Phantom Threads Robert J.C. Young to Laura Marcus She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. The thing could not feel the touch but she has been touched. To be touched by time means to lose touch, to fall out of touch, forgotten except by those who try to remember not to forget. Unless there are phantom threads. In Practicing Caste: On Touching and Not Touching, Aniket Jaaware writes of how in order to think caste differently she has attempted to proceed by means of a deliberate forgetting, even though she knows very well, from Heidegger and others, that a deliberate forgetting is never really possible. Therefore, I will occasionally pretend to forget what cannot be forgotten, keeping in mind that there is an indeliberate forgetting over which we have no control. Allow me to elaborate on this a little. For some relatively independent thought to occur in one’s mind, earlier practices need to be oublierred —to coin a portmanteau word from the French oublier and the English err. 1 Jaaware’s portmanteau word would have worked even better if she had kept to French, for errer would have allowed her to wander more transgressively while she was trying to pretend to forget to remember though knowing it impossible or possibly unintentionally The Oxford Literary Review 44.1 (2022): 17–26 DOI: 10.3366/olr.2022.0373 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/olr