all else, Serres’s understanding of touch in Les Cinq Sens is
one in which ‘le toucher se situe entre, la peau fait nos échanges’.129 Touch
retains a virtual dimension in all of its guises precisely because it is not our
sole preserve. The specifically haptic (potentially, simultaneously visual and
tactile) experience of touching and the language that articulates it no more
belong to us in their entirety than either concept does to the person, object
or surface that comes into proximal haptic contact with us. It is the third,

128 Serres, Les Cinq Sens, p. 87.

129 Ibid., p. 97.
Serres 239

shared, liminal dimension that tactility fosters between us and what we

(see and) touch which is so valuable in Serres’s opinion: it leaves room for
further thought and interaction on individual and societal bases. We may
presume to know something of that which we touch, but cannot hope to
know everything about it.
Serres also believes that the indefinable nature of tactility as a third, lim-
inal space frees us from the tyranny of modern science, which falsely claims
to be a form of all-encompassing knowledge:130 ‘Le toucher, topologique,
prépare les plans et les variétés lisses, pour un regard métrique, euclidien
et paresseux, la peau couvre d’un voile ce que l’œil ne peut pas voir’.131
Tactility thus has a role in scientific observation, if only as an unacknowl-
edged blind spot in a discipline which takes such pride in its metrics and
supposed impartiality.
As Les Cinq Sens draws to a close, it becomes clear that many of the
anecdotes and theories that Serres expounds upon during the text have
been selected to emphasise the writer’s conviction that his modified under-
standing of tactility (as a constitutive element of haptic perception) is one
of the few remaining bulwarks capable of challenging modern science’s
overriding influence (and its fixation with purely visual observation of the
world). Tactile perception as Serres postulates it in Les Cinq Sens is the
sole preserve of neither truth nor fiction, neither empiricism nor critical
theory. Similarly, tactility is not uniquely appealed to by the creative arts.
Indeed, our sense of touch can be every bit as verisimilitudinous as it can
be simulacral; it can lead us to critical thought and social observation as
readily as it may lead us into the realms of abstractive or wholly fantastical

130 Serres explores the origins of this issue at length in Hermès II (especially pp. 67–125,
163–80). See also Les Cinq Sens, pp. 458, 461: ‘rien n’échappe à l’empire de science.
Rien. […] Travaillant sur nos relations, les sciences humaines déracinent le langage
en passant derrière lui, comme font les sciences exactes sur les objets, en lui substi-
tuant un algorithme vrai. Le langage même se soumet à équations ou formules. […]
Je cherche à extraire le livre que j’écris et celui qui l’écrit des listes objectives, de la
mémoire machinale, des algorithmes repérés, pour les rendre à un nouveau sujet ou
pour relancer l’aventure de la philosophie’.
131 Serres, Les Cinq Sens, p. 101.
240 Chapter 3

literature. In addition, our tactile perception can be haptic in that our skin
may ‘see’ and even ‘hear’ as it interacts on an ostensibly tactile basis with
a given surface. For all its topological characteristics, the Serresian model
of tactility and its points of confluence with (inscribed) language have
yet to be mapped fully. As we shall see, Les Cinq Sens is only the first step
on this path.

Le Tiers-Instruit: That Swimming Feeling (Again)

Le Tiers-Instruit was first published in 1991, a year after Serres’s election

to the Académie Française. Though primarily focussed upon educational
issues, Le Tiers-Instruit ruminates at some length upon the confluence
between language and haptic perception that becomes apparent during the
course of Les Cinq Sens. Of particular significance is the manner in which
Le Tiers-Instruit presents haptic perception as more of a proprioceptive
phenomenon than was the case in Serres’s earlier work.132 For this reason,
I now turn to Serres’s literary, anecdotal portrayal of going for a swim, in
spite of there being allusions to football, rugby, tennis and dancing pep-
pered throughout Le Tiers-Instruit.
In common with those of Bataille and Blanchot analysed earlier,
Serres’s account of swimming begins with a description of the haptic sen-
sory indices that the act of swimming might evoke. His description then
turns to increasingly metaphorical concerns. Unlike Bataille or Blanchot,
however, Serres believes that there is materially valuable information to
be gained from indulging and immersing our bodies in the space that sur-
rounds us. Unexpectedly, much of the instructive potential of the (haptic,

132 Even so, remarks such as ‘[l]e corps se pose et marche par l’espace des messages,
s’oriente dans le bruit et le sens, parmi les rythmes et les rumeurs’ (Les Cinq Sens,
p. 181) imply that Serres’s approach to perception was already beginning to shift as
he wrote Les Cinq Sens.
Serres 241

proprioceptive) experience of swimming that Serres describes is rooted

in metric references, in the perception of distance between swimmer and
shoreline or riverbed:
Nul ne sait nager vraiment avant d’avoir traversé, seul, un fleuve large et impétueux
ou un détroit, un bras de mer agités. […] Partez, plongez. […]
Le vrai passage a lieu au milieu. Quelque sens que la nage décide, le sol gît à des
dizaines ou centaines de mètres sous le ventre ou des kilomètres derrière et devant.
Voici le nageur seul. Il faut traverser pour apprendre la solitude. Elle se reconnaît à
l’évanouissement des références. [L]a peau s’adapte à l’environnement turbulent, le
vertige de la tête s’arrête parce qu’elle ne peut plus compter sur d’autre support que le
sien; sous peine de noyade, elle entre en confiance dans la brasse lente. […] Le corps
qui traverse apprend certes un second monde, celui vers lequel il se dirige, où l’on
parle une autre langue, mais il s’initie surtout à un troisième, par où il transite.133

Particularly striking here is the rapidity with which Serres is able to move
from describing a physical pastime – replete with overtly proprioceptive
(and, in a Patersonian sense, haptic) detail – into a metaphor which evokes
language, whilst simultaneously distancing us from the haptic sensations
with which he began the description.134
Serres claims that ‘la solitude […] se reconnaît à l’évanouissement des
références’. However, the phrases which follow these words itemise how the
swimmer’s dizzying disorientation, which is centred on the head (there is
no hint of the Bataillean Acéphale in Serres’s work), is cured by the brain’s
obligation to trust in the arms that propel the swimmer across the water-
way or die. Furthermore, the swimmer’s enforced self-confidence in his
body is brought about by the realisation that he is not an easily quantifi-
able distance from solid ground. In short, the dangerousness of the space
in which Serres’s swimmer finds himself – and the instructive experience

133 Michel Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit (Paris: François Bourin, 1991; repr. Folio/Gallimard,
2008), pp. 24–25.
134 My assertion here echoes William Paulson’s remark in his article ‘Swimming the
Channel’ that for Serres, ‘[t]he user of language inhabits a sensory and kinaesthetic
body, the novelist draws on the accretions of language, the philosopher follows rep-
ertoires of stories and tales, the scientist draws on the whole cultural reservoir’ (in
Mapping Michel Serres, ed. by Abbas, pp. 24–36 (pp. 34–35)).
242 Chapter 3

that he will garner from this peril – is defined by the swimmer’s ability to
discern his distance from the safety of solid, tactile surfaces. Assessing this
danger requires a certain degree of congruence between sight and touch:
among those of us without serious visual disabilities, the eyes can detect
hazards from a greater distance away than our outstretched hands and
arms are able to.
It should not escape our attention that Serres claims the truly instruc-
tive potential of swimming to become apparent midway between two river
shores. At this stage, our tactile faculties (in the sense of proximal grabbing
for solid objects) and our visual faculties would be in harmony precisely
because of their inability to function with any more than fleeting efficacy.
Our eyes would tell us roughly where the shoreline we sought might be.
Though our hands would be unable to do this, their sieving of the water
through which they plunge would be sufficient to propel us towards the
visible shore. As a result, tactility dominates vision in this situation because
only physical actions (informed first and foremost by tactility) can save
the swimmer from drowning.
The peril that Serres’s swimmer faces is universal and genderless, yet
remains a unique product of haptic interaction between the (swimmer’s)
body and the (fluid) space that surrounds it. The swimmer in Serres’s extract
is male, but his plight would be equally applicable to any female in the
same situation.135 As Serres remarks later, ‘le partage par genre concerne
seulement les vivants sexués, quelques rôles sociaux, parfois le langage. Peu
de chose, en somme’.136
Faced with visual confirmation that safety is far from his grasp, Serres’s
swimmer ‘adapts’ to his almost total haptic immersion in a liquidity pos-
sessed of fluctuating currents on an expressly tactile basis. These watery pulls

135 Maria Assad goes a step further in ‘Being Free to Write for a Woman: The Question
of Gender in the Work of Michel Serres’, in Mapping Michel Serres, ed. by Abbas,
pp. 210–25 (p. 223): ‘the feminine is everywhere in […] Le Tiers-Instruit. […] The
question of gender finds its answer in the education of the other who goes into an
instructed middle’. (The ‘instructed middle’ to which Assad alludes includes the
ability to write with both hands.)
136 Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit, p. 37.
Serres 243

and pushes could prove fatal if the swimmer’s tactile balance with them
is not maintained. Balance between current and swimmer must therefore
involve all of the swimmer’s bodily faculties at once. As William Paulson
remarks, if such proprioceptive integrity is not possible, the rhythm of the
swimmer’s tactile interactions with the tide will be threatened, as will the
swimmer’s life.137 Akin to the Bataillean or Blanchovian accounts of swim-
ming, Serres’s account veers initially from the practical and the haptically
perceptible, to the abstractive. It is the learning of this timeless ‘language’
of trust that must develop between the various extremities of the disorien-
tated swimmer’s body in order for him not to drown which enables him to
complete his swim safely. (The ageless value of learning to trust one’s body
and mind determines the seemingly inverted chronology of the swimmer’s
journey through the ‘troisième [monde], par où il transite’ into ‘un second
monde, celui vers lequel il se dirige, où l’on parle une autre langue’.)138 The
swim eventually concludes with the swimmer’s safe arrival on the opposite
shore and a return to haptic sensation. However, this haptic sensation is
experienced in a different manner than before:

Il parvient à l’autre rive: autrefois gaucher, vous le trouvez droitier, maintenant;

jadis gascon, vous l’entendez francophone ou anglomane aujourd’hui. [L]e voilà
multiple. Source ou échangeur de sens, relativisant à jamais la gauche, la droite et
la terre d’où sortent les directions, il a intégré un compas dans son corps liquide. Le
pensiez-vous converti, inversé, bouleversé? Certes. Plus encore: universel. Sur l’axe
mobile du fleuve et du corps frissonne, émue, la source du sens. […] A-t-il traversé la
totalité du concret pour entrer en abstraction?139

Unlike the confusion that engulfs Bataille’s Troppmann or Blanchot’s

Thomas once they have emerged from troubled waters, Serres’s account
of swimming as a haptic experience is one in which returning to dry land

137 Paulson, ‘Swimming the Channel’, p. 35: ‘the sea both makes the music of its waves
and writes the traces of its ebb and flow on beaches and banks. [H]umans can only
understand this nonhuman language if they throw themselves into it, risking their
all, swimming naked’.
138 Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit, p. 25.
139 Ibid., pp. 26–27.
244 Chapter 3

brings mental and perceptual clarity. There is a perceptible trajectory from

one bank to another during which the swimmer gains empirical knowledge
about his body’s sensory faculties and how they – and his active body –
relate to the untamed violence of the river’s currents.
Serres says that empirical knowledge of this type helps to integrate
and to orientate our perceptive faculties and muscle movements: ‘Source
ou échangeur de sens, relativisant à jamais la gauche, la droite et la terre
d’où sortent les directions, il a intégré un compas dans son corps liquide’.
As in Les Cinq Sens, the Serres of Le Tiers-Instruit postulates an inex-
tricable confluence between integration and orientation of our bodily
faculties through physical exercise and the exercise of language through
multilingual polyphony (‘il parvient à l’autre rive: autrefois gaucher, vous
le trouvez droitier, maintenant; jadis gascon, vous l’entendez francophone
ou anglomane aujourd’hui’).
The extract above concludes with the question of the swimmer:
‘A-t-il traversé la totalité du concret pour entrer en abstraction?’. If we look
at the order of Serres’s observations, left-handedness melds into right-
handedness. This integration leads to a passage from monolingual expres-
sion to trilingualism. In turn, this widened variety of physical actions give
rise to a broadened intellectual, physically inscriptive and verbal scheme of
expression. Serres does hence imply a movement away from the corporeal
and a drift towards the abstractive in his explanation of this evolution. He
employs an example of physical, haptically orientated exertion in order to
create a metaphor that illustrates the benefits of being multilingual. These
benefits are generally supposed to be more abstract in nature: increased
theoretical knowledge or greater cultural awareness would be the most
obvious gains. What Serres seeks to demonstrate in the extracts above is
that these supposedly abstract gains through language are, as often as not,
the product of empirical haptic experience, and that they will make a mate-
rial difference once they have taken effect. In this instance, the swimmer’s
very life depends upon the application of empiricially gleaned knowledge.
The shivering mentioned in the quotation above is not the product of
fearful mortality, however. In my analysis of the Bataillean literary motif of
shaking or shivering, I remarked upon the clear oscillation between sublim-
ity and abjection that this action implies. Serres’s understanding of the verb
Serres 245

frissonner (to shiver or shudder) also suggests recurrent movement between

states (left-handedness and right-handedness; monolingual expression
and trilingualism). Unlike the vacillation between abjection and sublim-
ity that Troppmann (and to some extent, Blanchot’s Thomas) experiences
in the sea, Serres presents the act of shivering as a symptom of temporal
coincidence between these states. In Le Tiers-Instruit, the simultaneity of
abjection and sublimity manifests itself through an interlocking cadence
between perceptible, purposeful muscular activity and polyvalent linguistic
expression.140 Perceptible and physically interactive spaces become unified
in this process because right-handedness and left-handedness coexist within
the ambidextrous swimmer’s body. Serres himself asks, ‘[n]’est-il pas plus
raisonnable d’utiliser ensemble les deux hémisphères du cerveau?’.141 These
spaces are brought into haptic confluence to answer a functional need: to
stop the swimmer from drowning by repelling the bodily torsions caused
by the river’s currents. As Serres explains below, this sensory experience
has enduring mental consequences:

Un jour, à quelque moment, chacun passe par le milieu de ce fleuve blanc, état étrange
du changement de phase, qu’on peut nommer sensibilité, mot qui signifie la possi-
bilité ou la capacité en tous sens. Sensible, par exemple, la balance quand elle branle
vers le haut et vers le bas tout à la fois, vibrant, au beau milieu, dans les deux sens;
sensible aussi l’enfant qui va marcher, quand il se lance dans un déséquilibre réé-
quilibré; observez-le encore, lorsqu’il plonge dans la parole, la lecture ou l’écriture,
débarbouillé, embarbouillé dans le sens et le non-sens.142

Central to the interaction between perception and (inscribed or spoken)

language described here is an oscillation between the two realms which is

140 As Harris says in ‘The Smooth Operator’, ‘[i]n essence, Serres treats the text or dis-
course at hand as a set of elements bound together by some rule(s), which may be
formulated in their purest form in spatial terms’ (pp. 114–15).
141 Serres and Latour, Éclaircissements, p. 207.
142 Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit, pp. 29–30. Again, the similarity between Serres’s thoughts
here and those articulated by Jean-Luc Nancy is strong. For proof of this, compare
Serres’s remarks above with Nancy’s remarks concerning the interrelation of excription,
corporeity and literary accounts of this interaction (see especially Nancy, Corpus,
p. 14 and pp. 25–28 above for my commentary of excription).
246 Chapter 3

so intense that it blurs them together. Serres’s allusion to ‘haut’ and ‘bas’
puts us in mind of the alternation between sublimity and abjection that is
so apparent in Bataille’s writing, but such comparisons are, as we have seen,
a little misleading. What Serres evokes in the quotation above is an oscil-
lation between perception and literature that derives from sensory experi-
ences of centrifugal forces whose perceptible characteristics are themselves
defined through the empirical methodologies of physics. In concert with
the empirically defined theories which describe them, these forces create a
stable framework through which we can understand our past and present
physical actions, as well as our perceptions of these actions. This under-
standing also allows us to predict how our bodies will react to future situ-
ations that are, as yet, beyond our ken. Serres underscores the fundamental
importance of this synergetic knowledge by linking a child’s ambulatory
development with his or her acquisition of language.
It is by no means accidental that Serres mentions the act of walking
before he alludes to linguistic expression. It is, however, surprising that he
should place both of these before sens and non-sens in the quotation above.
If we recall the literary and critical works of Bataille or Blanchot, both writ-
ers wilfully refute the possibility of any rational ‘sense’ being derivable from
physical sensation. Indeed, the very ineffability of physical sensation is a
characteristic of Bataille’s formulation of angoisse as it is expressed in ‘Le
Gros orteil’ or in Le Bleu du ciel. The same can be said of the increasingly
disembodied and disorientated voices of Blanchot’s L’Entretien infini or
L’Instant de ma mort. According to either writer, whether it is written or
spoken, language is simply not up to the task of articulating sensory pro-
cesses or the data which results from them.
Serres disagrees with such notions. In all of the quotations from Le
Tiers-Instruit that I have presented, the overarching emphasis is upon
balance. Balance – at least in a physical context – is an expressly proprio-
ceptive phenomenon which, according to Mark Paterson’s definition of
the term, would require haptic interaction between sight and tactility. One
particularly salient feature of Serres’s account of swimming is the manner
in which physical balance paves the way for mental balance.
This realisation compels us to remember the aquatic episodes described
by Bataille in Le Bleu du ciel and Blanchot in Thomas l’obscur. In both
Serres 247

of these texts, immersion in water proves disintegrative of the protago-

nists’ sensory faculties. The very plurality of the characters’ thoughts and
sensations confuses them mentally and physically to such an extent that
Troppmann and Thomas both suffer acute sensory disorientation and
disjuncture. In Thomas’s case, this disorientation threatens his very life.
Serres portrays the act of swimming in another manner: the fluidity of
water and the simultaneous, often multi-directional pull of its currents force
any body that attempts to traverse them into a state of sensory integration.
Additionally, this materially necessitated but intellectually reasoned cohe-
sion of perceptive faculties leads Serres’s swimmer into a state of mental
clarity which is wholly transferrable to situations with little or no physical
resemblance to the act of swimming (such as speaking a second or third
language). Part of this transferability of skills arises from the fact that Serres’s
swimmer must be attuned to the rhythms of the currents upon which he
swims. This in turn requires an embrace of chronology and temporality
which is largely at odds with Bataillean or Blanchovian thinking.143
The Serresian swimmer keeps mental notes concerning the frequency
and intensity of the waves upon which he swims. He must also be mindful
of the sequence of physical gestures (such as kicking or paddling) that he
makes in response to the sea’s cadences, lest he become asynchronous with
them and potentially lose his life. Though the stakes will rarely be quite so
high, the act of speaking also requires a good sense of timing. In order to
provide our words with greater impact, we will frequently make physical
gestures for the sake of emphasis. This requires us to be able to coordinate
word and deed, often in response to the words or actions of others. Thus,
the skilful and simultaneous manoeuvring of body and perceiving mind
into temporal coincidence constitutes much of the parity or equivalence
that Serres claims to exist between the physical acts of swimming and
speaking.

143 As Assad suggests, ‘Serres’s’ discussion of the five senses demonstrates that we cannot
seize time as a sum total or even as a series of subtotals. It invites the reader to roam
the topological space of localities where one’s fluctuating wanderings are the new
expression of time’ (Reading with Michel Serres, p. 99).
248 Chapter 3

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Serres takes great exception to modern

science’s refusal to acknowledge the confluence between time as it is per-
ceived haptically and the subjective intervention that is required to navi-
gate the interaction between the concepts of chronology and body. Early
in his career, Serres remarks in one of his more critically orientated works
that from its earliest beginnings, geometry ‘arrête le temps pour mesurer
l’espace’ and that this is the (impossible) premise upon which modern sci-
ence is based.144 The Serres of Le Tiers-Instruit remains committed to the
localised congruence of perceiving body and time; empiricism – and not
pure observation – is the glue of this sensory integration.

