Abstract

Body and image are crucial to the elaboration of both Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy andClaire Denis’s work in cinema. Nancy’s short book about the body, Corpus ,though it may initially have appeared as a minor work in his œuvre, has since been shown,and notably since the intervention of Jacques Derrida, as the cornerstone of much ofNancy’s late thought. As Derrida demonstrates, Nancy’s interest in the body turnsaround the crucial trope of touch which comes to stand, in his philosophy, as the marker ofthe most fundamental limits that shape our understanding of and interaction with theworld: between inside and outside, subject and object, matter and meaning. As such, theconcept of touch frequently recurs in the discussion of art works, where the inscription of amaterial trace coincides with, or touches upon an evanescent sense. Nancy’s discussions ofartistic meaning have frequently centred around images – both painterly and filmic – asthe phenomena whereby the real, in manifesting its presence, is granted a certain sense.1Claire Denis, in common with the vast majority of live-action filmmakers, necessarily dealsin images and bodies – images of bodies – but her frequent refusal to provide thetraditional cinematic signifiers of psychological depth often means that the spectator isbrought up short before the strangeness of these bodies as bodies, which in turn opens upan interrogation as to the sense of her images. The mutual fascination that exists betweenNancy and Denis is well established, demonstrated by Nancy’s detailed, published engagements with Denis’s films – Beau travail , Trouble Every Day , L’Intrus – as well as by Denis’s short film portrait of the philosopher – Vers Nancy –and her cryptic appropriation of his text L’Intrus . But their engagement witheach other’s work appears in the image of Nancy’s somewhat abstract conception of touch:an approaching and withdrawing, a momentary proximity to the other that serves as muchto consolidate the stable identity of the one as it does to share in the identity of the other.Mirroring this intermittent relationship, this article will seek not to over-state theinterpenetration of the two œuvres, but merely to sketch some points of contact betweenthem, turning notably around the fascinating, but perhaps ultimately untouchable figureof the wound