Sophie Laniel-Musitelli (Lille): “Feeling one’s Way towards Expanded Modes of Vision: The Poetics of Contact in Romantic Literature”

What happens to Romantic vision when touch reasserts itself in the writing process? In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the modern sciences which gradually emerged out of the wider field of natural philosophy developed new methods to apprehend their objects through direct contact, from anatomical casts to the study of fossil imprints. How does Romantic literature’s confrontation with emerging life and physical sciences enhance its tropism towards tactility? The Romantics turned to the aesthetic potentialities of direct contact in order to extend and diffuse creative vision to the whole body, but also to imaginatively reach beyond the human senses. Touch being the most widely shared sense across the living world, that attentiveness to contact opened Romantic writing to nonhuman modes of sensation. That tropism towards contact also allowed Romantic writers to explore the sensitivities of matter itself, from the acuity of experimental devices to the impressionability of photosensitive surfaces.

Derrida in his On Touch baptized Nancy as the “first great thinker of touch” while reading all of his opus as a progressive development of a philosophy of touch, up until then one of the most disregarded senses in philosophy. To which Nancy peculiarly replied with his own book entitled Noli Me Tangere – “Do not touch me” – making explicit what was only implicit in his previous works. Thus, the lecture will explore Nancy’s philosophy of touch and the body as developed from Corpus to Noli Me Tangere – from his first, novel experimental conception of the body to an attempt of grasping the elusive object of touch – by employing haptolinguistics, a specific post-structuralist methodological approach that focuses on the intersection between touch and language. The theoretical bet underneath this attempt is that touch can be identified as a moment of the Real, where language as the Symbolic breaks, and the Imaginary corporeity dissolves.

Since the Tate’s 1981 exhibition Sculpture for the Blind, there have been a number of ‘tactile’ exhibitions by major galleries that seek to engage blind and partially-blind audiences, and sculptural work has often been to the fore of these multi-sensory exhibitions. However, when curated by sighted curators (as was the case with the Tate’s show) the engagement afforded has often considered touch a 'compensatory' sense—a substitution for visual experience—or, at best, a 'retrieval' of the artist's creative processes, hence an essentially passive role. By contrast, I want to claim that a consideration of ‘expanded’ sculptural practices, including those by blind and partially-blind artists, not only confronts this notion of 'substitution', but raises wider problems for established ocularcentric accounts of the ontology of contemporary art, and particularly sculpture. This is no more manifest than in the durational shift such work requires when experienced primarily through touch, the opposite of Michael Fried’s notion of ‘instantaneousness’.

Liliane Campos (Sorbonne Nouvelle): “Grasping Extinction: The Natural History Museum as Haptic Space in the Work of Gillian Clarke, Jane Robinson and Kathleen Jamie”

This paper will examine depictions of natural history museums in a selection of poems and essays drawn from Gillian Clarke’s Zoology, Jane Robinson’s Journey to the Sleeping Whale and Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines. These texts present the museum as a place in which we confront extinction through conflicting emotions, perceiving it as a space of care built on acts of violence, where presence here is conditioned by absence elsewhere. Contradictory emotions are negotiated not only through the gaze, but through a poetics of touching, gripping and holding. This haptic relation to the bones or bodies of dead animals raises questions that are both ethical and epistemological. We can approach touch, as Donna Haraway does in When Species Meet, as an action that 'ramifies and shapes accountability': the museum bears witness to complex agencies, to the hunter’s blow as well as the conservationist’s touch. But the ambivalent gestures explored by these poets also foreground the desire and difficulty of grasping extinction. My analysis explores how physical prehension, real or imagined, contributes to attempts at mental prehension.

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