Mois : mai 2025

21 mai 2025 de 17h à 19h. Cliquez ici pour vous inscrire.

It might not seem obvious to address the sense of touch as a critical sense. In Touching Feeling (2002), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick significantly reconsidered the place of touch in literary criticism by reorienting hermeneutics towards the phenomenology of affect. Conflating “hapticality” with the “capacity to feel though others” (Moten and Harney, 2013) comes, however, with its own political discontents. In this talk, I propose to define counterhapticality as the ability of literature and the arts to rehearse and resist the interpellations of touch. The feeling subject can articulate a right to touch and not to be touched as a response to social and sexual violence. Beyond the tactile experiences represented in literary texts, these precarious haptic rights may be extended to the politics of representation itself. After reflecting on the political repurposing of haptics in aesthetic discourse, I will first attempt to understand counterhapticality in the wake of Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s concept of “counter-interpellation” (1994) and Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of “countervisuality” (2011). Then, I will concentrate on modernism’s vexed relation to the sense of touch, focusing on scenes of invasion and discrimination in José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, Jean Rhys’s After Leaving Mr Mckenzie, and Nella Larsen’s Passing. The representation of tactile violence alerts us to the “persistence of realism” in modernist aesthetics (Paul Stasi, 2022) but also suggests modernism’s re-mediation of realism’s claim to tactile reality. In suspending its relation to the real, modernist fiction not only registered but generated haptic trouble.

Olivier Hercend (Université Paris Nanterre) will be respondent.