Reading As Touching: Material and Sensuous Encounters Between Severo Sarduy And Jean-Luc Nancy

• In Event: Textos híbridos: transmedialidad, materialidades y ensamblajes

Abstract

Severo Sarduy once described his literary practice stating, “poco importa si yo le comunico un relato o no […] Se trata de ponerlo en una situación física […] Lo que yo le invito no es que me lean […] sino que hagan el amor conmigo.” Sarduy’s disinterest in communicating an intelligible message in favor of an inoperative aspect of writing stands in stark contrast to the Cuban state’s edict that writers and artists have a civic obligation to contribute to the narrative of progress. While some critics have viewed Sarduy as politically disengaged, I’m interested in teasing out the ethico-political implications of such a “physical situation.” Sarduy’s invitation, “que hagan el amor conmigo,” as opposed to “que me lean,” calls for a practice of reading not unlike the exhortations of Jean-Luc Nancy: “One has to understand reading as something other than decipherment. Rather, as touching, as being touched. Writing, reading: matters of tact.”
Placing Sarduy’s 1963 novel Gestos and Nancy’s 1990 essay “Corpus” alongside each other, this presentation examines how conventions of representation—through which we order and understand the world— are made inoperative and, in so doing, generate new and imaginative forms of relating. Sarduy’s and Nancy’s texts, as I aim to demonstrate, displace the centrality of the knowing subject, foregrounding the sensuousness produced in the contact and sharing of other bodies. Collapsing structural and symbolic scaffoldings, their writing brings its readers to material encounters: at the limits of comprehension, the mechanics of writing become tactile and the links between the body and its sign come undone.

Author

• Christina M García, University of California, Irvine