Cinema and Contact

The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis

Laura McMahon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351571869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Drawing on the work of contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, Cinema and Contact investigates the aesthe-tics and politics of touch in the cinema of three of the most prominent and distinctive filmmakers to have emerged in France during the last fifty years: Robert Bresson, Marguerite Duras and Claire Denis. Countering the domi-nant critical account of touch elaborated by recent models of embodied spectatorship, this book argues that cinema offers a privileged space for understanding touch in terms of spacing and withdrawal rather than immediacy and continuity. Such a deconstructive configuration of touch is shown here to have far-reaching implications, inviting an innovative rethinking of politics, aesthetics and theology via the textures of cinema. The first study to bring the thought of Nancy into sustained dialogue with a series of detailed analyses of films, Cinema and Contact also forges new interpretative perspectives on Bresson, Duras and Denis, tracing a compelling two-way exchange between cinema and philosophy.

CHAPTER 1

Jean-Luc Nancy

Co-Exposure, Technicity, Cinema

But then we must not credit ‘touch’ too quickly or, still less, suppose that we could eventually touch upon the sense of ‘touch’ as a setting of limits for (the) sense(s). (C, 43–45)

Aleksandr Sokurov’s Mother and Son (1997) traces the final stages of a mother’s illness and death, detailing a relation of fraught intimacy between its eponymous couple — a fragile bond articulated via a caress, a carry, an embrace, a kiss. The intense tactility of this relation is mapped onto the texture of their surroundings: rendered in distorted images and vivid, overexposed colours, the film tugs at the textural relief of the landscape and plays with the caressing movement of wind through long grass; as Mikhail Iampolski writes, ‘texture here is rendered as a skin of transformations and transitions.’¹ As Mother and Son intertwines textures and contours of skin, flesh and landscape, existence is explored as that which is tactile, finite, shared and exposed.

This is also how Nancy thinks existence: as the touch between bodies and surfaces, as that which is material, mutual, finite and exposed. In Being Singular Plural, Nancy offers a philosophy of being which is co-extensive with a philosophy of touch. He writes: ‘We are in touch with ourselves insofar as we exist’ (BSP, 13). In order to touch we must exist, in order to exist we must touch. Here, and throughout Nancy’s writings, touch becomes a central figure for articulating this fact of our mutual, shared existence: ‘Being in touch with ourselves is what makes us “us”, and there is no other secret to discover buried behind this very touching, behind the “with” of coexistence’ (BSP, 13). Touch denotes an originary co-existence and co-exposure, the very ‘with’ of our commonality — what Nancy calls being-with [être-avec]. The radical extent of the claim that Nancy makes for touch here must be recognized: there is no other ‘secret’ beyond or behind touch. For Nancy, the figure of touch articulates an ontology of being-with. Yet this touch does not designate a form of contact as fusion, immediacy or continuity between beings. Touch demands to be thought, as Nancy is everywhere careful in his work to emphasize, as interruptive contact, as at once contact and separation. And these points of contact-in-separation belong not to subjects or to encounters between a pre-formed self and other but denote rather a relation, a co-exposure or partage (sharing/division), by way of which singular plural beings come into co-existence:

From one singular to another, there is contiguity but not continuity. There is proximity, but only to the extent that extreme closeness emphasizes the distancing it opens up. All of being is in touch with all of being, but the law of touching is separation; moreover, it is the heterogeneity of surfaces that touch each other. Contact is beyond fullness and emptiness, beyond connection and disconnection. If ‘to come into contact’ is to begin to make sense of one another, then this ‘coming’ penetrates nothing; there is no intermediate and mediating ‘milieu.’ (BSP, 5)

The law of touch is a constitutive spacing; contact denotes contiguity rather than continuity; proximity is perpetually shot through with distance. Here Nancy draws on the figure of speech ‘to come into contact’ in order to enunciate a connection at once corporeal and communicative; both forms of being ‘in touch’, material and signifying, are ways of making sense between bodies, between beings.² Presented to one another as a heterogeneity of surfaces, there is no mediating substance between us — we are exposed to, and in touch with, one another, just as bodies are mutually exposed and in touch in Mother and Son. Yet at the same time, as Nancy is careful to underline here, to come into contact is not to penetrate; this co-exposure is always punctuated by separation, spacing, distance. The touch which occurs here — as existence, sense, signification, contact — is one which takes place as withdrawal. It is this which the final scene of Mother and Son lays bare, as the son caresses the still hand of the dead mother — a moment of contact shot through with an irreducible separation, marking the limit between bodies and the very finitude of co-existence.