Fighting on Film and a Trip to the Theatre:

La Guerre mondiale

In the seventeen years between Le Tiers-Instruit and La Guerre mondiale,

only Variations sur le corps (published in 1999) explores matters of the
body and perception in the same level of detail that Les Cinq Sens did in
the mid-1980s.145 Even La Guerre mondiale only addresses these themes
in passing, however: the book is mostly concerned with diminishing what
Serres considers to be an ever-rising tide of global violence. With the advent
of Le Tiers-Instruit, Serres’s writing becomes appreciably less focussed upon
the confines of the human body and more preoccupied with its percep-
tible surroundings. Le Contrat naturel, published in 1990,146 had already
confirmed the beginning of this trend in Serres’s work and is, like much
of his writing over the following two decades, dominated by ecological

144 Serres, Hermès II, p. 167. The parallels between Serres’s portrayal of the geometric
notion of ‘arrête[r] le temps pour mesurer l’espace’ offers an interesting counterpoint
to the senseless freezing of time implied by the Blanchovian image.
145 A lack of space prevents me from examining Variations sur le corps in any detail here,
unfortunately.
146 Michel Serres, Le Contrat naturel (Paris: François Bourin, 1990).
Serres 249

issues. For its part, the narrative of La Guerre mondiale attempts to unify
the human body and environment against physical violence of all kinds.
There is insufficient space for me to analyse Serres’s response to the
problems of war and violence in any more than the broadest of strokes here.
Instead, I shall concentrate upon La Guerre mondiale’s fleeting allusions
to perception. These instances illustrate a significant shift in Serres’s writ-
ing about corporeality and sensory faculties in comparison with Le Tiers-
Instruit and Les Cinq Sens. In my reading of Le Tiers-Instruit, I identified
an increasingly noticeable shift towards the virtual in Serres’s descriptions
of the perceiving body. By 2008 and La Guerre mondiale, this change has
become more appreciable still.
I shall begin my analysis of the 2008 text by considering Serres’s account
of a bar fight which breaks out ‘[d]ans un bar à matelots, sur les quais de
Hambourg, de Brest ou de Bordeaux [:] L’Ancre de Miséricorde’.147 As the
passage progresses, we see that this brawl among sailors – which could be
taking place anywhere in the Western Europe of the Cold War era – is de-
escalated by the intervention of film:
Une chope renversée, un poignet qui effleure un cheveu, le pompon caressé de trop
près – qui commence, qui le sait? [P]résent, par chance, au milieu du bar, quoiqu’un
peu moins saoul, j’ai pu filmer, dès l’origine et jusqu’au dénouement juridique, le
grandiose et théâtral événement. En guise d’introduction, je propose d’en projeter
les séquences sur l’écran de vos imaginations, mais à l’envers.148

We read above that the physical contact which ignites the drunken fight
is not seen by Serres. However, two of the three reasons that he gives for
the brawl starting result from excessive proximity between bodies and
(perhaps deliberate) clumsiness. In spite of Serres being present to film the
‘origine’ of the ensuing disorder, his optical record of that disorder does
not pick out the haptic incitements which set the fight off. In the absence
of this haptic knowledge, Serres’s writing remains preoccupied with optical
detail. The narrative moves on to describe a reversed version of the brawl:

147 Michel Serres, La Guerre mondiale (Paris: Le Pommier, 2008), p. 27.

148 Ibid., pp. 27–28.
250 Chapter 3

‘je propose d’en projeter les séquences sur l’écran de vos imaginations, mais
à l’envers’. Because he is not physically involved in the fight, Serres can only
describe what he sees; he is not tactilely involved in it. In the absence of
points of tactile reference, Serres’s description of the bar brawl inverts the
chronology upon which his earlier works rely so heavily. In addition, the
writer seeks to project his rejection of temporality onto our mind’s eye,
onto the screen of our imagination, through his textual description of this
inverted chronology.
Under these circumstances, written words cannot compensate for
the temporal skewing that the absence of tactility causes. As we read his
inverted account of the fight, we understand that Serres, the tactilely unin-
volved observer who is ‘un peu moins saoul’ than those he surveys, seeks
to undo the careless ‘caressing’ that begins the scrum. Rather than having
a small, misplaced moment of tactility lead to sustained, haptically per-
ceptible exchanges of violence between the sailors, Serres seeks to reduce
the amount of tactile interaction between them from violent excess to
increasingly sober nothingness:

Du chaos confus, devenu désormais spectacle et représentation pour les anciens

lutteurs qui y participaient, restent, avec le temps, telle et telle escarmouche locale,
puis, à mesure que le film passe, un quatuor qui se défait, ensuite un trio, enfin le
duel principiel du quartier-maître et du bosco. Dernière image: le pompon, les che-
veux caressés.149

The diminishment of tactile intensity described above reduces the gener-

alised ‘chaos confus’ in the bar to an ‘escarmouche locale’ and ends with
a final caress. An increased absence of haptic contact therefore equates
with a return to rational thought and behaviour. Indeed, Serres attempts
to make the violent haptic excesses at once seen and felt by the squabbling
sailors just a few moments before into a ‘spectacle et représentation pour
les anciens lutteurs qui y participaient’.
This ‘heureux’ diminishment of excessively haptic proximity in
favour of non-tactilely experienced visions also leads to a reduced level of

149 Ibid., p. 29.

Serres 251

inebriation among the former combatants. In the aftermath of this aboli-

tion of tactility, the accoutrements of militarism and their visual impact
remain, unruffled:

À mesure que j’atteins la fin du film, c’est-à-dire le début de la rixe, puisque tout défile
à l’envers, je ralentis la vitesse de la projection pour laisser voir ce qui se dégage du
reflux: à l’agression de trois contre trois succède, lentement, celle de deux contre deux,
enfin un s’en prend à un … verre final-primordial, pompons droits sur les bonnets,
dénouement heureux.150

The juxtaposition of tactility and filmic visions undertaken by Serres

in these scenes recalls the hand holding which occurs between Irène and
Thomas as they watch a film in Blanchot’s Thomas l’obscur. In La Guerre
mondiale, Serres asks us to project the film of the violent disturbance in the
bar that he describes onto our mind’s eye, using his words as the instructions
for this process. His intent is to expose the tactilely limiting mechanism
through which he hopes violence in the modern world may be curtailed
(‘dans une période non protégée, que l’on pourrait nommer apocalypse,
[j]e livre ici un livre d’utopie, si j’ose dire, concrète’).151 In Thomas l’obscur,
the confluence of imagination and unexpected – or at least unconsidered –
tactile contact between Irène and Blanchot’s titular protagonist does a great
deal of violence to the female character’s mind, such that her very ability to
reason becomes impaired: ‘Elle le sentait souple, malléable […]. C’est une
absence de corps qu’elle s’appropriait comme son propre corps délicieux et
dont la douceur, bouleversante et déchirante, la grisait’.152 True to its can-
cerous nature, this intoxicating psychological experience of tactility then
causes Irène to imagine it doing physical damage to her body: ‘dans une
apothéose pathétique [l]es doigts, contact tour à tour froid et brûlant, lui
apportaient l’impression nouvelle […]. Irène se sentait malade, délicieuse-
ment malade’.153 Because they coincide with the actuality of her purely
tactile experience of holding Thomas’s hand, Irène becomes convinced that

150 Ibid.
151 Ibid., p. 22.
152 Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), p. 176.
153 Ibid., pp. 177–78.
252 Chapter 3

her mental images of the incident as being harmful are justified. No longer
merely tactile, this phantasmic haptic experience is initiated unthinkingly.
It is questionable whether Irène actually perceives it entirely consciously.
Nevertheless, she becomes sufficiently aware of these (newly haptic but still
essentially virtual) sensations to act consciously upon them.
Unfortunately, Irène decides to bring virtual reality into the physical
realm by slitting her throat. Her tactile embrace of the virtual image of
death brings a premature (and briefly, genuinely haptic) end to her life. She
becomes intoxicated to the point of mortality first with unthinking tactile
contact, then virtual imagery and finally, entirely haptic delusions. The
element of Dionysian Rausch that is apparent in the bar brawl that Serres
describes in La Guerre mondiale runs in the opposite direction (or ‘dans
l’autre sens’) to the increasingly haptic chain of events that Irène experiences
in Thomas l’obscur. It is Serres’s hope that by inverting the tragic spiral of
causality, he might create a series of mental images increasingly stripped of
tactility and thereby, rid these images of any physically harmful potential.
Serres projects his plea to reduce tactile (and by extension, haptic) excess
through filmic images that are disseminated in virtual form by his written
words.154 It is his intention that these words should form mental images
for his readers which will in turn encourage them to find practical ways to
stave off tactility’s intoxicatingly haptic excesses and thereby safeguard life.
Serres does not seek to endorse the morbid potential of Nietzsche’s demand
that theatre be considered an instrument to help audiences embrace their
mortality and their misery, however:
Non seulement les eaux se retirent, baisse la crue, refroidit la violence, mais naît le
spectacle. Voilà l’origine de la tragédie, que chercha Nietzsche sans la trouver. La
représentation commence lorsque la violence va vers son étiage, que baisse le nombre
des participants. Qu’elle serve de catharsis ou de purge devient simple tautologie. […]

154 Serres’s use of the cinematic paradigm in this instance clashes puzzlingly with a
remark he makes in 1999: ‘au cinéma […] les voyeurs restent assis et passifs dans une
chambre noire, réduits au regard, seul actif dans une chair aussi absente qu’une boîte
noire. L’œil vif au surplomb d’un organisme quasi mort donne des sensations presque
incorporelles, abstraites déjà’ (Variations sur le corps, p. 12).
Serres 253

Double bénéfice: la bataille ralentit, le théâtre émerge. On dit bien: le théâtre des
opérations.155

What Serres seeks to convey in his narrative and filmic reversal of

the bar fight is a reorientation of conflict which suppresses haptic inter-
action or tactile proximity in favour of distanced optical representation
and perception. In the absence of tactility (and hapticity), we are left with
phantasmic, disconnected visions of militarism. In place of the empiri-
cal science advocated by Serres in Les Cinq Sens and Le Tiers-Instruit, we
are edged nearer to the vociferous rejection of empiricism given voice by
Nietzsche’s concept of tragedy.156 Far from Serres’s backwardly projected
film inviting us to touch in the manner of Marksian haptic cinema, we are
being beseeched not to touch with even the slightest of intensity.
We might well ask where all of this leaves tactility and haptic percep-
tion in Serres’s thinking, given that he now seems to equate the reduction
of immediate tangibility with an increase in rational thought and socia-
ble comportment. His idea of diminishing the intensity of tactile contact
might well reduce the number of haptically active participants in a conflict.
However, Serres’s suggestions also ensure the enduring visibility of the
accoutrements and harbingers of any such conflict while emphasising our
powerlessness to do anything other than imagine or otherwise fabulate a
different train of events.
In order to decode Serres’s rationale here, we must look to a series of
remarks that he makes during the remainder of La Guerre mondiale. Let
us first consider his positing of the concept of battle or ‘bataille’:

155 Serres, La Guerre mondiale, p. 42.

156 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 75: ‘At present, […] science, spurred on by its pow-
erful delusions, is hurrying unstoppably to its limits, where the optimism hidden in
the essence of logic will founder and break up. [L]ogic curls up around itself at these
limits and finally bites its own tail, then a new form of knowledge breaks through,
tragic knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs art for protection and as medi-
cine. [W]e can see the insatiable greed of optimistic knowledge, of which Socrates
appeared to be the exemplar, turning suddenly into tragic resignation and a need
for art […]. Alas! The magic of these struggles is such, that he who sees them must
also take part in them!’ (emphasis in original).
254 Chapter 3

la bataille suppose une partition, donc une limite; il ne peut donc exister de telles
relations de puissance, ou d’oppositions entre les individus ou les groupes, que dans
le détail du découpage impliqué par cette réduction. Le temporel se bat pour son
bout de gras. Il découpe des cartes et fait la guerre sur ces frontières; il tue donc,
partial, pour ce partiel. Je veux souligner fortement le rapport décisif entre conflit
ou opposition et partition détaillée du réel.157

We learn from these remarks that Serres is attempting to undermine the

rigidity of concepts such as temporality and tactility because he believes
them to be inherently partial and therefore, potentially destructive (‘Je veux
souligner fortement le rapport décisif entre conflit ou opposition et parti-
tion détaillée du réel’). Battle as an empirical reality is a threat to life because
it invites the parties involved to divide up space and then fight over whose
version of this partitioning is the most valid. Conflicting, differentiating
perceptions of space external to our bodies – perceptions which include the
various schematisations of haptic and optical sensation – thus play a major
role in the incitement of conflict, according to Serres. As a result, the mini-
misation of touch that Serres’s reversed film-cum-theatre of Nietzschean
tragedy advocates is as much a warning not to discriminate on a physical
(and especially not on a haptic) basis.158 To do so would be to draw battle
lines: ‘Le partiel […] induit à la bataille et pousse à l’affrontement, ce que
cherchent, en effet, les interrogatoires du spectacle’.159
Thus far, we have established that Serres wishes the aestheticisation of
war to act as a form of surrogacy in the modern age. But how would this
idea work, in practice? In order to illuminate this vision, Serres returns to
one of his favourite sporting tropes: a game of rugby.

157 Serres, La Guerre mondiale, p. 112.

158 Writing of Les Cinq Sens, Connor notes that for Serres, ‘“Les sens ont le sens du
sans.” […] The senses move toward lessness. […] The lessons of the senses […] get
less and less’ (‘Michel Serres’s Les Cinq Sens’, p. 333). The same remark can be made
of La Guerre mondiale, in spite of the decades that separate these Serresian texts.
159 Serres, La Guerre mondiale, p. 185.
Serres 255

Tackling Rugby or the Benefits of Watching a Play

Prior to Le Tiers-Instruit and La Guerre mondiale, Serres writes about ball

games in several of his texts, including Le Parasite (1980) and Variations
sur le corps (1999). On each occasion, he describes the game in question –
either American Football or rugby – as an allegorisation of social exclusion.
The ball is a ‘quasi-objet’; its possession singles out a player as a potential
victim who must be protected by the rest of his or her team from aggres-
sion by their opponents.160
Serres’s presentation of rugby in 2008 differs somewhat because he casts
the game as an aesthetic replacement for warfare. In place of actors having
to ‘changer de peau’, a ritual that Serres considers integral to Greek tragedy,
the exchange of skin is effected by the rugby players’ throwing and catch-
ing of the ball. In the following account, the teams’ simultaneous sharing
of tactility and sight is particularly significant because the spectacle of this
haptic interaction transmits specifically haptic sensations to the watching
crowd which are not mediated by language:
sans langue, le frisson passe sur la foule comme la balle passe parmi les combattants,
elle vole comme le contact pugnace a lieu dans l’escarmouche. Dessinez bien les trois
zones: les engagés se battent vraiment, corps à corps dans le premier groupe, centre,
noyau, cœur, entre-deux au basket-ball ou round pour la boxe; la couronne intermé-
diaire se passe ou non le ballon, quasi-chose, intermédiaire entre signe et objet; une
onde d’angoisse ou d’espérance suit ce quasi-objet, parcourant la foule d’alentour.
La balle traduit, au beau milieu, la réalité du combat en signal ou la mobilisation
en émotion. Traduisant la chose en signe, transformant l’énergie haute en basse, elle
porte deux fois les deux. Dur de cuir mais doux de signe.161

The sentences above are particularly rich in detail concerning Serres’s

recent attitude towards tactile and specifically haptic sensation. They also
offer a number of points of confluence between his thinking and that of
Bataille and Blanchot. Serres begins with an account of how the crowd

160 See Serres, Le Parasite, pp. 404–05 and Variations sur le corps, pp. 44, 47 and 114.
161 Serres, La Guerre mondiale, pp. 64–65.
256 Chapter 3

shiver as one when visibly heavy physical contact occurs between opposing
players and the ball is thrown in response to these attacks. If we consider
this more closely, Serres claims that the ball’s flight transmits an urge to
shiver to the crowd who watch its trajectory (lest we forget, he remarks
in the more theoretically orientated Éclaircissements that ‘[t]out revient
en fin de compte au substantif, même le relationnel’, in spite of the fact
that he ‘vise un transcendantal des relations’).162 The ball is being thrown
following a scrum, either because a tackle between opposing players has
necessitated it or because one teammate wants to pass the ball to a team-
mate who is better situated to score a try. For their team to win, every
player must situate him- or herself spatially relative to the try line and the
players that are nearby.
In order to decide what to do next, each participant must look to
see what spaces there are within the opposing team’s line of players, or
imagine what gaps might develop when this line moves. In this imagin-
ing, haptic space is virtualised, but this virtual space is itself cast in haptic
terms. Steven Connor writes: ‘Gaps in space and gaps in time are entirely
equivalent. […] The field of play winks and shimmers, opening and closing,
actual and virtual, with these wrinkles and pockets of opportunity [being]
nothing but the fluctuation of these chronotopological compossibilities’.163
Whatever the circumstances, there is a clear confluence between sight,
touch and temporality on each player’s part which will eventually lead
that player to throw or catch the ball. Additionally, according to Serres,
the crowd will shiver in response to the ball’s flight. In other words, what
causes the crowd to shiver is a visible excess of haptic interaction, fol-
lowed by an optically discernible absence of tactile input whilst the ball
is airborne. This process concludes by satisfying the crowd’s anticipation
of renewed haptic contact between the rugby ball and the hands of one
or more players when it lands.

162 Serres and Latour, Éclaircissements, pp. 166, 172.

163 Steven Connor, A Philosophy of Sport (London: Reaktion, 2011), p. 78.
Serres 257

On the Ball

I would now like to address the rugby ball’s status as either a haptic or an
optical surface in the situation just described. For the players, the ball alter-
nates between being haptic – in that they will probably handle some or all
of its surface – and optical, because it will frequently be airborne and well
beyond their reach. For the crowd, the rugby ball as an object is uniquely
optical: they are almost certain never to have any proximal contact with
it (unless it is kicked into the stands). However, Serres claims that the
rugby ball as quasi-objet is capable of disseminating haptically perceptible
(that is, at once visible and tangible) shivers through the watching crowd:
‘Traduisant la chose en signe, transformant l’énergie haute en basse, elle
porte deux fois les deux’.164 Though the rugby ball is described as ‘[d]ur
de cuir’, Serres also qualifies it as being ‘doux de signe’:165 it has a physical
presence which is augmented by its transformation into abstractive (and
nonlinguistic) sign. Crucially, once it is visible, this transformation is expe-
rienced on a haptic basis and projects a transubstantive potential: the rugby
ball stops being a purely optical object for the crowd because they shiver
in response to its flights (and perhaps in response to or anticipation of
the crunching tackles which necessitate the ball being thrown in the first
instance).166

164 Serres, La Guerre mondiale, p. 65.

165 Ibid.
166 This sentiment echoes Connor’s words in ‘Michel Serres’s Les Cinq Sens’. Connor
claims that for Serres, ‘the body, or more particularly the senses, is never a mere object,
but itself a kind of work. The body is the work of transforming mere sensitiveness
into sense and sensibility both: the body is its work of transformation. There is no
chance of getting back to the body, since it is the nature of the human body to be
self-organising and therefore self-surpassing’ (p. 331). Connor adds that the body
conducts this work ‘through sensation’ (ibid.). These comments are also applicable
to Le Tiers-Instruit and La Guerre mondiale.
258 Chapter 3

So, the rugby ball as Serres describes it is an optical surface which is

nevertheless capable of transmitting haptic sensations to its beholders,
without them ever coming into tactile contact with it. The haptic data
transmitted by the ball as an optical object is virtual because it is inferred
from the ball’s visible movement. In spite of this, the virtual haptic data
that the ball transmits – the urge to shiver – exerts a tactile and visible
influence upon those who see the source of its transmission (the rugby
ball flying through the air).
It is this virtual transmission of haptic perception which provides the
major point of confluence between Serres’s treatment of haptic sensation
and the haptic traits apparent in the literary works of Bataille and Blanchot
that I have analysed. At its simplest, Serres’s metaphorical treatment of
the empirical realities of a rugby game evokes the excessive desire to at
once see and touch which is so notable in Bataille’s prose. The ball’s flight
also reminds us of the decorporealisation towards which both Bataille’s
literary works and those written by Blanchot tend, especially in their later
careers.
In the case of Bataille’s fictional characters often oscillating between
abjection and sublimity, there is a clear parallel with Serres’s claim that
the rugby ball is capable of ‘[t]raduisant la chose en signe, transformant
l’énergie haute en basse’. Indeed, the shockwaves of this translation make
themselves felt haptically: the awestruck crowd shiver, either out of excite-
ment or angst. Blanchot’s habit of imposing an inexpressible sense of silence
upon his fictional characters also resonates in Serres’s account of the way
in which ‘sans langue, le frisson passe sur la foule comme la balle passe
parmi les combattants’.
It might be argued that Serres makes a convenient metaphorical fic-
tion of the empirical realities involved in playing rugby: his description of
the game in La Guerre mondiale bears no reference to the first person, for
example. The same criticism could easily be levelled at facets of Bataille’s
and Blanchot’s prose. Yet there is one major difference between Serres and
Bataille or Blanchot: Serres believes that haptically perceived experiences
can help humanity better itself. Thus it is that the writer claims war to be
sublimated by theatrical tragedy, which is in turn being usurped by the
sports spectaculars of today: ‘[l]es sports d’équipe remplacent, sans texte,
Serres 259

le théâtre, en construisant un événement où la passion s’attache seulement

à [q]ui donc va gagner’.167
As Serres presents it, modern sport – with its players taking the place
of theatrical actors – projects emotion by manifesting the act of projec-
tion itself. In its momentary excursions skyward before coming back down
to earth, the flight of a rugby ball offers the crowd a fleeting metaphori-
cal visualisation of their impossible dream, of their desire to leave their
own bodies.168 The vicarious optical realisation of this fantasy creates a
perceptible resonance within the sensory faculties of each member of
the crowd – this is why they shiver. This emotional resonance is not
the product of a purposefully irrational oscillation between abjection
and sublimity in the Bataillean mode, however. The crowd must under-
stand why one player should kick or throw the ball to another at a given
moment based solely on the tactile gesture itself and its immediately visible
consequences.
It is this chronology that makes Serres’s forfending of language in the
movement from theatre to sport so notable. In the absence of descriptive
language, Serres claims that ‘le concret (cum-crescere) désigne la croissance
de toutes les parties vers un tout solide, comme aggloméré’.169 On this basis,
the emergent community based upon sporting spectacle and virtual haptic

