Seduction, pleasure and a laying on of hands: a hands-on reading of Sartre's Nausea

This chapter examines the way in which philosophy and fiction intertwine in Sartre 's Nausea. A case will be made for reading Nausea as a powerfully self-referential fictional text that, perversely, owes its very literariness to the philosophy of Being and Nothingness. The relationship between the author and reader will be shown to be equally perverse, the ceding of authorial power and empowerment of the reader being shown to be a complex ontological struggle. The author will become a lover seeking to make his text 'the whole world' for the beloved. And at the centre of this erotics of writing will be the hands of both writer and reader; their communication at the interface of the text will be studied as an example of the Sartrean caress.