Skin
Skin
Steven Connor
I am interested in all aspects of the representation of the skin,
in a range of cultural forms and practices. I am at work in
particular on a longish paper I'm currently calling
`Dermographics: Sadomasochism and the Assault on the Skin'. The
paper tries to explain the recent rise to cultural visibility in
the wake of AIDS of sadomasochistic fantasies, practices and
representations, along with associated phenomena such as bondage,
piercing, and certain forms of fetishism. I focus my discussion
specifically
on the function of the skin in such practices, drawing on the
psychoanalytic morphology of the skin developed by Didier Anzieu,
in the course of his characterisation of the `moi-peau', or
`ego-skin', in order to try to interpret the forms of epidermal
assault characteristic of sadomasochistic practice. I suggest
that the ambivalence of the skin, as at once a surface and a
volume, a permeable membrane and a shield, an object and an organ
of sense, makes it an important bearer of the signs of assault
left by
a sadomasochism which characteristically writes itself over the
skin, whether in the marks left by flagellation, or the evidence
of piercing and tattooing. I say that this punctuation of the
body surface is both the source of transgressive excitation, and
a containment of that excitation. The scarified skin expresses
the desire to obliterate the shape of the body, and yet to hold
that obliteration together in a shape; it is power exercised over
the flesh which only the flesh has the power to embody. I go
on to consider the other punctuation effects, generated on the
model of this primary form, in the rhythms of enumeration, in the
acoustic structures which are an important feature of
sadomasochistic scenarios, and in the narrative orderings of the
scenario itself.
I compare the erotics of contemporary epidermal assault with
earlier analogies, for example in the miraculous skin-writing
that marked the exorcism of Soeur Jeanne des Anges in Loudun, the
function of dermographia in Charcot's investigations in hysteria,
and, of course, in Kafka's `In The Penal Colony'. I try to
generalise these discussions by a consideration of the
contemporary cultural phenomenology of the skin; and after all
this, I may have time left for some reckless speculations about
suntanning and
the ozone layer, Kaposi's Sarcoma, bodybuilding and cosmetics;
as well as the transformed metaphorics of the skin for example
in contemporary architecture and virtual reality technologies.
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