Haptic Experience in the Writings of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Michel Serres by Crispin T. Lee (review)

In this dense and challenging study, Crispin T. Lee amply demonstrates that the haptic experience announced in the title is not confined to the strict discipline of cognitive psychology. Rather, his ambitious project is to relate four theories of haptic perception (simply put, the process of recognizing objects through touch) to the critical theories and literary prose of his three chosen ‘writer-philosophers’. Accordingly, Lee spends much of his Introduction giving a detailed exposition of how the haptic is conceived and theorized in the writings of the late-nineteenth-century Viennese art historian Aloïs Riegl who uses the term haptisch to refer to painted, sculpted, or constructed surfaces exhibiting overtly tactile or visual detail; in Laura U. Marks’s The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), which places haptic visuality in the context of the cinematic; in Mark Paterson’s The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford: Berg, 2007), concentrating on ‘proprioception’ (the cutaneous, tactile, kinaesthetic, and vestibular senses) and the decorporealization of sensations where technological advances can now allow haptic interaction to be divorced from physical proximity (virtual reality); and finally in Jean-Luc Nancy’s understanding of the haptic across a number of texts with his particular emphasis on sensory zones and the concept of ‘excription’. Lee then delineates his corpus of texts by Bataille, Blanchot, and Serres before devoting a lengthy chapter to each writer. The chapters are constructed in an identical manner, with Lee first identifying the haptic (even if not explicitly named) in certain theoretical and critical writings of the writer concerned, and then offering largely thematic readings of how this plays out in aspects or specific scenes of three literary texts: for Bataille, Histoire de l’œil, Madame Edwarda, and Le Bleu du ciel; for Blanchot, Thomas l’obscur (première version), La Folie du jour, and L’Instant de ma mort; for Serres, Les Cinq sens, Le Tiers-instruit, and La Guerre mondiale. Seasoned readers of Bataille and Blanchot may initially be surprised to learn that haptic perception is an ‘inescapable touchstone’ (p. 39) of their critical and literary texts, but Lee’s arguments are cogently advanced, and the critical attention given to Serres’s sometimes inscrutable work is equally illuminating, in particular how Serres’s writing has evolved over the last thirty years, with ‘theory and dry terminology [giving] way to erudition and etymological analyses’ (p. 202). Given the genuinely difficult nature and theoretical sophistication of much of the material discussed, Lee generously offers to help by constantly repeating hypotheses, anticipating arguments, summarizing conclusions before reaching them, highlighting differences and similarities between his thinkers, and relating their preoccupations to one or more of the haptic theories previously analysed. Like the subtitles guiding us from one section to another, this all proves useful even if it does also create an impression of the painstakingly doctoral. Still, Lee’s erudite engagement with the deeply philosophical aspects of his triumvirate of writers, as well as with his four haptic theorists, is impressive indeed. Scholars and graduate students of any one of these writers and theorists may beg to differ with certain interpretations, but they will also find much here to explore and pursue.