In order to probe the implications of Nancy’s tactile ontology of being-with for a consideration of cinema, what follows explores the figure of touch within the context of his writings on philosophy, art and film and in relation to Derrida’s On Touching — Jean-Luc Nancy. This will allow for an elaboration of several key ideas in Nancy’s work — contact, being-with, co-exposure, techné, sense, presentation and the real — which offer a fertile approach for thinking about film, one which invites a reformulation of film spectatorship away from both a phenomenological model of fusion and immediacy and a psychoanalytic dynamic of identification and lack. The syncopated rhythm of interruptive contact articulated by Nancy becomes the site, as Derrida reads it, of both the singular contribution and plural ambiguities of Nancy’s figure of touch. It is via these ambiguities, I suggest, that Nancy’s work becomes vital for thinking the relation between touch and cinema. For, in texts such as Noli me tangere and The Evidence of Film, while Nancy deconstructs, respectively, a Christological faith in presence and a philosophical investment in realism, he continues to address questions which will be central to a consideration of cinema throughout this study: questions of materiality and touch, presentation and contact, the body and the real.

Ontology of Touch: Exposure, Being-with and Film

How does Nancy’s ontology of touch inform his thinking of the body? In Corpus, Nancy identifies a tradition in Western philosophy dating from Aristotle by which the body has been thought predominantly in terms of substance. The definition of substantia (Aristotle’s upokeimenon) is that which is literally sub or under something. It denotes a form of closure and self-identity, for substance cannot belong to anything other than itself.³ Nancy wishes to move away from this traditional notion of the body as substance and to think it rather in terms of exposure: ‘The body is a thing of exposition. It’s not just that the body is exposed but that the body consists in being exposed. A body is being exposed’ (C, 124). To be a body is to be exposed; without this exposure there would be no body. Whilst to consider the body as substance is to think in terms of interiority and depth, to configure the body as exposure is to think in terms of exteriority and surface.

Nancy’s thinking of the body is radical. As Derrida notes, this logic of ‘ex’ — of exteriority and exposure — is an exorbitant one (T, 26). For it demands that we consider the body in terms of an originary outside. For Nancy, touch acts as a central figure for this perpetual state of being (as) outside: ‘A body touches on the outside, but at the same time (and this is more than a correlation, it’s a co-appurtenance [co-appartenance]), it touches itself as outside. A body accedes to itself as outside’ (C, 128). Thinking existence as exposure allows Nancy to pull the body out of abstraction and to configure it in literal terms as a touching of skin: ‘This is what skin is. It’s through my skin that I touch myself’ (C, 128). Thus Nancy suggests that the self-reflexive experience of ‘self-touching’ does not return us to ‘a primary interiority’, as in the phenomenological analyses of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, but rather makes manifest an exposure to exteriority: ‘To begin with, I have to be in exteriority in order to touch myself. And what I touch remains on the outside. I am exposed to myself touching myself’ (C, 128–29). This thinking of the body as outside itself is challenging, as Nancy himself is quick to recognize: ‘this is the difficult point — the body is always outside, on the outside. It is from the outside. The body is always outside the intimacy of the body itself’ (C, 129). To consider the body in these terms is not to deny interiority and intimacy but rather to acknowledge that they are always already preceded by an originary exteriority and exposure. The paradox here is that an originary exteriority which resists opposition to interiority precedes and conditions any possibility of articulating that which is inside and outside. This is what Derrida describes as the ‘impossible but inevitable inclusion of the outside in the inside, of the untouchable in the touchable’, suggesting that ‘a consistent thinking about touch can only be a thinking of the intangible (thus of tact) [...]’ (T, 297). Whilst such a paradoxical logic — or double bind — resists thought, what Nancy and Derrida appear to propose here is that thought may expose itself to it (I return to this below).