167 Serres, La Guerre mondiale, p. 68.

168 Steven Brown’s explanation of the quasi-objet as social token expresses this vicari-
ously derived transcendence in terms of subjectivity: ‘The token is a marker of the
subject. She or he who is caught with the token is “it”, a subject. We others form the
indivisible mass, we are the mute collective who will turn on the “I”, who is now
victim, the excluded. The quasi-object marks out these “I”s, it is the moving back
and forth of this marker, these provisional subjects. In this sense Serres describes
the token as being equally quasi-subject. But this pointing out is ambiguous. To be
the “I” is to enjoy a privileged position. One is able to influence the play – shoot for
goal, make a heroic move. But equally one is a potential victim – the fool, the one
to be excluded. Hence the collective turns around the endless selection and passing
on of “I”s’ (‘Michel Serres: Science, Translation and the Logic of the Parasite’, p. 21).
169 Serres, La Guerre mondiale, p. 185; emphasis in original.
260 Chapter 3

sensation that Serres presents here is inavouable, to borrow a term (though

not an ideology) from Blanchot.170
Social relations within Serres’s speculative community continue to
be focussed upon physical presence, meaning that the community itself is
similarly concretised. Though this is not an imagined community in the
Blanchovian sense, the essence of those physical relations between sub-
jects and objects cannot be grasped either physically or linguistically with
any degree of consistency or certainty. Serres detects no partiality in this
situation. Indeed, he speaks of the sporting aestheticisation of conflict in
positively glowing terms: ‘Le partiel revient brusquement au passé, vieilli,
obsolète, au formel abstrait, méchant et guerrier. Il induit à la bataille et
pousse à l’affrontement, ce que cherchent, en effet, les interrogatoires du
spectacle’.171 On this basis, the rugby ball’s virtual but nevertheless haptically
perceptible projection of emotion and its resultant translation of active
tactile conflict into tactilely remote spectacle appear anything but partial.
Indeed, for Serres, the (rugby) ball’s arcing trajectory has the potential to
tweak the haptic faculties of anyone who sees it.
Language is a result of this transition from theatre to sport. The move-
ment from audio-visual perception to oscillations between optical and
haptic perception is a product of this evolution, rather than being a factor
in its instigation. (How else could one crowd member express to the next
what he or she felt whilst watching the rugby ball travelling its path?) In
light of this fact, how might we consider the role of new media such as the
internet in disseminating clouds of data which rely upon the application
of linguistic and numeric principles? Given his comments concerning the

170 The communal experience of silence is treated in differing manners in the works of
Blanchot and Serres. Compare for example Serres’s remarks concerning the rugby
crowd above with the following observation from Blanchot’s La Communauté ina-
vouable, p. 19: ‘La communauté n’est pas pour autant la simple mise en commun,
dans les limites qu’elle se tracerait, d’une volonté partagée d’être à plusieurs, […] de
maintenir le partage de “quelque chose” qui précisément semble s’être toujours déjà
soustrait à la possibilité d’être considéré comme part à un partage: parole, silence’.
171 Serres, La Guerre mondiale, p. 185.
Serres 261

virtual and the haptic, Serres’s answer to this question is somewhat unex-
pected, as I shall now demonstrate.

An Ever More Virtual Skin

Though Serres does not actually mention the internet by name in La

Guerre mondiale, he does refer to ‘l’agglomérat des données [,] la somme
des sommes’172 and suggests that ‘au moins virtuellement [,] [f ]lottant sur
un déluge mondial qu’elle contribue à créer, l’humanité navigue à bord
d’une arche mondiale qu’elle construit en temps réel, cognitivement’.173 It
would be hard not to think of the worldwide web when reading descrip-
tions such as these. Serres informs us that the primary effect of recent evo-
lutions in communication technology such as the internet is to place us
into direct contact with knowledge. For him, the most important piece of
this knowledge is the number of people who have been killed in wars since
the beginning of recorded history: ‘Je m’appelle, tu t’appelles, nous nous
appelons Noé: […] nous venons d’apprendre, grâce à l’OMS, le volume du
Déluge: plus de trois milliards de morts. Noé n’avait recruté qu’un reste;
nous recrutons tout’.174 Because anyone with access to the internet can dis-
cover this information (at least in theory), a new, non-hierarchical form
of democracy results: ‘comme tout le monde peut connaître cette somme
et les autres, nous assistons à l’émergence d’une démocratie nouvelle, celle
des données, celle des totalités’.175
A key characteristic of the new, democratic ‘totality’ of knowledge that
Serres postulates is that it places humankind into a state of being which is

172 Ibid., p. 187.

173 Ibid., pp. 187–88.
174 Ibid., p. 186.
175 Ibid. In making these statements, Serres appears to overlook illiteracy, innumeracy
and State-sanctioned policies which deny access to information technology or seek
to block access to certain websites.
262 Chapter 3

simultaneously subjective and objective. Needless to say, neither Bataille

nor Blanchot conceive of any such fusion of subjectivity and objectivity as a
functional means of acquiring knowledge, much less one which is common
to all things. (Bataille’s Expérience intérieure requires that ‘[l]’expérience
atteint pour finir la fusion de l’objet et du sujet, étant comme sujet non-
savoir, comme objet l’inconnu’, for instance.)176 Serres is nevertheless con-
fident that social and perceptive change will occur inevitably as we adapt
to our new, simultaneously subjective and objective mode of being:
Comme cette démocratie s’ensuit de ces calculs et peut les contrôler, elle naît comme
sujet, comme active production de ces synthèses, mais aussi comme leur résultat,
elle naît comme objet. L’humanité devient sujet de son monde et son objet. Cette
nouvelle donne cognitive ne peut pas ne pas faire émerger une nouvelle culture, de
nouvelles politiques.177

The haptic element of the ideas in the quotation above comes from the
manner in which Serres frames them. We base our new state of simultane-
ously subjective and objective being upon abstractive numbers, but these
numbers belie the physical remnants of the rising tide of bodies and vio-
lence that they describe. The virtual data provided by the internet is what
brings us into present-day sensory contact with past brutalities, the physi-
cal remnants of which have long since rotted from haptic recognition.178
By recognising the abstractive number of war dead, we recognise the
empirical (and haptic) realities of the wholesale slaughter that these num-
bers represent. Using our simultaneous subjectivity and objectivity, we
navigate this new empirical reality intellectually and haptically, referring to

176 Bataille, L’Expérience intérieure, p. 21.

177 Serres, La Guerre mondiale, pp. 186–87.
178 See Christian Godin, ‘Panorama d’une pensée’, in Michel Serres, ed. by L’Yvonnet and
Frémont, pp. 27–36: ‘un passé très lointain peut coller exactement au présent: ainsi
l’arithmétique sumérienne est-elle intégrée à des logiciels informatiques. Ce temps
plié donne à voir des coïncidences qui ne sont pas des hasards. Lucrèce coïncide avec
la physique moderne; littéralement, il tombe en même temps qu’elle. Ainsi va l’anti-
histoire de Michel Serres’ (p. 34; emphasis in original).
Serres 263

both realms at once.179 As Serres tacitly suggests below, our sensory faculties
play an unavoidably large (though consciously unacknowledged) role in
navigating this newfound coincidence of subjective and objective thought
and action because our perceptive faculties create our sense of the world
around us. These same perceptive (and especially, haptic) faculties are also
our primary means of establishing a social rapport with those around us:
Désormais, nous embarquons des sommes: sommant la somme des universels concrets,
notre arche devient équipotente au Monde, au moins virtuellement. Nous voilà
embarqués sur le Monde, avec le Monde, dans le Monde. Flottant sur un déluge
mondial qu’elle contribue à créer, l’humanité navigue à bord d’une arche mondiale
qu’elle construit en temps réel, cognitivement. Cette puissance cognitive changera
les consciences. [L]’humanité flotte sur des rapports humains souvent insensés.180

Here, Serres describes a form of reality which is responsive to our thought,

but which is based in physicality. It is matter being moulded by our minds,
by our access to virtual data concerning physical situations that we have not
experienced directly. The products of this rumination are then mediated
by or filtered through our recollection of prior perceptive (and specifically
haptic) experiences which may or may not be related to the virtual data
that we interpret.
The physical and sensory convergence that this process requires of us
also joins up our perception of time: the past becomes a part of our per-
ceptually discernible present. What Serres implies is that, whether or not
we realise it, we are at once perceptually fused with the virtual data that
we perceive whilst also being objectively detached from it. This temporal
congruence of mental and sensory states determines that all experience is at
once haptic and optical, in much the same manner that Nancy suggests all
of our sensory zones contain an unpredictable, immeasurable and continu-
ally variable ratio of haptic and optical data. (‘[P]ar conséquent, le sens du
monde ne se donne qu’en dis-loquant d’origine son sens unique et unitaire

179 Assad’s remarks are prescient in this regard, as well; see Reading with Michel Serres,
p. 76: ‘For Serres, […] the sensate brings together […] the subject and the object [.]
[T]ouch is the fractal boundary that opens up a creative process’.
180 Serres, La Guerre mondiale, pp. 187–88.
264 Chapter 3

de “sens” dans le zonage général qu’on vise sous telle ou telle distribution
différentielle des sens.’)181
In keeping with the concepts detailed above, Serres claims that the
sensory and temporal integration that is fostered by virtuality manifests
itself visually. Just a few words later, he then invokes the tactile comparison
between ‘doux’ and ‘dur’ that he employed in Les Cinq Sens:

Du coup, et par images, Noé le Patriarche ou Deucalion avec Pyrrha la Rousse n’em-
barquent plus seuls à bord de l’Arche, mais tous les accompagnent. […] Douce, l’Arche
croît et peut atteindre le volume du Déluge, dur. Face à la vieille croissance des morts,
due aux guerres engendrées par l’ancien concret partiel et ses vieux partages jaloux,
voici la nouvelle croissance, l’agglomérat des données vers la somme des sommes,
vers l’univers. Qui prétendrait se battre contre l’univers?182

The ghosts of wars past are haptic once more. Ancient Greek myth (per-
sonified by Deucalion and Pyrrha, the husband and wife who survive Zeus’s
flooding of the earth) and Christian dogma (personified by Noah) now
inhabit the same perceptual space as the victims of war who have died
in the name of any culture, religion or philosophy throughout history.
All now exist in the present, a present that we construct and reconstruct
materially using our thoughts. These thoughts are in turn influenced by
our own sensory memories of violence as a haptic experience. Our per-
ceptual memories are then manipulated into real, current sensations by
the virtual data that the internet provides us with. Our sensory memory,
lashed together with the information it processes, forms an experiential
raft upon which we float, in time with the different rhythms and intensities
of violence that our sensory faculties intercept. Much like the swimmer in
Le Tiers-Instruit, our survival upon these composite tides of information,

181 Nancy, Les Muses, pp. 37–38; emphasis in original. Nancy also observes that
‘[l]’indifférence ou la synergie synesthésique ne consistent pas en autre chose que
dans l’auto-hétérologie du toucher. La touche des sens pourra donc être distribuée
et classée d’autant de manières que l’on voudra: ce qui la fait être la touche qu’elle
est, c’est une dis-location, une hétérogénéisation de principe’ (ibid., p. 36; emphasis
in original).
182 Serres, La Guerre mondiale, p. 187.
Serres 265

sensation and violence requires our perceptual synchronicity with them,

lest we become engulfed or overpowered in the manner that Blanchot’s
Thomas is when he goes swimming. As Serres explains, ‘la crue de cadavres,
je n’en découvre l’importance que par les sommes de l’Arche; […] je ne
puis connaître la nature du Déluge que par les informations globales qui
constituent l’Arche. En les absorbant, pourra-t-elle en assécher les eaux?’183
Because these agglomerated tides of violence, sensation and informa-
tion result from an exposure to a multiplicity of data and sensations, our
navigation of them no longer requires discriminative perception of the
haptic or optical type. Indeed, to think on a differential – rather than an
integrative – basis would be to repeat the same mortal errors which have
created all of the death and destruction that assails our senses each day:
‘Nous n’agissons et ne pensons que différentiellement; au moment même
où nous avons besoin d’intégrales, nous n’avons de philosophies que celles
de la différence. La différence faisait la guerre’.184
How best then to go about the business of perceiving ourselves and
our (social) environment in the Information Age? Serres’s answer is that
we should use all of our sensory faculties to their fullest extent and as inte-
gratively as possible. We must avoid consciously excluding any of them.
To do so would be to turn a blind eye to the horrors of the past, human
tragedies on an epic scale which could – and sadly, continue to – repeat
themselves. In the final analysis, Serres presents a model of haptic percep-
tion which remains haptic, but which is augmented to its optimum state
by the rest of our (proprioceptive) sensory faculties.
According to Serres, skin is no longer a barrier to our perception, if
ever it actually was. In the Information Age, our skin (and the sense of
touch associated with it) has become a fully integrated locus of our sensory,

183 Ibid., p. 188.

184 Ibid., p. 190. This quotation illustrates indirectly the profoundly varied approaches
favoured by Serres and Nancy in matters of différence; where Nancy embraces dif-
ference, Serres seeks to reduce it as much as possible. For evidence of this, compare
the quotation above with pp. 161–62 of Nancy’s Corpus.
266 Chapter 3

intellectual and social evolution.185 Serres intends to spread the news of this
newfound sensory interconnection between myth, religion and (social) his-
tory, hoping it will reduce the growing tide of violence that spans human
history. This is not all Serres intends to do, however: he also wishes to
disseminate the interdisciplinary knowledge which bursts forth from this
perceptive confluence of subjectivity and objectivity. In order to do this,
Serres makes a final gesture towards this newfound integration of optic
and haptic perception, of theory and prose: he dons the ever-changeable
skin of Arlequin, a figure popular in seventeenth-century French theatre
that Maria Assad characterises as an androgynous man-beast.186 Arlequin
is arguably the unattainable paradigm of the corps troisième, a concept
that I showed to be of importance to Serres’s theories of perception earlier
in this chapter. To judge by the quotation below, however, the only way
that anyone can hope to experience Arlequin’s multifaceted existence and
perceptions is to wear a patchwork imitation (or simulacrum) of his skin
over their own:
à l’image de mon monde, je me vêts d’un habit d’Arlequin à mille couleurs, mêlé,
tigré, chiné, nué, haillonné, ensemencé de pièces et semé de déchirures.
Cousu, connecté.
Je cours vers L’Ancre de Miséricorde, proposer aux matelots, encore habillés
d’uniformes, de s’en revêtir.187

Rather than this situation representing the failure of Serres’s approach to

perception, the events described above in fact represent its success. Donning

185 As Hénaff remarks in ‘Des pierres, des anges et des hommes’, ‘chacun en son lieu est
virtuellement en tout lieu. Le vieux rêve d’ubiquité prend forme. Très exactement
il se matérialise. Et cela de multiples manières. Il y a l’ubiquité des corps mêmes qui
peuvent maintenant, en quelques heures, changer de continents, en des voyages qui
demandaient autrefois des semaines ou des mois. Mieux, sans même nous déplacer,
nous pouvons par les techniques de communication intervenir en temps réel et
simultanément en des endroits différents de la planète’ (88–89).
186 Assad provides a full overview of the Arlequin character in Reading with Michel
Serres, pp. 129–30, 144–45, 147.
187 Serres, La Guerre mondiale, p. 192.
Serres 267

Arlequin’s imitative skin creates a perceptible, continually changing third

space which would exist as a sensory buffer between the sailors’ skins and
the patchwork of simulacra that Serres proposes that the sailors wear over
them. As Serres says in 1987, ‘le mélange ou le métissage a toujours été la
chose qui m’a le plus passionné. Cette espèce d’espace entre’.188

Conclusion

Prior to my summation of how the critical theories and literary prose of

Bataille, Blanchot and Serres treat the issue of haptic perception, let us
consider Serres’s approach to haptic perception in its own right.
Serres’s inscriptive relationship with haptic perception is one of
stages. He begins his career with more theoretically orientated works. Of
these works, the Hermès cycle is particularly influenced by Information
Theory. One of the key characteristics of these works – and especially of
Hermès II – is Serres’s insistence that perception of information is a matter
of interception: ‘J’interviens, et ne pense que si j’intercepte’.189 The writer
presents this ostensibly abstractive concept in relatively personal terms by
employing first-person pronouns.
This stylistic choice is far from accidental: the potential for friction
between the performative ‘je’ and the demonstrative ‘il’ is a major issue
for Serres. This is not because he favours subjectivity over objectivity, but
because modern science classifies tactile sensation as a symptom of sub-
jectivity and therefore excludes it from modern scientific methodologies.
In place of tactility, science embraces visual perception as its sole appraiser
of metrics and values.
Such favouritism is unwise in Serres’s opinion because it is based upon
a fallacy. His biggest problem with the supposedly scientific pre-eminence

188 James and Serres, ‘Entretien avec Michel Serres’, 792; emphasis in original.
189 Serres, Hermès II, p. 16.
268 Chapter 3

of visual perception is that it establishes intangibility as a healthy norm

when it should not be considered as such. Serres summarises his appraisal
of the advent of modern science by stating that ‘[l]e récit d’inauguration est
ce discours interminable que nous tenons sans repos depuis notre propre
aurore. Qu’est-ce, au fait, qu’un discours interminable? Celui qui se rap-
porte d’un objet absent, d’un objet qui s’absente, inaccessiblement’.190 To
clarify, Serres adds that ‘l’inaccessible est ce que je ne puis toucher, ce vers
quoi je ne puis transporter la règle, ce sur quoi l’unité ne peut être appli-
quée. […] La vue est un tact sans contact. […] L’inaccessible est, parfois,
accessible à la vue’.191
The tactile remoteness of modern scientific rationale clearly troubles
Serres because it always places something just beyond our reach – and vis-
ibly so. We know that we are missing out on something, but cannot put
our collective finger on it. At the same time, however, Serres posits a form
of free-floating information that exists and transmits itself independently
of all sensory and linguistic indices.
How, then, can the interception of information that Serres deems
necessary take place? The answer is virtually, through evocation of haptic
sensations. In Hermès II, Serres expresses this virtuality in terms of an
‘image’ which stimulates our sensory faculties. (Laura U. Marks’s concept
of haptic visuality is not far removed from this idea: ‘a haptic work may
create an image of such detail […] that it evades a distanced view, instead
pulling the viewer in close’.)192
In Serres’s words, ‘je ne suis pas un point fixé ici et maintenant, j’habite
une multiplicité d’espaces, je vis une multiplicité de temps, toujours autre
et toujours le même’.193 Functioning in a number of spatial and temporal
dimensions at once, each ‘quasi-point’ of Serres’s oscillating information
network ‘reçoit et redistribue, […] trie sans mélanger, […] simule locale-
ment, sur une station ponctuelle, la totalité du réseau efférent et afférent’.194

190 Ibid., p. 180.

191 Ibid., p. 165.
192 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 163.
193 Serres, Hermès II, p. 150.
194 Ibid., p. 131.
Serres 269

It can be argued that Serres’s subsequent works of critical theory con-

cern themselves more with the various manners and contexts in which such
perceptive stimulation through simulation could occur. In Hermès V, the
intellectually perceived space of interdisciplinary exchange between the
natural sciences, mathematics and the humanities provides the necessary
simulacral ingredients. In Éclaircissements, Serres clarifies the interaction
between temporal and spatial perception. As he does so, the writer casts
the sensory ambiguities inherent to either of these terms as one of the key
motivating forces of the interdisciplinary approach that he advocates in
Hermès V.
In volume four of Petites chroniques du dimanche soir, we learn that,
nearly forty years after the publication of Hermès II, Serres continues to
present the perceptual process as being a matter of confluence between
perceiving skin and its localised stimulation by virtual simulation. In this
instance, Serres alludes to Lucretius’s concept of the skin-covered simu-
lacrum in specifically haptic terms: ‘Lucrèce […] dit que la vision nous met
directement en contact avec des membranes que chaque chose que nous
voyons émet […]. [C]es membranes – […] des “simulacres” – circulent […]
dans l’espace entre nous, telles des peaux mobiles. Elles se posent sur
nos yeux’.195
Whatever their vintage, Serres’s critical theorisations of corporeal
perception rely upon some form of virtual or simulacral transmission of
sensation. In each instance, he is able to demonstrate convincingly that
there is a detectable pattern in the manner that such transmission operates.
Even if it is not linguistically explicable in its entirety, it is by no means
chaotic or irrational.
What changes is that the abolition of distance through non-differ-
entiation of subject and object as it is theorised in 1972 becomes a spe-
cifically haptic and subjectively experienced undertaking in 2009, just
as the internet’s endless and often impersonal dissemination of data had
begun to insinuate itself into the daily lives of societies across the globe:
‘quand on touche, on a l’impression – la pression? – que la distance s’abolit.

