Touching Freud's dog: h.d.'s tactile poetics

"Do not touch me", Frau Emmy warns Freud in 1889. "Do not touch", Freud echoes in 1933. This time, he is referring to his pet chow, Yofi, warning H.D. that "she snaps - she is very difficult with strangers". Examining the prohibition in light of work by Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, this article charts the withdrawal that always interrupts touch. Despite Freud's taboo, however, H.D.'s writing seeks to make contact in strange and unnerving ways. Developing Julia Kristeva's account of the semiotic, this paper proposes a literature of touch. Reading H.D.'s poems, alongside Tribute to Freud, and her letters, the author demonstrates that H.D.s poetics are always haunted by the very (im)possibility of contact.