The Crush: A Practice of Not-Wanting-to-Seize

Abstract

Interweaving personal experience, discussion of contemporary sexual ethics, and a meditation on Barthes’ Fragments, Sophie Eager considers the potential and limits of a touch which is indirect, mediated via an object, as a species of what Barthes calls le non-vouloir-saisir (not-wanting-to-seize). Addressing many of the motifs of these modes of contact in the Fragments, Eager extends this to discussion of the dynamics of interpretative violence, and resistance to such violence, in the intertextual networks that surround the Fragments, ultimately considering the Barthesian practice of reading as a practice of not-wanting-to-seize, preserving the freedom of the other.