Noli me tangere: Bonnefoy, Nancy, Derrida

St. John's Gospel is the only gospel to describe Mary Magdalene's encounter with the resurrected Christ and Christ's warning to her not to touch him, saying: "Noli me tangere". This episode has inspired a long tradition of iconographic paintings, from late antiquity to the present day. Some of the most famous paintings are by Rembrandt, Dürer, Correggio, and Titian. This episode and the paintings of it have come to be referred to as the scene of Noli me tangere. They all center around what Jean-Luc Nancy describes as "un jeu de mains remarquable".¹ One hand reaches out in desire or humility: the other hand is raised in warning or withdrawal. There is often a near or slight touching at the moment of the refusal of contact.

This article explores the motif of touch and resistance to touch in Yves Bonnefoy's Début et fin de la neige, published in 1991.² It begins by examining a poem that bears the title "Noli me tangere" and then it explores how Bonnefoy configures and reconfigures this biblical scene in a series of poems about touching or failing to touch snow. The refusal or resistance encountered by the hand that seeks to touch is suggestive of the obstacles inherent in the poetic process: the disjuncture between language and the physical world, the impossibility of attaining presence in language, and the dispersal or dissemination of meaning. Yet the partial touchings and the failed touchings that are portrayed in Début et fin de la neige suggest how the potential aporias or impossibilities of the poetic text can become enabling devices. This article begins by examining two instances of a failed touch: the dissipation of a presence that the hand would preserve and the vain desire for a metaphysical absolute. It ends by analysing a very different conception of touch: a touch that does not resist or seek to overcome disjuncture but which explores and engages with the very movements of separation.

There are powerful similarities between Bonnefoy's exploration of touch in Début et fin de la neige and the thinking of touch that occurs in Nancy's philosophical writings. It is worth noting that Bonnefoy published Début et fin de la neige in 1991 and that Nancy published Corpus, a deconstructive meditation on the body and, in particular, on touch, in 1992.³ In 2003, in a book entitled Noli me tangere: Essai sur la levée du corps, Nancy conducted a close reading of the biblical scene and the paintings of it and elaborated his conception of a touch in separation, of an interrupted contact between sense and matter. It is important to note that Nancy's Noli me tangere: Essai sur la levée du corps is a response to Jacques Derrida's book Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, published in 2000, which examines the figure of touch as it recurs in Nancy's philosophy and in western philosophy. Derrida argues that while Nancy's thinking of touch breaks radically with traditional conceptions of the body, the figure of touch remains, to some extent, implicated within a "haptocentric" metaphysical tradition, a metaphysical tradition centered on touch.⁴ In response to Derrida's commentary, Nancy's reading of the biblical scene of Noli me tangere very deliberately foregrounds "a touch which never occurs as touch but only ever as a touch in the refusal of touch", to use the words of Ian James.⁵ The conception of a suspended or interrupted touch, Nancy would argue, has always been present in his writings on the body.⁶

In Noli me tangere: Essai sur la levée du corps, Nancy makes a list of artistic works—novels, plays, pieces of installation art—that are inspired by the biblical scene. This list does not mention Bonnefoy's poem "Noli me tangere" nor any of the poems of Début et fin de la neige and this is not entirely surprising. Since the early 1950s, Bonnefoy has presented himself as the poet of la présence, a designation that inevitably distanced his work from the deconstructive...