Being-Exposed: ‘The Poetics of Sex’ and Other Matters of Tact

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to challenge the logic of regional boundaries as it manifests itself in literary studies, sexuality studies and sexual practices, and humanist understandings of subjectivity and sociality. It achieves this aim by performatively evoking the sensuous exposure to the other that engenders and is engendered by reading, writing, being, and that exceeds the limits of ontological and conceptual boundaries even as it institutes what Derrida refers to as ‘the limit’. Drawing on the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jeannette Winterson-in particular three texts which touch me, which move me in powerful and yet inexplicable ways-I raise the question of how to respond without uncritically employing the codes and conventions associated with already established conceptual systems and/or fields of knowledge such as those listed above. My response, my paper, could be said to constitute both a critical ontology in the Foucauldian sense-it is not, ‘a doctrine, nor a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating … but an analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’-and a sensuous encounter, an exposure to the illimitable alterity of the other that (with any luck) repeats the call to respond.