Noli me tangere: Bonnefoy, Nancy, Derrida

This paper examines the motif of touch and resistance to touch in Yves Bonnefoy’s collection of snow poems, Début et fin de la neige, 1992. The resistance encountered by the hand that seeks to touch, as evoked within Bonnefoy’s poem ‘Noli me tangere’, is suggestive of the problems and 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 impossibilities and aporias of the poetic text become its enabling devices. This paper examines an attitude to meaning that rejects comprehension, the possession or holding of knowledge, in favour of receptiveness, interaction, and playfulness. It examines how, across the poems of the collection, a different conception of touch emerges: a touch that does not resist or seek to overcome disjuncture, but which explores and engages with the very movements of separation. This paper identifies important similarities between Bonnefoy’s treatment of touch, Nancy’s Noli me tangere, and Derrida’s Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy