So Close: Writing That Touches

Abstract

In a culture pervaded by a ‘law of tact’ (Derrida, 2005: 66), this paper presents a theory of ‘tactile poetics’ – writing that touches. Reading So Close (2009) by Hélène Cixous, I consider the reciprocal relationship between touch and feeling and the ways that writing can perform contact. Outlining the history of touch and its relationship to language, the essay examines the literary texture of Cixous's poetics, drawing on theoretical work by Renu Bora and Jacques Derrida in order to formulate a theory of writing that ‘in its essence touches upon the body’ (Nancy, 2008a: 11). Suggesting ways that writing can touch without tampering, I invite you to open up your own poetics to new textures of writing.

Keywords:

• Hélène Cixous
• Jacques Derrida
• Jean-Luc Nancy
• poetics
• touch
• texture

Notes

1. Note that the title of this text, translated from the French Si près, is haunted by the name of the cypress tree (cyprés). According to translator Peggy Kamuf, ‘these homonyms provide a principal key to the fiction’ (163). My thanks to Éditions Galilée and Polity Press for granting permission to cite extracts from the English translation of Hélène Cixous's Si prés (© Éditions Galilée, 2007). The English edition is translated by Peggy Kamuf as So Close (© Polity Press, 2009).

2. These distinctions, Bora explains later, are related to Deleuze and Guattari's definitions of ‘smooth’ (or haptic) and ‘striated space’. In A Thousand Plateaus (2004), Deleuze and Guattari take the terms ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ from the composer Pierre Boulez, who used them to describe differences in musical space (525). Whereas smooth space is characterised by the texture of felt – it is unlimited in every direction – striated space is characterised by a woven fabric, delimited on at least one side (539). In practice, connections and passages exist between these oppositions (532).

3. See McQuillan (2009) for an account of Jean-Luc Nancy's translation of Christ's prohibition as ‘Do not hold me back’ (Nancy, 2008b: 15). See also Jackson, 2010: 188–189.