McMahon (film and visual culture, U. of Aberdeen, Scotland) argues that film provides a space in which the theme of touch can be understood as a marker of withdrawal, discontinuity, and separation rather than in its more traditional guise of immediacy, continuity, and presence. He also finds this theme of touch-as-withdrawal throughout the work of contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. Thus, Nancy's work here provides the philosophical framework for investigating this understanding of touch in selected films by Robert Bresson, Marguerite Duras, and Claire Denis, connecting touch-as-withdrawal to such thematic concerns as the logic of incarnation in Bresson, a negative model of community in Duras, and notions of alterity and intrusion in Denis--or more generally to a destabilization of concepts of identity, propriety, immediacy, and presence. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)