Lightning and rain: Phenomenology, psychoanalysis and Matisse’s hand

A celebrated sequence of slow-motion footage of Matisse’s working hand fascinated philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. This paper explores how their analyses figure broader tensions between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, and how this bears upon interpretations of drawings by Matisse and of the graphic trace in the work of Mary Kelly and Susan Morris.