Nous Deux

Naomi Segal’s book Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch, opens with this epigraph: L’amour, tel qu’il existe dans la société, n’est que l’échange des fantaisies et le contact de deux epidermes. It is from 1796, one of the witty epigrams of Nicholas-Sébastien Roch, who assumed the name of Chamfort. He was secretary of the Jacobin Club, among the first to enter the Bastille at its storming, but I feel I am already digressing, a familiar strategy of deferral. I was charged with speaking about art and psychoanalysis ...