195 Serres and Polacco, Petites chroniques du dimanche soir, IV, p. 138.
270 Chapter 3

[S]i Lucrèce a raison, nous nous caressons sans arrêt les uns les autres, et
nous caressons le monde qui nous caresse. [C]’est […] la fin des distances,
le bonheur et la paix’.196
As is the case with Bataille and Blanchot, there remains an equivocal ‘si’
to this reasoning; Serresian hapticity is localised, even if it can be extrapo-
lated into a global context. It should not be forgotten that Riegl makes
similar claims for the haptic interaction of sight and touch; he believes
that they can explain all of humankind’s artistic evolutions.197
The hesitation of Serres’s critical theories between ‘touche’, ‘impres-
sion’ and ‘pression’ in 2009 recalls his earlier likening of these qualities
in Les Cinq Sens, the first of his works of literary prose to be analysed in
this chapter. The stylistic choices made by Serres in the writing of this
text from 1985 demonstrate an appreciable movement away from critical
theory, even if all of his books contain some theoretical argument. (There
are no footnotes in Les Cinq Sens, unlike the Hermès series, for example.)
In Les Cinq Sens, Serres’s ideas are clearly focussed upon identifying
and presenting confluences between art history, literature, philosophy and
perception, rather than analysing the flow of information between subjects
and objects from a mathematical or structuralist standpoint as he does in
Hermès II. The biggest difference between the two texts is, however, tangi-
ble. Though there are plenty of allusions to the first person in Hermès II and
Les Cinq Sens, the ‘je’ of Serres’s 1972 work is just one alternately exchanging
and interceptive surface among an almost infinite multitude of others. The
first person narrative of Les Cinq Sens is, by contrast, rooted in simultane-
ously tangible, visible and otherwise perceptible sensory experiences. Visual
interaction is alluded to frequently in the anecdotes concerning instances
of haptic confluence between sight and touch which appear in Les Cinq
Sens, but touch is often proven to exert the dominant influence. Thus it is
that we are treated to Serres’s account of being stung by a hornet: it would
have hurt the writer more had he been looking at the hornet as it stung

196 Ibid.
197 See above (pp. 3–11 and 16–17, n. 46) for my analysis of Riegl’s claims concerning
the haptic and optical.
Serres 271

him. This may be a true story. It might equally be a conveniently fabricated

anecdote. The fact is that the truth of this tale – and of any of the others
that I have analysed in this chapter – is to be found in how easily it can
be related to perceptive experiences that many of us have endured. In the
words of David Webb, ‘[l]e matérialisme de Serres est tel que les termes
vecteurs sont puisés au plus proche, dans des exemples concrets tirés du
quotidien (littérature, art et sciences)’.198
In Serres’s encounter with the hornet, this story with a sting in its
tail, tactile sensation is not portrayed in abstract terms. Similarly, in the
following comment concerning Bonnard’s painted female figures, Serres
casts the confluence between writing and painting in primarily tactile and
deeply personal terms, even if visual observation is alluded to: ‘l’œil enfin
ne trouvera plus rien. Reste à toucher la feuille imprimée, pellicule fine,
support de sens, la feuille, la page, tissu-étoffe, peau, la toile même de la
femme de Bonnard. Je feuillette le peignoir’.199
Though what Serres describes above may appear similar to Jean-Luc
Nancy’s concept of excription, the equivalence of touch and literature
evoked by Serres is markedly different. To be more specific, Nancy says
that, ‘[l]e corps, sans doute, c’est qu’on écrit, mais ce n’est absolument pas
où on écrit, […] toujours ce que l’écriture excrit’.200 Rather than concerning
itself with effacing the perceiving body, the very point of Serres’s likening
of text and tactility is to underline the vital haptic and intellectual synergy
between sight, touch and mind that primarily tactile sensation can incite.
Remaining on the question of likeness, are there any discernible differ-
ences between male and female touching of the kind that are apparent in
Bataille and Blanchot’s narrative works? Though masculinity and feminin-
ity are mentioned in Les Cinq Sens, Serres does not highlight any particular
difference between the manner in which the sexes perceive tactilely, visually
or haptically. He adds in Le Tiers-Instruit that ‘gauche et droite se disent

198 Webb, ‘Penser le multiple sans le concept’, p. 92.

199 Serres, Les Cinq Sens, p. 31.
200 Nancy, Corpus, p. 76; emphasis in original.
272 Chapter 3

de plus de choses que mâle ou femelle et séparent plus universellement que

le genre ne distingue’.201
This allusion to left- and right-handedness is far from surprising: Serres
admits to favouring empirical science over tactilely remote observation
during the final paragraphs of Les Cinq Sens and a similar sentiment perme-
ates Le Tiers-Instruit. There is, however, change afoot in Serres’s work from
1991. In Serres’s hands, swimming becomes more than just an empirical,
physically educative experience of haptic and proprioceptive interaction;
it is also an activity rich in metaphor.
Whatever the circumstances, it is clear in Le Tiers-Instruit that Serres’s
writing is beginning to transcend the confines of the human body, in order
to place that body in closer proximity to the earth’s (in)visible chemical,
biological and evolutionary processes. Haptic perception remains impor-
tant in this enterprise, but is markedly less apparent in Le Tiers-Instruit
than it was in Les Cinq Sens.
By 2008 and the publication of La Guerre mondiale, Serres consid-
ers the world’s increasingly violent proclivities to be as grave a threat to
humanity as pollution. His answer to this rising tide of violence is the
diminishment of tactility and hapticity through their virtualisation. A bar
brawl escalates among drunken sailors; Serres’s response is to film it without
intervening and then ask us to imagine how that fight would appear if it
were played backwards. The end of the violence (and the end of the film)
leaves the sailors at a respectful tactile distance from one another, growing
more sober. Spectacle remains, unabated, whilst haptic interaction becomes
undesirable. On this occasion at least, film is by no means the haptically
inviting medium that Laura U. Marks claims it to be.
In place of violent haptic melees such as the sailors’ bar fight, armed
conflicts are to be sublimated by games of rugby; total war is to be replaced
with a (rugby) code of violence. The flight of a rugby ball will act as a surro-
gate for a flying bullet. The baying crowds who behold this ordered conflict
are spared the haptic excesses which occur on the (battle)field. They will
be transfixed (or even fascinated?) by the rugby ball’s transubstantive flight

201 Serres, Le Tiers-Instruit, p. 36.

Serres 273

because it reminds them of their desire to escape their own skin, however
briefly. In a cruel twist of fate, this visual reminder of their inability to tran-
scend will make the crowd shudder visibly. Though the thrown or kicked
rugby ball is an optical quasi-object to the crowd, their witnessing of the
players’ handling and throwing of the ball among themselves before and after
its flight gives it a haptic ‘charge’ or polarity which is visually perceptible.
When in no-one’s hands and flying through the air, the formerly tactile
ball fleetingly ceases to appear tactile (and therefore, does not seem haptic)
to the crowd. They shiver in anticipation of its imminent interception by
a player and the visible orgy of hapticity that will greet the ball as it lands.
Just as with the oscillations between haptic and non-haptic sensation
that we find in Bataille and Blanchot’s writings, the flight of Serres’s rugby
ball creates a third, virtual space in which our hesitation between vision and
tactility creates a limited synergy between the two faculties and thereby,
haptic sensation. Thus, even where there are no tactile data or surfaces to
solicit our faculties, tactile perception may remain possible, almost as if
it were – paradoxically enough – a phantom image of the variety experi-
enced by Blanchot’s Thomas whilst he shelters in the cave. Blanchovian or
not, Serres’s rugby crowd shudder at the rugby ball’s flight and anticipate
its bumpy landing. The vector of this haptically experienced shudder is
uniquely optical.
Serres applies the same notion – that tactile sensation can be fostered
by images – to his treatment of the internet. Faced with the grim visual data
published on the internet by the WHO, data which suggests that three
billion humans have died in wars since the beginning of recorded history,
it would be hard to imagine not feeling a shiver, however slight. It is that
small shiver which Serres seeks to make us mindful of. This instinctive yet
perceptible tweaking of our collective conscience suggests that humanity
may yet be able to diminish the tide of self-inflicted death and destruction
which has swept it along thus far. Serres’s prose may have moved away from
its earlier specifically haptic preoccupations, but the virtuality of which
Serres now writes remains haptically impactful. To think of the Serresian
virtual in such narrow terms is to miss the point, however: its raison d’être
is to integrate haptic and optical perception, along with the auditory, olfac-
tory and gustatory, into a proprioceptively functional (and intermittently
274 Chapter 3

haptic) whole.202 In Serres’s opinion, however, only the virtual, visualised

rendering and mathematical representation of humanity’s war-torn past
and the sensations that they provoke within us can provide the necessary
push to begin this integrative process. Once we are walking this path,
interdisciplinary thought, praxes and our own empirical experiences will
guide us.
After more schematic beginnings, Serres’s ‘critical’ works appear to
have reached a similar conclusion. Except that there is no definite conclu-
sion yet: Serres continues to write, continues to refine his opinions and
continues to speak as he finds. What most differentiates Serres’s critical
theorisation of haptic sensation (a perceptible synergy between sight and
touch) from those of Bataille or Blanchot most of all is its (untapped)
potential to heal society’s wounds: ‘Cette puissance cognitive changera
les consciences. [L]’humanité flotte sur des rapports humains souvent
insensés’.203 According to Serres, the positive imprint that haptic percep-
tion leaves upon human societies has yet to be charted in anything like its
entirety. The more integrative rather than exclusive that our approach to
issues of perception, language and society becomes, the better our chances
of feeling the positive, as yet unrealised potential of (haptic) sensory inter-
action that Serres evokes so passionately.
To conclude, I shall provide a brief summary of my findings. Just how
different are the Bataillean, Blanchovian and Serresian approaches to the
constitutive elements of haptic perception and how much difference is there
between the writers’ critical and literary explorations of them?

202 Though I have not had the space to address the issue here, the connectedness of the
gustatory and olfactory senses to the human body’s visual, tactile and auditory sensory
faculties is alluded to on numerous occasions in Serres’s Les Cinq Sens in particular
(notably pp. 199–247 and 274–95).
203 Serres, La Guerre mondiale, p. 188.
Conclusion

In writings which straddle the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Aloïs Riegl tells us that haptic sensation is inspired by tangible art objects
such as reliefs, monuments, paintings, statues and buildings. The potential
tactility of these objects’ visual detailing imposes itself upon the beholder’s
eye to such an extent that he or she feels compelled to touch the object.
Though Laura U. Marks admits to ‘changing Riegl’s definition of the
haptic somewhat’,1 her twenty-first century recasting of haptic perception
as a form of cinematic haptic visuality remains dependent upon the appeal
of proximal tactility. However, this appeal is incited by a virtual experi-
ence of tactile proximity; Marksian haptic visuality arises from the filmic
projection and enlargement of materially distant surfaces. This projection
magnifies our awareness of those surfaces’ tactile details and makes us want
to touch them. The probable geographical and temporal distance of these
surfaces means that the projected surfaces are likely to be impossible for us
to touch or to see in the way that the cinematic image before us suggests.
The camera may magnify otherwise imperceptible visual details greatly or
diminish the appearance of others which would be much more noticeable
if the filmed surfaces were placed before us to inspect haptically. Use of
camera effects such as focus zooming and hazing or (digital) film manipu-
lation in postproduction renders the moving pictures before our eyes even
further removed from the surfaces that the camera lens dwelt upon initially.
Nevertheless, the projected vision of these surfaces makes us want to see
and to touch those surfaces at the same time. Marks’s understanding of
hapticity as haptic visuality is therefore as rooted in physicality as Riegl’s
haptic postulations are, in spite of the virtual – and simulacral – nature
of haptic visuality’s sensory solicitations. Marks’s haptic visuality also has
psychological implications and demands a desirous ‘respect’ of all forms

1 Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 162.

276 Conclusion

of otherness as ‘difference’.2 Riegl’s postulation of haptic perception makes

no such demands.
In Jean-Luc Nancy’s haptic theories, physical differences between male
and female bodies have a decisive effect upon the ways in which we perceive
ourselves and others.3 In addition to this, Nancy claims the functioning of
and triggers for haptic perception to be infinitely variable because, in his
opinion, the human body’s zones of perception are in perpetual flux. As a
result of these fluctuations, the body’s perceptive faculties cannot even be
defined consistently in terms of the haptic/optical distinction upon which
Riegl or Marks’s understandings of haptic perception rely. Moreover, the
Nancyan concept of excription establishes a principle which further weak-
ens any effort to discuss haptic sensation in literary terms. In texts such as
Corpus, Nancy states that philosophies which purport to explain corporeal
perception are inherently suspect. Any attempt to write objectively about
our bodily sensations is similarly doomed. No empirically valuable infor-
mation may be derived from either enterprise.4
Even Mark Paterson’s proprioceptively orientated (and largely gender-
neutral) postulation of haptic perception suggests that there are virtual
dimensions to the corporeal synergy of proximal tactility, vision, vestibular
sensation and kinaesthesia that his use of the term describes. One instance
of synergy between the virtual and the haptic that Paterson discusses is the
first ‘virtual handshake’ to be conducted internationally via the PHANToM
haptic system in 2002.5 In his discussion of Paul Sermon and Susan Kozel’s
video art installation Telematic Dreaming, Paterson also remarks at length
upon the use of video technology to create a virtual simulation of haptic
immediacy.6

2 Ibid., p. 192.
3 As I discussed above (see p. 28).
4 See my earlier commentary on Nancy (pp. 25–28 above).
5 This handshake is discussed above (pp. 19–21) and is explored in detail by Paterson,
The Senses of Touch, pp. 127, 135–37, 140–43.
6 Telematic Dreaming is described in the introduction (pp. 21–22 above). For further
details, see Paterson, The Senses of Touch, pp. 119–20.
Conclusion 277

From these brief summaries, it is clear that theoretical understandings

of haptic perception are becoming increasingly orientated towards the
virtual at the expense of the physical. As the examples cited by Paterson
illustrate vividly, a paradoxically constant factor in this change is technol-
ogy’s increasing ability to mitigate the effects of physical distance between
two people, to bridge a tactile and optical divide by (re)creating proximal
haptic data.
The critical and literary writings by Bataille, Blanchot and Serres that
I have studied also exhibit an increasing proclivity towards virtualisation
in their descriptions of corporeal and especially, haptic sensory experience.
However, these writers seek to convey their impressions of what effects
haptic sensation can have, rather than attempting to recreate haptic sen-
sations by means of inscriptive language. With the advancement of the
careers of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres, each writer comes to portray bodily
sensations as a gateway into a realm (or realms) other than the corporeal.
If anything, the already notable divergence of approach between Bataille,
Blanchot and Serres grows even more pronounced as the perceiving human
body becomes a less important component of their various works of criti-
cal theory and literary prose. Bataille’s critique and prose suggest that only
death frees us of corporeity, but adds that the sensuousness that leads us
to our mortal fate will also leave us feeling nothing, in the end. Blanchot
seems to consider even the living body to be undergoing a preliminary stage
of the death and sensory numbness which so preoccupies Bataille’s critical
and literary writings. Blanchot’s prose and philosophical writings imply
that life blunts the living body’s perceptive faculties to such an extent that
death must result from this increasingly indifferent sensory experience. The
demise of sensory awareness leaves only the unbearable acuity of a disem-
bodied, unidentifiable voice whose literary inscription says something and
nothing of the sensations and thoughts that went before it. For Bataille
and Blanchot, sensation is doomed to become a less and less relevant topic
of critical or literary exploration. This situation is inevitable and must be
embraced. In the works of both writers, hapticity is accordingly most sig-
nificant in its absence and in the intellectual equivocation that simultane-
ously visual and tactile awareness brings with it. There is even a degree of
predictability to these haptically defined absences and confusions because
278 Conclusion

manifestations of disorder and outright chaos are integral to the theories

and prose of Bataille and Blanchot.
Serres’s works arguably begin working through – if not working
out – the difficulties of discriminating reliably between the haptic proximity
and optical distance that Bataille and Blanchot’s critical and literary works
identify. (Contrary to the insistences of Bataille and Blanchot, physical
numbness and the mortality that it implies are not to be embraced, accord-
ing to Serres’s writings.) During this process of ‘working through’, Serres’s
critical theories and literary prose allude frequently to a form of materially
and intellectually instructive haptic perception that is most consistent with
Paterson’s proprioceptive model.
By contrast, the works of Bataille and Blanchot that I have analysed
only point out the perceptible paradoxes in our understandings of what
is near or present and what is far or absent. The two authors appear either
unable or unwilling to resolve such ambiguities. I shall consider why this
might be in a moment.
What Serres’s works show us is that, just as the genres of literary prose
and critical theorisations converge in his writings, so the postulates of art
history and the natural sciences, of mechanical technicity and theorisations
of corporeal perception, merge into one continuous and reasoned (though
not always balanced) dialogue. Blanchot’s récits hint at the possibility of a
theoretical convergence of this kind, but he – like Bataille – seems unable
to move beyond his disbelief that corporeal perception could be of any
instructive value.

Mathematics, Chaos, Hapticity, Order

This sense of disbelief on the part of Bataille and Blanchot has far-reaching
implications. Where Serres lauds paradigms of perceptually led inter-
connection between sciences and technologies of ancient and modern
vintage, Bataille and Blanchot seem unable to discern any more than hap-
penstance. More often than not, Serres’s allusions to haptic perception
Conclusion 279

have a mathematical aspect which would probably be characterised as a

‘redingote mathématique’ by Bataille.7
The tension between Serres’s initially reluctant yet increasingly taut
embrace of the technological algorithm8 and what Bataille deems to be the
abstractive tendencies of mathematics also underscores an evolution in the
treatment of haptic perception’s relevance to literature and philosophy.
(I note this at a time when, through dissemination of blogs, retweetable
newsfeeds, online gaming and socialising, the internet appears to be leading
us into an ever more disembodied sphere of perceptual existence.) In Serres’s
writings, just as with the modern artistic and more practical applications of
technology described by Paterson, an interactive, haptic element remains
necessary. Whereas the human bodies of Blanchot or Bataille’s critical
theories and prose are often passive and frequently unaware of themselves
to any significant extent, the bodies portrayed in Serres’s oeuvre are proac-
tive and self-aware, creating meaning and learning from their every gesture.
The sensations conveyed by Serres’s writings concerning active bodies
also provide instructive philosophical lessons to their experiencers in a
manner wholly absent from the critical or literary works of either Bataille
or Blanchot. As I stated in the introduction, the Bataillean and Blanchovian
prose that I have analysed appears to begin from a haptic perspective in
almost every instance. This perspective is rejected more or less immediately
in favour of an optical standpoint. The critical writings of Bataille share this
trait, as do those of Blanchot. Whether prose or treatise, each of the texts
by Bataille and Blanchot that I have studied concludes with a portrayal
and, perhaps, an investigation of the impossibility of integrating haptic and
optical perceptions into a functional sensory continuum.
It is apparent from my analyses that there are many more instances
of (unacknowledged) haptic perception in Bataille’s literary works than
there are in those of Blanchot. Insofar as Blanchot writes about any form

7 ‘Il faudrait en effet, pour que les hommes académiques soient contents, que l’uni-
vers prenne forme. La philosophie entière n’a pas d’autre but: il s’agit de donner une
redingote à ce qui est, une redingote mathématique’ (Bataille, ‘Informe’, p. 217).
8 To appreciate this change, compare for example Les Cinq Sens (1985) and La Guerre
mondiale (2008).
280 Conclusion

of perception consistently, he refers appreciably more frequently to the

uniquely visual (or optical) than he does to any form of identifiably haptic
(at once visible and potentially tactile) perception.
Contrarily, the critical and more anecdotal Serresian texts that I consid-
ered during the previous chapter begin by presenting what Serres considers
to be the ‘mythe’ of a necessary discrimination between visual and tactile
sensation. His theory is consistent on this point: the senses of sight and
tactility are part of an interconnected sensory network which the human
body’s cutaneous surface renders whole. In Serres’s opinion, arguments
which contradict this stance arise from the fact that Western philoso-
phers have failed – often wilfully – to understand the constructive value
of simultaneously tactile and visual perception to the human condition.
The narratives of Les Cinq Sens, Le Tiers-Instruit and La Guerre mondiale
set about exposing different facets of how, through (haptic or otherwise
integrative) perception, a materially and intellectually useful integration
of visual and tactile perception can be arrived at. This process reaches a
conclusion of sorts with La Guerre mondiale.