Thus, in place of a coherent totality, the body is figured as an assemblage of ex posed surfaces and fragments. In Corpus, Nancy gives explicitly tactile and material contours to this model, recasting the body as corpus rather than corps, cata loguing a ‘corpus of tact’ in evocative terms: ‘skimming, grazing, squeezing, thrusting, pressing, smoothing, scraping, rubbing, caressing, palpating, fingering, kneading, massaging, entwining, hugging, striking, pinching, biting, sucking [...]’ (C, 93). The body is only a body insofar as it forms a dislocated summation of touching, scratching, grazing, sliding, palpation. Describing the insides of the body (muscles, nerves, organs, bones) as ‘functionalist formalisms’, Nancy contrasts this with the ‘truth’ that is the skin:

Truth is in the skin, it makes skin: an authentic extension exposed, entirely turned outside while also enveloping the inside, a sack crammed with rumblings and musty odours. Skin touches and lets itself be touched. Skin caresses and flatters, gets wounded, flayed, and scratched. It’s irritable and excitable. It absorbs sunshine, cold and heat, wind, rain; it inscribes marks from within — wrinkles, spots, warts, peelings — and marks from the outside, which are sometimes the same, or else cracks, scars, burns, slashes. (C, 159)

Fleshed, caressed, injured, wrinkled, burnt, creviced — the body is emphatically figured here as materiality, skin, surface, fragment, as expeausition.⁴ Such a view of the body is essential for thinking about cinema. For Nancy does not presuppose a body which would be whole before cinema comes to treat it, frame it, cut it up and view it. Nor does he posit a body as interiority and substance which it would be cinema’s constitutive fantasy or failure to penetrate. Rather, for Nancy, the fragmentation and exteriority of bodies that cinema discloses is the truth of those bodies.⁵

In Agnès Varda’s Jacquot de Nantes (1991), the viewer encounters the ill and aging body of Varda’s husband Jacques Demy through intimate, caressing close-ups. Tenderly detailing a corpus of fragments — skin, hair, stubble, sunspots, moles, folds and wrinkles — these images intimate not only a sense of touch but an exposure of the skin inscribed with marks from both inside and outside (through aging, illness, weathering), resonating with Nancy’s description above. While reminiscent of Irigaray’s desire to preserve the memory of a caress, in ‘remembrance of the most profound intimacy’,⁶ these images gesture to a preservation and remembrance configured here by Varda as that which seeks not to enclose but to disclose. Echoing Nancy’s notion of the body as ‘outside the intimacy of the body itself’, here intimacy itself is opened to the outside. As Varda interweaves reconstructed fragments of Demy’s childhood in the past and close-up fragments of his body in the present, being is articulated not as interior and continuous but as fragmentary, open, exteriorized, lovingly memorialized and emphatically corporealized. Varda’s film sensitizes the viewer not only to the fragility of tactile, sentient skin but to the precarity of any coherence and continuity of self. Resonating with Nancy’s configuring of the self not in terms of identity and essence but as a heterogeneity of surfaces in contact, the various times and spaces mobilized by Jacquot de Nantes are each fleetingly associated with a singular plurality of being — Jacques, Jacquot, Demy — made up of parts and fragments rather than anchored in any one continuous, self-contained subject. If, as Nancy contends, the body is an image which offers itself up as a series of discontinuous textures dispersed and exposed, then Varda’s film suggests that cinema presents a privileged space for exploring such fragmentary modes of corporeal being — as image, texture, dispersal, exposure.⁷

For Nancy, this notion of the body as exposure is intimately linked to the figure of the body as image:

bodies are exposed to each other. The between-bodies is their images’ taking-place [leur avoir-lieu d’images]. The images are not likenesses, still less phantoms or fantasms. It’s how bodies are offered to one another, it’s being born unto the world, the setting on edge, the setting into glory of limit and radiance. A body is an image offered to other bodies, a whole corpus of images stretched from body to body, local colours and shadows, fragments, grains, areolas, lunules, nails, hairs, tendons [...]. (C, 121)

These bodies, these images, are always already fragmented, exposing themselves to one another not as coherent totalities but as the scattered localities of grains, nails, hair, skin, shadows, and so on. For Nancy, the mutual exposure of bodies is the site upon which the image takes place. Such a notion depends not only on the fragmentary modes of corporeal being outlined above but also on a particular understanding of the image which Nancy develops in works such as The Muses and The Ground of the Image. For Nancy, the image is not a copy or reproduction of something in the world. The image is ‘distinct’ in that it marks a simultaneouscontact with, and separation from, the world — a (dis)connective relation to worldly presentation, a delicate oscillation between proximity and distance, cut free from a logic of mimesis or dichotomy of truth and appearance (GI, 1–9). Thus, in suggesting here that bodies open to one another as images, Nancy asserts the material, worldl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Jean-luc Nancy: Co-exposure, Technicity, Cinema
• 2 Robert Bresson: A Cinematography of Contact
• 3 Marguerite Duras: Back to Zero, or a Politics of Being-with
• 4 Claire Denis: Commonalities in Close-up
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index