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French Studies 2007 61(4):447-459; doi:10.1093/fs/knm232
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Touch, Translation, Witness in Alberto Giacometti, La Main, Le Nez

Timothy Mathews

University College London

In the period from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, spanning the Second World War, Giacometti embarks on his attempts to represent the human form. He discovers his inability to locate the human form in space. How then can human experience be witnessed? What is at stake in transposing, translating one experience into another? Aesthetic concerns activate moral ones by failing to occupy the same place. This creates an experience of responsibility which arises through engagement with the formal presence of aesthetic artefacts; and also through the act itself of comparison. This essay responds by placing two pieces by Giacometti in a critical vicinity with works by Nancy and Blanchot exploring the failure to locate in touch, on the one hand, and in time, on the other.


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