A Journey into Virtually Inscribed Skin and Actual Sensation

In La Guerre mondiale, Serres asks us to imagine a bar fight between sail-

ors that he has filmed. He then asks us to imagine a filmic reversal of the
fight’s chronology and of the increasing haptic excesses which this reversal
undoes. We are told that this reduction of hapticity is a paradigm that we
should aspire to. Under its aegis, purely optical spectacle becomes a con-
ductor of haptic sensation. War is sublimated by the sight of a rugby ball
being fought for and thrown around a field by opposing teams. The crowds
that behold this substitutive ritual shudder visibly at the ball’s moments
of airborne intangibility, at the fleeting non-consummation of its haptic
appeal. Serres asks us – albeit implicitly – to experience this same shudder
when we discover via the internet that three billion people have been killed
by war since the beginning of recorded history.
Conclusion 281

The shudder of sympathy, regret and repugnance that Serres demands

renders the physical horrors evoked by the otherwise abstract number of
wartime casualties (haptically) perceptible and, thereby, current. With
this new, virtual yet haptic relation to the past as our moral touchstone,
we begin to assimilate further virtual data brought to us by the internet
into our perceptions of our present (social and ecological) surroundings.
Gradually, we become motivated to make positive changes to these spaces.
Serres suggests therefore that the present day is one in which we exist and
perceive in a reality that is augmented and informed by virtual, mathemati-
cal data. This convergence between our sensory faculties and our percep-
tible environment also requires enmeshing of the sensory faculties which
discern and define our surroundings for us. Under these circumstances,
haptic perception (that is, the synergetic sensory interaction between tac-
tility and vision posited by Riegl, Marks or Nancy or the proprioception
suggested by Paterson) remains relevant to the sensory integration that
Serres demands and may even be one of its primary directive forces. An
examination of Serres’s comments in texts such as Hermès II or even recent
works such as the fourth instalment of Petites chroniques du dimanche soir
suggests that he rarely deviates from this stance in his more theoretically
orientated writings. Contrarily, the integration of perceptive faculties that
Serres posits in La Guerre mondiale (and Les Cinq Sens or Le Tiers-Instruit
before it) assembles visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory and gustative sensa-
tion into one multi-temporal sensory continuum. Unless we define this
sensory integration using Mark Paterson’s definition of hapticity (spe-
cifically, the proprioceptive fusion of kinaesthesia, vestibular, tactile and
cutaneous perception), haptic perception alone would be insufficient to
navigate humanity through the new, virtually augmented realities that the
imagery of Serres’s literary anecdotes present.
The sensory confluence presented by Serresian anecdote and the tem-
poral multiplicities which go hand in hand with it provides an unexpected
parallel with Blanchovian critique. In texts such as L’Espace littéraire or
L’Entretien infini, Blanchot suggests that there is a synergy between time
and human consciousness. Serres posits his understanding of temporal
interaction in terms of multi-temporal and multi-spatial composites which
are cemented together by bodily sensations and our attempts to think about
282 Conclusion

them or to explain them by inscriptive or verbal means. Contrarily, Blanchot’s

concept of fascination describes an inscriptive orality which exists distinct
from the perceiving human body and which even places the body into a state
of temporal neutrality when it attempts to speak (or to write). This distinc-
tion between the body which houses or stores thought and sensation, as well
as the (articulating) voice which attempts to convey and interconnect them
places the human voice’s transcendent relationship with temporality into
asynchrony. A perceptible disjuncture arises between our sensations and the
language that we employ either to think about those sensations for ourselves
or to describe them to others. Blanchot’s interest in this disembodied voice
is evident in his critical and literary works from an early stage.
Through the postulates of abjection and sublimity, Bataille’s literary
portrayals of haptic perception exist in a median space between those of
Serres and Blanchot. As a result of oscillation between the abject and the
sublime, moments of profound haptic excess in Bataille’s prose are frequently
offset by instances of apparent decorporealisation. For example, the collec-
tive murder and mutilation of Don Aminado in Histoire de l’œil is counter-
balanced in Le Bleu du ciel by the lonesome disintegration of Troppmann’s
sensory faculties while he floats alone in the waves at Badalona. Bataille’s
works of critical theory are similarly ambivalent in matters of decorporealisa-
tion. His articles alternate between denunciations of corporeal perception’s
unreliability (in ‘Le Langage des fleurs’) and explorations of transcendence
rooted in carnality (in the various drafts of ‘L’Œil pinéal’).

Bataille and Blanchot: Virtual Haptic Likenesses?

A recurrent theme of Bataille’s critical and literary works is the random-

ness of sensory oscillations. Examples of this include the murder which
concludes Histoire de l’œil, or the behaviour of Madame Edwarda’s titular
character at the conclusion of that text, during which the narrative lurches
from carnality to voyeurism and ends in somnolence. In both works, narra-
tive reliance upon hapticity gives way to uniquely optical perception, only
Conclusion 283

for both forms of perception to cease to provide any empirically useful

knowledge or awareness.
The critical and literary strands of Blanchot’s writing also return to
the themes of serendipity and sensation on numerous occasions. The lin-
guistic mechanisms of fascination ensure that Blanchot’s presentation of
these concepts remains opaque, however.
Serres agrees that chance plays an important role in matters of per-
ception, but Serresian chance manifests itself as multiplicities of spatio-
temporal simultaneity and interdisciplinary congruence. Neither of these
qualities is apparent in the Bataillean or Blanchovian oeuvres to any great
extent. Nor should they be: the critical and literary approaches adopted by
Bataille and Blanchot are rooted in exposing – but refusing to even attempt
to resolve – perceptible disjunctures between time, space and (academic or
scientific notions of ) rationality. In spite of this, the disfavour that Bataille
and Blanchot accord rationality does not amount to a rejection of or disin-
terest in empirically verifiable truth or falsehood in either writer’s critical
or literary works. As I have shown, Bataille and Blanchot present lengthy
paeans to the perceptible simulacra of physical presence and their power
to mislead. Acting together or on their own, tactile and visual perceptions
are portrayed in both strands of Bataille’s and Blanchot’s writings as being
capable of creating powerful simulacra which are eminently able to confuse
previously coherent thought patterns or explicable sensations.

Hapticity and Gender, Life and Death

What we see over the decades spanned by Bataille, Blanchot and Serres’s
critical theories and literary works is, as I have stated, a virtualisation of
the haptic experience. Unlike Bataille and Blanchot, Serres does not equate
the virtual with the simulacral in every instance. This is because, as we have
seen, Serres believes there to be much intellectually instructive value inher-
ent to empiricism of any variety. His predecessors are rather less convinced
by such ideas. For Bataille and Blanchot, haptic sensation is capable of
284 Conclusion

making us aware of the error that we make when we imagine perception

to be an intellectual experience purely because we can articulate aspects
of our sensations through spoken and written language. This is the only
truth that haptic sensation can provide us with, according to the critical
theories or prose of both writers.
For markedly differing reasons, we can see that the literary and critical
texts of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres therefore exhort us to think about
ourselves and the (social) world that we perceive around us in more integra-
tive terms than haptic/optic differentiations. The appreciable effects of this
demand play out differently in each author’s works, especially where gender
is at issue. Serres, for example, does not portray an appreciable difference
between the perceptual faculties or experiences of the male and female
characters that he alludes to. This holds true whether the figures mentioned
are historical, present-day or eternally mythical figures. The same cannot
be said of Bataille or Blanchot. A brief comparison between the differing
behaviours and sensory experiences of the male and female protagonists
of Bataille’s Madame Edwarda and Le Bleu du ciel or Blanchot’s Thomas
l’obscur and La Folie du jour shows as much. Even in the most unhinged situ-
ations, the male protagonists – especially if they are also narrators – almost
always remain sane enough to recount or explain their actions and percep-
tions lucidly. Contrarily, female Bataillean characters such as Edwarda and
Dirty or Blanchovian figures such as Anne, Irène or the anonymous female
characters in La Folie du jour are frequently mere narrative objects. They
rarely appear able to comprehend what is happening to them, much less
articulate their feelings about this state of affairs. Serres meanwhile portrays
the painted female skins of Bonnard’s canvases as being exemplary of all
sensory relation in Les Cinq Sens. We could also refer to his insistence upon
gender’s relative unimportance in Le Tiers-Instruit. As can be seen from
Hermès II and Le Tiers-Instruit alone, ‘la réduction de la différence’ in its
many forms has proved to be a subject of enduring importance for Serres.9

9 See Serres, Hermès II, p. 40 and Le Tiers-Instruit, pp. 35–37. It goes without saying
that Nancyan notions of hapticity based upon gendered différence such as those
itemised in Corpus (pp. 161–62) do not, therefore, sit well with Serres’s thinking.
Conclusion 285

Serres’s attempts to minimise difference – or at least, sensorially appre-

ciable difference – in all of its forms have unmistakeably social implications.
Chief among these is the possibility that the diminishment of difference
that Serres advocates might actually impede forms of social integration
which demand a recognition and acceptance of difference. This realisation
also poses particular difficulties for any reading of Serres through Marks’s
concept of haptic visuality, which relies upon a ‘respect’ of otherness. Like
Serres, Bataille and Blanchot also explore issues of social cohesion and
dissolution in their critical and literary works (notably in L’Expérience
intérieure and Le Bleu du ciel for Bataille and in La Communauté inavouable
and L’Instant de ma mort in Blanchot’s case). In spite of this, Bataille and
Blanchot do not consider touch, much less haptic perception (as per any
of the haptic models that I presented in the introduction), to be in any way
constitutive of social bonds. As a result, we find relatively few direct allu-
sions to tactility anywhere in Blanchot’s critical works concerning society
which are anything other than obfuscatory. The same is true of the vari-
ous Bataillean works of critical theory that I have examined. In addition,
neither Bataille nor Blanchot appears to consider tactile interaction to be
governed by any specific ethical code, but both writers claim that to touch
another person in whatever way is to do violence to that individual’s mind
and body. In both authors’ critical and literary works, the act of touching
satisfies an otherwise unquenchable desire created by the initial act of look-
ing longingly at that person.
To this extent, the act of touching appears almost vampiric, especially
in the prose of Bataille and Blanchot. Tactile interaction stimulated by
vision sucks the beholder’s mind of its pent-up desire and concretises that
psychic energy (and its ability to create or to do the unthinkable) into
banal carnality, into haptic sensations familiar to almost every human adult.
According to the prose works of Bataille and Blanchot, once tactile con-
tact is initiated, the haptic effects of the mental and physical damage that
it inflicts cannot be abated. Serres, for his part, claims that in moderation
(a moderation which he believes to be achievable), tactility (as a constitu-
tive component of (haptic) proprioception) is inherently constructive. It
builds social bonds, allows us to adapt to our changing environment, to
realise and, subsequently, minimise the violence that we do to it and to
286 Conclusion

ourselves. What Serres’s theories and anecdotes tell us is that, as the sensory
bonds between an individual and his or her locale of global society and its
ecology become increasingly manifest (whether by haptic or other sensory
means), anything becomes possible. There is an appreciable divergence
between the approaches to perception adopted by Bataille and Blanchot
and Serres’s treatment of the topic.
Be this as it may, the literary works of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres
that I have presented all share one surprisingly simple guiding principle.
The principle is this: skin – whether it is living or dead, present or phan-
tom – must come into contact with another haptic surface in order for the
perceiver to make sense or nonsense of whatever happens subsequently.
Most importantly, this rubbing together of one or more surfaces must be
at once seen and tactilely perceived to have taken place by at least one of
the parties involved.
As my analyses show, Bataille, Blanchot and Serres’s literary works all
linger to some degree not only upon visual imagery, but also upon any tactile
detail that might be expected to coincide with those images (regardless of
whether or not the texts in question actually identify any such confluence).
This proclivity is especially notable in Bataille and Serres’s anecdotes, but
is also apparent in Blanchot’s prose from time to time. For example, in the
deathly aftermath of his escape from a Nazi firing squad, the protagonist of
Blanchot’s L’Instant de ma mort continues to be haunted by ‘le sentiment
de légèreté qui est la mort même ou, pour le dire plus précisément, l’instant
de ma mort désormais toujours en instance’.10 In other words, Blanchot’s
literary figure is haunted by the absence of any tactile sensation that can
equate with his enduring visions of being before the firing squad (and being
on the verge of death). The young maquisard’s lack of tactile involvement
in the image of impending death that his mind continues to flash before
his eyes does not make his unshakeable ‘sentiment de légèreté’ any less real
to him. This is because these mortal visions still demand a matching tactile
element to them, however impossible that demand may be. It is the haptic
character of this impossibility which ensures that these visions endure.

10 Blanchot, L’Instant de ma mort, p. 17.

Conclusion 287

Hapticity as Exclusion or Inclusion

The equation of hapticity and impossibility which Blanchot establishes

so vividly in L’Instant de ma mort is central to the concept of the virtual
that I attempted to draw out in my analysis of Serres’s writings. In my
commentary of the fourth instalment of Petites chroniques du dimanche
soir, I remarked that Serres claims haptic contact between two surfaces
to be capable of forming a third, composite space – a corps troisième –
between these two surfaces.11 In this inherently fractious third space, sensory
data from both surfaces intermingles and may be perceived or otherwise
exchanged by either surface. I suggested that, in Serres’s works of theory
and prose, the hybridity of the corps troisième is presented as being simu-
lacral to a certain extent. This is because the composite nature of the corps
troisième requires us to extrapolate not only spatially but also temporally
in order to understand the (haptic) sensory data that we have intercepted
by placing our skin in contact with another surface. More often than not,
our navigation of this interceptive process will be faulty, distorted by the
social, physical or emotional contexts in which it must take place. Under
these circumstances, our perceptions become fabulatory, simulacral of the
surfaces which incite them. Because there can be no certainty as to how
the haptic detail of Serres’s hybridised third space will be perceived by
either of the surfaces whose contact creates it, there is an inherent element
of chance as to whether the haptic data contained within this space will
be communicated properly, if at all. This unpredictability creates a ‘blind
spot’, an aspect of the Serresian corps troisième’s empirical and temporal
multiplicities whose material effects cannot even be guessed at without
prior empirical experiences to inform that surmise.
I would now like to take this idea a step further. Based upon my analy-
ses, I assert that the literary works of Bataille and Blanchot studied in this
book can be considered to be their writers’ creative illustrations of their
critical reasoning. Each of these texts illustrates why a corps troisième of

11 Serres and Polacco, Petites chroniques du dimanche soir, IV, pp. 136–37.
288 Conclusion

the kind that Serres postulates subsequently would be empirically impos-

sible. It is the unavoidable ‘blind spot’ that chance’s role in the perceptive
process creates – and which Serres claims to be just one feature of the
corps troisième’s space among many others – which is at issue. The critical
works of Bataille and Blanchot imply that this randomly occurring ‘blind
spot’ would in fact be the only perceptible feature – or at least, the most
apparent characteristic – of any corps troisième of the kind posited more
recently by Serres.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the récits of Bataille and Blanchot refer
to essentially haptic paradigms in order to demonstrate the sensory chaos
which space such as that postulated by Serres would entail. As Histoire de
l’œil or Madame Edwarda, Thomas l’obscur or La Folie du jour demonstrate,
Bataille and Blanchot associate tactility and by extension, hapticity, with
physical or emotional intimacy. All four of these texts depict the perils
of such intimacy, particularly between man and woman. To go by these
literary works alone, the single greatest threat that physical or emotional
intimacy poses is its ability to distort the accuracy of any sensation that
might be exchanged between two or more proximal surfaces, whether
they are both sentient or not. We need only look at the mortal fates of
Thomas, Anne and Irène, the three key protagonists in the first version of
Thomas l’obscur, to witness how sensory distortion caused by haptic inti-
macy might become a three-dimensionally destructive phenomenon. In
instances of potentially haptic, optical and tactile perception, the critical
and literary works of Bataille and Blanchot remain relatively consistent in
their treatment and portrayals of physical proximity as a negative, materi-
ally harmful force.
In Serres’s theoretical works and anecdotes, however, physical prox-
imity and intimacy are welcomed. Serres’s postulations of perception as
physical interception in Hermès II in 1972 and his allusions in 2009 to
tribology and haptonomy as examples of tactility reaching into the virtual
realm attest to the endurance of his convictions on this subject. The sport-
ing and artistic tales contained in Le Tiers-Instruit or Les Cinq Sens suggest
that Serres adopts a correspondingly consistent (though subtly evolving)
critical viewpoint in his more anecdotal writings concerning tactility and
hapticity: physical proximity remains a source of material good. When
Conclusion 289

we read La Guerre mondiale and examine the filmed barfight that Serres
describes, the positive attributes of proximity extolled by his earlier works
appear to be in severe decline. Until this point, Serres’s critical theories
and anecdotes tend to be closely linked. It is only when we read about the
Serresian rugby ball/quasi-objet transmitting haptic sensation by means of
a momentarily visible absence of contact with living skin that Serres’s quest
to diminish the earlier bar fight’s cinematic images of excessively haptic sen-
sation makes sense. Serres shows through his text that, when sensations of
physical proximity can be made to arise at an experiential distance (albeit
by virtual means), so too can feelings of empathy. On this basis, physical
and emotional sensations of difference can be reduced without physical
contact, further reducing the risk of conflict.
Unlike Bataille and Blanchot, the Serres of La Guerre mondiale
gravitates towards the idea that the absence of tactility is in fact a vector of
haptic perception. Bataille and Blanchot see no contradiction in alluding
repeatedly to haptic sensory experiences in order to illustrate the impos-
sibility of ever perceiving accurately by haptic (or any other perceptual)
means. Serres meanwhile treats the visible absence of tactile data in par-
ticular as being solicitous of haptic sensation. The absence of visible tactile
detail is an invitation for the perceiver to move closer to the other surface
or person whose optical details so captivate him or her, in the hope that
both perceiver and perceived may be better understood. It is this ration-
ale which ensures that Serres’s theories and literary anecdotes follow a
logical chronology which, even when seemingly broken or disjointed, in
fact plots a continuous journey towards empirical revelation of one form
or another. The same cannot be said of Bataille or Blanchot. Bataille, for
example, shows some critical engagement with behavioural praxes which
may lead to revelation, particularly in texts such as L’Expérience intérieure.
The teleology inherent to empirical methodology proves too problematic
for Bataille to pursue such thought with any vigour, however. Blanchot’s
critique of perception never moves past its distrust of order and continuity
and fails to consider questions of praxis with a great deal of intellectual
consistency.
Remaining with the motif of consistency for a moment, it is often said
that all myths contain some grain of truth, however small. I contend that
290 Conclusion

the same can be said of the literary works of Bataille and Blanchot. In their
case, the grain’s kernel of truth is essentially haptic. Try as they might, nei-
ther writer can quite eradicate the haptic synergy between sight and touch
from their fictionalised bolstering of their critical stances. With each pass-
ing work of prose by Bataille or Blanchot, the haptic certainly becomes less
prominent, but it never disappears entirely. Taken with Bataille’s inability
to rid his narratives of haptic allusions, Blanchot’s failure to adhere to La
Folie du jour’s closing remark (‘Un récit? Non, pas de récit, plus jamais’)12
suggests a confluence between subjectively experienced haptic sensation
and récit that even the most abstractive of theoretical stances cannot efface.
Serres is similarly unable to eradicate the haptic from his work, but he
does not wish to. Instead, he integrates hapticity into his treatments of
perception and broader interdisciplinary thinking. Serres’s liberal use and
juxtaposition of personal and mythical anecdote in his writings are exem-
plary of this trait.
With this comparison between the three writers in mind, we realise
that, in the works of Bataille, Blanchot and Serres that I have examined,
critical treatise and literary prose make use of haptic motifs to mark-
edly differing ends. Absent in much of Bataille and Blanchot’s works of
critical theory, instances of haptic perception are nevertheless employed
regularly in both writers’ literary prose. Ironically, the inclusion of haptic
sensation in Bataille and Blanchot’s literary works justifies the haptic’s
increasing exclusion from both writers’ critical texts concerning the human
body and the manner in which it perceives. In Serres’s anecdotes and
critical theories, however, haptic perception becomes increasingly inte-
gral to the manner in which he addresses issues of corporeity and percep-
tion. Moreover, Serres frequently employs anecdotes in order to explain
why hapticity should be a significant factor in his empirically derived
theorisations.

