Between Self and Other: Anaïs Nin’s Transformative Erotics

Abstract

This chapter addresses a critical neglect of the sense of touch in literary theory, identifying a hierarchy that places sight and hearing above the carnal sense of touch, which has historically been considered a more immediate, therefore less critical, sense. Building on Mark Paterson’s example of technologies that “remediate touch” by facilitating tactile experience, I outline particular literary techniques that remediate touch in Anaïs Nin’s fiction, arguing that touch, not sight, is the dominant sense in the reading process. In order to do so, I first establish the sensual hierarchy that exists in reading and critique, which has resulted in the predominance of what Paul Ricoeur calls a “hermeneutics of suspicion” and which, according to critics such as Eve Sedgwick and Rita Felski, has become the dominant mode of literary critique. Following this, I aim to reverse this hierarchy through close readings of Nin’s fiction, mobilizing Brian Kearney’s carnal hermeneutics, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s carnal phenomenology. Finally, this chapter considers the way in which Nin’s privileging of the carnal senses has resulted in critical marginalization, neglect, and misunderstanding in some readers, whilst triggering intense personal attachment in others.