Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis

Drawing on the work of contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, Cinema and Contact investigates the aesthetics 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 dominant critical account of touch elaborated by recent models of embodied spectatorship, Laura McMahon argues that cinema offers a privileged space for understanding touch in terms of spacing and withdrawal rather than immediacy an 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 throughout. (Legenda 2011)