12 Blanchot, La Folie du jour, p. 38.

Conclusion 291

Seeing and Feeling the Difference? Theory, Prose and

the Virtual

For Serres, hapticity in the proprioceptive, Patersonian or virtual, Nancyan

senses of the term can bridge perceptible difference in almost every instance,
though gaps will remain. For Bataille and Blanchot, any of the four variants
of haptic perception that I have presented will render already perceptible
difference more manifest still. Paradoxically, the writings of Bataille and
Blanchot suggest that such sensory revelations in fact blind us across all
of our perceptual registers to the very facts that these sensations of differ-
ence purport to bring to our conscious attention. In spite of this major
divergence of opinion, Bataille, Blanchot and Serres appear to agree that
the question of difference is one which transcends empirical, corporeal
reality: it has an unquantifiable, virtual dimension to it. To judge by the
philosophical and literary texts by Bataille, Blanchot and Serres studied
in this book, virtuality has become an ever more appreciable presence in
portrayals of human perception by literary prose or as descriptions in critical
analyses. In response, postulations of hapticity and the various syntheses
of sight and touch that the term might designate have become subsumed
within increasingly transcendental schematisations of human perception.
The arc of reasoning which underpins the haptic postulates advo-
cated by Riegl, Marks, Nancy and Paterson confirms this evolution. From
the early 1900s and Aloïs Riegl presenting the haptic in terms of a static,
genderless viewer peering at a painted canvas or sculpted surface, we have
reached the proprioceptive and projective hapticity described recently by
Mark Paterson. Using brain scans, we can now see how sight and touch
function in concert with the rest of our perceptive functions and how all
are controlled by and interact with the brain. The appeal of a haptic sur-
face to our eyes and to our tactile faculties can therefore be measured fairly
accurately in the 2010s. This was categorically not the case in Riegl’s era,
necessitating a more interpretive – and socially determinative – approach
to theorisations of perception and art history. This is not the only change.
In the present day, haptically perceptible body movements can be converted
(or virtualised) into machine code, transmitted hundreds or thousands of
292 Conclusion

miles away via satellite and internet and then converted back into haptic
data through computer controlled, force-feedback devices. All of this can
occur in synchrony with the visions which incite and correspond with
those actions. This generation and use of haptic data – which would have
been impossible in Riegl’s time – nevertheless exhibits certain elements
of Laura U. Marks’s concept of haptic visuality, of close-up visual details
gleaned from filmed surfaces inciting our desire to touch them. Facets of
Jean-Luc Nancy’s concepts of excription and virtual, sensory zonage are also
evoked by these decorporealised bundles of haptic data.13
The manifold possibilities of converting a piece of binary-encoded
haptic sensation back into analogue haptic sensation and/or images at
a remote distance underscore the material metamorphosis that haptic-
ity is beginning to undergo as a result of the internet’s virtual bridging
of physical distance. This is a change which – evidently – only Serres’s
increasingly proprioceptive and now virtual approaches to hapticity have
begun to (or are able to) take account of. Were they still alive, it is hard to
imagine what Bataille or Blanchot would have thought of the alternately
technological and virtual hapticity that Paterson describes in The Senses
of Touch, for example.

Some Final Words and No End of Haptic Feeling

In summary, the critical theories, literary anecdotes and prose of Bataille,

Blanchot and Serres that I have analysed plot several distinct steps in an
appreciable evolution of attitudes towards haptic perception which has
taken place in French philosophical and literary circles during the twenti-
eth and early twenty-first centuries. There are many points of disjuncture

13 The notion of committing haptic data to an internet server’s hard drives bolsters
Nancy’s assertion that ‘[l]e corps, sans doute, c’est qu’on écrit’ (Nancy, Corpus, p. 76;
emphasis in original).
Conclusion 293

between the literary and critical approaches employed by the three writer-
philosophers whose works I have studied here. There are even marked dis-
continuities between the manners in which Bataille, Blanchot and Serres
present instances of haptic perception in the critical and literary strands of
their own writing. Nevertheless, if we read each author’s texts in chrono-
logical order, an increasing congruence between critical theory and literary
prose in matters of haptic sensation becomes apparent. This could well be
the result of each writer better understanding his own ideas with the pas-
sage of time, or simply rethinking his previous opinions. Still, the degree
of rapprochement between Serres’s theorisations of haptic perception and
related anecdotes early in his career is far in advance of any philosophical
confluences between the critical theories and prose of Bataille or Blanchot
at a similar stage.
In their peripatetic journeys between the poles of critical thought
and literary and personal anecdote, Bataille, Blanchot and Serres all seek
to establish a creative path which addresses philosophical approaches to
the acts of writing and perceiving. The growing integration between criti-
cal thought and anecdote attested to by Serres’s writings coincides with
increasingly fruitful attempts to digitise and decorporealise human sen-
sation itself. As Serres’s recent musings concerning Lucretius remind us,
however, these circumstances are merely the concretisation of millennia-
old postulations linking physical sensation to corporeal transcendence via
perceptible simulacra. Over time, Lucretius’s theories were written down for
future generations to discuss in relation to their own (potentially haptic)
sensations, much as Serres does today in his works of theory and anecdote.
Bibliography

Primary Texts

Bataille, Georges, Œuvres complètes, 12 vols (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1970–1988).

Blanchot, Maurice, Thomas l’obscur (première version) (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1941;
repr. 2005).
—— Faux pas (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1943; repr. 2009).
—— La Part du feu (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1949; repr. 2009).
—— L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Folio/Gallimard, 1955; repr. 2009).
—— Le Livre à venir (Paris: Folio/Gallimard, 1959; repr. 2008).
—— Lautréamont et Sade (Paris: Minuit, 1963; repr. UGÉ/10/18, 1967).
—— L’Entretien infini (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1969).
—— Le Pas au-delà (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1973; repr. 2008).
—— La Folie du jour (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1973; repr. 1980).
—— La Communauté inavouable (Paris: Minuit, 1983; repr. 2009).
——L’Instant de ma mort (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1994; repr. NRF/Gallimard, 2006).
James, Geneviève, and Michel Serres, ‘Entretien avec Michel Serres’, The French
Review, 60, 6 (1987) <http://www.jstor.org/stable/393765> [accessed 31 August
2012].
Serres, Michel, Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques (Paris: PUF,
1968).
—— Hermès II: L’Interférence (Paris: Minuit, 1972).
—— Hermès V: Le Passage du Nord-Ouest (Paris: Minuit, 1980).
—— Le Parasite (Paris: Grasset, 1980; repr. Hachette/Pluriel, 1997).
—— Les Cinq Sens (Paris: Grasset, 1985; repr. Hachette/Pluriel, 2008).
—— Le Contrat naturel (Paris: François Bourin, 1990).
—— Le Tiers-Instruit (Paris: François Bourin, 1991; repr. Folio/Gallimard, 2008).
—— Variations sur le corps (Paris: Le Pommier, 1999).
—— La Guerre mondiale (Paris: Le Pommier, 2008).
—— and Bruno Latour, Éclaircissements (Paris: François Bourin, 1992).
—— and Michel Polacco, Petites chroniques du dimanche soir, 5 vols, IV (Paris:
Le Pommier/France Info, 2011).
296 Bibliography

Secondary Texts

Assad, Maria L., Reading with Michel Serres: An Encounter with Time (Albany, NY:
SUNY, 1999).
—— ‘Being Free to Write for a Woman: The Question of Gender in the Work of
Michel Serres’, in Mapping Michel Serres, ed. by Niran Abbas (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 210–25.
Balzac, Honoré de, ‘Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (version 1837)’, in Georges Didi-
Huberman, La Peinture incarnée, suivi de Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu par Honoré
de Balzac (Paris: Minuit, 1985), pp. 133–56.
Barthes, Roland, ‘La Métaphore de l’œil’, in Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964),
pp. 238–45.
Bident, Christophe, Maurice Blanchot: partenaire invisible (Seyssel: Champ Vallon,
2008).
Brillouin, Léon, La Science et la théorie de l’information (Paris: Masson, 1959).
Brown, Steven D., ‘Michel Serres: Science, Translation and the Logic of the Parasite’,
Theory, Culture & Society, 19 (2002) <doi: 10.1177/0263276402019003001>
[accessed 31 August 2012].
Bruns, Gerald L., Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins, 2005).
Collin, Françoise, Maurice Blanchot et la question de l’écriture (deuxième édition)
(Paris: Gallimard, 1986).
Connor, Steven, ‘Michel Serres’s Les Cinq Sens’, in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual
Cultural Reader, ed. by David Howes (Oxford: Berg, 2005), pp. 318–34.
—— A Philosophy of Sport (London: Reaktion, 2011).
Crowley, Martin, ‘Touche-là’, in Blanchot dans son siècle, ed. by Monique Antelme
and others (Lyon: Paragon/Vs, 2009), pp. 166–76.
Dagognet, François, Le Corps (Paris: PUF, 2008).
Deleuze, Gilles, Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1968; repr. 2011).
—— and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980).
Derrida, Jacques, Mémoires d’aveugle: l’autoportrait et autres ruines (Paris: Ministère
de la culture, de la communication, des grands travaux, et du bicentenaire, 1990).
—— Demeure (Paris: Galilée, 1998).
—— Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000).
—— Séminaire: la bête et le souverain, 2 vols, I (Paris: Galilée, 2008).
Didi-Huberman, Georges, La Ressemblance par contact: archéologie, anachronisme et
modernité de l’empreinte (Paris: Minuit, 2008).
Bibliography 297

Dubois, Jean, and others, eds, Dictionnaire de la langue française: lexis (Paris: Larousse,
1989).
Elsner, Jas’, ‘From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections on Riegl’s
Concept of Kunstwollen’, Critical Inquiry, 32, 4 (2006) <doi: 10.1086/508091>
[accessed 29 May 2014].
ffrench, Patrick, The Cut/Reading Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil (Oxford: British
Academy/OUP, 1996).
—— After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community (London: Legenda, 2007).
Fitch, Brian T., Monde à l’envers, texte réversible: la fiction de Georges Bataille (Paris:
Lettres modernes, 1982).
Foucault, Michel, ‘La Pensée du dehors’, Critique, 229 (1966), 523–46.
Freud, Sigmund, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. by James Strachey
(New York: Basic Books, 1962).
Godin, Christian, ‘Panorama d’une pensée’, in Michel Serres, ed. by François L’Yvonnet
and Christiane Frémont (Paris: L’Herne, 2010), pp. 27–36.
Harris, Paul A., ‘The Smooth Operator’, in Mapping Michel Serres, ed. by Abbas,
pp. 113–34.
Hénaff, Marcel, ‘Des pierres, des anges et des hommes: Michel Serres et la question
de la ville globale’, Horizons philosophiques, 8, 1 (1997) <doi: 10.7202/801061ar>
[accessed 1 April 2014].
Hollier, Denis, La Prise de la Concorde (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1974).
——‘La Tombe de Bataille’, in Hollier, Les Dépossédées (Paris: Minuit, 1992), pp. 73–99.
Hurault, Marie-Laure, Maurice Blanchot: le principe de la fiction (St. Denis: PUV, 1999).
Iversen, Margaret D., Aloïs Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA/London:
MIT Press, 1993).
James, Geneviève, ‘Le Philosophe récitant’, in Michel Serres, ed. by L’Yvonnet and
Frémont, pp. 266–72.
Jones, H. S., and others, eds, A Greek-English Lexicon (New Edition) (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1961).
Landes, Donald A., ‘Le Toucher and the Corpus of Tact: Exploring Touch and Technic-
ity with Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy’, L’Esprit Créateur, 47, 3 (2007),
80–92.
Lea, Jennifer, ‘Negotiating Therapeutic Touch: Encountering Massage Through the
“Mixed Bodies” of Michel Serres’, in Touching Space, Placing Touch, ed. by Mark
Paterson and Martin Dodge (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 29–45.
Lee, Crispin, ‘Georges Bataille or the Theory and Fiction of Apocalyptic Visions’,
in Visions of Apocalypse: Representations of the End in French Literature and
Culture, ed. by Leona Archer and Alex Stuart (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013),
pp. 165–75.
298 Bibliography

Levinas, Emmanuel, Sur Maurice Blanchot (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1975).

Libertson, Joseph, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (The
Hague/Boston/London: Nijhoff, 1982).
Lozier, Claire, De l’abject et du sublime: Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012).
Marks, Laura U., The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the
Senses (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2000).
Mayné, Gilles, Georges Bataille, l’érotisme et l’écriture (Paris: Descartes et Cie, 2003).
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945;
repr. 1976).
——Le Visible et l’invisible: suivi de notes de travail (Paris: Gallimard, 1964; repr. 2006).
Nancy, Jean-Luc, La Communauté désœuvrée (Paris: Bourgois, 1986).
—— La Pensée dérobée (Paris: Galilée, 2000).
—— Les Muses (édition revue et augmentée) (Paris: Galilée, 2001).
—— Corpus (édition revue et complétée) (Paris: Éditions Métailié, 2006).
—— Le Poids d’une pensée, l’approche (Strasbourg: Le Phocide, 2008).
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings,
ed. and trans. by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), pp. 13–116.
Olin, Margaret, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).
Paterson, Mark, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford/New
York: Berg, 2007).
Paulson, William, ‘Swimming the Channel’, in Mapping Michel Serres, ed. by Abbas,
pp. 24–36.
Préli, Georges, La Force du dehors: extériorité, limite et non-pouvoir à partir de Maurice
Blanchot ([Fontenay-sous-Bois]: Recherches, 1977).
Ravel, Emmanuelle, Maurice Blanchot et l’art au vingtième siècle: une esthétique du
désœuvrement (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).
Riegl, Aloïs, Die Spätrömische Kunst-Industrie Nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn
(Vienna: Druck und Verlag der Kaiserlich-Königlichen Hof- und Staatsdruck-
erei, 1901; repr. Paderborn: Salzwasser Verlag, 2012).
—— Das holländische Gruppenporträt, 2 vols, I (Textband), ed. by Karl M. Swoboda
(Vienna: Österreichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1931).
——Late Roman Art Industry, trans. by Ralf Winkes (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider
Editore, 1985).
—— ‘Der moderne Denkmalskultus: sein Wesen und seine Entstehung’, in Riegl,
Gesammelte Aufsätze mit einem Nachwort zur Neuausgabe von Wolfgang Kemp,
Bibliography 299

ed. by Karl M. Swoboda (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag (Edition Logos), 1995),
pp. 144–93.
—— ‘Über antike und moderne Kunstfreunde’, in Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze,
pp. 194–206.
—— ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin’, trans. by Kurt
W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, in Oppositions Reader, ed. by K. Michael Hays
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), pp. 621–51.
——The Group Portraiture of Holland, trans. by Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los
Angeles: Getty Research Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999).
Starobinski, Jean, ‘Thomas l’obscur, chapitre premier’, Critique, 229 (1966), 498–513.
Steinmetz, Jean-Luc, ‘Bataille le mithiraque (sur Histoire de l’œil)’, La Revue des
Sciences Humaines, 206 (1987), 169–86.
Surya, Michel, Georges Bataille: la mort à l’œuvre (Paris: NRF/Gallimard, 1992).
Terrell, Peter, and others, eds, Collins Concise German-English, English-German
Dictionary (Second Edition) (Glasgow: HarperCollins/Pons, 1996).
Tucker, Ian, ‘Sense and the Limits of Knowledge: Bodily Connections in the Work of
Serres’, Theory, Culture & Society, 28 (2011) <doi: 10.1177/0263276410372240>
[accessed 31 August 2012].
Webb, David, ‘Penser le multiple sans le concept: vers un intellect démocratique’, in
Michel Serres, ed. by L’Yvonnet and Frémont, pp. 87–94.
Index
abstraction 56, 93, 113–16, 123, 163 (n. 124),
170, 176, 186–87, 194, 199, 210,
220–22, 238–39, 243–44, 257,
262, 267, 271, 279, 281, 290
alterity 16, 26, 138, 163
Artaud, Antonin 83
artistry 5–13, 16, 19, 21–22, 28 (n. 73),
29–30, 37, 100, 230 (n. 109), 271,
288, 291
see also cinema, film, painting,
photography and screen
Assad, Maria L. 187, 192 (n. 18), 209, 216,
218 (n. 86), 219 (n. 89), 220, 231
(n. 115), 242 (n. 135), 247 (n. 143),
263 (n. 179), 266
attraction 44, 61, 76–77, 83, 89, 95, 111,
119, 124, 132, 146, 150, 154, 167
balance 18, 41, 51–52, 61, 81, 94–95,
97–98, 196, 202, 212, 237–38, 243,
245–46, 278, 282
see also perception/kinaesthetic,
perception/proprioceptive and
perception/vestibular
Barthes, Roland 58 (n. 48), 59–60, 85
Bataille, Georges vii, 1–3, 23, 31–35,
37–39, 41–107, 109, 123, 127–29,
130, 135, 138, 141, 147–52, 154,
158, 161–62, 165–67, 172–73, 176,
178 (n. 163), 179, 182–83, 185–86,
189 (n. 10), 193, 202–03, 208,
210–13, 215, 221, 225–27, 231, 234,
240–41, 243–44, 246–47, 255,
258–59, 262, 267, 270–71, 273–74,
277–79, 282–93
abject, l’ 46–47, 52, 58, 81, 85–86, 89,
91, 98, 138, 147, 158, 162, 167, 182,
227, 244–46, 258, 259, 282
Acéphale, l’ 31, 60, 152, 241
Descartes, René, beliefs of 49–50
hétérogène, l’ (the heterogeneous)
25, 55, 60, 264 (n. 181)
hétérologie, l’ (heterology) 31, 54–56,
73, 100, 264 (n. 181)
image, l’ 42, 44, 48 (n. 18), 49, 60,
62, 72, 76, 79–80, 94–96
informe, l’ (the indistinct, the shape-
less) 31, 57–59, 61, 73, 99, 101,
115, 167–68, 189 (n. 10), 210, 279
(n. 7)
œil pinéal, l’ 31, 49–54, 74, 86, 100,
212, 282
scatologie, la (Scatology) 56, 73
sublime, le 46–47, 52, 81, 85–86,
89, 93, 98, 138, 147, 159, 162,
167, 176, 179, 182, 227, 244–46,
258–59, 282
Bident, Christophe 103 (n. 148),
106 (n. 2)
Blanchot, Maurice vii, 1–3, 23, 33–35,
37–39, 103–83, 185–86, 192–93,
195, 202–03, 208, 210, 213, 215,
221, 225–27, 231, 240, 243,
245–46, 251, 255, 258, 260,
262, 265, 267, 270–71, 273–74,
277–79, 281–93
302
fascination, la 33–34, 112, 117–20,
123, 127, 131, 136, 143–44, 149, 157,
158, 160, 161, 170, 175, 177, 180–81,
203, 282–83
image, l’ 33, 111–19, 123–24 (n. 41),
127, 131, 136–38, 141–44, 148–49,
155–61, 169–70, 180, 188–89, 229,
248 (n. 44), 273, 286
intervalle, l’ (perceptual lag) 120–21,
124
neutre, le (the neuter; the neu-
tral) 119–20, 126 (n. 46), 127
nuit, la (night) 109, 127, 144, 162
rapport du troisième genre, le (rela-
tionship of the third kind) 33,
121–23, 125–27, 135, 168–70,
172–73
blind spot 24, 27, 48–53, 61, 73, 76, 87,
93, 101, 119–20, 123, 135 (n. 61),
146–47, 231, 239, 287–88
blushing 66–67, 70, 78, 94–95, 147–48
Brown, Steven D. 204 (n. 52), 208–09,
259 (n. 168)
Bruns, Gerald L. 109–10, 127, 144
(n. 82), 151 (n. 95), 154 (n. 105),
159 (n. 120), 173 (n. 151)
cinema 11–15, 30, 63, 131, 136 (n. 62),
152–59, 163, 167, 227, 252 (n. 154),
253, 275, 289;
see also artistry, film, painting,
photography and screen
Collin, Françoise 127, 157 (n. 112)
communication 19, 25, 34, 36, 45, 61, 77,
102 (n. 144), 109–10, 112, 118,
124, 128, 132, 149, 155, 189–90,
193, 200, 215, 218, 230, 261,
266 (n. 185), 287
Connor, Steven 197 (n. 32, n. 33),
228 (n. 107), 254 (n. 158), 256,
257 (n. 166)
Index
Crowley, Martin 120 (n. 30), 122 (n. 36),
170 (n. 145)
Dagognet, François 163 (n. 124)
death 11, 32, 60, 65, 69, 72–73, 75–77,
86, 88, 92, 102–03, 108, 129, 152,
155, 160, 171, 175–80, 186, 213, 252,
265, 273, 276–78, 281, 286
Deleuze, Gilles 3 (n. 3), 192 (n. 17)
Derrida, Jacques 23, 48, 174 (n. 154), 176
(n. 159), 212 (n. 71)
Didi-Huberman, Georges 3 (n. 3)
différence, la (difference) 13–14, 16–17,
25, 28 (n. 73), 37, 39, 56 (n. 45),
65, 75, 83 (n. 107), 88, 97–98, 105,
109, 111, 129, 130, 151, 155–56, 158
(n. 115), 161–62, 178, 183, 189, 192
(n. 17), 198, 212, 217, 244, 258,
265, 270–71, 276, 284–85, 289,
291
discontinuity 8, 16, 30, 44–45, 48, 51,
54, 58, 70, 108–09, 152, 162, 166,
179, 185, 193, 199–200, 211 (n. 68),
247, 263, 264 (n. 181), 282–83,
289, 292–93
distance 4, 7, 12, 20, 21, 34, 38, 70, 114–15,
118–20, 124–26, 136, 141, 150, 164,
170 (n. 145), 181, 204, 207–08,
212–13, 217, 223, 227–28, 241–42,
253, 268–70, 272, 275, 277–78,
289, 292
doigt, le (finger) 20, 46, 49, 63–64,
86–87, 93, 153, 158, 199, 222–23,
226, 251, 268
see also perception/tactile
Elsner, Jas’ 16
empiricism 2, 22, 25–28, 30–31, 36–37, 57,
93, 113, 121, 127 (n. 50), 132, 158,
181–82, 186–87, 192, 194–95, 199,
205, 210–11, 216, 220, 231, 234–35,
Index
239, 244, 246, 248, 253–54, 258,
262, 272, 274, 276, 283, 287–88,
289, 290–91
ethics 11, 32, 37, 63–65, 69, 213, 281, 285
eyes see yeux
feeling see perception
feet see pied
ffrench, Patrick 56 (n. 45), 58, 60–61,
77 (n. 93), 78 (n. 98), 85, 101,
106 (n. 3), 128, 151 (n. 95)
film 10 (n. 21), 12–15, 21, 30, 37, 71, 136,
152–57, 200, 232–34, 249–54,
272, 275, 280, 289, 292
see also artistry, cinema, painting,
photography and screen
finger see doigt
Fitch, Brian T. 41 (n. 2), 73,
74 (n. 85, n. 86), 84 (n. 112),
85–86, 87 (n. 119), 88 (n. 122), 98
(n. 140, n. 141), 99 (n. 142)
fluidity 72, 79, 86–87, 97–98, 131–32,
149, 163, 198, 203, 216, 224,
234, 235 (n. 121), 242–43, 247
Foucault, Michel 124 (n. 41)
Freud, Sigmund 16, 24 (n. 61)
gender 15–16, 22, 28, 30, 35, 51, 53, 62–66,
69–70, 72–73, 75–81, 83–84,
86–88, 92, 95, 97–98, 102, 103
(n. 147), 130, 132, 135, 146, 147,
150–51, 161, 169, 176 (n. 158), 178,
225, 242, 271, 276, 284, 291
see also sexuality
geometry 19, 37, 192 (n. 18), 194–95, 201,
230, 248
Godin, Christian 262 (n. 178)
Guattari, Félix 3 (n. 3), 192 (n. 17)
Harris, Paul A. 195, 230, 245 (n. 140)
hearing see perception/auditory
303
Hénaff, Marcel 234 (n. 120), 266 (n. 185)
Hollier, Denis 48 (n. 19, n. 20),
69 (n. 71), 78 (n. 98), 85
Hurault, Marie-Laure 142, 143 (n. 80),
169 (n. 142)
Husserl, Edmund 19, 105
imbalance 26, 61, 69, 85, 94–95, 101, 245
see also perception/kinaesthetic,
perception/proprioceptive and
perception/vestibular
impossibility 48–49, 69, 71, 89, 91, 95–96,
107–08, 115, 121–22, 128 (n. 51),
133, 137, 146, 149, 151, 170–71, 181,
221, 226, 279, 286–87, 289
indifference 25, 133, 136, 145, 149, 151,
164, 188–89, 209, 264 (n. 181),
269, 277
insanity 69–71, 75, 77, 81, 91, 141, 159
(n. 120), 166, 169, 228
internet 1, 19–20, 37, 38, 39, 260–62, 264,
269, 273, 279–81, 292
see also screen
intersubjectivity 15, 97 (n. 137), 189,
193–94, 211
irises 74, 86, 88, 149–50, 166
see also yeux
irrationality 31, 55, 98, 103, 128, 142, 159,
161, 166, 170, 259, 269
Iversen, Margaret D. 3 (n. 4)
James, Geneviève 198 (n. 35), 235 (n. 121),
267
juxtaposition 21, 189, 209, 219–20, 251, 290
knowledge 35, 37, 39, 42–43, 57, 73,
99–100, 121, 133 (n. 58), 165,
181–82, 187, 188, 202–03, 205, 211
(n. 68), 212–13, 215, 219–20, 231,
239, 244, 246, 249, 253 (n. 156),
261–62, 266, 283
304
Landes, Donald A. 25
language
inscriptive 22, 25–28, 30, 33–34, 38,
57, 59–61, 65 (n. 61), 100–02,
108–10, 113, 115–19, 122–24, 128,
146, 154 (n. 105), 159, 167, 170
(n. 145), 172, 173 (n. 151), 177
(n. 161), 181, 187, 191 (n. 13), 195,
196 (n. 27), 201–02, 216, 218–21,
227, 231, 238, 240, 242 (n. 135),
244–46, 250, 252, 267, 271,
276, 277–78, 282, 284, 287,
289–93
spoken 23, 36, 45, 57, 64–69, 86–88,
93–94, 106, 108, 110, 112, 119–20,
123–26, 127 (n. 48), 146, 148,
166, 172, 191 (n. 13), 195, 207–08,
236–38, 243–47, 258–59, 282, 284
Lea, Jennifer 233–34
Levinas, Emmanuel 106, 114 (n. 16), 181
Libertson, Joseph 114, 128
Lozier, Claire 47, 65 (n. 61), 72 (n. 77),
81 (n. 105), 85
luck 26, 59, 82, 95, 109, 111–12, 193, 197,
224, 227, 234, 249, 257 (n. 166),
262 (n. 178), 274, 283, 287
main, la (hand) 19–20, 22, 35, 46–48,
69–70, 76–77, 84, 86, 88–89,
91, 93, 136–37, 144, 146–49, 151,
153–56, 160, 169, 201–02, 206,
222–23, 237, 242–45, 251, 256,
271–73, 276
see also perception/tactile
Marks, Laura U. 2, 11–17, 19–20, 23–24,
29–30, 33, 38, 43–44, 48 (n. 17),
51, 56, 59, 63, 65, 70–71, 89, 95, 97,
102, 104, 111–12, 114, 116–19, 125,
130–31, 152, 154–55, 158, 161, 164,
167, 170, 185, 192–93, 199–200,
209, 217, 220, 224, 227, 253,
Index
268, 272, 275–76, 281, 285,
291–92
haptic visuality 11–14, 16, 20, 29–30,
33, 38, 63, 65, 70–71, 89, 95, 97,
102, 111, 131, 152, 154–55 (n. 109),
157, 158 (n. 115), 167, 268, 275, 285,
292
mathematics 18, 36, 57–58, 260, 262, 264,
269, 270, 274, 279, 281
Mayné, Gilles 41 (n. 2), 48, 72 (n. 77),
73, 80 (n. 103), 86
measurement 25, 55, 73, 84, 124, 145, 200,
212, 239, 241, 267, 291
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 3 (n. 3), 19, 106,
191 (n. 13)
myth 37, 52–53, 201, 264, 266, 280, 284,
289–90
Nancy, Jean-Luc 2, 22–36, 43–44, 51,
56, 59–60, 65, 70, 83, 88–89, 100,
103–04, 112, 116 (n. 19), 117–19,
125, 130, 159, 168, 178, 185, 191–92,
199, 206 (n. 57), 208 (n. 62),
213 (n. 73), 216 (n. 80), 220, 223
(n. 94), 245 (n. 142), 263, 264
(n. 181), 265 (n. 184), 271, 276,
281, 284 (n. 9), 291–92
excription, l’ (exscription) 26–30,
32–34, 38, 59–61, 80, 83, 100, 117,
159, 168, 172–74, 177, 181, 245
(n. 142), 271, 276, 292
Reiz, das 24 (n. 61)
se-sentir-sentir, le 24, 26, 83 (n. 108),
191 (n. 16), 216 (n. 80)
zonage, le 25 (n. 63), 70, 83, 103, 264,
292
zone, la 23–28, 64, 83 (n. 107, n. 108),
112, 118, 191, 199, 216, 228 (n. 107),
255, 263, 276
Nietzsche, Friedrich 48 (n. 19), 133, 186,
252–54
Index
objectivity 8, 111, 119, 122, 126, 141, 156,
190, 208, 262, 266–67, 276
objet, l’ (object) 33, 42–43, 55, 105, 109,
114–17, 121–22, 125, 165, 170
(n. 144), 181, 188, 190–91, 195–97,
199–200, 202–09, 218, 239, 262,
268
œil, l’ (eye) see yeux
Olin, Margaret 14 (n. 31), 15 (n. 41)
OMS (Organisation mondiale de la
santé) see WHO
ontology 2, 38, 83 (n. 107), 85–86, 106
orteil, l’ (toe) 45–47, 49, 99, 212, 246
see also pied
painting 5, 10, 12, 30, 36, 171 (n. 146),
225–33, 271, 275, 284, 291
see also artistry, cinema, film, photog-
raphy and screen
paradox 22, 33, 39, 48, 97–98, 106, 112,
135, 138, 142, 147, 150–51, 165, 170
(n. 145), 186, 189, 273, 277–78, 291
Paterson, Mark 2, 17–22, 24, 29–30, 37,
41, 43–44, 51, 56, 59, 65, 88–89,
103–04, 111, 116–18, 125, 130,
140–41, 146, 161, 170, 185, 189
(n. 10), 192–93, 199–200, 209,
212 (n. 71), 214, 220, 241, 246,
276–79, 281, 291–92
PHANToM (Personal Haptic Inter-
face Mechanism) 19–20, 276
Telematic Dreaming 21–22, 276
see also perception
Paulson, William 241 (n. 134), 243
perception
auditory 24, 67, 70–71, 78–79, 80,
88, 98–99, 103, 112, 131–33, 135,
175, 179, 215, 218, 224, 233, 236–37,
240, 273, 274 (n. 202), 281
cutaneous 17–18, 20, 22, 108, 111, 127,
130, 132–34, 136–37, 139–40, 142,
305
145–46, 148–50, 154–57, 163–66,
175–76, 179, 199, 233, 237, 280–81
see also perception/tactile and skin
gustatory 45, 69, 98 (n. 140), 103,
112, 135, 237, 273, 274 (n. 202), 281
kinaesthetic 13, 17–18, 25, 64, 111,
140, 158 (n. 115), 175, 199, 214, 241
(n. 134), 276, 281
olfactory 18, 42, 68, 77, 112, 179, 224,
273, 274 (n. 202), 281
proprioceptive 17–18, 30, 33, 37, 39,
41, 43, 46, 69, 82, 85, 88–89,
96–100, 103, 111, 140–41, 146,
149, 151, 199–200, 204, 209, 212,
214–15, 228, 240–41, 243, 246,
265, 272–73, 276, 278, 281, 285,
291–92
tactile see main, doigt, pied, orteil,
perception/cutaneous and skin
vestibular 17–18, 25, 140, 199, 276, 281
visual see yeux
phénoménologie, la (phenomenology)
3 (n. 3), 15–16, 18–19, 30, 106,
190–91 (n. 13)
philosophy 2, 18–19, 22, 33, 35–39, 52,
54–58, 61 (n. 57), 73, 90, 92,
100–01, 103, 126, 172, 178, 186,
189, 196, 199, 202, 205, 207, 214,
217, 219, 239 (n. 130), 241 (n. 134),
264–65, 270, 276–77, 279–80,
291–93
photography 12, 27, 30
see also artistry, cinema, film, painting
and screen
pied, le (foot) 19, 46–47, 96, 138, 164,
174, 206, 211–12, 222
see also orteil and perception/tactile
poetry 109, 113, 181, 183, 202, 235 (n. 121)
potentiality 42, 49, 51, 95, 99, 101, 107,
112, 114, 120 (n. 30), 122, 132–33,
141, 143, 158, 170–73, 174 (n. 50),
306
176–77, 180–82, 186, 192 (n. 17),
193, 210–11, 214, 218, 220–21,
230–31, 234, 238, 240, 242, 245,
247, 252, 254–55, 257, 259 (n. 168),
260, 267, 273–75, 280, 288, 293
Préli, Georges 173 (n. 151)
projection 12, 17, 19, 21–22, 29–30, 51,
79–80, 111, 142–43, 148, 153–54,
156–57, 163, 195, 208–09, 230–31,
233, 250–53, 257, 259–60, 275, 291
proximity 4–5, 7, 14, 19–22, 32, 34, 42,
61, 70–71, 77, 80, 89, 102, 107,
114–15, 118–20, 124, 126 (n. 46),
128 (n. 51), 139, 142–43, 147–49,
150–52, 156, 162–64, 167, 170,
200, 208–09, 218, 223, 227, 238,
242, 249, 250, 253, 257, 272,
275–77, 278, 288–89
rapport, le 28, 53, 65, 115, 126, 141–42, 169
(n. 142), 170, 195, 197, 204, 234
(n. 120), 254, 263, 268, 274
rationalism 26–27, 30, 39, 43, 57, 58
(n. 48), 73, 97, 100–01, 107, 119,
122, 133, 135–37, 140–41, 166, 171,
186, 235
Ravel, Emmanuelle 115, 116 (n. 18, n. 20),
170 (n. 144), 177 (n. 161),
182 (n. 170)
repulsion 61, 77–78, 83, 95, 154
rhythm 18, 83, 95–99, 101–02, 132, 134,
211–12, 240 (n. 132), 242–43, 245,
247, 264
Riegl, Aloïs 2–13, 14 (n. 31), 15–17,
19–24, 29–31, 41–44, 48 (n. 17),
54, 55 (n. 40), 63, 65, 88, 102,
111–12, 114, 116, 118–19, 125, 130,
142–43, 154–56, 158, 161, 164,
170, 171 (n. 146), 185, 188, 192–93,
199–200, 209, 217, 220, 224, 227,
270, 275–76, 281, 291–92
Index
Kunstwollen, das 16–17 (n. 46)
objectivism 4–8, 22–23, 111
Reiz, das 7 (n. 12), 8 (n. 14), 24 (n. 61)
subjectivism 4–8
science 35–37, 52–56, 73, 122, 133 (n. 58),
193–96, 202–03, 205, 209–10,
214–16, 219–20, 222–23, 239,
241 (n. 134), 248, 253, 267–69,
271–72, 278
screen 12, 21, 154, 156–57, 163, 227
(n. 102), 249–50
see also internet
sensation see perception
sensuality 5, 51, 64, 68, 70, 72 (n. 77),
75, 77–81, 84–87, 94–95, 97, 147,
153–54, 186
Serres, Michel vii, 1–3, 23, 35–39, 182–83,
185–293
algorithme, l’ (algorithm), impor-
tance of 239 (n. 130), 279
Arlequin (Harlequin), skin of 37,
266–67
Balzac, Honoré de, influence
of 228–30
Bonnard, Pierre, discussion of paint-
ings by 36, 225–33, 271, 284
Brillouin, Léon, influence of 190
corps troisième, le (the third body, the
body between) 214, 266, 287–88
football 37, 208–09, 240
haptonomie, l’ (haptonomy)
206–07, 214, 288
hornet sting 36, 236–38, 270–71
hylomorphism, Aristotelian concept
of 218
image, l’ 188, 195, 217, 225–26,
228–30, 237, 250, 252, 264, 266,
268, 273, 275, 281, 286, 289, 292
interception 188, 193, 267–68, 273,
288
Index
interdisciplinary approach of 36, 187,
194, 201–02, 215–16, 219, 222, 230,
235, 266, 269, 274, 283, 290
interférence, l’ 189, 194
Latour, Bruno, interviews with 36,
187, 202, 215
Lucrèce (Lucretius), influence of 201,
217, 224, 262 (n. 178), 269–70,
293
Polacco, Michel, radio show with
36, 206–07
quasi-objet, le (quasi-object) 204–06,
208–09, 255, 257, 259 (n. 168),
273, 289
quasi-point, le (virtual sensory
node) 191, 268
réseau, le (sensory or information
network) 187, 190–91, 204, 218,
268
rugby 38, 204, 205 (n. 53), 208–09,
240, 254, 255–60, 272–73, 280,
289
tribologie, la (tribology) 213–14, 288
troisième objet, le (object of the third
kind) 197
sexuality 32, 51, 53, 58, 60, 63–74, 75–81,
83–89, 92, 95–98, 102, 103
(n. 147), 130, 135, 138, 149–50,
169, 242
see also gender
shivering 81–83, 85–86, 89, 92, 94, 147,
243–45, 255–59, 273
simulacrum 115–16, 200–01, 216–17,
219–21, 224, 226–28, 230–34, 239,
266–67, 269, 275, 283,
287, 293
skin 13, 17–18, 29, 32, 46–48, 52, 64,
66–70, 77–82, 84, 86–88, 95–98,
112, 130–31, 136–37, 140, 143–45,
150, 153–54, 157, 159, 161, 163–66,
192 (n. 18), 200–01, 213–14, 217,
307
224–29, 231–40,
255, 265–67, 269, 273, 284,
286–87, 289
see also perception/cutaneous
smell see perception/olfactory
society 3 (n. 3), 11, 15, 21, 27, 29, 35, 37–39,
43, 47, 55, 66–70, 78 (n. 98),
90, 98–99, 104, 106, 125, 160,
192 (n. 17), 193, 195, 204 (n. 52),
205–06, 213, 223, 234, 239, 255,
259–60, 262–63, 265–66, 269,
274, 279, 281, 284–87, 291
speech see language/spoken
Starobinski, Jean 135 (n. 61), 137 (n. 64),
163 (n. 124)
Steinmetz, Jean-Luc 73 (n. 81)
subjectivity 5 (n. 8), 6 (n. 11), 7, 8, 111,
119, 122, 126, 155–56, 195–96, 205,
210, 214, 216, 218, 223, 237, 248,
262–63, 269, 290
Surya, Michel 49 (n. 23), 50 (n. 24), 83
(n. 107)
swimming 37, 96–97, 99, 129–33,
135–38, 140, 145, 147, 150, 160, 169
(n. 139), 240–47, 264–65, 272
synaesthesia 25, 112, 264 (n. 181)
taste see perception/gustative
tears 53, 62–64, 69, 72–73, 86–88,
91–92, 148–49
temporality 8, 16, 20, 27–28, 30, 36, 64, 85,
99, 108–10, 114–17, 119–21, 123–24,
141, 144, 147, 150, 152–53, 155–56,
158, 177, 179, 185–87, 191–92,
196–98, 200, 203, 219 (n. 89), 220,
224, 229, 243, 245, 247–48, 250,
254, 256, 262–64, 268–69, 275,
281–82, 289, 293
theatre 98, 186, 252–53, 254, 259, 260,
266
toe see orteil
308
topology 193, 195–96, 199, 201–02, 215,
218–19, 230, 239–40, 247 (n. 143),
256
transcendence 2, 20, 22, 26, 28, 32, 34–35,
46, 66, 69, 70, 83–85, 89–90, 92,
96 (n. 135), 98, 126, 161–62, 178,
189, 192–94, 211–13, 216, 227,
256–57, 259 (n. 168), 272–73, 282,
291, 293
Tucker, Ian 191–92 (n. 17), 203 (n. 49),
211 (n. 68), 221, 237 (n. 127)
violence 32, 37–38, 63–65, 71–73, 82, 89,
96 (n. 135), 98–99, 102, 134, 149,
151, 162, 179, 213, 244, 248–53,
262–66, 272, 285, 289
virtual, the 19–22, 25–28, 36–38, 50, 140,
186, 191, 192 (n. 17), 193, 202, 204,
206, 208, 210–11, 216–17, 220–21,
225, 227, 234, 238, 249, 252, 256,
Index
258–64, 266 (n. 185), 268–69,
272–77, 281, 283, 287–89, 291–92
walking 46, 76, 82, 88, 94–96, 146, 164,
175, 212, 246, 274
Webb, David 196 (n. 27), 271
WHO (World Health Organisation) 38,
261, 273
writing see language/inscription
yeux, les (eyes) 4–7, 11, 14 (n. 31), 18,
26, 34, 42, 44, 48–51, 53, 71–75,
77–78, 86–89, 91–93, 95, 98,
130–31, 134, 138, 140–44, 147–50,
165–66, 168, 171, 173, 176, 177
(n. 161), 195, 200, 217, 227, 235,
239, 242, 250–51, 265, 269, 275,
279, 286, 291
see also irises, perception/kinaesthetic
and perception/proprioceptive
Modern French Identities
Edited by Peter Collier

This series aims to publish monographs, editions or collections of

papers based on recent research into modern French Literature. It
welcomes contributions from academics, researchers and writers in
British and Irish universities in particular.
Modern French Identities focuses on the French and Francophone
writing of the twentieth century, whose formal experiments and
revisions of genre have combined to create an entirely new set of
literary forms, from the thematic autobiographies of Michel Leiris and
Bernard Noël to the magic realism of French Caribbean writers.
The idea that identities are constructed rather than found, and
that the self is an area to explore rather than a given pretext, runs
through much of modern French literature, from Proust, Gide and
Apollinaire to Kristeva, Barthes, Duras, Germain and Roubaud.
This series reflects a concern to explore the turn-of-the-
century turmoil in ideas and values that is expressed in the works of
theorists like Lacan, Irigaray and Bourdieu and to follow through the
impact of current ideologies such as feminism and postmodernism on
the literary and cultural interpretation and presentation of the self,
whether in terms of psychoanalytic theory, gender, autobiography,
cinema, fiction and poetry, or in newer forms like performance art.
The series publishes studies of individual authors and artists,
comparative studies, and interdisciplinary projects, including those
where art and cinema intersect with literature.

Volume 1 Victoria Best & Peter Collier (eds): Powerful Bodies.

Performance in French Cultural Studies.
220 pages. 1999. ISBN 3-906762-56-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4239-9
Volume 2 Julia Waters: Intersexual Rivalry.
A ‘Reading in Pairs’ of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
228 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906763-74-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4626-2
Volume 3 Sarah Cooper: Relating to Queer Theory.
Rereading Sexual Self-Definition with Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig
and Cixous.
231 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906764-46-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-4636-X
Volume 4 Julia Prest & Hannah Thompson (eds): Corporeal Practices.
(Re)figuring the Body in French Studies.
166 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906764-53-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4639-4
Volume 5 Victoria Best: Critical Subjectivities.
Identity and Narrative in the Work
of Colette and Marguerite Duras.
243 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906763-89-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4631-9
Volume 6 David Houston Jones: The Body Abject: Self and Text in
Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett.
213 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906765-07-5 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5058-8
Volume 7 Robin MacKenzie: The Unconscious in Proust’s A la recherche
du temps perdu.
270 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906758-38-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5070-7
Volume 8 Rosemary Chapman: Siting the Quebec Novel.
The Representation of Space in Francophone Writing in Quebec.
282 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906758-85-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5090-1
Volume 9 Gill Rye: Reading for Change.
Interactions between Text Identity in Contemporary French
Women’s Writing (Baroche, Cixous, Constant).
223 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906765-97-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5315-3
Volume 10 Jonathan Paul Murphy: Proust’s Art.
Painting, Sculpture and Writing in A la recherche du temps perdu.
248 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906766-17-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5319-6
Volume 11 Julia Dobson: Hélène Cixous and the Theatre.
The Scene of Writing.
166 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906766-20-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5322-6
Volume 12 Emily Butterworth & Kathryn Robson (eds): Shifting Borders.
Theory and Identity in French Literature.
VIII + 208 pages. 2001.
ISBN 3-906766-86-1 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5602-0
Volume 13 Victoria Korzeniowska: The Heroine as Social Redeemer in
the Plays of Jean Giraudoux.
144 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906766-92-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5608-X
Volume 14 Kay Chadwick: Alphonse de Châteaubriant:
Catholic Collaborator.
327 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906766-94-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5610-1
Volume 15 Nina Bastin: Queneau’s Fictional Worlds.
291 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906768-32-5 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5620-9
Volume 16 Sarah Fishwick: The Body in the Work of Simone de Beauvoir.
284 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906768-33-3 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5621-7
Volume 17 Simon Kemp & Libby Saxton (eds): Seeing Things.
Vision, Perception and Interpretation in French Studies.
287 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906768-46-5 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5858-9
Volume 18 Kamal Salhi (ed.): French in and out of France.
Language Policies, Intercultural Antagonisms and Dialogue.
487 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906768-47-3 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5859-7
Volume 19 Genevieve Shepherd: Simone de Beauvoir’s Fiction.
A Psychoanalytic Rereading.
262 pages. 2003. ISBN 3-906768-55-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5867-8
Volume 20 Lucille Cairns (ed.): Gay and Lesbian Cultures in France.
290 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906769-66-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5903-8
Volume 21 Wendy Goolcharan-Kumeta: My Mother, My Country.
Reconstructing the Female Self in Guadeloupean Women’s Writing.
236 pages. 2003. ISBN 3-906769-76-3 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5913-5
Volume 22 Patricia O’Flaherty: Henry de Montherlant (1895–1972).
A Philosophy of Failure.
256 pages. 2003. ISBN 3-03910-013-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6282-9
Volume 23 Katherine Ashley (ed.): Prix Goncourt, 1903–2003: essais critiques.
205 pages. 2004. ISBN 3-03910-018-1 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6287-X
Volume 24 Julia Horn & Lynsey Russell-Watts (eds): Possessions.
Essays in French Literature, Cinema and Theory.
223 pages. 2003. ISBN 3-03910-005-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-5924-0
Volume 25 Steve Wharton: Screening Reality.
French Documentary Film during the German Occupation.
252 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-066-1 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6882-7
Volume 26 Frédéric Royall (ed.): Contemporary French Cultures and Societies.
421 pages. 2004. ISBN 3-03910-074-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6890-8
Volume 27 Tom Genrich: Authentic Fictions.
Cosmopolitan Writing of the Troisième République, 1908–1940.
288 pages. 2004. ISBN 3-03910-285-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7212-3
Volume 28 Maeve Conrick & Vera Regan: French in Canada.
Language Issues.
186 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03-910142-9
Volume 29 Kathryn Banks & Joseph Harris (eds): Exposure.
Revealing Bodies, Unveiling Representations.
194 pages. 2004. ISBN 3-03910-163-3 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6973-4
Volume 30 Emma Gilby & Katja Haustein (eds): Space.
New Dimensions in French Studies.
169 pages. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-178-1 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6988-2
Volume 31 Rachel Killick (ed.): Uncertain Relations.
Some Configurations of the ‘Third Space’ in Francophone Writings
of the Americas and of Europe.
258 pages. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-189-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6999-8
Volume 32 Sarah F. Donachie & Kim Harrison (eds): Love and Sexuality.
New Approaches in French Studies.
194 pages. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-249-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7178-X
Volume 33 Michaël Abecassis: The Representation of Parisian Speech in
the Cinema of the 1930s.
409 pages. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-260-5 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7189-5
Volume 34 Benedict O’Donohoe: Sartre’s Theatre: Acts for Life.
301 pages. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-250-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-7207-7
Volume 35 Moya Longstaffe: The Fiction of Albert Camus. A Complex Simplicity.
300 pages. 2007. ISBN 3-03910-304-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7229-8
Volume 36 Arnaud Beaujeu: Matière et lumière dans le théâtre de Samuel Beckett:
Autour des notions de trivialité, de spiritualité et d’« autre-là ».
377 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0206-8
Volume 37 Shirley Ann Jordan: Contemporary French Women’s Writing:
Women’s Visions, Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives.
308 pages. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-315-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7240-9
Volume 38 Neil Foxlee: Albert Camus’s ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’:
A Text and its Contexts.
349 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0207-4
Volume 39 Michael O’Dwyer & Michèle Raclot: Le Journal de Julien Green:
Miroir d’une âme, miroir d’un siècle.
289 pages. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-319-9
Volume 40 Thomas Baldwin: The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust.
188 pages. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-323-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7247-6
Volume 41 Charles Forsdick & Andrew Stafford (eds): The Modern Essay
in French: Genre, Sociology, Performance.
296 pages. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-514-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7520-3
Volume 42 Peter Dunwoodie: Francophone Writing in Transition.
Algeria 1900–1945.
339 pages. 2005. ISBN 3-03910-294-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-7220-4
Volume 43 Emma Webb (ed.): Marie Cardinal: New Perspectives.
260 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-544-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7547-5
Volume 44 Jérôme Game (ed.): Porous Boundaries: Texts and Images in
Twentieth-Century French Culture.
164 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-568-7
Volume 45 David Gascoigne: The Games of Fiction: Georges Perec and Modern
French Ludic Narrative.
327 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-697-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-7962-4
Volume 46 Derek O’Regan: Postcolonial Echoes and Evocations:
The Intertextual Appeal of Maryse Condé.
329 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-578-7
Volume 47 Jennifer Hatte: La langue secrète de Jean Cocteau: la mythologie
personnelle du poète et l’histoire cachée des Enfants terribles.
332 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-707-0
Volume 48 Loraine Day: Writing Shame and Desire: The Work of Annie Ernaux.
315 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-275-4
Volume 49 John Flower (éd.): François Mauriac, journaliste: les vingt premières
années, 1905–1925.
352 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0265-4
Volume 50 Miriam Heywood: Modernist Visions: Marcel Proust’s A la recherche
du temps perdu and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma.
277 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0296-8
Volume 51 Isabelle McNeill & Bradley Stephens (eds): Transmissions:
Essays in French Literature, Thought and Cinema.
221 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-734-6
Volume 52 Marie-Christine Lala: Georges Bataille, Poète du réel.
178 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03910-738-4
Volume 53 Patrick Crowley: Pierre Michon: The Afterlife of Names.
242 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-744-5
Volume 54 Nicole Thatcher & Ethel Tolansky (eds): Six Authors in Captivity.
Literary Responses to the Occupation of France during World War II.
205 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-520-5 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7526-2
Volume 55 Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze & Floriane Place-Verghnes (eds):
Poétiques de la parodie et du pastiche de 1850 à nos jours.
361 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-743-7
Volume 56 Thanh-Vân Ton-That: Proust avant la Recherche: jeunesse et genèse
d’une écriture au tournant du siècle.
285 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0277-7
Volume 57 Helen Vassallo: Jeanne Hyvrard, Wounded Witness:
The Body Politic and the Illness Narrative.
243 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-017-9
Volume 58 Marie-Claire Barnet, Eric Robertson and Nigel Saint (eds):
Robert Desnos. Surrealism in the Twenty-First Century.
390 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03911-019-5
Volume 59 Michael O’Dwyer (ed.): Julien Green, Diariste et Essayiste.
259 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-016-2
Volume 60 Kate Marsh: Fictions of 1947: Representations of Indian
Decolonization 1919–1962.
238 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-033-9
Volume 61 Lucy Bolton, Gerri Kimber, Ann Lewis and Michael Seabrook (eds):
Framed!: Essays in French Studies.
235 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-043-8
Volume 62 Lorna Milne and Mary Orr (eds): Narratives of French Modernity:
Themes, Forms and Metamorphoses. Essays in Honour of David
Gascoigne.
365 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-051-3
Volume 63 Ann Kennedy Smith: Painted Poetry: Colour in Baudelaire’s
Art Criticism.
253 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-094-0
Volume 64 Sam Coombes: The Early Sartre and Marxism.
330 pages. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-115-2
Volume 65 Claire Lozier: De l’abject et du sublime: Georges Bataille, Jean Genet,
Samuel Beckett.
327 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0724-6
Volume 66 Charles Forsdick and Andy Stafford (eds): La Revue: The Twentieth-
Century Periodical in French.
379 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-03910-947-0
Volume 67 Alison S. Fell (ed.): French and francophone women facing war /
Les femmes face à la guerre.
301 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-332-3
Volume 68 Elizabeth Lindley and Laura McMahon (eds):
Rhythms: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture.
238 pages. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-349-1
Volume 69 Georgina Evans and Adam Kay (eds): Threat: Essays in French
Literature, Thought and Visual Culture.
248 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-357-6
Volume 70 John McCann: Michel Houellebecq: Author of our Times.
229 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-373-6
Volume 71 Jenny Murray: Remembering the (Post)Colonial Self:
Memory and Identity in the Novels of Assia Djebar.
258 pages. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-367-5
Volume 72 Susan Bainbrigge: Culture and Identity in Belgian Francophone
Writing: Dialogue, Diversity and Displacement.
230 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-382-8
Volume 73 Maggie Allison and Angela Kershaw (eds): Parcours de femmes:
Twenty Years of Women in French.
313 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0208-1
Volume 74 Jérôme Game: Poetic Becomings: Studies in Contemporary French
Literature.
263 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-401-6
Volume 75 Elodie Laügt: L’Orient du signe: Rêves et dérives chez Victor Segalen,
Henri Michaux et Emile Cioran.
242 pages. 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-402-3
Volume 76 Suzanne Dow: Madness in Twentieth-Century French Women’s
Writing: Leduc, Duras, Beauvoir, Cardinal, Hyvrard.
217 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-540-2
Volume 77 Myriem El Maïzi: Marguerite Duras ou l’écriture du devenir.
228 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-561-7
Volume 78 Claire Launchbury: Music, Poetry, Propaganda: Constructing French
Cultural Soundscapes at the BBC during the Second World War.
223 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0239-5
Volume 79 Jenny Chamarette and Jennifer Higgins (eds): Guilt and Shame:
Essays in French Literature, Thought and Visual Culture.
231 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-563-1
Volume 80 Vera Regan and Caitríona Ní Chasaide (eds): Language Practices
and Identity Construction by Multilingual Speakers of French L2:
The Acquisition of Sociostylistic Variation.
189 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-569-3
Volume 81 Margaret-Anne Hutton (ed.): Redefining the Real: The Fantastic in
Contemporary French and Francophone Women’s Writing.
294 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-567-9
Volume 82 Elise Hugueny-Léger: Annie Ernaux, une poétique de la
transgression.
269 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-833-5
Volume 83 Peter Collier, Anna Magdalena Elsner and Olga Smith (eds):
Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture.
359 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-846-5
Volume 84 Adam Watt (ed./éd.): Le Temps retrouvé Eighty Years After/80 ans
après: Critical Essays/Essais critiques.
349 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-843-4
Volume 85 Louise Hardwick (ed.): New Approaches to Crime in French
Literature, Culture and Film.
237 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-850-2
Volume 86 Emmanuel Godin and Natalya Vince (eds): France and the
Mediterranean: International Relations, Culture and Politics.
372 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0228-9
Volume 87 Amaleena Damlé and Aurélie L’Hostis (eds): The Beautiful and the
Monstrous: Essays in French Literature, Thought and Culture.
237 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-900-4
Volume 88 Alistair Rolls (ed.): Mostly French: French (in) Detective Fiction.
212 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-957-8
Volume 89 Bérénice Bonhomme: Claude Simon: une écriture en cinéma.
359 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-983-7
Volume 90 Barbara Lebrun and Jill Lovecy (eds): Une et divisible? Plural Identities
in Modern France.
258 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0123-7
Volume 91 Pierre-Alexis Mével & Helen Tattam (eds): Language and its Contexts/
  Le Langage et ses contextes: Transposition and Transformation of
Meaning?/ Transposition et transformation du sens ?
272 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0128-2
Volume 92 Alistair Rolls and Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan (eds): Masking
Strategies: Unwrapping the French Paratext.
202 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0746-8
Volume 93 Michaël Abecassis et Gudrun Ledegen (éds): Les Voix des Français
Volume 1: à travers l’histoire, l’école et la presse.
372 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0170-1
Volume 94 Michaël Abecassis et Gudrun Ledegen (éds): Les Voix des Français
Volume 2: en parlant, en écrivant.
481 pages. 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0171-8
Volume 95 Manon Mathias, Maria O’Sullivan and Ruth Vorstman (eds): Display
and Disguise.
237 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0177-0
Volume 96 Charlotte Baker: Enduring Negativity: Representations of Albinism in
the Novels of Didier Destremau, Patrick Grainville and Williams Sassine.
226 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0179-4
Volume 97 Florian Grandena and Cristina Johnston (eds): New Queer Images:
Representations of Homosexualities in Contemporary Francophone
Visual Cultures.
246 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0182-4
Volume 98 Florian Grandena and Cristina Johnston (eds): Cinematic Queerness:
Gay and Lesbian Hypervisibility in Contemporary Francophone
Feature Films.
354 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0183-1
Volume 99 Neil Archer and Andreea Weisl-Shaw (eds): Adaptation: Studies in
French and Francophone Culture.
234 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0222-7
Volume 100 Peter Collier et Ilda Tomas (éds): Béatrice Bonhomme: le mot, la
mort, l’amour.
437 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0780-2
Volume 101 Helena Chadderton: Marie Darrieussecq’s Textual Worlds: Self,
Society, Language.
170 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0766-6
Volume 102 Manuel Bragança: La crise allemande du roman français, 1945–1949:
la représentation des Allemands dans les best-sellers de l’immédiat
après-guerre.
220 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0835-9
Volume 103 Bronwen Martin: The Fiction of J. M. G. Le Clézio: A Postcolonial
Reading.
199 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0162-6
Volume 104 Hugues Azérad, Michael G. Kelly, Nina Parish et Emma Wagstaff (éds):
Chantiers du poème: prémisses et pratiques de la création poétique
moderne et contemporaine.
374 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0800-7
Volume 105 Franck Dalmas: Lectures phénoménologiques en littérature française:
de Gustave Flaubert à Malika Mokeddem.
253 pages. 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0727-7
Volume 106 Béatrice Bonhomme, Aude Préta-de Beaufort et Jacques Moulin (éds):
Dans le feuilletage de la terre: sur l’œuvre poétique de Marie-Claire
Bancquart.
533 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0721-5
Volume 107 Claire Bisdorff et Marie-Christine Clemente (éds): Le Cœur dans tous
ses états: essais sur la littérature et l’art français.
230 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0711-6
Volume 108 Michaël Abecassis et Gudrun Ledegen (éds): Écarts et apports des
médias francophones: lexique et grammaire.
300 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0882-3
Volume 109 Maggie Allison and Imogen Long (eds): Women Matter / Femmes
Matière: French and Francophone Women and the Material World.
273 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0788-8
Volume 110 Fabien Arribert-Narce et Alain Ausoni (éds): L’Autobiographie entre
autres: écrire la vie aujourd’hui.
221 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0858-8
Volume 111 Leona Archer and Alex Stuart (eds): Visions of Apocalypse:
Representations of the End in French Literature and Culture.
266 pages. 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0921-9
Volume 112 Simona Cutcan: Subversion ou conformisme? La différence des sexes
dans l’œuvre d’Agota Kristof.
264 pages. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-1713-9
Volume 113 Owen Heathcote: From Bad Boys to New Men? Masculinity, Sexuality
and Violence in the Work of Éric Jourdan.
279 pages. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-0736-9
Volume 114 Ilda Tomas: Arc-en-ciel: études sur divers poètes.
234 pages. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-0975-2
Volume 115 Lisa Jeschke and Adrian May (eds): Matters of Time: Material
Temporalities in Twentieth-Century French Culture.
314 pages. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-1796-2
Volume 116 Crispin T. Lee: Haptic Experience in the Writings of Georges Bataille,
Maurice Blanchot and Michel Serres.
316 pages. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-1791-7